Xbox = Love

(Contains the usual amount of pace-breaking parathetical asides)

So now I have an Xbox (I've bravely decided only to capitalize the noun form) all my own, and Halo and Vice City and three controllers. I spend most of my time playing Vice City, although playing Halo against my brothers is a recent family tradition.

On Saturday we played Halo for many hours.

Josh hosted an xbox party (or, in his words, "box fest") at my house, to which a dozen of his friends (and, as it turned out, two of mine) were invited.

A large sign outside our driveway, proclaiming simply "Mittens", identified our house for his friends. All in all, 14 people showed up for a communal game of Halo. It was wonderful.

I was working until 7, so I was the last guest to show up. But I brought some pizza from work so that was o.k.

Graham, special guest Adam, and a friend of Josh's named Paul K (who may well be my other brother's brother-in-law someday, I realized later) shared the upstairs t.v. with me, in what Paul dubbed "the smart room."

(To punish Paul for his insolence, we talked about globalization and agripolitics for a bit.)

I like to think that our team held its own. We won a few rounds of capture the flag and used teamwork quite often. With our powers combined, and all that.

I know that all this probably sounds geeky and boring, but it definitely wasn't boring. (Graham, of all people, called it the geekiest thing he's done in quite a while, which I'm sure is a terrible lie.)

We got to hear the shouts of Josh's friends, our opponents, from downstairs whenever we got the upper hand… we got to pile into a virtual jeep and storm a virtual base… and all the while we got to make idle chit-chat with one another. We even all talked on the phone to Jenna, at one point.

That it was enjoyable seems so obvious that I can think of no better way to explain why.