“FUCKING BALLSACK SHIT FUCKERS!” I yelled, smacking my forehead into the tiny screen in front of me.

My boyfriend laughed and patted my back. “You doing okay there?”

I grumbled loudly. “Fucking. Fucks. Motherfucking bitchwad Alien asshole. I have to jump on him three times and I can’t even do it fucking ONCE.” I dug my fingernails into my skull and heaved a sigh.

Boyf had dug his Game Boy Advance out of the closet along with a slew of games, hoping to give me something less stressful to do than read my coursework. OH IF ONLY HE KNEW. I gleefully plucked Mario 2: 6 Golden Coins out of the pile because I remembered putting countless hours as a child into trying to kick Wario’s ass. Turns out childhood video game memories are a lot like memories about giving birth: if you didn’t repress the shitty parts, you might never do it again. It didn’t take long for me to remember why I never beat the game as a child, and why my own original Game Boy is currently in about fifty-seven pieces in a disused Caboodle box in my mom’s basement.

My relationship with video games is sort of like having a deaf chimpanzee as a best friend. At first it’s all sorts of fun: you’re feeling pretty in control and enjoying your time with Mr. No-Hearz, as the two of you romp and jump in leaf piles and have spontaneous tickle fights. After not too long though, you realize that caring for an aurally handicapped primate, even one you’re really fond of, starts to get tedious and stressful. You yell and yell at Mr. No-Hearz to stop shitting on the kitchen table, but he just looks at you like “What?” and shits again. Oh, if only you’d had the foresight to teach your best friend basic sign language. Perhaps then you wouldn’t have to sit back and watch in abject horror as Mr. No-Hearz, startled by the sudden presence of someone in your living room, mercilessly rips through your best friend’s flesh. “NO WORRY! THIS FRIEND!” you wish you could sign by patting the top of your head three times. But he doesn’t know sign language, and can’t hear either of you screaming. Eventually you start to realize things have gotten out of control. What started as a fun and cute playmate has transformed into a monstrous unwieldy beast over which you no longer have any control. Mr. No-Hearz is quietly put down, never to be spoken of again.

My point is, I would love to be good at video games, but I always end up feeling utterly overpowered by them. I can still only really manage 2D games, because three dimensions are for PHYSICISTS AND SORCERERS, and I typically only play games starring pudgy plumbers, because please don’t ask me to follow complex plot lines during this process. My confidence is relatively high at the beginning of a game as I fly through the first few worlds with a pocket full of dreams and warp whistles, but it dwindles quickly. I realize that it’s likelier that I will give birth to an immaculately conceived half-bear-half-child than it is that I will ever beat this game. If you were to  (creepily) video tape me playing a video game, the product would require a NSFW tag.

The variety and creativity with which I manage to sling vulgarities while I play video games is…well, if they awarded a Nobel Prize in Cursing, then I’d be price comparing flights to Stockholm. Every possible curse word can and does fulfill every possible part of speech it can, sometimes producing a complete, syntactically correct sentence that lacks anything but curse words. “FUCKS SHITTING BASTARD ASSES,” I cry, as the moving scenery traps me in between the left side of the screen and a wall of blocks. “BITCH TITTING CUNTLESS FUCKERIES,” and then a swift kick to the coffee table. Not to mention the endless possibilities available if you combine curse words with benign, unrelated words, producing things like “Sink Fuckers” and “Bitch Warblers.”[1]

The only time in my life when I actually managed to beat a video game (the laughably childish Luigi’s Mansion for GameCube) is also the first time my mother heard me curse out loud. Not that that really mattered; she just tromped halfway up the stairs and yelled toward my room “STOP YOUR FUCKING YELLING!” But it made me wonder how I managed to express the unique brand of frustration I get when I can’t beat a boss level before I knew how to use curse words. Perhaps I yelled things like “BUTT NUGGETS!” or “FLARFEBLARGENS!”But that sounds more like how I talk now. So maybe I just silently seethed and cried.

I should probably apologize in advance to boyf, because his GBA may not survive my efforts. I have to consciously remember not to ram it against the wall every time Mario gets womped on by a Goomba and loses his flighted bunny ears. To say nothing of actually dying! Sprinting, panic-stricken, through the first fourth of Wario’s castle (First eighth? Sixteenth? Thirty-Secondth? I have no fucking idea how long this stupid fucking castle is) and continually mistiming my jump and getting taken out by a ginormous spikey floating ball thinger and watching my life count plummet like something that, in a metaphor, would plummet very quickly is perhaps the most stressful and hopeless thing I’ve ever put my heart through.

“I remember why I stopped playing this back then,” I said, burying my head in a pillow.

“You can do it!”

“I’ve already blown through sixty lives.”

“You’ve WHAT?!”

YES THAT’S RIGHT. I will burn up more lives trying to get through the end of a Mario game than we idiomatically afford to an entire battalion of cats.

I almost always end up mostly nude after a few hours of game play. No, I’m not going for sexy. I can think of about three dozen things, just off the top of my head, sexier than an embittered and red-faced awkward girl screaming obscenities at a TV screen. I just end up getting so worked up and sweaty that by hour three, I’m scrunched up in a ball on the floor in just my underwear, pitching the controller into the floor like it’s a football. Please, seriously, erase all thought in your mind that this is even remotely attractive. I assure you, it’s not. It’s really not.

I will pick the game up again soon, albeit warily, like it’s a tiny sleeping carnivore that could awaken and gnaw my face off at any moment. And like so many other games I played as a child, very likely this one will go undefeated. Eventually I’ll reach my breaking point and uncontrollable rage will subside into a deep melancholy, during which I will hand the game over to boyf, my naked body twitching and shaking on the bed, and beg him to please please. PLEASE. Just jump on his fucking head three times so I can go to bed.

–Katie Sisneros

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