Guest Post from Erika: My Life as Pac Man

Alternate title: Erika Shows Her Age

First of all, if you've never played Pac Man, this post is unlikely to make any sense to you, but I can try to explain. Pac Man is a video game that was popular in the early 80s. Now for all of you youngsters out there, 80s-era video games were nothing like the incredibly realistic blood and guts shoot 'em up games that today's youth (and a few older gentlemen I know) spend hours "engaging" in.

In *my* day, we went to the pizza parlor or the video arcade, plopped a few quarters in, and played for a few minutes (or more, if we were lucky, or really, really good). But I digress. In Pac Man, your character is an endearing little yellow circle who is mostly mouth. He navigates quickly through a maze, eating as many dots as possible. He has to eat all of the dots in the entire maze before the monsters that are chasing him catch him. Occasionally he'll eat a special dot that allows him to eat monsters for a brief period of time. As you play, everything speeds up faster and faster until you are navigating on pure reflexes.

This is my life!

Today I have to figure out how to get from one end of the maze to the other, making sure I pick up beer and ice for tonight's Tech Talk (starring Martin Kosina!), our CSA box, and, oh yeah, my son, along the way. Sounds simple until you add in a 1:00pm meeting, a 3:00pm meeting, a 4:00pm meeting, the fact that I can't pick up the CSA box until after 2:00pm, the fact that ice melts and there are no refrigeration facilities at the Tech Talk venue, and the fact that I have to pick up Peter by 5:00pm, yet arrive at the Tech Talk venue with dinner in my stomach no later than 5:30pm. Hmmm.

It's an interesting math problem. But it's all good. I feel lucky that I get to enjoy being a mama AND work part time at a job that I love, and that stimulates me intellectually beyond today's math problem and beyond changing the latest poopy diaper (yes, we are still working on that whole potty training thing). I get the best of both worlds. And thank god I have a willing and supportive partner (thanks Martin!) without whom I could never get it all done. It's just that sometimes my worlds collide and I feel like monsters are going to eat me if I don't figure it out quickly enough or miss just one of those blinking yellow dots...