I’m Not Dead

I’m just freaking tired. Does a man’s existence diminish when he isn’t online? There’s one of those weird postmodern questions for you to chew on.

The next month will be spent playing Call of Duty 4. There’s some product endorsement for you all.

My Life as a Senator

Lately FTTW has taken on a sports and music kind of vibe, and while I can boast of some pretty pretentious titles in my CD collection, I am absolutely clueless when it comes to the subject of sports. The sports that I actually can watch without falling asleep are golf, boxing, hockey, and football, in that order. The first is because I occasionally play it and so I know what’s going on, the rest because they involve people hitting one another. I would have been a pretty good Roman peasant.

Now, since I prefer to spend money on video games instead of cable service, I don’t get the chance to watch any of these things on TV, so I decided to become better acquainted with sports through the wonderful world of the Xbox 360. Rather than grabbing the latest shoot-em-up, I bought NHL 07, the latest hockey game from Electronic Arts, and started up my career with the Ottawa Senators in honor of Deb, a fellow FTTW contributor and a hockey nut. (Seriously, check out her column. It got me interested in hockey.) 

Anyway, I can’t say that the virtual Senators are a bad team, but I am a very bad Senator. Perhaps I need to look into the actual rules of the game or something, because all I really know about hockey is that the puck is supposed to go in the net and players get into fights. In the game, I lose every faceoff and the damn virtual ref blows the whistle every time I get a good shot. Lousy stinking virtual hockey ref. The problem is that I have no clue as to why he’s stopping the game.

I must say, though, that it is an exciting game. None of the other games I’ve played in quite some time have managed to suck up as much actual time while seeming so short. I even get tired after playing a couple of matches.

So that’s how I’ve been wasting my time lately after the first year of grad school ended. Perhaps I’ll actually bother to write something about that later, but I think you all know not to trust me on that.