Facts: Today is about
40 degrees colder than yesterday, today I ate approximately fifteen Hershey’s
kisses, and today I registered for my third Chicago Marathon. All of these things are new, and I feel the
need elaborate on two of them.
When I was little, I was really, really good at playing the
original Super Mario Brothers for Nintendo.
Not Super Nintendo, not Nintendo 64 – but the original gray, red, and
black box where you had to blow vigorously into the cartridges when they
wouldn’t work. I wasn’t skilled at any
other game, just Mario. This was largely
due to my total lack of interest in playing any other game (similar to how I only
practiced the songs I liked on the piano, leading to Christmas melodies
being played year round in our home). I
was really good at Mario on my own, but with the Game Genie, I was
unstoppable.
I’m not sure if any of you had a Game Genie, but we did. You would plug it into the cartridge of whatever you were playing, and you could enter codes to, basically, cheat. I still remember the code for infinite lives
(SXIOPO - scary? Yes. I remember the
code for moon gravity too - YAZUIG). With
infinite lives, I could play for hours – falling in holes, getting hit by
fireballs, landing on spiky flowers, and getting smashed by falling
debris. It didn't matter. I always had
another life. This fact, however, did
little to ease my anxiety, as I didn't like to lose, particularly to my
brother. I would spend hours trying to
get past the same exact part in a fire level, dying, and dying, and dying in exactly
the same place – getting bumped back to the beginning over and over and over
again. My heart would race as I approached
the obstacle, and I would drop my head in to my hands, groaning in frustration
as I died again.
Where am I going with this?
I relived this exact feeling today trying to register for the Chicago
Marathon. I even had a code to type in –
my individual code to register for a charity spot. Registration opened at noon (how convenient!
My lunch! The only free twenty minutes of my day). I was staring at the registration page as it
refreshed to “Registration is now open.”
I clicked register, started the process, and immediately got an error
message “This page is temporarily unavailable.”
Ok, no big deal. I tried
again. This time I got one step further
“Internal Server Error.” I could feel
the panic rising in my chest. I could
almost hear the little “death jingle” from my Mario playing days. I tried again, and again, and again, and
again. I continued to try repeatedly through my
entire lunch – periodically texting my brother who was going through the same
process. I started my homeroom class
watching a movie they are required to watch, and then I started again. The process went on for close to 50 minutes
– sometimes, I would make it all the way to the end – through 4 “levels” of
registration - type in my code to redeem my spot, only to discover that active.com
was so sorry for the inconvenience, but this page was unavailable.
I passed the job over to my mom, who has sixth and seventh
period free (free to work, not to do battle with the BOA marathon
website). God love her, she would move
the moon for me if I asked her. She went
through the same process as myself for over an hour, and – finally – I got
through and registered. I was so
stressed by the entire process that I ate a half a bag of Hershey’s kisses left
over from Valentine’s Day (see – the second explanation was much shorter!)
I just heard that registration was suspended after four
hours, so who knows, maybe I’ll have to do it all again tomorrow. Either way, I’m pumped for the hours of
training, the hours chatting with my girlfriends as we lace up at 6:30 am every
Saturday morning for four months, and for the four plus hours I’ll spend
running through the streets of Chicago on October 13th. Happy Tuesday friends!
No comments:
Post a Comment