February 28, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Modern man: Bad dancing, bad video games, bad love life
by MIKE TODD

When my wife Kara recently announced that she was planning a girls’ weekend in New York City with some of her friends, my thoughts immediately turned to the provisions I’d need to sustain myself in her absence, namely video games and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

To those who might think that video games do not qualify as survival necessities, I submit the following story: Kara’s good friend from college, who for the purposes of this column will be named Martha, once decided to seduce her college boyfriend. She bought lingerie and spent a bunch of time in the bathroom doing, I don’t know, whatever girls do in there to make themselves look better in their own minds when they look perfectly good already.

When she slinked into the living room to suggest her ideas for the evening’s itinerary, her boyfriend didn’t look up from the TV screen. “Not now,” he said, mashing the buttons on the controller. “I’m in the middle of a really good part.”           

After some more discussion that really could have benefited from the application of the “pause” button, the evening ended with her exit from the apartment as he continued playing. 

“I got turned down for sex because of a video game,” Martha complains whenever her long-gone ex-boyfriend becomes the topic of conversation.

Upon hearing this story, every one of my guy friends has the same reaction.  They’ll shake their head in disbelief, pause for a moment, then ask, “What game was he playing?”

When they ask this question, they’ll already be fishing in their pockets for their car keys, getting ready to roll through all the stop signs on the way to Best Buy. Surely, a game that good warrants at least a rental. 

To anyone who worries that the current generation of young males is too obsessed with video games, may you at least take some solace in the fact that their chances of procreation are looking pretty slim, which certainly bodes well for a planet that is way too crowded.

Even though I’d miss Kara while she was gone, I was looking forward to getting some quality time with my much-neglected PlayStation 3. While some men may have taken offense at getting ditched by their wives for the weekend, I was glad that Kara would have the opportunity to dance at a nightclub with her friends without involving me, potentially getting it out of her system. 

In my life, I’ve seen maybe two guys who would qualify as good dancers and an equal number of girls who would qualify as bad dancers. The reason for the inequality is not immediately evident, but it’s my hypothesis that women have an extra hinge in there somewhere. 

The objective for any male on the dance floor is to dance well enough to keep his partner entertained, while blending enough to become invisible to everyone else. I’m 6’4” tall, which makes blending very difficult. When I’m dancing, I feel like one of those cell towers that’s been done up to look like a tree. Standing above all the other trees, I just keep saying, “See?  I’m a tree, too.  Please don’t look too closely.”

After Kara and her friends departed for the big city last weekend, a couple of my buddies came over for an Assassin’s Creed marathon. That’s a particularly grisly video game that would make the Iraq War look like Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes we ordered pepperoni, sometimes we ordered half-pepperoni, half-plain. It’s important to have variety in your diet.

After one particularly gruesome kill, blood spraying all over the screen, my buddy Allen said, “So was Kara excited to get away for the weekend?”

“Yeah, but she was worried that her clutch didn’t match her outfit,” I replied.

“Her clutch?” he asked. I assume he was raising one eyebrow, though I didn’t press ‘pause’ to look.

“It’s, uh, a little purse,” I replied, ashamed.

“Where I come from, a clutch is something that engages a transmission,” he said. That used to be where I came from, too. 

Mike Todd is a Penn State grad and alleged computer whiz who decided last weekend that it was time for him to do some stuff around the house — sit around it, lie around it and walk around it. When he was finished with those strenuous activities, he invented large-type-size alphabet soup for senior citizens. You can feed him some beer at mikectodd@gmail.com.