Starting in the early summer of 2011, I found myself facing some new and interesting decisions. I had just turned thirty, had finished two masters degrees (MA-English, MFA-Poetry) in a wonderfully challenging and fulfilling environment, and was preparing to begin my PhD in English in a new city. I wasn't worried because I had been through this before: a new city, a new university, new jobs for me and my wife, new schools for the kids, etc... But this summer was more of a challenge than I had anticipated (go figure). I'll return to this in a moment.
I am a writer. Writing is what I have been trained in, what my degrees are in, and what I teach to make a living. Since I was a small child I knew I wanted to write, and I have been writing my whole life. But I am also a
gamer. Only my closest friends know of how serious a gamer I am. I have been gaming as long as I have been writing, and I spend at least as much time, if not more (yeah, probably more) playing games as I do writing. This goes for more than just video games: sports, board games, trivia games, trading card games (I am a pretty serious MTG player), made-up games, you name it. If it looks fun and can be won, chances are I will play it.
This can be perceived as a problem when one is trying to build a career as a poet. People think a writer should be typing away by candlelight with no other distractions than his or her serious literary thoughts. That is a Hollywood stereotype. Reality is much different. Nobody could or should write every hour of the day. Poems come when they come, and when they come you had better drop everything and listen. Gaming is my other great love, and gives me something to look forward to when I am not working. Aside from being my favorite pastime, I never thought that gaming could inspire me in my non-virtual life. It has given me many hours of enjoyment, but this summer it also jumped up and kicked me in the ass.
Thus the purpose of this blog.
I had never played any of The Sims games before, but this summer I have been playing The Sims 3 port on Xbox 360. For those of you who are not familiar, The Sims is a series of games where you create virtual people and help them lead their virtual lives. Like many people probably do, I made a Sim version of my own family and have been working on fulfilling our virtual dreams and wishes. Each character has a lifetime wish and hundreds of smaller personal wishes. Each completed wish adds to your character's Lifetime Happiness total.
As I sat playing, my character who much like the real me is a bookworm, wanted to go to the Library. This is a common wish for Bookworm characters in the game, but it occurred to me that outside of the university library where I sometimes hold my classes, I had not been to the library in a long time, and never for non-scholastic purposes. I also realized that my children who are five and three years old respectively, had also never been to the library. I was ashamed of that realization. After all books are my business, but my children whose own father is a published poet had never been to a library. I was accomplishing more in my virtual life than in my real one.
I thought, why can't I really live like this? How do we get so disoriented in our lives that we forget to live simply? Have I been so caught up trying to become a writer that I forgot about the damn library?
I turned off the game, threw the kids in the car, and went to get a new library card. In five minutes my kids were going wild picking books off the shelves and I remembered how happy a simple trip to the library could be. I thought to myself, how could this game help me live better?
As I said earlier, the move to a new city has been harder than I thought. I feel as though I have been on an island of myself. I have hardly left the house in months because I don't have anywhere to go really, and nobody to visit. But that is my own fault. I realized that there are plenty of things to do and wish for in the world. I have just been forgetting about them. So I set myself a challenge. Using the challenges and wishes from the Sims universe, I am going to keep track of my lifetime happiness.
The rules are simple. I will do as much of this list as I can, and report about it here on this blog. The goal is not the completion of the list. There are some things on there that I will never do, and some that are impossible for me to do. There are plenty that I simply don't want to do, but I am going to try and make an effort to live outside of my comfort zone. The goal: 1,000,000 lifetime happiness points or I drop dead, whichever happens first.
J. Bruce Fuller
Lafayette, LA
August 2011
