But I'm just too excited to focus right now. Plus, this is technically "work", isn't it?
It's Thursday, which is the night D (my partner) and I set aside for playing games and hanging out. That's just the arrangement for this semester - we've had a lot of other schedules for when we would hang out during the school semester, most of which have been far from "scheduled". So, before I start actually blogging about my experiences with these date nights, I thought I would start at the beginning and explain how our relationship has evolved from geographically close to geographically distant to virtual and where it is today.
When D and I started dating, we were both attending the same university and working on our MAs. One of the first nights we ever hung out, he bought Guitar Hero for himself as a birthday present and we played it for several hours. [Sidenote: Although D grew up playing computer and video games (mostly Nintendo systems), he had been "off" of them for a year or so before that night. In his previous relationship, his girlfriend didn't quite share these interests (putting it nicely) and he sort of purged it from his lifestyle. Buying Guitar Hero was a video game awakening for him, as well.] Over the course of the next couple of years, we played a lot of games together, mostly on the Nintendo Wii or one of the changing versions of the Nintendo DS. I had had a sporadic, tenuous relationship with gaming up until this point. Sure, I grew up playing video games (e.g., the original Tomb Raider and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for Playstation 1 were my games), but when I moved away from home for college the systems stayed at my parents' house with my siblings and I couldn't afford one for myself. So the new(er) world of gaming that D introduced me to hooked me pretty quickly. Some entire weekends we would spend completely in front of his TV playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King or Animal Crossing or some other more demanding games whose names completely escape me at the moment. We also made up several drinking games to accompany Friday or Saturday night dates. I can say that, right? I mean we were well over the legal drinking age...
At any rate, when D introduced the idea of going out of state for a doctoral program I was immediately super emotional and sad. I had no idea what a long distance relationship was like, how it would function, what to even do to maintain any semblance of the relationship we currently had... Clearly I'm good at handling change. Of his original options, one of them was New York, which would have at least left us the option of weekend drives to see one another. But it ultimately became a decision between two programs in California, and San Diego triumphed.
So then we were left with a future full of distances that included three hours in time and about 2500 in miles, and an accumulation of student loan and credit card debt to support air travel. We also had a summer to figure out what was going on with us before it all began.
I'm not here to talk about the horrors and triumphs of long distance relationships, by any means. But, I do feel it's at least important to give you some background information about what happened next and why it had such a profound impact on our relationship, my research interests, and the reason I'm involved in this project.
So that summer, the summer before D moved to San Diego, I bought a Wii. The summer after that, I bought a PS3. These two consoles have played a major role in the shape our LDR (long distance relationship) has taken. In both gaming and non-gaming related ways. I'll explain each of these in more detail in another post, because the 'preview' of this one has shown me it's incredibly long.
To be continued...
