Lazy Sunday

I spent this past Sunday at our pad with 18 year-old Vermont boy, relaxing to fresh beats and playing video games while the rest of the crew journeyed to Panera for a day of interneting and food shopping. I wasn’t ready to leave the sheltered life of no internet quite yet, so I decided to spend some time with the immature, habitual marijuana smoking, dowdy young whipper snapper on our team. It brought back vivid images of me fresh out of high school and entering college. First off: Video games. I remember a time when I played Madden 2005 seasons all the way through, padding my favorite players stats so they’d be better next year, drafting prospects after the season ended and practicing plays to use in games. I cared so much about these results (I’ve always had a rabid obsession with video games.) On this lazy Sunday, me and Vermont played Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, a game in which you try to kill all the enemies and reach the end of a level so that you may move on to the next level, kill more enemies, and repeat until boredom sets in. And bored I got. Vermont, however, remained engrossed in the game for about 3 hours. I played for a while, went for a run, started a load of laundry, did some dishes, and came back and played some more before he finished up. The game felt petty, irrelevant, a sort of time filler while I gathered motivation to be productive. For Vermont, however, the game was his world. The level he reached measured how successful or productive his day was. The contrast humored me, before I realized how similar I was at that age. Its little realizations like these that I wanted from this program. I predicted correctly that it would force my own maturity, but it has also allowed me to view it on my own.

Later on that day Vermont told me that he thought he would learn a lot from me over the coming months. As vague as that statement is, it might be the most respectful thing anyone has said to me. That’s the thing about Vermont: He’s completely ignorant, combative, totally useless most of the time and loves video games, but there’s some honest naivety that forces you to make the effort to dumb things down for him. This is the first time I’ve felt like a mentor to someone. So, to respond to his admonition, I tried to think of something deep and profound, but uttered something more along the lines of “yea, that’ll be sick.” Not always the quickest on my feet, I feel now like I have a little protégé to take care of and teach the ways of the elder folk. Nice.