Over the weekend I played with Jenny’s cousin’s son, a hyperactive two year old. Both my body and my mind received a thorough workout as we roughed up a stack of Jenga blocks, where the individual tiles were transformed into a pile of bricks, a horde of money, food, cars, trains and planes. Next, we moved onto an etch-a-sketch, where we drew faces, created scenes of day and night, and drew a whole lot of random scribbles from which we’d eke out meaning, like a Rorschach test. We did the same with his collection of toy cars as well as his Thomas the Tank Engines of various sizes (which somehow came to represent members of his family). Overall, about 2 hours of intense play.

It was like the opening scene of Toy Story 3 – toys aren’t simply objects to be appreciated for their features and design – they were avatars for the personalities and characters that we invent for them in our imaginations. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, I used to play with Transformers in the same way that girls played with dolls. I distinctly remember one Transformer called “Searchlight” that I used to play with a lot, for whom I built a little bed out of a tissue box for him to sleep at night.

As an adult, I no longer afford myself the opportunity to truly play with toys. My limit is putting them into spiffy poses and taking a photograph or two – any more than that and I’d probably be committed. The generally accepted adult expressions of creativity are things like this:

That’s great if you have the passion and the talent, but what do you do if you don’t?

Should I have returned the compliment – “thanks mate, you’re looking pretty sharp yourself”, or downplayed it with “nah, I just threw it on this morning ‘coz it was cold”?

Is it possible to learn this in a systematic fashion to compensate for not having acquired it by osmosis during the last 32 years?

I always feel guilty for not making better use of my time – what exactly have I achieved in my obsessive-compulsive pursuit of the above goals? Was I truly more entertained in having achieved everything, or am I only doing it so that I can brag about it on Facebook? Instead, I could / should be writing, increasing my proficiency in cello/violin/piano through practise, learning the skills required to turn my ideas into reality, etc. It may just be that gaming creates the delusion of achieving something because of its interactive nature.

I never wanted us to be one of those couples that do nothing but sit and watch TV every night. Yet by denying myself, I end up sitting around angsting over what to do instead – and achieving just as little – probably less – than if I’d just let myself watch Top Gear or something. (On the other hand, Jenny’s perfectly fine because she’s busy studying for her Master of Counselling degree.)

Let me put the question out there: what do you do to pass the time, and do you ever feel the need to justify it?

While The Descent did nothing to improve the thriller/horror genre’s standing in my books, I did find myself being somewhat affected by The Reader (and not because Kate Winslet is naked in half of her on-screen appearances). There’s a lot of tension as Michael Berg (played by David Kross) grapples with his conscience as to whether he should keep silent and see his unrequited love go to jail, or speak up against her wishes and shame her in front of the court (and presumably, country). While Jenny was weeping by the end of the movie, the whole time I was going “is it really worth being sentenced to prison for life, just to hide the fact that you can’t read and write?” while secretly choking back a tear.

This probably reveals just how much of a geek I am, which is to say completely out of touch with my emotions (feelings that can’t be expressed with an emoticon don’t exist :-P) – but maybe like the cliché about the speck of grit being the source of great beauty, flaws are necessary for the telling of great stories, and it’s only by allowing yourself to ignore these flaws that one can connect emotionally. I blame my inability to appreciate this on being exposed to too much awesome.

So where does that leave The Descent? The oyster must’ve gotten a mouthful of dirt, choked and died.