Just Another Story With No Point

Ok, so I had a very disappointing moment the other day. I was playing The Sims Online (TSO) and you are allowed to develop a sort of bio for your Sim. It is a free form text area. They suggest some stuff like favorite type of music, favorite quote, and other stuff like that. I decided to put just 2 quotes in my bio and nothing else. The quotes are:

“You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.”
-Calvin

and,

“Questions I know the answers too, I don’t need to ask, right?”
- Calvin

Both are from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite all-time newspaper comic strip. Calvin was king when I was in college. People made sure they got copies of the school newspaper for no other reason than to make sure they read both Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County every day. Even when I started to work, one of the first things I would turn to in the newspaper at lunchtime was Calvin and Hobbes. In fact, the very first thing I ever hung up at my desk was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon clipped out of the daily paper. It went like so:

CALVIN: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?
HOBBES: “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.”
CALVIN: Academia, here I come!

Calvin’s first statement was an eye opener for me. I never had a writing philosophy. Now I did!!!! And is made perfect sense. Why didn’t my college professors describe it that way?

That comic strip has traveled 10 years with me through 4 towns, 5 buildings, and more desks then I care to count. It is still on my desk at work as we speak. But that’s not what I came here to tell you about.

So, many players read these bios religiously. I am not one of those players. I usually prefer to make my own judgement. But reading them has come in handy a few times. So I was in a house practicing my skills and someone pipes up that they love my quotes and that he was a big Calvin and Hobbes fan too. So we were chatting about it a bit when someone else pipes up, “Who are Calvin and Hobbes?”

I just found myself in disbelief. How could they not know? I was thinking to myself, has it really been so long. And I was dismayed to find it had been. To me it was one of those things that was a fixture in my life and the lives of many of my peers at that time. But it ended on Dec 31, 1995. So to today’s generation, did it even exist? I was crushed.

I wanted to explain to the person who they were and what they meant but she left the house and I lost my chance. Then I thought about it. What would I have said anyway? Yeah, I could have told her it was a comic strip about a little boy and his stuffed tiger who came to life in the little boy’s imagination. I could also tell that is was at times laugh out loud funny and sometimes movingly profound and more often both at the same time.

But would that have been meaningful? Would that have sparked this person to be curious about this and maybe go out and check it out? Could I have changed her life with my statements? Well, of course not!!!!! Hell, the most likely outcome would be she looked at me like an old kook. Of course, someday, someday, this same person will be out there somewhere humming an N’Sync song and someone will say, “Oh I used to love N’Sync.” And then some other younger person will say, “Who’s N’Sync?”
And somewhere I will be smiling.

I think I am going to add a third Calvin and Hobbes quote to my TSO bio.

“I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point.”
-Calvin

That about sums it up.

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