Motorcycle Envy

I was driving home Saturday evening after a lovely visit with family in West Virginia, and following a motorcycle. The woman riding on the back of the bike was in a black tank top, and her skin was bronzed by the sun. My first thought was that if it was me, I would be sunburned beyond recognition; I have fair skin that burns very quickly. I turned to Jim and shared that thought, and he laughed, and we both returned to our own thoughts. Yeah, I told myself. Motorcycles are not for me.

The bike was ahead of me for some time. I thought about how uncomfortable it would be to ride on a seat like that for a long time. I thought about how it would be, riding on the back, and shifting my position to ease my constant back pain, thus throwing the bike off balance and causing a painful, perhaps deadly accident. Yeah, motorcycles are not for me.

I thought about the time when I was about 12 and wanted to learn to ride one. One of my cousins spent an hour trying to teach me the basics, but I was so terrified that I never managed to actually go anywhere. Yeah, motorcycles are not for me.

That thought took me ahead a decade plus, to a summer when we went to a family reunion in Wyoming. My Uncle John had brought his family's four-wheelers, and again I got the urge to try to ride despite my abject terror. I talked myself out of it a number of times, but finally, I found myself sitting on one of the four-wheelers, the engine making my legs vibrate at nearly the same frequency as my fluttering heart. I moved the machine slowly, jerkily; I couldn't relax enough to do anything else. Talking to myself to steady my nerves, I said, "We'll do one little loop, then get off calmly, say thank you, and then just breathe for a while." But just as I was coming around the front of the yard, my mother jumped on the back, shouting "Wahoo! Let's go!" Every muscle in my body froze solid, and I screamed, "NO!! Get OFF!!" There was a light pole about fifteen feet away, directly in front of me. Directly. In. Front. Of. Me. I could not turn the handlebars. I could not release the gas. I was totally helpless. SMACK. I jumped off the four- wheeler, bawling like a baby, and ran into the house. I wasn't going fast enough to do any damage, but I knew then and there, four-wheelers (and motorcycles) are seriously not for me.

More years passed. My Seester, Michelle, bought a motorcycle. It was a nice bike. But I thought she was crazy. She was talking about doing these big cross-country rides, where you have only so many days to make it a certain distance... She was so excited about her bike. Me, well, I could appreciate the beauty of the bike, but no, no, thank you. Motorcycles are really not for me.

Michelle went with me somewhere -- in a car -- one day after she'd had the bike for awhile. We were driving south on I-80, a little north of Salt Lake, as I recall. There was someone on a motorcycle in front of us. Another biker passed on the other side of the freeway, going the other way. My sister sighed. "What?" I asked.

"One of the things I love about riding my bike," she said. She pointed out that when bikers meet on the road, each driver drops his or her left hand off the handlebar, sticking it out slightly at about the hip, like a cool motorcyclist "low five" without touching. I'd never noticed it, but after that, I watched the guy on the bike ahead of us. It was true. It was like they were a secret club, and suddenly I was feeling desperately left out. Motorcycles are not... are not...

Flash forward to 2011, to my "van-without-air-conditioning," on the road to Columbus. There is that universal biker salute again, and I sigh. Mini-van drivers don't have any such thing. Remember the Suzuki Samurai commercials, where they did the "beep-beep, HI!" thing? They were trying to make themselves out to be "cool like that." We used to laugh about that, but I wonder if it worked. (I wonder if anyone out there still HAS a Suzuki Samurai?)

No, motorcycles aren't for me. Sigh.

While the Cat's Away...

Shame on me, seriously.

I know Jim won't be thrilled when he returns from China to find that I have, once again, bought a back yard wading pool. How many have there been in the 14 summers since we had our first child? And he has hated every one. For a simple, $15 purchase, I wouldn't bug Jim on his business trip, now would I? So, of course, it will be a lovely surprise for him when he gets home.

And, of course, it is the biggest wading pool I've ever bought. I think. There was that one inflatable one I bought, the one that stayed too cold for wading until it was so full of mosquito maggots I couldn't bear to let the kids into it. This one may be bigger than that one. Of course, this time, it is going to be different. It will get warm enough, quickly enough that we will have a blast with it. We will get $60 of fun out of it, and Jim will say it was a wonderful investment in childhood. Yep.

So I'm a Chicken at Heart

At one point last year, a friend on Facebook (do I have any other kind?) posted that she was looking for blogs to follow, and asked if anyone had one she hadn't found yet. I replied with something like, "Yes, I do, but you'll never find it!!" And then I sat there, with the arrow poised over the "reply" button...

...

...

... and I deleted the reply. After all, if someone KNEW I had one and wanted to find it, would it be challenging to find it? I didn't know. Did I want someone to read it? Well, yes, and yet...

Last week, after writing a new post that had been weighing on my mind for some time, I took the plunge and posted a link to this blog on my FB page. Then I worried. What if no one bothered to read it? What if someone did? What if they didn't like it? What if they made fun of me? What if??

And this time, I left it. And suddenly, my blog says that I have three followers. Wow! One seems to be following it privately, so I don't know who it is, but three (3) is three times as many as I had last year.

Now, do I dare ever write anything else?

Mom, Why Do You Hate Boosts?

My eldest son, R, asked me this week, "Mom, why do you hate boosts?" I was playing a game on Facebook, Zuma Blitz, which I let my younger son, B, play on my account frequently. When B plays, he turns on the maximum number of "boosts" -- special powers that boost his ability to win. When I play, I turn them all off. Yep, I hate boosts.

The fact is, for almost a month I have been trying to write a blog entry about this very topic. Why do I hate boosts? Well, first of all, let's call them what they are: cheats. They are little, socially accepted cheats, to help you get around the rules in order to score higher in computer games. It used to be that such things were straight-out called "cheat codes," but I guess they have softened that name to make it sound less dishonest. But you know, I miss the days when people simply played games by the rules. I think of my grandfather, during World War II on his battleship, playing checkers. He placed second in the ship-wide competition. He didn't use any boosts. There was no, "I'll spend 5,000 checkers-points for the ability to move directly ahead," or such. Can you imagine?

My boys have tried unsuccessfully to convince me to buy them some device that plugs into the Nintendo DS. They gave up asking, so I have forgotten what it is called. Apparently this device carries cheat codes for a number of DS games. They borrowed one from a friend at one time, and B delightedly told me about how his character in one game had now obtained unlimited lives, and could jump higher, and could swim. I listened to him boast, but I asked, "Where is the fun in that?" He looked at me like I was crazy, and went to tell his brother about it.

Isn't most of the fun in a game found in legitimately beating the challenge? Where is the challenge, if your character no longer is bound by the rules?

One of my former favorite Facebook games, Bejeweled Blitz, started off as a great challenge. Two of my friends were fantastic at it, and every week I fought hard to try to match their scores. I could never stay at the top of the leaderboard for long, though, as one or both would inevitably outdo my score.

Then they released a new "beta" version, in which each round allowed you to win "coins," which could be redeemed to purchase... BOOSTS. Start the round with a 2x score multiplier! Add a few seconds to the game! If you wanted, you could spend actual money and buy more coins. I played the new game for a day or two. Once, when I didn't have enough coins to purchase any boosts, I was playing the old way, with just my own skills, and I beat my high score. I was so excited, and when I posted my score, I wrote that I "hadn't even used any boosts" and suddenly I had an epiphany. My high score, for which I had "worked" so hard, looked the same as any other score from outside. I looked at my friends' high scores, and wondered how many boosts they were using, and which ones. And right then I realized that a boost was a "clean" name for a cheat.

I sent a message to the developers, complaining that boosts ruined the fun of the game. I saw on their wall several comments from other players with the same complaint. But soon the old clean version of the game disappeared, replaced by the new one. I refused to use the boosts, letting the useless "coins" accumulate. Sometimes I would see the high scores others had, and would succumb to the unspoken peer pressure for a few games, but it always made me feel sick.

Last week, I broke the 3,000,000 coin mark. I haven't played anywhere near as regularly as I once did, or I'd probably have double that. But I decided that I'd finally had enough. Just for the fun of it, I decided to spend all those useless coins and leave the game in a blaze of glory. Sure enough, I got the high score for my team last week. But it was such an empty victory. It has taken me a lot of wasted time to drop the balance below 2,000,000. And frankly, I don't care enough to keep trying.

My awareness of cheats has increased because of it. Yesterday, I caught part of a reality TV show where three teams of bakers were trying to make the best decorated cake. As the teams worked, they pulled the team leaders aside for two events. The first event -- which I missed, actually -- seemed to involve making a cake that looked like a poster. The second was a taste test, from their special cake. Now, if the competition is about making a fantastic cake, I could see the point of the second "minor" event; a gorgeous cake that tastes awful isn't worth the sugar rush. The first event, however, seemed kind of forced. ANYWAY, the point was that the winners of these two events got to pick a team to penalize in the main competition -- by taking away 30 minutes of work time from that team. The same team won both events, and the leader chose to penalize the same team both times. Now I don't know how much time they had in all, but to lose a full hour of competition time? How can that count as anything other than a cheat? Now by this time, I was pretty "into" the program, rooting with all my heart for the team that had been so unfairly hindered -- and that team won, by the way. But I am so disgusted by the way the competition was dirtied that I will not watch it again.

If you want the "minor" events included, that is just fine with me. The taste test, in particular, should be part of the final score of the cake, absolutely! But to give any team an unfair advantage, or disadvantage, based on the whims of a winner... No. How does that get everyone to do their best? How does it encourage good sportsmanship?

Suppose that my team had lost the competition, perhaps by a narrow margin. (I believe they may have won by a narrow margin; it is hard to say.) What would they walk away saying? "If they hadn't stolen an hour's labor from us, we would have had them." "We were robbed!" (Yes, they were.) There might have been cordial congratulations, but "unfair" would have been seething under their smiles.

A friend of mine asked on Facebook about another reality show tonight; "Who was eliminated?" Another friend responded that the person eliminated was "saved" by the judges, so would be going on in the competition after all. The judges on this show didn't used to have the power to "save" a favorite, to essentially say, "The rules won't apply this time." They do now.

Why do we settle for this in our society today? Have we become so competitive -- no, that isn't fair to the term "competition." Have we become so determined to win at all costs that we've given up on honesty and fairness? Why is it so acceptable to bend the rules here, and break them there? Why do we put up with it in our computer and video games and on reality shows, and then act so shocked when people expect to get away with cheating in other areas?

I believe in being honest. THAT is why I hate boosts.