Tuesday, November 13, 2012

You can only save so many butterflies...

Ah, still figuring out how to set things up in here – it’ll get there. It's one more thing to do, and I got swamped the past week or so!!!  (Although, I probably should have figured that all out before posting anything right? LOL!)
BUT, that leads me to one of the ideas for posting that’s been floating around in my brain.  “Fluttering” would be a better word, as this involves butterflies.  Cartoon game butterflies, to be exact.
Do you know the game Bejeweled?  (Yes, yes, Sparkly Aardvarks of course love most things gemstone related!)  I got sort of sucked into “Bejeweled Blitz” on Facebook – you match as many gems of the same color together as quickly as you can, to get as high a score as possible in only a minute. I love it—you can play for a couple of minutes and feel like you accomplished something, rather than take all afternoon playing something that you never finish.  Then, my fabulous sister gave me an iPod Touch for Christmas two years ago.  Yay -- I could listen to all my music so easily! Yay – I could record all my lessons, coachings and practice sessions—brilliant!  Yay – uh-oh!  :blink:… I could play games on it, too… I limited myself to downloading only a couple, as I have enough glorious time-sucks in my life.  (~waving~ “Hi!!” to all my Facebook friends, LOL!)
Then this summer, I learned I could get Bejeweled on the iPod and thought, “Oh, that would be fun to play on the subway!”  A couple of weeks ago, my friend Roben asked if I had tried the “Butterflies” variation.  Ooh, no, I hadn’t seen that one yet – I said I would try that the next day, which I did.  I opened up the game and was delighted to see that some of the gems were little butterflies and when you matched them with other gems of the same color, they’d flutter away.  (“How wonderful!  Ooh, I wonder who programmed this!?”)  Then the game ended rather abruptly, but I’d not been paying full attention because I have a tendency to get involved and ride past my stop and that’s always annoying, so I was keeping an eye on the window as well.  So I started another game, made a few moves, and after again checking what stop we were passing, I realized there was a big spider telling me the game was over.  Hmm. This wasn’t going to be much fun if it’s always over so quickly…
So I started a third game and only then realized (don’t judge me—I already said I wasn’t paying full attention, LOL!) that at the top of the board is a little cartoon spider, and the butterflies are actually all advancing to be captured—they are all heading toward their DOOM!!!  Not only that, but they know it—they begin to quiver and shake if they get within two rows of the spider!!!  My aforementioned delight abruptly changed to, “OMG, this is =awful=!!! Who the heck =programmed= this?!??!?!”  My game strategy changed immediately (make sure the butterflies stay away from the top, LOL) and, after a longer game with a much higher score, I came to the horrible realization that there is No. Way. To. Ever. Save. All. The. Butterflies…  The game only ends when one gets captured, after more and more of them show up.  And it was at this point that I realized I had ridden past my stop… :sigh:!
Neither this realization nor subsequent conversations with Roben about the bastard, cheating spider have deterred me from the game, though—no, I’ve had a couple games where I’ve gotten more than a million points, in fact.  But the game always gets me pondering about life…If I think about all the music I want to sing and perform, all the books I want to read, all the places I want to go and things I want to do--all the gazillions of "butterflies" in my life, I get overwhelmed and think that there’s no way I can do it all.  It’s rather like my initial despair that this game was designed to be totally unwinnable.  Roben suggested not to look at all the butterflies I can’t save, but know that I did save some, and I half-heartedly said, Yeah...  I know she’s right, though.  Many times during some years of going through various adversities, I’ve had people ask me how I manage, and I say, “I get up in the morning. I do what I have to do.  Sometimes there’s extra time to do some of the other things I want to do, then I go to bed and start again the next morning.”  What more can anyone do, or what more can anyone ask of someone? 
So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look at some music now, because I have some extra time today.  Then maybe I’ll go rescue some butterflies before bed.  And eventually I'll figure out how to do things on here!!  J

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