Lockout
I was just wrapping up a very productive day. At the “office,” I’d worked up a Flash video animation from start to finish and sent it off to my boss — all before anyone back home opens their email for the first time on Monday morning. I finished shaving (a once-every-three-days operation that I mostly like to postpone until I can’t stand it anymore), completed a rigorous workout on our in-home exercise machine, ate lunch, cleaned up lunch, took out the trash and watered the potted plants. Apple called at around 5:30 in the afternoon and said she’d be home soon, so we could eat dinner together. Having finished my work, I fired up the Xbox 360, connected to Xbox Live and made sure all of my games were up-to-date with the latest patches.
At length, the doorbell rang. This is Apple’s signal that she’s arrived home, so I can shut down everything here in the room (A/C and lights off, computer on standby, keys and cell phones in my pockets) and come down to open the door for her. This time, I was in the middle of starting a download of Street Fighter II: HD Remix — the free trial version — from Xbox Live Marketplace. If I waited until I finished this task before going down to open the door, Apple would be sitting out there for another couple of minutes. So I stuck my iPhone and the house keys in my pocket, turned off the air conditioner, and decided to run down to open the door and then head back upstairs to get the download going before dinner.
I went down, met Apple and brought the clean laundry into the house. (Each day, thanks to the housekeeper Apple’s family employs, we take dirty laundry to the print shop and we bring a clean load home.) I told her my plan and then dashed back upstairs to put the laundry basket in the bedroom, start downloading the game and then return to the kitchen. But for some reason, as I grabbed and twisted the bedroom doorknob, the door refused to budge.
For a moment, I thought maybe it was stuck. Back when it was raining here every day, the house’s wooden doors soaked up a lot of moisture and expanded, making it hard to open and close them. But it hasn’t rained in days. Further attempts to open the door made it pretty clear that it was, to borrow a phrase from Peter DeLorenzo, notgonnahappen.com.
In my haste to leave the bedroom, I thought, I must have accidentally pushed the locking button on the inside of the doorknob before closing it behind me. So I ran downstairs to tell Apple to ask her brother-in-law A — who had just brought her home — if there was a spare key somewhere to open that door. A had just left the house, though, so Apple called him, got the location of the key and we tried it. But even though we clearly had the correct key, and the knob was clearly unlocked and turning freely, the door was still not opening.
Reloading
I’m sitting in the lounge of Sittara Spa in Hat Yai, Thailand, while Apple enjoys a 50-minute reflexology session (that’s a foot massage to the rest of us). I would have gotten one, too, except that we were walk-ins and there was only enough room for one. Because of the possible benefits of reflexology on total body health, including the reproductive system, the choice of which one of us should get the massage was obvious.
There’s very calming music playing in the lounge. It actually sounds like music you’d hear in a baby’s nursery, akin to the chimes of a music box. It actually reminds me of the music from that part of Fallout 3 when you’re a year old. It’s quite comfortable and relaxing in here, even if I’m not having a massage myself. I could use the quiet, frankly. It’s been a busy week. So far, with the exception of my ability to sleep late this morning, the weekend has been likewise.
My parents know this already, but our first round of fertility treatment has concluded in failure. Everything went as perfectly as one could expect, but when it came time for the forces of nature to do their thing, we just didn’t get lucky. Such is life.
We actually handled this turn of events pretty well, all things considered. Especially Apple, whom I am very proud of for picking herself up, dusting herself off and keeping herself busy with forward-looking activities and plans — and in relatively short order. It will be a couple of months before we can try again, so in the meantime we’re trying additional treatments, both holistic (cue the foot massages) and spiritual (a planned trip to visit a famous monk in northern Thailand who is well-known for assisting couples with fertility issues). And in my case, there’s always work, so I haven’t that much time to dwell on it all. At least I can say that my work is going very well.
Tonight we’re having a big family dinner — a Christmas dinner, I do suppose — at a popular Chinese restaurant. I’ve been there before. It’s always one of the favorite destinations when our family wants to have a big get-together, particularly when there is some occasion to be celebrated. The traditional multi-course Chinese meal usually includes fish maw soup, steamed bass with ginger and vegetables, fruit salad, and lots of other things. Quite a bit different from the western-style turkey and mashed potatoes that I’m used to at the holidays, but certainly no less enjoyable.
At times, particularly after the failure of our first IVF attempt, I was feeling a bit consumed by consternation and despair over our situation. How many more sacrifices would be necessary? As much of a pain as these setbacks may seem, today I had to admit to myself that we could be in much more dire straits. An article on MSNBC’s website about the abject hell that my hometown (Detroit) has slipped into was the galvanizing force behind these feelings. We have almost no debt, no other health problems to speak of, wonderful families on each side of the Earth, a stable and well-paying job, a house of our own in the mostly-pleasant climate of Florida, and yes, plenty of toys. By comparison, I could be unemployed, living in a burnt-out corridor of Detroit with nothing but a rusted-out Toyota Tercel and a GED. Things could be much worse. And it’s this thought that I try to use to motivate myself when things seem bleak.
This coming week will probably be pretty quiet due to some family members heading off on a vacation of their own, so I’ll use this time to recharge myself and collect my thoughts. I probably won’t take any days off for the holiday; maybe one at most. But at least they’ll probably all be fairly calm days. I expect to immerse myself in a lot of reading and writing, especially out on the patio where the cool breezes of Thailand’s mild season are best felt. (Oh yes, there’s another reason to celebrate my present circumstances: No snow to clean up, drive in, or otherwise deal with.)
Apple should be done soon, so I’ll wrap this up. Did I mention the spa has free broadband Internet via wi-fi? I think I will be glad to come back here whenever Apple would like.
Join The Midnight Club
Midnight Club L.A. box art
Among the bevy of Xbox 360 games I picked up shortly after landing here in Thailand is Midnight Club L.A., the latest entry in Rockstar Games’ action driving franchise. You might think of the Midnight Club series as analogous to EA’s Need For Speed series, because they have a lot in common: Arcade-style racing packed with visual realism; action driving with a “gangsta” street racing element; police chases; plenty of destruction; and a host of cars from the import tuner, American muscle and exotic categories.
“Ugh…gangsta street racing again?” I hear you moaning. “It probably has a thuggish rap soundtrack too, right?” (Yeah, but it’s also got genres like rock, electronica, techno and death metal, and you can turn off the crap you don’t want to hear.) Despite how this sort of game seems to have been done to death, particularly under the Need For Speed moniker, Rockstar manages to pull off something just a little different, whose flavor is just new enough that it entertains you in new ways. And if you’re like me, and can never get enough of a good action-oriented racer with some cool cars and lots of property destruction, Midnight Club L.A. becomes that much easier to love.
While I’ve kept up with the aforementioned Need For Speed series, it’s been a long time since I played a Midnight Club game. The last time, in fact, was Midnight Club 2 on the PC, probably back in 2003. That game was fun — I even blogged about it at the time, but the article was on my old domain so I don’t have it handy. However, it did seem more frustrating than Need For Speed, in the sense that you’d always find yourself dodging around a ridiculous amount of traffic while you’re racing, and the game even seemed to deliberately lead you into calamitous crashes that you could never possibly have avoided.
In Need For Speed, if you got into a crash like that, you could pretty much go ahead and restart the event. But Midnight Club is deceiving, because the AI is programmed to let you recover fairly easily from these kinds of mistakes, even making it possible to come back and win if you’ve beat your car to hell. For this reason, Midnight Club always starts off maddeningly frustrating on the surface, but once you realize that it’s okay to screw up, it takes a lot of the edge off and the game becomes more enjoyable. Because after all, who doesn’t like crashing and bashing their video game car all over the screen? The destruction effects may not be as good as other games in this genre, but high-speed wrecks are still plenty satisfying.
In Midnight Club L.A., Rockstar has followed this same formula, which is so recognizable that I was immediately reminded of my vintage adventures in Midnight Club 2. But it adds in a modern style “story” with cutscenes and the like, and unlike the pretentious, self-aggrandizing cutscenes in the Need For Speed games, Midnight Club’s unfolding story seems to almost lampoon itself. At one point, the Japanese girl you’re about to race taunts you by saying, “Good luck! …Actually, no. No luck for you!” To which your character responds in disbelief, “Um…wow, yeah, great trash talking, there.” There’s this current of self-deprecating humor about the whole thing that I found deliciously amusing.
When the game begins, you find yourself dropped into the virtual shoes of your player character: An un-named, vaguely ethnic dude with a buzz cut who’s just arrived in Los Angeles from somewhere out east. You want to get into L.A.’s street racing scene, and your first contact is an egomaniac named Booke who hooks you up with your first car. Hilariously, the cars you can choose from at the start are all beaters, with mismatched body panels and lousy paint. Booke talks all gangsta, and what’s funny is that your character reacts to him like he’s got to be some kind of clown, which is great because that’s the reaction I always have in real-life to these overblown racing game characters. It seems Rockstar is having a giggle at Need For Speed’s over-the-top “balla” personalities. It’s a giggle that’s richly deserved.
As the so-called “career mode” of the game rolls on, you run street races against the local L.A. hotshots, upgrade your car, buy new cars, and do it all over again. There’s a few different race types: ordered races, which are checkpoint-based sprints from one location to another along an ordered path; circuit races, which have you following a series of checkpoints for multiple laps; and landmark races, where the game gives you a start point and an end point, and you have to make your own way there. The sandbox-style game world is like that of Grand Theft Auto, in that you’re dropped into a living, breathing virtual city and are allowed to explore at will. The game world isn’t as vibrant or as humorous as GTA’s, but it’s still plenty real.
