My head hurts

a million years ago I worked a snack Kiosk at Sea World. Even now the song to the pioneer ski show is stuck in my head to pop up at random moments...

Where are we going?
I don't know.
When will we get there?
I ain't certain.
All that I know is we are on our way...

A year ago I have no idea what the hell I was doing. Seriously, I barely remember yesterday's dinner. What I do remember is that I was gaming, and my kids were gaming and my ex-husband was gaming and in its way everything was cool and I was cool.

My then 10yr old daughter who is the least gaming inclined would sit around with her DS, playing anything with animals, and trivia and if it was animal trivia that was even better.

My 7yr old son would call me excitedly from the other room to look at his cool new weapon or the  awesome shotgun he was storing at Moxxi's in Borderlands for me to claim next time we played together. Because while I played as Lilith or Mordecai, who specialized in SMGs and Sniper Rifles respectively, I have a weakness for explosive shotguns in Borderlands. That and a nice Pestilent Defiler pistol with a scope.

My 12yr old daughter asking for her own copies of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, starting Mass Effect and Dragon Age, not so much for herself I think, but for me. Because I liked them and she wanted to be cool like mom. Well that goes for the latter 2. She loves the hell out of Fallout all on her own lol.

My then husband was either putting more hours into Borderlands with me or in the living room on the PS3 playing Yakuza 3. I remember one night doing Knoxx's DLC, in the "Circle of Duty" an arena type mission...we breezed through most of it and then the assholes with jetpacks appeared. Death after death and a constant "one more try" every single time. By the time the last damn Elite Crimson Guard was dead it was 7am and we hadn't even noticed we had been up all night playing.

But it wasn't always that way, One big gaming family. It wouldn't stay that way either.

I won't bore you yet again with my "history of gaming" I'll just take it back a bit...

I had established over the past few years that I liked gaming and I had a decent little collection going when Oblivion came out. Til that moment I had played games sporadically and my husband would argue that I was spending too much money on games I wasn't playing (nice to see things haven't changed lol). He would encourage me to play more, so that it wasn't a waste of money.

Then I got Oblivion and suddenly the opposite was true. The argument became that I gamed too much, that I should put the controller down. Eventually I did put it down, after 250 hours. I continued to play games but not as much as I had played Oblivion. I encouraged my children to game often, eventually convincing my husband to buy everyone their own DSLite. I played hours of Style Savvy with the girls and Pokemon with all the kids. I took a lot of flak and a lot of strange looks for being an "old woman" who gamed like a child, and for encouraging my children to play those "awful video games" from other parents.

When Scribblenauts was released I was vindicated. My son went from worst student to best student in his class over the span of winter break. I had my husband print out a file someone posted online with every word in Scribblenauts.That led to  this blog and to me feeling pretty good about gaming. Getting to talk to the Dev. and being a featured commentor on Kotaku for writing a post about it made me even cooler to my kids and my husband said he was proud of me. Yep, I was feeling pretty awesome. I started spending more time reading up on games, more time playing games, more time and money buying games. My son graduated to more difficult console games, my kids friends thought I was cool and it was pretty great.

Since then I've been writing on and off, trying to just, get anyone to read what i write. Why? I don't know. Mostly its just me ranting about stuff but I've enjoyed it and I've gotten a few people to read regularly and some became good friends.

Then this year everything changed, and it changed fast.

I sit here now and I don't even know what I'm saying or why. Its like I just kinda gotta let it all out. Maybe I'll understand it better.

I find myself divorced now. My children a year older and completely changed.
For Christmas I got my kids their own PC and my son is slowly migrating from console to PC. Currently he's playing Skyrim and knows 1 console command, how to increase his carry weight haha.
My daughter now 11 finds herself playing Minecraft with her friend on xbox more often.
But my oldest, now 13, sh'es changed the most. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing her a disservice for being who I am, what I am.
On one hand it was she who created the Facebook page for this blog, she encouraged me to create a youtube channel and she sits in for some of my videos. On the other, I think sometimes she wishes I was more..conventional. She gets annoyed that I tend to hang out with her friends when they come by. The other night while she and a friend giggled the night away on Facebook I was playing Gears 3 with her other friend. We had a blast but I don't think my daughter was so amused.
Maybe its just part of being a teenager now? No matter what kind of parent you have you find them embarrassing and annoying? But its gotten me thinking...maybe I am being some silly middle-aged woman trying too hard to be young, on the other hand, this is who I am and I can't change that.

So a year later, gaming is still cool but maybe i'm not as cool as I used to be.