I have very generous people in my life, with excellent taste, so I was showered with most awesome birthday gifts—books, and a massage and DVD sets and awesomeness and that would have all been more than enough, but then I got a Wii. A Wii! The Nintendo gaming system of crazy coolness that is impossible to find and that I’ve been jonesing over, like a big nerd, ever since it came out, and now I have a Wii and now I am screwed because I won’t ever be leaving the house ever again.

E. gifted it to me on Friday night, and we meant to set it up immediately, but got distracted. But! The next day! We set it up and I curled up on the futon and I was immediately and completely entranced with the baton thing and the nunchucky thing and how waving your hands around makes the things go on the screen and you can build a little avatar of yourself and all your friends that you will lose because it is mesmerizing! It’s addictive! It’s stupidly fun and it is possible you will never again be productive, have friendships, or leave the house which will become a pit of filth and despair for as long as you live, once you get a Wii, but at least you will get in your aerobic exercise, with all the bouncing jumping punching flailing and if you’re me, almost knocking over the TV. And there will be no one to see you make a fool of yourself. Which is kind of a very sad and lonely image, now that I think about it.

It is a whole new world of video games for me. Way back in the misty mists of time, one rainy Saturday, my father got me and my brother an Atari. I wrestled my brother to the ground and took away the controller and I played the weird Atari version of Pac Man until my eyes were ground down into grit, and a nerd was born, and it was a beautiful thing. We wore out that Atari. We were thrilled when the Nintendo came out, and then the Super Nintendo, and then we swapped over to the Playstation.

Years later, when I was in college, I bought myself a Playstation 2, to my boyfriend at the time’s delight. Less to his delight, I stayed up 'til all hours playing role-playing games—the types of games with stories, and characters that needed to be leveled up. I’d spend an entire weekend in front of the television, just leveling up my characters, from 1 to 99. It was the most meditative, relaxing thing I could possibly do after a hellish school week. It was mindless, repetitive, and so incredibly soothing I cannot even tell you, to sit curled up on the couch and direct my little men all over the pixelated screen, jabbing at buttons when necessary. No surprises, nothing to tax my head, just monster battle, monster battle, monster battle, and a sense of accomplishment at the end, because there my guys were, pumped up and ready to kick some serious ass I moved through the harder levels of the game.

I have never entirely stopped doing that; I still own both my Playstation and Playstation 2; I wish I had an original Nintendo; I have been jonesing for the Playstation 3, and when the Wii came out, something in my heart went ping, and I realized I had been waiting for it all my life. In the meantime, I play role-playing games, I spend way too much time leveling up, and if you knew how excited I was when I heard that the composer of the Final Fantasy series score was touring in the United States, you’d shake your head at me.

This is not, you understand, something I have ever confessed to before, in a public forum. I admit readily to being kind of a dorky girl, but the extent of my dorkiness, that’s something I generally keep under wraps. And now you understand why I shrieked when I opened my Wii, and danced around the room, and why we went immediately to the store the next day to get me a game and then to the video store to rent a handful more and when we weren’t distracted, we were playing video games. And now it is a struggle, when I come home from work late, and tired, and with a list of nine hundred things I must do and have to do and cannot possibly put off, to not immediately plop on the futon and fire up the console (the controllers? Have a power button! How cool is that?) and spend the rest of night playing, and playing and playing and not thinking about my life. Video games, they’re easier than life.