Insidious Adaptation

As an average child raised primarily in the 90’s video games were still at their infancy in terms of their regularity in people’s lives. I mean, yea, Atari was around like 20 years before my time, but it wasn’t like a staple in a household yet. Not like the 90s brought about, not like our house anyways. Nintendo was cool, Sega was fine, but when the Nintendo 64 came about, and a game called Gauntlet Legends was discovered, my brothers and I had the ability to take our bickering to another realm.  The game was set up so that all players shared the same screen, so, the further players got away from each other, the more zoomed out the screen got, leaving tiny bumbling figures at ends of the screen, sometimes stuck, glitches we found early on in the game. Sometimes if a heard of bad guys came out and attacked one member of our group, then the rest could run away and leave him to lose all of his life. When a chest or food was found, life-giving forces in the game, there was a scr...

"The popularity resides in the clothes," a thought that drove my summer vacation. A fear that I would be seen for the inadequate self I truly identified as. The kids seeing me as this once-popular student, now nothing more than another, “poor” kid. I knew the truth, I knew that the clothes I wore were expensive, and yet, I HAD to have them. I was consumed by the inevitable situations I would land in, depictions of Tommy Hilfiger commercials running in my head as my cargo handle was grabbed by some girl in a midriff top, interested, giving me that which I could not establish within myself.  This is all in retrospect for in the moment, as I worked all summer long, babysitting and mowing lawns, to get the coveted check from my father to then go and budget appropriately, along with the minuscule amounts donated from mom, I could afford the clothes to match the persona of a “cool” kid. I missed the part where I was supposed to live and experience life, and instead I isolated...