“Will you pass history class? Oooh, you’re a Pisces with the moon in . . . ugh. Give it up, Tina.”
Turns out the girls loved having their own private psychic in the changing room. I convinced my mom to drop me off at class a half hour early for “stretching” and started consulting with all the dancers on parental problems, summer school plans, you name it. A lot of them brought in birthdays of boys they liked in order to see how their charts aligned. I’m pretty sure my advice led to a few de-virginizations. It was an awesome change from no one wanting to talk to the weird homeschooled girl! I’d finally found a way to relate to other kids. It was fulfilling. And made me popular. And eventually I got shut down.
Miss Mary, my dance teacher, stopped me one day when I arrived. “Felicia, what are you carrying?”
“Um, just a few books.” There were fifteen stacked up to my chin. I’d just discovered Chinese astrology and I Ching and couldn’t wait to tell Jennifer about the guy she crushed on, Simon. Sadly, his stubborn Tiger traits would always keep them apart.
“Megan’s mom doesn’t like her learning about astrology. I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking about it with the girls.”
“But it’s the science of the stars!”
“She thinks it’s Satanic. You gave her daughter a pentagram.”
“It’s a natal chart, duh. You can’t let ignorance trump science here, Miss Mary!”
Nothing I said could persuade her. She was a Taurus. Once her mind was made up, it was over.
I was forced to hang up my crystal ball, and eventually the girls stopped talking to me again. (And they probably made terrible life choices they could have avoided if they hadn’t been deprived of my insight, thanks to Megan’s mom.) I was upset but soon bounced back and was able to move on to another, more accessible place for friendship and identity exploration: the online world.
[?Vidya Gamez!?]
I don’t need a psychologist to tell me that my love of role-playing games is linked to my childhood quest for self. Link number two: I like killing virtual monsters.
We were always big on technology in my family. My dad studied to be an engineer before becoming a doctor, and he’s the kind of dude who always had a PalmPilot in a large holster attached to his belt. (Now he has his Android phone in a large holster attached to his belt, but that’s his life choice, and I will not mock it. To his face.)
When I was about seven or eight, my grandfather gave us his secondhand “laptop,” which was as big as a dining room table.
I think it was meant to help my parents with their college courses, but generally my mom set the standard for us kids by playing video games on it. They were text-only, because the monitor didn’t support graphics, so it was more like reading an interactive novel than anything. The gaming equivalent of liking weird foreign films with subtitles.
My favorite one to watch her play was called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It came with a scratch-and-sniff sheet tied to various parts of the game, and I sniffed the pizza area until it disappeared, even though it smelled more like dog food than pepperoni. (If I did drugs, I would totally be a sniffer. Gasoline and Magic Markers, I gotta fight against getting my nose all up in there.) After watching my mom type “attack Tiffany with pipe” and having the game tell her back, “Tiffany yells, ‘ow!’,” I knew I was hooked on video games for life.
As my brother and I grew up, we played any PC computer game we could trick our parents into buying us. It was the primary hobby we used to fill our many, MANY free hours between geisha lessons.
“We need this program called Math Blaster to help us learn better, Mom. Oh, and those four other games under it, too. Don’t look too close!”
In an amazing stroke of Cancerian fate, right after the ballet class Satan-worshiping situation, I stumbled upon a video game series called Ultima. Besides pretty much being one of the seminal Role-Playing Game series of ALL TIME (don’t argue with me about this, you’re wrong), this is a video game that literally changed my life.
What set this series apart from other indecipherably pixilated games of the early ’90s was the way you created your character. At the beginning of the game, a fortune-teller asks you several multiple-choice questions like:
“A girl is to be killed for stealing bread from a dying woman. What do you do?”
A) Let them kill her; she deserved it.
B) Demand that she be freed; her crime is understandable.
C) Offer to take the punishment instead. She’s hot.
(Okay, that wasn’t one of the real questions.)