You ever play Tetris Attack?
It’s this awesome SNES game released in the mid-90s where you have to clear the blocks from an ever-rising stack to prevent them from reaching the top of the screen. If they reach the top, it’s game over. The basic idea is fun enough (similar to a million other games, yes – Tetris, Bejeweled, etc.) but what sets it apart is the Vs. mode.
In Vs., whenever you clear a significant number of blocks at once, you drop a big block on your opponent – the bigger your clear, the bigger the thing you drop on them. This block is uglier than the normal ones, and much more difficult to clear the bigger it is.
Where am I going with this? Bear with me.
My friends and coworkers warned me before Isaac started school. They said we’d be overwhelmed with all the extra-curricular activities and last-minute school needs and general frantic pace of everything. I figured there was some truth to that, but I don’t see my son enrolling in a ton of different after-school activities, so I took the warnings with a grain of salt.
We are three months into Kindergarten, and the amount of stuff that comes back in that backpack of his is just mind-boggling.
Handwriting practice, hand-drawn pictures, random scribbles, and paper “toys” are the best of it. Then on top of that there are countless solicitations, fundraisers, book orders, notifications of upcoming meetings or events, PTA grubs, homework, and other assorted crap. A lot of it comes in an official-looking manila envelope, which requires one of us to sign. The sheer volume of the stuff is overwhelming.
It’s been a busy year already, here. We have a ton of stuff to manage. I worked at home today, furiously coding all day, and after I got done with that I dove into stuff for Alex – managing my ISBNs, re-formatting my Smashwords document, etc. (part of which was much more painful than it needed to be – but that’s another post).
When my wife and the kids got home, I went upstairs, not just ready but desperate to relax a little – and here comes Isaac’s backpack, overflowing with reminders and homework and grades and papers to be signed. It was a stack of stuff at least half an inch thick.
I felt like a character in Tetris Attack, getting whallomped by a gigantic brick 7 blocks high.
We trudged through it and got it more or less under control (it took half an hour). In Tetris Attack, when the characters get slammed by the giant bricks, they just fall on their backs, loll out their tongues, and sputter.
Next time, I think I might just try that.
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