Conor - It's All About The Points

Being straightforward is something I've been trying out lately, to middling success. My being straightforward is usually not the problem, it's usually the juxtaposition of me being straightforward and other people not adhering to that idea.

What if all of life had to be as clear and quantitative as I would like it to be? What if life had to look each participant in the eyes and say "yes, good job" or "that was a mistake man" after every single decision or event?

What I'm fantasizing about (or suggesting, really, if anybody in charge is reading this) is a point system. Instant feedback for everything. You get constant high fives or put downs from the universe based on your performance, in the form of either green or red numbers popping up over your head after each happening. I realize I'm an extremely competitive person, but there's no way that I'm the only one who wants this.


This scoring system would be purely contextual and completely hilarious. Life will finally be able to blatantly tell us that yeah, it's been a huge fan of irony this entire time.


Let's say you hookup with the secretary at the office that always looks super cute. Nice! 100 points! But then immediately afterwards you meet the woman who is unquestionably the love of your life and you drop everything with the secretary. Yikes! -15 for every time you pass her while walking into the office and you can't make eye contact with her because you're really embarrassed, and you might be doing this on a daily basis. And she can see these numbers appear, too. Months later, while you're eating dinner alone all of the sudden -500 appears above your head and you have no idea what's going on until you hear that the secretary's pregnant! Oh god!


My friend Holden is over there blatantly scratching his balls through the sweatpants that I'm letting him borrow. Those are my sweatpants. What a party foul, Holden! -50 points. 


I'm midway through The Bourne Ultimatum right now, the third movie in the Bourne Trilogy. I can't decide how much completing movie marathons should be worth. I'd say Caitlin gets 30 points for watching all three without interruption or distraction, while I get 25 points for watching all of them but writing a blog post during the final movie. Holden and Nate get around 20 because they missed a large chunk of the second movie, and Nina ended up losing around 10 points tonight for promising to watch these and then sleeping through all of them. Obviously all of these values would be tripled if we were talking about tackling all three extended editions of The Lord Of The Rings. 


Don't even get me started on what Jason Bourne's score would be, jesus christ. Every reflexive punch in the face has to nab him 500, at least. That car chase in Moscow towards the end of the Bourne Supremacy? I would give him 10,000 for that, easy. To put that in perspective I'd say you get like 3,000 points for becoming President.


I'm thinking that the system for Final Fantasy marathons would be you gain points while you're playing the game (as if you had cast Regen) and slowly lose points while watching (as if you were poisoned.) You lose 50 points for attending if you are Nicholas Dietrich.

Points will accumulate. You can track your stats! How interesting, I score a disproportionate amount of points on Thursdays but often end up with a net loss on Tuesdays. Huh! August was apparently a good month for me. I have 1,459 points as of right now. Is that good? I don't know, compare with your friends! Imagine how bitter things will get when life very clearly tells some people that they are better than others. I'm probably like, one point ahead of Mada.

There's no end to the possibilities. I think I'm going to just live my life as if this system was in place. I will fight and struggle for points.

And I will win.