The ultimate gift

Sometimes I think that Josh's blog is just oh-so-stellar because he has this conversational format that can tease out more interesting points than a regular post (for those who don't know Josh his blog is Fearing Robots...there, I plugged your freaking blog). It's like the ultimate dream of having a big important conversation on TV where the person you are talking to gives exactly the comments you want and nothing more and asks leading questions to get you to talk about the coolest things bouncing around in your brain (So, tell me Doug, what about British Sea Power? What do you think of them). Between the ages of 5 and 12 (I would like to think I stopped doing this way before 12, but there's an awful possibility I did this after 12 so I'll just say 12) I staged elaborate football games in my backyard featuring myself and a pretend football. As the games became more complex and imagined the plays I was running and the kind of hits that I was taking, I wished that I had a robot that I could communicate with telepathically to get him to perform the necessary defensive play in response to what I wanted to do on offense (or vice versa if I wanted to make a bone crunching tackle). This would have been the ultimate gift. Now, some of you snarky little mongrels will say, "Hey, get a friend, you freak!" I often played football against live competition in the neighborhood during this same time frame, but even if I played one-on-one tackle, I could never make the game work as I wanted it to. It was fun, but it wasn't an excercise in imagination like my fake football games were. Although I stopped acting it as I aged, I still daydream about cool possible outcomes in games or careers or things like that. It's a whole story line. Example: Great player in baseball decides to only focus on one aspect each season and only signs one year contracts with teams. So one year, he hits for average, the next year he's all about the defense, the next year, home runs. Before he signs with teams, he makes an announcement as to which area he'll be awesome at that year. I don't know why these scenarios play out in head, but they do all the time.