Day: April 8, 2006

Mario Castle

By / April 8, 2006 / 10 Comments

Link is sick with a fever today. When kids are sick they seek comforting activities. Link chose to pull out the Nintendo 64 games. They are comforting to him because he is good at them, they have happy memories attached, and they tend to be less complex than the gamecube games. I walked past as Link was playing Super Mario 64 and was ambushed by the following memory:

Link was just under 4 years old. He’d just begun to be able to play video games, but the Nintendo was new and we didn’t have very many. We solved this problem by renting games from Blockbuster. Super Mario 64 was one of the games we rented and returned. Several months later we rented Mario Kart. Link loved driving the little karts around, but on one particular course he kept driving off the road and up to a castle. We finally figured out why when we heard Link talking to the Mario on the screen. He was begging and trying to convince the MarioKart Mario to get out of the kart and go into the castle. He knew there was a game where Mario went into a castle and he wanted to be able to play that game. Nothing we could say would convince Link that this wasn’t the game where Mario went into the castle. He could see Mario and he could see the castle. He was sure that if he could just convince Mario to go into the castle he could play that other game. His frustration only ended when we returned Mariokart to the store. Fortunately his birthday came shortly thereafter and we gave him Super Mario 64 and he was finally able to make Mario go into the castle.

Maybe it worked.

By / April 8, 2006 / 2 Comments

Last Saturday I spent all day and all night in the hospital taking care of Gleek. At one point I remember looking around the hospital room and realizing that I wasn’t feeling that “this is a terrible place” vibe that I’ve always had about hospitals. I didn’t want Gleek to be sick and I would have preferred to be someplace else, but the hospital itself was not filling me with angst. I was too busy to pay more than passing notice to this thought.

Today it hit me. Hospitals have not always filled me with dread. They have only done so since since surgery and radiation therapy. Perhaps I didn’t mind the hospital last Saturday because of all the emotional purging I did last January. I opened up and emptied out those reservoirs of feeling and now when the hospital subconsciously reminds me of those events, I have no angst threatening to burst free. All that blogging seems to have done me at least that much good. Maybe I’ve also short circuited the midwinter=bad as well.

It is nice that hospitals can just be places instead of bad places. It is also nice that when I was stressed over Gleek I did not have old emotions lingering close and adding to the unpleasantness of the experience.