Not the way I wanted (the rise and fall of Pikmin Bloom)

It was not going the way I wanted. Nothing was. We can slog on for days, completely ok, maybe even happy and then one day, an unfortunate series of events.... and then the next days are... well... sh*t. Do I need to back up?

Sunday was the day the giant mushrooms sprouted. Oh, I guess I need to back up even further. Around the 4th of July, my older daughter, the student, finally got the entire family to play Pikmin Bloom. It wasn't much of an effort on her part. I just woke up on the 3rd and decided to play and the next day, everyone else joined in. What is Pikmin Bloom, you ask? It's this app on your phone that's based on the Nintendo Pikmin games but the app is from Niantic, the same company that brought everyone Pokemon Go. No, don't groan. It's totally not the same. 

Pikmin Bloom is basically a walking tracker. The point of the game is to get people to walk around their neighborhood. Players get rewarded with Pikmin of all sorts. Seedlings that you pick up, plant, pluck, feed and walk, not like your dog because they're plants but I guess they're planimals? Like, the Vegimals! Oh, nobody watches The Octonauts. Oooh we need to talk about that sometime. 

Every month there are special Pikmin that you only get for the next few weeks and they're especially strong against the mushrooms that you battle in the game. You get rewards from those battles, like nectar to feed your Pikmin, which result in them gaining friendship points that lead to them eventually picking up an adorable decoration that is at the core of their identity. Whoa. Ok, a little serious.

A postcard from Collegeville with cute Pikmin

What else is there? You get challenges that require you to plant flowers, which can only be done by walking. Flowers that bloom can give you postcards, or just simply more nectar, that you feed the Pikmin and give you petals to plant. It's all a cycle and it circles back to, you have to walk, and the app is linked to whatever step counter you have on your phone. In my case, while I bring my phone with me everywhere when I'm out, I also wear my Apple Watch so literally all my steps are counted. I hope.

So that's enough back story. Basically, we're just all into it and we strategize and plan walking routes and destinations to get different kinds of Pikmin decorations and battle all sorts of mushrooms. We get postcards from different places. I also made "friends" on the game. These are not people I ever interact with in person but just other players who can send you a bullhorn to join a battle that they're in or they can send you postcards from flowers they bloomed or battles they were in. I feel safe enough, even with the younger child playing because nobody is actually talking to strangers or anything like that. You just do challenges simultaneously.

Sometimes, within the community, you notice that the same player names pop up frequently in certain battles and so our family has kind of developed back stories for these random players. Oh, we surmise that so and so lives in this area or maybe travels to it but only weekdays so maybe for work. We notice that battles that this person is in, are always joined by so and so, which makes us conclude that they must live together our maybe they're just together. It was all fun and in a way, made us a little more adventurous. Let's go for a drive and find that obscure pizza place in Malvern that is next to an art gallery. It's how we discovered the Jenkins Arboretum. Cool things like that. 

My children started wanting to declare their hunger level as if they were Pikmin. I'm a 1/6 right now! I kept telling them to stop trying to make that happen. It isn't. Ha! On one of my walks, I decided to sit down in front of the supermarket for a break when a man and a woman in the midst of a conversation walked by me. I overheard the woman say to the man, "When you send a copy of the song out and that's the original, that's the master." Whoa wait what? Who are these people? I need to talk to these people. Maybe they know why when I try to record the vocal track while listening to the guitar track, I can't adjust the volume to the level that I need! Who are you, neighbors? I need your help!

I'm getting sidetracked. Anyway, on Sunday, my husband decided to employ a game strategy that I did not understand. So I kept asking him questions, saying, "I want to understand why you would like to do that." However, he took this to mean that I disagreed with his strategy and in his mind, totally just in his mind and not in reality, I was "telling him that he was playing the game wrong" and he got very upset. He started yelling (at no one in particular) because he was frustrated and witnessing this scared my daughter. Loud sounds upset my children. They take the slightest rise as an indication of anger and therefore is considered "yelling" even when it is not. But my husband was yelling, I think. Her interpretation is, they're fighting and it's my fault. We were not fighting. He was yelling, I tried to understand what was going on and seeing that there was not much I could do for him, I just let him yell. We went home and I called my therapist. No, I called the student. Basically, my 18 year old is now my therapist. As the only person who would understand the context of any of this, she was the only one that could listen to me and be of any help. And by help, I only mean, to listen to me tell the story of how my Sunday afternoon unraveled. 

But, this did not end on Sunday because on Monday morning, I now had my husband with his continuing midlife crisis, totally shut down. Oh, and he announced that he is no longer going to be playing Pikmin Bloom. I did the school drop off and I thought my little girl was going to be ok, even as she declared that she did not want to talk about what happened the day before. I respected that. There was really no time, anyway. Whatever I explained to her last night will hopefully suffice. But in the lovely downward spiral that continued, I received a call from the school assistant principal mere hours later that my sweet little one had unleashed an uncontrollable monster within her. She just lost it sometime around third period. 

We'll keep all of that in the confidential files. The child isn't a serial troublemaker. This has literally never happened before. Navigating it was entirely new to all of us. I found myself saying this to the assistant principal and basically asking her, uhm, what am I supposed to do now? My next call would be to my therapist. Right, the student, who is actually a student of psychology so this is great practice for her future career. I rehearsed my spiels with her, for when I pick up her sister. What should be in the ensuing conversation, the treatment of this conversation. I'm basically writing copy for, what to say to your child if she ever gets sent to the principal's office. Ok, got that script down. It's memorized. We got this.

A postcard from a battle at Valley Forge Park

I'm not going to bore you with any more of the details but I will say this. Last night, I felt sad. When I woke up this morning, I felt pain. Seriously, actual physical pain, that ran down the length of my right leg. I do the school drop off, she seems better, great. It will blow over and be fine. But I'm not fine. I drive down to Valley Forge Park and cruise through this lovely little road with trees on either side and an expanse of grass that stretched endlessly. 10 miles per hour should be safe enough to drive while crying. The beauty of my surroundings is not lost on me and I should probably just park and walk but I don't think I could walk. I spy a person, huddled in a hoodie, sitting under a tree and I park a few feet away. I'm not going to disturb that person but I take a minute to just let it out. There's music, in the background. A Rob Thomas essentials playlist that I'd been listening to for a few days. He has great songs but the best ones are sad. I could sing this, or that, maybe not right now but would it be so terrible if the album I made had mostly sad songs? I'm going home. I think it's time to change the banner.

Playlist Recommendation: Pieces, Rob Thomas