Pac Man Life

Without a doubt, the hardest-hit area of life after Japan is ego. The great thing about teaching English in Japan is that no matter who you are, you have instant rockstar status as a foreigner. Provided that you aren’t Chinese or Korean.

“I’m from America” no longer cuts it as a pickup line.

And so the quarterlife crisis, that existential quandry that you managed to avoid dealing with by moving to Japan, you discover is still hanging around. Every day, you come home from work, and there’s your quarterlife crisis hanging out on the couch, hogging the remote, adding Wayans brothers movies to the front of your Netflix queue, drinking your beer, listening to crappy nu-metal and not showering regularly. Increasingly he even shows up at your work, just to mock you for painting houses with a B.A. in Humanities and Social Sciences.

You reflect that perhaps you brought it all on yourself by majoring in LInguistics, a field that most people don’t know exists, and that most of the others think is synonymous with translation. At least you got a couple years abroad out of the deal though, right?

The problem with college is that it doesn’t prepare you for life. Not in the sense that you’re never really going to use trigonometry in your daily routine, but in the sense that in school, every few months, you have your finals, a new semester or quarter begins, and the whole cycle begins again. It’s like finishing a level in Super Mario Brothers. Hell, you even have points in college. No, the reason college doesn’t prepare students for life in the real world is not because of irrelevance. It’s because life is not Super Mario Brothers. It’s Pac Man. It’s Tetris. It’s Pong. You might finish the level, but there’s no princess, and it all just gets faster, more difficult, and increasingly manic as you progress. Until you die.

There’s a freeware game that I came across the other day, it’s called Passage. It reminds me of those old 8-bit NES games. You have a five-minute time limit, within which you can do whatever you want. You are a little pixilated guy with blue eyes and blond hair. You can walk around a little world in any direction you want. The right hand side of the screen stretches off and blurs into the horizon. You meet a little pixilated woman, and she begins to follow you around. The little pixilated timer in the corner keeps counting up to five minutes, and you begin to notice the little pixilated couple getting older. Eventually, your pixilated blond hair disappears altogether, and the woman in replaced with a little pixilated grave marker. All of a sudden you realize that no longer is the right hand side that stretches on into pixelated, blurry 8-bit promise, but the left hand side, what you’ve already crossed over. And by the time you’ve put the whole metaphor together, your little nameless pixilated guy has been replaced by his own little grave marker. No power-ups, no giant, fire-breathing lizards, no flame throwers or assault rifles, just life in 8-bit technicolor glory, and a reminder that the clock is still ticking along, regardless of what you decide to do with that time.

It’s a lot of pressure, living in a Pac Man world.