y = sin(nx) where y > 1985

"It's always darkest before the dawn."  I know this is a common saying, but I always remember when my mother said it once long ago.  I'm reasonably sure that my middle school experience was very similar to that of most children, but during one particular week it was more awful than usual.  I was turned down by my crush, caught some kind of stomach flu that caused me to shit while vomiting, and received the first "eighth hour" of my academic career.  I was a loner anyway, but during that week I didn't talk to anyone.  I didn't smile.  I didn't laugh.  I just kept to myself until I could go home and keep to myself in my room.  Near the end of this terrible week, somewhere in the peak of my shit/vomit episodes, my mother came to the door of the upstairs bathroom where I was sitting on the toilet with a bucket in my hands and asked how I was doing.  Now, not being in a particularly enjoyable position from which to answer this question, I coughed out something about feeling horrible and wanting her to leave me alone.  She cracked the door open, to my EXTREME displeasure, and sighed while saying, "You know, Neen, it's always darkest before the dawn," and then shut the door again to me waving her frantically away while shouting and scowling.  After she had left me in peace I didn't really think about what she had said.  I was too busy shitting my life out because of some bad Mexican food.  In fact, I didn't really think about it at all until much later, years later, when I started noticing something about myself.

Maybe I'm bipolar, maybe I'm just really unstable, but I find my mood oscillating up and down between extreme satisfaction and horrible depression.  When I was younger, the oscillations were much faster.  However, the maximum and minimum amplitudes have always been the same.  Over the past few weeks I've passed through the minimum, a horrible tangle of depression and self hatred combined with a dissatisfaction with the world around me, but now I'm coming back out if it.  I can feel it.  Due in no part to my own actions, I am now feeling happier.  I suppose I could chalk it up to a lot of things, but when you get right down to it nothing has really changed.  All the major parts of my life are unchanged.  And that brings me to my main point, I think I focus on minor details because all the important things in my life are satisfactory.  I'm fishing for things to worry about because I don't really have anything to worry about.  It's always darkest before the dawn, I'm always most depressed before I realized I'm not really that depressed.  I think I just gather a bunch of random unimportant crap up into a big pile and then wallow in it until I realize that it's unimportant and slowly go back to feeling happy again, only to later repeat the same cycle.

But how can I break the cycle?  How can I just be happy all the time?  I think the answer is that I can't because it's paradoxically impossible.  I think saying that it's always darkest before the dawn also means to me that without darkness, dawn doesn't seem that bright.  If I could remove all the worry and sadness from my life by "fixing" every little minuet detail, I would also be removing the contrast in my life that allows recognition of happiness.  I know none of this is particularly ground breaking or new and people have been saying things like this forever, but I just wanted to have a conversation with myself about it.  I'm trying to tell myself that being frustrated and depressed about little, stupid things is inevitable and that I should just get used to it, let it wash over me, and come out of it like I usually do without worrying about how I can "fix" myself or my life because there isn't actually anything to fix.

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I haven't actually sewn anything in a long time.  I guess...it kind of had a bad connotation for me after Halloween 2005.  You many ask yourself if you know me well, "Wasn't that the day that she started dating her now husband?  Wasn't that the day she wanted to commemorate with her wedding reception last year?  I'm confused."  You would be right.  However, there is something else extremely important about that day which I usually choose to ignore.  It was the day I broke up with my high school boyfriend after telling him I had been cheating on him...yes, with my now husband.  You can certainly see why I choose to overlook this little tidbit of information rather than allowing Halloween to forever be ruined because of it.  And you may be asking yourself, "Why sewing?  What does that have to do with anything?"  I'll tell you.

On the Halloween of 2005 I was prepared to unveil my ultimate sewing achievement, a full Jedi outfit complete with hooded cloak, all hand sewn by me.  My high school boyfriend had made one as well and we were going to wear them together on Halloween in Columbia.  However, in the weeks that preceded Halloween, I had become embroiled in another relationship and had not told him.  I was cheating...physically and mentally.  When he arrived I sat down on my dormitory bed and asked him to sit down as well.  I could see the apprehension on his face.  I'm sure he could sense that something was wrong and had probably been wondering almost since the whole ordeal had started.  There we sat, both of us in our Jedi costumes, staring at one another, waiting for everything to go up in flames.  I slowly explained that I had been cheating on him.  I slowly explained that I thought it would be better if we just broke up.  I slowly explained that he should probably just go home.  He started crying.  I started crying.  I hated myself.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I asked him if he was still going to go trick or treating when he got back home.  His brow furrowed and he told me he never wanted to wear this costume again.  He threw his cloak off and stormed out of my room.  I looked down at my own costume, all the delicate stitching, the careful choice of the perfect color scheme, everything thoughtfully put together through laborious consideration of detail...and then I thought about the state of my relationships.  If only I had put a fraction of the time and effort into them as I had this that stupid costume I wouldn't have had to tell someone that I had been cheating.  I would have realized he wasn't right for me long before that and broken it off much less painfully before heading off to college.  But that's a long story, one I've probably already told in this blog at one point or another.

What I meant to say is that after all that I wasn't really interested in sewing again for a long time.  But with Anime Central on the horizon I've taken upon myself to create a costume not only for myself, but also one for my husband.  I was afraid at first, worried that I wouldn't be able to thread a needle without crying and thinking back on long forgotten transgressions against proper relationship etiquette, but instead I found myself soothed and relaxed and sewing with purpose just as I had back all those Halloweens ago.  There is a satisfaction that comes with sewing, especially without patterns, that is unmatched by most other endeavors.  I'm happy I can still feel it.

I feel very lucky for having direction in my life, or perhaps I just have a wanton commitment to the path I am following combined with an easily satisfied thirst for productivity.  I'm the kind of person who simply chooses a direction and starts walking, and even if the path gets really hard it doesn't really phase me.  I've committed to it and have no desire to wonder about what things could have been like given different life choices.

My point is that I don't think my husband is that way.  I suppose it is lucky that he sees me as perfect for him, because if he didn't I can tell that he would never had married or even dated me.  He speaks a lot about being satisfied with what he has and all that, but when you really get down to it he is a perfection seeker.  He wants his dream job and he wants it immediately.  There is no waiting or working toward it or suffering through something less enjoyable for satisfaction later on.  He wants to be a video game designer this instant.  And although he has never said any of this out loud, I can tell in his mind that is what he is thinking.  There are no options that are just "alright" or "good enough" for him.  It's either amazing or he hates it.  I can see where that mindset could be viewed as valid, but it does make life a lot more difficult.  I've been trying to find something, ANYTHING, that would hold up to his standards for things that would be acceptable as careers.  I've been suffering through his tantrums and bad attitudes about everything.  But I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.  I've come across something amazing.

I'm not going to state explicitly what it is on this public blog, but for the first time his eyes lit up and he got excited.  All I will say is that I came up with an idea for a small business that he is more than willing to own and work at 60 hours a week.  Over and over I've sent him e-mails with links to jobs, commented on websites and tried my best to intrigue him with possibilities.  Nothing worked until now, not working for Google, not the supercomputer on campus, not even being a cashier at Gamestop.  He would nonchalantly suggest that he would look at it later and then get back to playing whatever video game he was involved in at that moment.  But this time he actually turned off his 360 and immediately went to the website.  I mean, we can't open it tomorrow and there is a lot to do, like apply for the franchise and find suitable locations and apply for small business loans and all that, but for the first time all the effort that he will have to put in doesn't phase him.  And he said something remarkable, something I had been hoping was lurking somewhere inside him and just seemed to be absent:

"If we do this then the reward will be directly correlated to how hard I work for it."

He understands.  He isn't just a lazy piece of shit.  He's just a really picky person when it comes to what occupies his time, but deep down he has the same hardworking spirit that I admire in myself.  It just isn't being stimulated at his current job and that's why he's so frustrated and grumpy.  There has already been a change in his demeanor!  Yesterday I asked him how his day at work was, expecting him to say something about how it was boring as usual and someone yelled at him for some random reason.  Instead he said:

"It was...okay.  It was better than usual.  I have something to look forward to now."

And then he just smiled.  He smiled and patted me on the leg as he was driving me home from the lab.  I almost cried.  I'd been hoping to hear that for so long, but in a slightly different context.  Since then he's been less angsty and more loving.  We had sex for the first time in several weeks yesterday.  I just wish I had thought of this sooner.

Now I can only hope that everything works out.  The main thing is that everything will take time, time that he will have to spend working his current job until the business is set up and ready to open.  I hope he can make it through, but I believe he can now that he has something exciting to focus on.

Last night (and by that I mean around noon a few hours before I woke up) I had a dream where, at one point, I was shivering uncontrollably and my mother started mixing sugar and water together and then trying to bake the little globs on a cookie sheet.  I assume they were to help me from shivering, but she was mixing them out of the ethidium bromide waste bucket in our lab and I was crying for her to stop touching it and that I didn't want the little sugar things but she wasn't listening.  Then my father said I should go to the dentist who happened to be one of my professors, only he was completely insane in my dream.  After the frightening dentist appointment (where the assistant was a small child dressed as a clown and everyone was okay with this) my father then suggested I go to the doctor and have them take a bone marrow sample from the back of my foot right above the heel.  He made it sound really painful and frightening so I ran away.  Somehow I met mreechan and we got into this really shitty rusty car and drove to a really old gas station to refuel.  We both went inside and I paid for the gas and got back in the car.  She came out with a bunch of candy, but for some reason I knew that she had stolen all of it and I was really disappointed and wanted her to take it all back but she had already opened it all.  And one of the candies looked like different flavors of PCR primers.  We drove for a while and somehow were back at the place where I started uncontrollably shivering and I screamed and then woke up.

It wasn't an enjoyable dream.  The entire time I felt out of place and angry or frightened.  Honestly, that's the way I feel now during my waking hours anyway.  I guess it's starting to seep into my dreams.

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This weekend has been terrible so far.  And maybe I'm just sensitive.  I know MY terrible is a lot less intense than a lot of people's terrible.  I guess what I mean to say is that from Thursday to today, I have been more unhappy than usual.

On Thursday I ruined several samples (only my own, thankfully) of DNA and had to start over from the beginning of the experiment...which takes an additional 36 hours. 

On Friday I had finished everything to be back at the point which I previously ruined.  I smiled to myself that I hadn't set myself back that far, but as I was measuring the samples I realized that they were ruined as well and I would have to start over again.  So much for learning lessons after the first mishap.  More than that I also realized that I wasn't able to do something that I expected to be able to do.  I know this sounds horrible and egotistical, but that's really never happened to me before.  I'm at the point in my life where my shortcomings are catching up with me.  The things I'm doing aren't easy anymore.  Biological work involves being very gentle and careful and not rushing through things and I'm just not used to it.  All my previous work has been with things that are inanimate and can be baked at 800 K before breaking down or even melting, things that can be thrown down a set of stairs and then centrifuged and still be intact, things that didn't require so much...finesse, I guess.  Failing twice in a row for very similar reasons each time just...it really made me feel completely inadequate and worthless.

Also on Friday I had several talks with several different people that really highlighted the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing and probably won't for quite some time.  I shouldn't have listed biological laboratories as my choices.  I should have stuck with the materials science labs and the things with which I was previously familiar.  I can already tell that I'll be here for at least five years, maybe six, just because of all the "new" things I have to get into my head before I can really start thinking on my own with respect to my projects and research.  It's awful.  I feel like a child in a world full of stuffy, self important adults.  Maybe going to graduate school was a fool's errand.

On Saturday everything went wrong.  I'm going to sum it up as me being extremely fed up with human contact.  I didn't want to see anyone, talk to anyone or be inconvenienced by anyone in any way.  I was much less tolerant than usual.  I just wanted to be out of the site of other humans as quickly as possible.  When I got home that night I really wished I had a cat to hold and snuggle and just hide away with somewhere were no one could talk to me or call me or message me.  And that made me resent my husband and his allergies to cats.  I can remember a moment last night where I just wished he would leave and I could be in the apartment all by myself.  I haven't felt like that in a long time.

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Actually, I've been pretty frustrated with my husband in general lately, the smallest offense being that last night at the peak of my dislike for human contact he started playing L4D2 for the first time in a really long time.  And he has the Starcraft 2 beta to play!  I just went to bed.  I didn't even wait for him to say goodnight.  I couldn't stand being awake anymore.

The main thing is the whole job situation which I've beaten to death on here.  I won't go into it further, but now my parents are calling me all the time telling me I have to do more to get him to keep working.  I can only say so many things and cry so many times before it's meaningless.  He's made up his mind and I can't change that.  I just...I never thought he would be this selfish.  I guess I expected that being married would mean we both made sacrifices for each other and for the betterment of our future together, but I guess he never really got that memo.  He keeps bringing up that I said I would be happy if he was my house husband and could cook and clean and take care of children, but that situation hinged on us having enough money and children to take care of.  Both of these criteria are not met at this time.  Well, regardless, I'm back on the pill and I won't have to worry about him quitting his job while I'm pregnant and we need money more than any other time.  Now if he quits we just won't be able to put anything into savings for a home, so I guess that isn't so bad. 

But you know, the lack of money isn't really what bothers me the most.  It's his attitude about the whole situation.  Like yesterday I was commenting about a couple of places others had mentioned as good places for a computer science major to work and he told me not to talk about it on the weekend because it stresses him out.  I just looked at him in horror, thinking in my head, "What a piece of shit."  I mean, I was trying to help his sorry ass by asking other people and doing research into it.  Fuck.  I don't think that's how you are supposed to feel about your significant other, but it's a growing theme in my day to day thoughts now.  And you would think that hating your job would make you more receptive to others having bad days at their own jobs, but if I ever seem frustrated by my own work he gets pouty and disinterested.  It's like I can't have a bad day because he's too busy having his own bad day.  Whatever.

I always imagined married couples being support systems for each other, working through the hard times together to make it to the better ones, comforting one another when things were going poorly.  I guess I imagined a lot of things going differently.  Why didn't I notice all this when we were still just dating?  I guess the warning signs were there, but I chose to ignore them.  I'm sure in the end I'll convince myself that all this is my own fault and that I shouldn't be so frustrated and disillusioned.  And then I'll suffer in silence as I go through the motions of being happy like I always do in situations like these.  Then one day I'll reach a breaking point and I honestly don't know what will happen.  Hopefully I'm wrong and I'll feel better soon.  Hopefully.

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I thought my period starting would really make me feel a lot better about everything, but the slight happiness gained from not being pregnant at this inopportune time was quickly overshadowed by everything else.  I guess it was too much to ask that I be happy again just from one simple change in my reality.

My period still hasn't started, but I took a pregnancy test a few days ago and it was negative.  I don't know if it was a false negative because I took it too early or if my period is even more irregular than I remember it being back in high school.  Whatever the reason, I just kind of wish I could get some closure.  Am I pregnant or am I not?  Is that so much to ask?

In addition I've been really dizzy lately.  I get disoriented just while sitting sometimes.  I was blaming it on not eating a lot, but it happens kind of randomly and seems unrelated to mealtimes.  Internets say that's an early pregnancy warning sign, but it's also a warning sign for like a million other things so I don't really trust the internet.  I just don't know what to do.

I have to make a presentation during my research group's meeting tomorrow.  I thought I was going to make it a week from tomorrow, but I got bumped up in the schedule which left me scrambling for the last couple days trying to get the stupid thing ready.  I just hope I can concentrate long enough to present well. 

I'm a real mess right now.  I'm pretty much freaking out.

My entries are so down nowadays.  I promise that if my period starts in a few days I will post something happier after the fact.  I know I will be less focused on the negative when I'm not so worried about the difficulty my immediate future may hold.

Everything is so messed up right now.

I mean, not with graduate school.  Graduate school is fantastic.  The other first year and I successfully grew and purified our first batch of DNA!  Both of us had acceptable concentration measurements and we totally high-fived with our gloves on, the nerdiest kind of high-fiving.  Also, I'm becoming more and more excited about the fact that I only have a few more classes until I never have to take another class in my life!  It's all really exciting and I know I made the right choice coming here.  This is the place for me.  When I walk into the lab I feel as though I am walking into my future as a respected scientific mind.  I don't know when or how, but there is something deep inside my mind telling me that one day I will create something earth shattering.  I just wish I could say the same for my husband.

He's the part that's messed up.  I guess I never realized, in all the years we were together before we got married, that he really has no work ethic.  If you've met him you can probably tell that he is very intelligent.  However, he graduated with a 3.4, and easily avoidable 3.4.  If there was an opportunity for him to slack off and waste time instead of doing homework, extremely simple homework in some cases, then he would take it.  When I first met him he was in some random blow off class, but because he wasn't doing the homework he had a really awful grade for no reason.  At first I thought it was kind of alluring.  This guy was extremely attractive and really smart, but he seems so "laid back" unlike me.  He relaxed me.  He still relaxes me, but when it comes to a real job he just can't cut it.  Everything else in my entire life has taught me that working hard and being proud of a job well done is a very important thing.  Earning your own money, taking care of yourself, these are footsteps on the path of life.  If you miss them then you get off track.  And yet I married someone who seems to think the exact opposite.  It's strange to say, but I don't really mind.  He's the part that's messed up because everyone else minds.  My parents, his parents, friends, other family members, all of them are constantly asking me about him and his job and why he doesn't like it and if he is going to quit. 

My mother reminded me today that if he quits a job in this economic climate he will probably never be considered for another contested position ever again.  I hear about what a horrible decision it is for him to quit over and over and over and I'm just sick of it.  I know it's a bad decision for many reasons.  I know he could make lots of money and we could save it up for a great house someday.  I know it's not the "right" decision for a lot of people, but we've all made our choices.  He has every right to make his own just as he has given me the right to make my own and come here to this university.  If this stupid, pointless job isn't for him then I have no right to tell him he has to keep working, and neither does anyone else, even if to us it seems crazy for him to want to quit.  Everyone has the right to live their own life, "the pursuit of happiness" and all that.  I'm tired of telling people I want him to stay and convincing myself that torturing himself for money is more important than him being happy.  If my period starts in a few days we will go back to baby prevention efforts and he will have my full support to quit his job and enjoy his life instead of waking up each day to the realization that his terrible job is waiting for him with hungry dripping teeth, stealing his energy and happiness from him.

I just hope that:
1) I am not pregnant.
2) I win a fellowship that will increase my salary slightly.
3) we can still save up enough for a modest home somewhere even without his income.
If these three things came to pass I would feel so much better right now.  As is, I'm really not in a healthy mental state.  Too many opinions and too many worries have been shared with me about our future that all I can think about is the negatives.  Sometimes people need to remember the "if you can't say something nice" rule of life, especially after they have already expressed their opinions.  I'm just...really tired.

Also, I stepped in bug poison this morning.  I washed my foot but I can't get it out of my head.  That shit is poison to people, too.  We just don't die because we are a lot bigger.

So I'm anxiously awaiting my period, hoping it will start around the 28th or so.  It's funny because I had prepared myself to never again have to worry about such things, yet here I am.  It's nerve racking.  I can feel eyes on me, judging me for my lack of resolve and my compulsive decision making, but they are my own eyes so I can't escape them.  Why do I judge myself so harshly, consider every mistake over and over until it is burned into my brain?  I suppose it's only human nature to be so constantly obsessed with one's own successes or failures.

I've been so busy lately.  There is so much to do as a graduate student that I rarely finish everything I set out to do in a day.  And when I come home there is cooking and cleaning and washing and exercising so much so that I am feeling a little lost and helpless.  The restless spirit of the girl I used to be, playing video games for 24 hour periods without food and going to bed at 5 AM only to get up again at 7 AM, is crying to be let free of her dark, damp cell and help me remember what it is like to actually procrastinate.  Consequently, I've stumbled into some kind of limbo between working extremely hard and completely letting myself go to the gods of laziness and relaxation, that being staying up until 4 AM playing video games and getting up at 10 AM to go into lab, followed by going home at 6 PM and beginning the cycle anew.  I hope it will keep me from becoming burnt out on the less enjoyable aspects of my life.  No one wants a repeat of the time of troubles prompting that one fateful phone call that I complained so incessantly about a few years back.

I'll write more later.  Right now I want to go home and play Mass Effect 2.  Spoilers, you don't get to see Tali's face so I'm fucking Jack.

So I guess I had a mini nervous breakdown last night.  To summarize the ordeal, I don't think I'm prepared to be a mother yet. 

I may currently be pregnant and in that case I'm sure I will be able to deal with the situation as necessary, have the child and raise it just as I hope to do someday.  However, if there isn't a baby inside my belly yet I would like to avoid it at this time.  I guess I just realized that all this talk about babies and houses and my husband's job and all that "grown up" stuff has really been getting to me.  I'm tired of worrying about a lot of unnecessary stuff on top of the necessary things I already have to worry about, like rent and electric and health insurance and all that.  I'm not prepared to start my research with the additional burden of wondering when (not if) Mike is going to quit his job, if we will have enough money for payments on a home or how we will raise a child when we both need to work/one of us isn't working and we don't have enough money.  It's just a lot to think about right now and I would much prefer the freedom to focus on my research, work hard to save some money, learn how to breakdance, play DDR and eventually find a really great job at which point my husband is free to bum around the house and we can start making babies.

I explained all this to him last night and I don't think I could have done a fantastic job of it what with the words being broken up by sobs of desperation and sessions of intense nose honking into at least 30 tissues.  I woke up this morning and looked into the trash can at the small heap of wadded up tissues and just sighed to myself.  I hate crying and I do it all the time.  I'm far too emotional and whether I am talking about something wonderful or something terrible I burst into ridiculous crying bouts followed by headaches from the pressure on my sinuses and stomach aches from the snot draining down my esophagus.  I really hate crying.  Plus whenever you explain something while you are bawling your eyes out no one takes you seriously or they focus on the emotion rather than the words behind it.  Anyway, he kept telling me that we would talk about it tomorrow when I was "feeling better," but that's not really what I wanted to do.  I wanted to tell him how I was feeling.  I think maybe he just really wanted me to change my mind.  I know he wants children just as much as I do, but he's so short sighted.  Yes, it would be wonderful to have a child of my own in my arms staring up at me and yes, I absolutely want to have a reasonable number of children so I need to begin having them relatively soon, but I'm not going to let my desire cloud my judgment.  I just don't want to raise a child while I'm dirt poor living in an apartment with barely enough time on my hands to even sleep because of my research.  Why make it hard on ourselves when waiting just a few more years will make it so much easier?  Really, if he wasn't so flaky about his job right now I would feel a lot better about trying for children, but until he finds a job where he isn't going to just up and quit because he thinks we have enough money, well...I'm not so interesting in baby making.

That's what I was trying to tell him last night.  Hopefully I can try again today without crying and he'll actually listen.
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In other news, Mass Effect is an awesome game and you should play it if you haven't yet.

I'm a mess right now and I cried last night.  More to come when I have time to type.

I feel like there is some underlying "togetherness" that all people who play Pokemon feel.  Whether you are 8 or 80, when you find out someone else plays Pokemon it's almost like you nod approvingly in your head, patting yourself on the back for finding another kindred spirit.  I've loved Pokemon as long as I can remember and the appeal doesn't fade with age.  Even as I am now able to play extremely complex and mature games, unlike when I first started playing Pokemon and still had to get my dad to kill the final bosses in FPS games, I can't deny my strange fascination with Pokemon.  I'm currently playing through Mass Effect, a game full of decisions that question your morality, realistic graphics (especially with my graphics card allowing visual recognition of the veins in people's eyes) that immerse you in the story and situations where you can kill whoever you want just because you feel like doing so.  I appreciate it as a plot driven story and thoroughly enjoy it, but there is something about Pokemon that it can never capture. 

Pokemon is the same game, packaged over and over with new graphics and new characters.  It should be boring as hell and I should toss it aside after a few minutes when I remember how I've done exactly what I'm doing a bunch of times before in all the previous games.  Yet I continue to play.  I get excited each time I see a "new" Pokemon, even if I've caught it a bunch of times before on other games.  I delight in filling out my Pokedex, pretending that I'm bettering the world's knowledge of Pokemon.  There is a childlike wonder that never fades for me.  As a Pokemon trainer you are never evil or cruel or nasty and if you are it means you are shitty at battling and letting your Pokemon die.  There is no option to go around killing everyone for fun and profit.  You are simply a "researcher" of sorts and maybe that's why I enjoy it so much.

Additionally, I have never met another "trainer" that I was extremely negative about.  And when I say trainer in quotes I'm talking about someone who is really into the game, not just someone who has played once or twice or might have played Red but never anything else like a certain husband I know.  It seems like the Pokemon community as a whole wants everyone else to succeed, to get all the Pokemon, to have all the items, to enjoy the game as much as possible.  People are always willing to trade and help one another, and because there is no option to screw one another over people who like doing that sort of thing shy away from the game.  It's a fantastic filter.  I mean...if you realllly wanted to be a dick you could be, but it's much more difficult than doing so in a game like, say, Counterstrike or something where being a dick is basically a summary of the game mechanics.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out to people who love Pokemon.  <3

Also, if you are going to play the upcoming release, which is it?  Did you play gold or silver back in the day and are you going to follow your trend now or choose the opposite of what you played in the past for something new?  Do you still love Ho-oh or are you a Lugia fan?  Or will you just buy both because they're both going to be awesome?  Thoughts?