tetris, the game of life

I've never been big into video or computer games, my obsessive-compulsive side never quite stoked by the flames that fanned the Super Mario Brothers generation. It may have been a case of out of sight, out of mind; Atari and Nintendo were never Christmas gifts for my brother and I, and we were never upset with Santa because of it.

That's not to say I've never been momentarily besotted to the point where a computer game has taken over my life. I have. Three times exactly. My first love was Leisure Suit Larry, a game that made me a pretty popular girl back in grade six. Computers in the home were still relatively new back then, and their novelty for a 11-year-old was honed sharply by the fact that you could play dirty games on them. Needless to say, when the teachers went on strike for those two glorious weeks in 1989, I could have used a bouncer given how many kids wanted to come over to meet Larry. My most recent obsession occurred two short years ago, when I spent obscene amounts of time in grad school playing computer Solitaire. We're talking obscene. But the big kahuna, the mother-of-them-all? Tetris. Sweet, sweet, Tetris.

When I was 14, I borrowed a friend's Game Boy and was MIA for two weeks straight, until my friend gave me an ultimatum: either give him back his Game Boy, or ... okay, there wasn't really an ultimatum, he just wanted his Game Boy back. For those who have never played Tetris, it's based on a splendidly simple concept: you arrange a bunch of colourful and random shapes that fall from the top of the computer screen so that there are no black spaces left in between the shapes the end of the game (or blue, as in the diagram above). As time goes on, the shapes fall faster, making it more and more difficult to ensure everything fits perfectly, that there are no dark holes where you've poorly cobbled things together. The key to success - in my neophyte gamer's opinion - is not to focus on the holes you've accumulated: keep your eye on the top of the screen because those shapes keep falling, and they don't wait for you to make peace with the black.

Lately, it feels like I'm playing Tetris 24/7 again, only this time with life. The shapes are falling with increasing speed, and I ignore my own good advice and keep looking at the bottom of the screen, wondering if I'm leaving too many holes. The shapes in my life? The single girl's adventures, complete with Mexican vacation; falling in love with my best friend; the diamond solitaire; the white picket fence; the round-trip ticket, taking me to Brussels, Barcelona, Beijing; the sheep skin diploma(s); the fabulous career with a big paycheck and even bigger recognition; the rug rats; etc, etc. With time marching on to an ever accelerating drum, and those varied strings of squares dropping from atop post-haste, it's more arduous than it's ever been to ignore the caverns I've created; clearly, fitting everything together perfectly is next to impossible. Some shapes (like rug rats) preclude or delay others (like round-the-world extended vacations, or the absolutely-positively-fabulous, aren't-you-jealous? careers). It's hard not to kid myself that the shapes of my life could all have been perfectly aligned, if only I planned better, or smarter, as the chips were falling. When this happens, I try to step back from my game screen, and recognize that Tetris is a game more about colour than black, and usually when I do this I remember why I find it so addictive.