Chaos Attraction

Swordplay

2004-09-24, 11:36 p.m.

Swords seem to be a theme in my life lately.

I keep getting a lot of Swords cards in my tarot readings. The Queen of Swords especially seems to come up a lot (at this point, Jess and I are pretty much thinking that refers to her. Heh).

At night after Julian goes to bed, I've been obsessively watching old episodes of Highlander. Every night I go to bed with the "I Am Immortal" theme song in my head.

While I was home getting the teeth out, I read Peter and the Starcatchers. Plus "Talk Like A Pirate Day" was recently, and I'm quite enjoying reading Dave Barry's weblog and looking at his pirate-on-tour pics.

I play Kingdom of Loathing, which has plenty of swords, and most of the time these days I'm using my "icy-hot katana" to bludgeon mob penguins and Knott Yeti for meat.

And then there's Julian's sword obsession.

A week or two ago- I think it was right before the wisdom teeth came out- Julian invited me up to his bedroom one night to check out his new longbow that he'd gotten at Bonfante Gardens. This led into him showing me the plastic ninja swords he's got, which morphed into him wanting to teach me how to fight ninja-style. (His dad's a fencer, so Julian is rather practiced at these sorts of things. I think I've actually seen some of his moves done on Highlander.) He wanted to do three days of official lessons...which morphed on the third night into this very long game/story thing, in which I was a barbarian with ten pet snakes who had a bunch of bad dreams and fought stuff.

Then I went off to dental hell.

When I came back, well...I hadn't realized what I'd done. Because he LOVED the story thing. He wanted to do it again and again and again, for hours and hours, every free moment from when I got home from work to when he got forcibly dragged off to bed.

Only, well...after an hour or so, it gets old. Well, repetitive, really. He's so going to be a future Dungeonmaster someday, but right now he repeats a lot. The game always starts out with me battling some creature and getting hit on the head. Julian comes along and wakes me up, introduces me to his dog (the dog, Oreo, always starts climbing all over me and licking me if I get near to her level. She tries to French kiss my nose, people.), and then heads off into various strange portals, through which I follow him. Every time I go through, I have to trip so he can catch me. Sometimes he knocks me out again and I have very strange dreams he narrates in which I get killed a lot.

Oddly enough, this doesn't even involve much swordplay any more. Mainly I just "follow" him around the living room while holding a sword and conspicuously tripping.

A half hour to an hour of this is fine. More than, however... and I have started to feel burnt out. Or at least along the lines of "Uh, there was some other stuff I wanted to do tonight, dangit."

And the thing is, he could not be distracted to do anything else! He normally loves to play computer games: he's not doing them. Ditto PlayStation (well, at least he's not doing these things when I'm there). He normally loves to play swords with his dad, and he won't even do that! He told his mom he wanted her to go away today specifically so she wouldn't interrupt the game. And he keeps waiting outside the computer room/my bedroom so that when I have to get up at seven, on the dot he can come in and ask to play swords.

On the one hand, flattering that I seem to be a favorite these days. On the other hand, that's also...strange to me. Plus getting out of playing more game without being really rude is seeming pretty impossible. I don't want to do that.

I got out of the game for the last two days- Wednesday was Movie Night and thus no game, and he got to go to the rock climbing gym Thursday. So I knew I had to suck it up a bit when within five seconds of entering the house he was bringing me the swords again.

This time, I was trying not to get all "Dammit, I didn't get to check any of my favorite websites today," about it. I was enjoying how he'd slip rabbit references into the game because he knows I like bunnies. I actually started to get more into it. Good for me.

But what surprised me was that when the game finally got adjourned for a pizza run, he hugged me a bunch of times. Awwww. Plus when we were at the pizza place, he wanted me to draw in his journal. I did several silly bunny pictures.

I feel pretty flattered, really.


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