Learning (or not) from Experience

I had pain in my right shoulder, arm and neck, which surely, I told my husband, was due to a malignant tumor positioned beneath my armpit. Had to be. The pain had been there for weeks. I was quite pleased with myself for having waited so long to mention it.

Husband was unimpressed. “How are you using your mouse?’ he asked.

“My mouse? Well, I suppose…”

I was offended that Phil so readily dismissed my diagnosis. Then it dawned on me. Repetitive clicking and stabbing to eliminate Mahjong tiles or annoying frogs could be part of the problem. I didn’t admit that to Phil, of course. Mumbled something about adjusting my mouse position and left it at that. Fine. I’ll stop playing games for a while and see if the pain goes away. If not, it’s a tumor.

Easier said than done, it turns out. End of the day? Stuck on a problem?  Celebrating work finished? Avoiding starting new work? Playing a game had become the first response to all of the above. I blame the habit on my writing students. Constantly resorting to games worked for them: they wrote awesome stuff. Abstaining, I found myself pacing in my study, a tiny room. Not pretty.

I made a list of alternative activities: take a walk, do a house chore, read. In this house the TV does not come on until after 5 and I want to keep it that way. Eat something. No. Bad idea. Play games with the left hand, the right hand’s retarded brother. Doesn’t work. Left hand’s retarded, Jack. Within minutes I switch to the right without realizing it, wake from my game trance fifteen minutes later, saying, “wait, what?” The safest thing is to back away from all electronics until they are out of reach.

I noticed a cobweb in the corner of the entryway, behind the coat tree. Great, when game playing became irresistible, I’d do that. I made good progress on my translation until I came to a sentence that refused to resolve into meaning and translating it laboriously word by word, looking up even the words I knew, using four different hard copy dictionaries and three online ones, didn’t help. Argh! Why was I doing this stupid translation work anyway? I clicked the Mahjong icon, but in the nick of time remembered that entryway.

Moving the coat tree with its several coats topped by hats to the living room, I cleaned that corner, thinking about the translation project and what the hell the writer meant by that sentence and how today was supposed to be nice but now it’s cloudy and I should put on lights to see what I’m doing, turned around and gasped to discover, out of the corner of my eye, a tall man in a hat standing behind me.

Damn. Coat tree gave me a heart attack.

In the kitchen for more cleaning supplies, I remembered the sheets, put them in the dryer, heard my neighbor’s recycling cart rumbling in from the alley, went to get mine, saw that the bird feeder was empty and we might even have some precip coming the way it felt. It’d be nice if it was rain, but we never get rain. Snow or nothing, that’s Denver. I filled the feeder and paused to watch my resident quarrel of sparrows swarm the perches. “Ours! Ours!” They twittered vociferously, but the finches and chickadees patiently waited them out, got some too. Back in the house, I shrieked to find someone standing in the living room.

From his upstairs studio, Phil demanded, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

This did not satisfy him. Phil can be very suspicious. He came to the top of the stairs. I had to lie, manufactured a spider that took me by surprise to make my husband  go back to his room.

It’s pathetic when you scare yourself twice with a thing you put there to begin with. So perplexingly human, isn’t it, how we can’t seem to learn from experience? I suppose I could have been distracted by withdrawal from the games. If I were addicted to them. Which I’m not.

Like all that’s familiar, once the coat tree was back in its place, it stopped scaring me. I managed (mostly) to avoid repetitive motion games for two weeks. The pain in my arm may have lessened during that time, but it’s still there and I’m playing games again. Could be the games. Or it could be a tumor.