The Mother Hen

Confessions of a Closet Gamer

I'm going to let you in on a little secret of mine. I'm kind of a Tetris nerd.

I was first introduced to Tetris when Bug lived with us in high school. She had a little hand held Tetris game and I would play it by the hours. I had been a big fan of video games since my early days of playing Pac-Man on my cousin Kevin's Atari. (Blog challenge: to all my blogger readers your challenge is to totally get "Atari" in to your next blog post. Who says "Atari" anymore?) Ok, so I digress. I don't know what was up with my Mom; I think she was a deliberate parent before deliberate parenting was cool and she didn't want to fry my brain but for whatever reason we didn't have video games at my house and so that made them all the cooler to me.

Fast forward to last October when I was farting around with a google toolbar on my desktop and saw the game 'Tetramino'...basically a really bad, knock off Tetris game. I was hooked.

At that time the PC was up in our bedroom (until Bestie Kara told me it totally ruined my love shack aura and made me move it) and when Jeff saw what I was doing one night before bed he almost stroked out. He made fun of me pretty hard core for 1) being a gamer and 2) being a gamer on a really, bad knock off game.

I guess after watching me play Tetramino for 2 months he felt bad for me because for Christmas Hot Jeff got me a little Nintendo hand held and a Tetris game. Here's the funny part: he bought it at some gamer store and its a vintage Nintendo and so it doesn't have a back light so in order to play it I have to wear a head lamp. Yes, I said a head lamp. And if you ask really nicely I will have Hot Jeff take a picture of me playing and I will post it for you. Its ridiculously sexy.

I only play at night, right before I go to sleep. I call it my wind down time. It has 15 levels and so far I can make it to level 12. I'm really rocking it. My favorite part of playing Tetris before I go to sleep, well besides totally dominating it, is getting lost in my head and thinking. Sometimes I think about blog posts, sometimes I pray, sometimes I process through a book I'm reading and tonight (before I decided to get up and write this) I was thinking about the Grey's Anatomy season finale.

Sometimes, and you will love this, I think about going to a Tetris tournament and blowing everyone out of the water with my mad Tetris playing skills. I like to imagine the day before I play getting a hand massage and not changing any diapers so I can just rest up my fingers. I would probably take a nice long nap too. And eat a big carb dinner.

I also play this same little pretend game when I'm cooking. I like to pretend I have my own cooking show. I walk around the kitchen talking to a fake camera crew and telling them my cute little kitchen tips and making funny food puns. I'm not really that great of a cook I just think I'd be spectacular on TV.