The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Today, my mother asked about buying a 360 for her TV downstairs.

I thought this was a bit silly, but I told her the price. She didn’t feel like it was worth 200 dollars. When I asked her why she wanted one, it was so she could play games. Well, hey, that seems like the reason one would get a 360. Of course, the games she wanted to play was trivia stuff like You Don’t Know Jack and whatnot. She wants to be able to play with Dad without bothering me, which is nice of her, of course. It’s not a great idea. She doesn’t trust herself with a 360 controller at all, so I don’t know what she’d do with actually owning a system. But it’s kind of cool she wanted to.
I followed this up by showing her the new Jack on my iPad and some of the funny Portal 2 videos that have been going around. I was showing her what was going on in gaming, and she seemed relevantly interested.

It’s kind of amazing to me that trivia has basically made my mother respect one of my biggest past-times. She doesn’t understand most of what I do, of course, but she gets the appeal of having everyone over to play Jack, or Buzz, or Scene It!. She wants to play these games, and even though it’s normally a huge hassle for me (she’ll only play them downstairs, so I have to unhook all my systems and carry them downstairs and hook them up there and such, which would be less of a problem except I am also forced to hide all the cables, making it hard to adjust things, but oh well) I always go ahead and do it because I love having her, and dad, and everyone involved. It feels awesome, and it’s a lot of fun. It worked with Dad and Golf, and it works with my mother and trivia.

Similarly, giving my mother a good, working laptop has done wonders for her understanding why I am on the internet all day. She gets as stressed as I do when the internet doesn’t work nowadays. She is on there, watching videos, reading news, or playing games on Yahoo games basically every night. She understands it, and doesn’t fight with me about being connected anymore.

For so long, I wished she would just leave me alone, or try to understand why I enjoy what I enjoy. It always seemed to hypocritical that she’d tell me I needed to not play games the whole night when she’d spend the whole night watching television. Finally, I have that understanding, at least with this stuff, and that’s pretty neat. Gives me hope for other things.