the Super Mario Bros. song is my ringtone, does that count?

When I saw that this week's topic was video games, I thought, "oh noetry," because, you guys? I suck at video games. I'm just awful. The only video game I have ever successfully completed was The Legend of Zelda on Super Nintendo, but only because I spent an entire summer playing it, and every day I'd frantically call my dad (at work) and be all, "Hey, dad . . . I'm in the castle and I'm supposed to kill these things that stomp around in a circle but they keep breaking out of the circle and stomping on me! They stomp and stomp and stomp and my sword does NOTHING," and then he'd be like, "Jennie, remember how you have a bow and shitload of arrows? How about you try that and let me get back to work."

Whenever I try to play video games that require any amount of skill, I fail miserably and do what I usually do when I'm not automatically good at something: I quit. Or I play the easiest world of Super Mario Brothers over and over because I can actually make it through that one.

Most of the time.

I had a bit more luck when the Wii came out, because now you actually had to move the controllers to make the game do anything. Something I had been doing for years with no result. I can bowl and play tennis. I can milk a pig and shoot UFOs and ride a cow. I cannot, however, race a boar around a racetrack or ride a bird and corral pigs.

I never really cared that I was terrible at video games. If others were playing, I'd just be like, "oh, my thumb hurts," or "I'm too drunk to see the screen," and no one thought anything of it. And then Rock Band came along.

Rock Band. The video game of all video games. I could play Rock Band for hours. I HAVE played Rock Band for hours. And hours. And some more hours. And I'm not even that terrible! Well, I'm pretty terrible at the drums. But I'm adequate on the guitar and the bass and I got an 89% on Don't Look Back in Anger ON EXPERT so I think I'm OK at the vocals. None of it matters, though. I love this game. Even if I failed every instrument five notes into the song and pissed everyone else off because they really, really wanted to rock out on Black Hole Sun, I wouldn't care. Instead, I would play Rock Band until my hands fell off, and then I'd get new, robot hands and play some more.

Rock Band!