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Thursday, May 8, 2003 - 6:48 p.m.

On shoes and gaming systems

Actually, this is the entry I had intended to write today, but then the whole thing with the Coke machine happened (previous) and I just didn't feel like hooking the two trains of thought into one big freight train of rambling along the tracks of my mind.

What I wanted to talk about before � ahem � the Coke took over (and I'm trying not to let it affect my life as much as it did back in my college days) was Casey's shoe purchase when we were in the Hamptons. Casey talked about how she has so many and keeps buying them and it's great when she can find Michael Kors for as good a price as she did and then I kind of wondered aloud, "Well, if you can spend up to $200 on a pair of shoes, what the hell is stopping me from justifying a PlayStation?"

She looked at me. And agreed.

There have been several reasons I've refrained from even shopping around for a video game system developed since the 80s, though I've teased myself when I played Matt's GameCube down in D.C. in December. The NCAA football game was so realistic, complete with Ty Willingham leading the Irish onto the field (Casey even recognized him without any prompting � that's how authentic it is), and I was impressed. But why get one? I have fun with our Old School Nintendo (or OSN, which I believe is its official name now), I have enough other distractions to chose from, among them a DVD player (which includes various movies, the first two seasons of The Simpsons, and the entire series of Sports Night), The Sims, the internet, my photography, books, magazines, beer, sex and the outdoors � but sometimes you just want something else (or something's ... um ... not available to you at that moment). But I figured that if I did go out and by a PlayStation, a GameCube or an XBox (do these companies save money by not using spaces, or am I just mashing them all together for no reason?), I'd enjoy it endlessly for a good week or so, then adequately for months and years after that, but would it justify the purchase?

But how much different is it than Casey's shoe purchases? To be clear, I don't constantly go on and on about how ridiculous I think shoe obsessions are. I have obsessions of my own, and I can understand. Some of mine are even less practical than purchasing shoes that go with only two outfits and therefore get worn only two times a year. I mean, there are dozens of baseball jerseys I'd like to own, and I'd wear them much more often than once every six months, but do I get them all? No. Why? Because Casey won't let me. Something about "that guy."

OK, bad example. All I'm saying is while I will occassionally question why this pair of strapy black heels is different from that pair of strapy black heels, and I may crack a joke or two, I can back down and just let the fetishes take over. You want to own 36 pairs of shoes at an average price of $190, or whatever those kinds of shoes go for, fine. I have car payments to make.

In our discussion, though, she totally agreed with me (and maybe it was so she could look at me and think, "Well, he did get that PlayStation ...") that if I decide to go to Target and grab an XBox for $150 and then a couple of games at $50 (yeah, a drawback) every few months, I should be entitled, without feeling too guilty about it. It's certainly something I can share with friends, and it's not something that's going to sit around and get no use. And frankly, if it does, this is the age of eBay and Half.com, and I could probably get back at least half of what I paid for it if it does start getting more attention from the dust bunnies than me. Additionally, the OSN may be on its last microchips. It's becoming harder and harder to get games to work, even those that we don't remove from the console. No amount of blowing on the cartridges seems to work sometimes, and when that fails, what else is left? (Incidentally, Peter at work once told me his theory that human beings of our generation � that whole "you know you're a child of the 80s if ..." group � are genetically coded to know to blow on a Nintendo cartridge. He hypothesizes that if you took an American child born after 1974 and put them in a home with an OSN, which they'd never seen before, and they tried to get a game to work, they'd simply know to blow on the open end of the cartridge as a form of troubleshooting.)

But I'm not running out to Target on my way home tonight. I have to set some guidelines for myself. First, as I mentioned before, we have enough to entertain us right now, particularly with so many DVDs as yet unwatched � or unopened. We've been buying them for gifts, for ourselves, on sale because we know we want them, but haven't had the time to watch them all. But now that the television season is coming to an end, we'll soon have much more viewing time. I don't need to watch baseball every night, that's for sure, and the NBA and NHL playoffs will be over in five or six weeks � sooner for me if the New Jersey teams lose, and I don't really watch the games, just flip back every few commercials and whatnot to get an update.

So the first plan is to make a list of the DVDs and movies that MUST be watched before I can consider a new video game system purchase. And there are a few books I'd like to move from the "you've owned these for three years now read them already" pile into the "aaaahhhh ... finished" group. But once that list is made, and once everything is crossed off, I should feel free to being price and spec comparisions among the PlayStation, GameCube and XBox.

And then as soon as I've made my purchase, one of the companies will announce the next future in home video game systems, immediately rendering mine obsolete and beginning the descent in price that will eventually lead to the whole thing being priced at half what I paid for it.

Maybe I should just wait for a parallel Dan on the other side of the country to do just that, thereby allowing me to reap the benefits of a reduced-price system.

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