Ahh… To Be a Kid Again
May 8, 2006
I had the opportunity to take a little trip back in time today. In a sense, anyway. I spent the better part of the day playing a battery of old-school classic Nintendo games. It may come as a surprise to some that I’m actually a pretty big gamer. Not competitive or anything like that. But I have rearranged my daily schedule on numerous occasions to either play or buy a new game. I couldn’t sleep the night before Resident Evil 4 was released.
Many of the games that I owned and loved back then weren’t the mainstream, super-hits that everyone else was playing. For instance, Guardian Legend, my favorite NES game ever, is an obscure, seldom heard of game that took me FORever to beat. I got to play it today. I used to compete with my siblings for top rank on Super Mario Bros 3. I got to play it today, too. I used to spend many a free afternoon at my friend Jared’s house playing Blaster Master. We took turns beating levels for what seems like months until we’d finally conquered it and retrieved our lost pet frog. I got to play that today, too.
I’m deep in nostalgia mode right now. All of these games remind me of someone or some time from my childhood. Back when my $5 a week allowance was a million dollars… as opposed to the amount of gas I burn to and from work each day. Or when my hardest homework assignment was writing the definition of my ten vocabulary words for the week… as opposed to a twenty-five page research paper on personality disorders and family therapy. Way back when school was my job and my free time was spent playing one of the above mentioned games or outside running and jumping and getting dirty.
I’ve often heard people reminisce about their childhood days. Oh how much simpler life was back then. Of course, at the time it probably didn’t seem like it. We had no idea what was ahead of us… just around the corner… waiting to shake our world to the core. It really was the life. The world was much more mysterious and even the simplest of things were fun. Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all lived in a magical world just beyond our grasp. And we were still innocent enough to not be bothered by the ills of the world.
Knowing what you know now, would you go back and do it all again? Would you go through the hell of adolescence, puberty, and growing pains to recapture the life you once had as a child?
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September 7th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
[…] Not too long ago, I revealed my secret love of video games. As I said then, I’m pretty specific on the games that I like to play. And I don’t own every console ever created. In fact, a trusty GameCube is all that’s left in my arsenal of game systems. But when I do find a game that I like, I can spend hours a day playing it. […]
June 16th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
It would be interesting to know what life would have been like, if you knew back then what you know now. Would you have made the same choices? Would you have cherished more? Time machine…where’s my time machine???!!!
June 17th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
I think there are a couple of things I’d have done differently. There are several specific situations I’d have handled differently… especially some relating to the way I treated people in the past.
But for the most part, I think I’m where I’m supposed to be at the stage of my life. I think I’m on the cusp of a major change in the near future… but for right now, all is how it should be.