has anyone else unwittingly picked a hobby of your fiance's that you never thought you were capable of doing? i used to like hanging out in the room, doing something else while the boy played games whose names i could never recall. soon, many games had nicknames, so i retained a strong hold of my girlyness. when i was younger, super nintendo was the coolest thing, and i'm sure we all had gameboys (heck most people our age, guys and girls alike, have the nintendo DS), and donkey kong country and all the sequels rocked my world. but then the videogame industry introduced the concept of 3D, which soon dominated, and i couldn't maneuver my little mario guy in a straight line, quickly became dizzy, and gave up. gone were the days of running across the screen, from left to right, jumping on bad guys. after dating my fiance, i came to learn these were called "platform games." when we first started dating he trained me to play a soccer game, Winning Eleven, and he was surprised at how good at it i became. somehow he managed to suck me into playing Resistance with him last year and with the recent releases of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3, I can officially play "first person shooters." not well enough to play against any hard core guys online, but well enough to get a few kills in when him and i play together....although i can totally beat a pack of 16 guys online in Motorstorm.

when Rock Band first came out, my fiance and I happened to stumble upon it by fluke at costco and snatched it up. an old boss of mine had pre-ordered it on amazon, but then he was told it wasn't going to arrive in time for christmas! so i called around to try and find it as a surprise, then went to circuit city. as i was paying for it, the sales-guy was telling me how lucky i was to get it, to which i said, i already have it - this is for a friend. then he proceeded ask if i had guitar hero, yes. a ps3? yes. a wii? yes. an xbox 360? yes. and then he said "wow! so you're a gamer!" that left me totally speechless. somehow in the course of the last three years, my fiance had transformed me into a gamer?! but it's okay. my DS is light pink and i like chopping things in zelda. and it's also okay, because it's cute to see him happily pick up my new honking-big camera and take snapshots of me. and of course i always get to rub it in his face and say "how many guys have girlfriends that will help them shoot down people in world war 3?"