She Packed My Movies!

You read correctly, Dear Reader. In the long list of atrocities against mankind, has there ever been one to match this? When I left the house that fateful morning, I was advised that “packing” would go on in a very vague sense whilst I was away. I discarded this information, as I do most sentences that don’t have “Batman” somewhere in them. My wife knows this, and she uses it to her cunning, feminine advantage.

When I returned to my marital abode in the late evening, there were several people standing in my living room. As is my usual custom, I ignored all of them and craned my neck to say hello to my Xbox 360, which has delicate emotional needs. She was fine, thank you for asking, but the shelf space surrounding her, which is normally filled to the brim with DVDs, was impoverished. Nothing. All gone. The look on Corelyn’s face was that odd mix of guilt and satisfaction, I don’t think she could decide if she was enjoying this or not. She walked over to me and wrapped her tiny hands around my wrists, looked up at me, and quietly stated, “We packed up the movies…and the games.”

It’s times like this that I wish husbands could exact any kind of revenge on wives that doesn’t actually come back around and hurt them in the end; believe me, I’ve tried to think of some. Your only recourse is to marry a woman who actually cares about your feelings, and in this regard I have succeeded. So at this point, she actually attempted several points to assuage my devastated soul:

1. “We don’t really watch our movies.” This was just an opening volley, a blind fire around the wall. I laughed openly at it and so did she. Her statement is correct, but it doesn’t change the fact that I watch those movies constantly. We both knew that before the discussion began, so moving on to the real battle.

2. “It was important to get done.” I feel like this is in every point she ever makes, it’s a nonspecific reference to some kind of invisible timetable our lives are always running on. Now sure, I believe this vaporous schedule is real, but sometimes the urgency with which it requires oddly specific things makes me skeptical of Corelyn as its oracle. Do I really have to stop playing “Left 4 Dead” this instant? Is a grocery trip really mandated for this moment precisely? I’d like to get a look at the hard copy of this thing.

3. “I left a few for you!” This was really the most adorable moment. Seeing that neither of those stratagems had prevailed, Corelyn pouted her lip a little and innocently pointed at a small stack of games sitting next to the television. I wandered over to see what she had left for me. The list was as follows:

“Fallout 3″–uh…ok. Now she did this because she had noticed me playing it again after not doing so for awhile, so it was a good guess, but it’s an exclusively single player game, and there are a couple of key multiplayer games that were triaged out. I mean, I’ll play it now, because it’s all I’ve got, but you know what I mean.

“Left 4 Dead”–she wins that round. I’d have gone crazy if she had boxed this one.

“Gears of War 2″–and there’s where she slipped, the boys and I have not been playing this one recently. But there’s something far more insidious at play here. Corelyn knows for a fact that we have been regularly partaking of “Halo 3″ and “Halo Wars,” and yet did not choose to keep them unpacked. Simple mistake? Afraid not. The “Halo” franchise as a whole is regarded by her as some kind of Anti-Christ, it literally stands for everything she opposes. She doesn’t “hate” it, because that word cannot convey the depth of fury in her soul. I think she sincerely wants to murder it, then dance on its grave.

I’ve given up asking “why,” there’s no reason. “Halo” features absolutely zero scantily clad women, very little gore, a science fiction story that is derived from books I know she loves, and an operatic tone very akin to the new “Star Trek,” which she desperately wants to see. It’s not some trashy “Duke Nukem” game with topless bartenders and decapitations, it feels like a Ridley Scott epic.

I think the truth is that Corelyn understands men better than most women, and she knows that “Halo” is a game which contains all the things our gender cannot resist, and she fears that no one brand should be allowed to contain such raw, undulating power. Let’s face it, if you want a dude to do anything, you need to keep him focused, and charging a Warthog jeep with a mounted gauss cannon into a wave of alien tanks is way cooler than doing laundry. The aesthetic, for her, is not the problem; it’s the implications for the future.

Anyway,

It’s a funny exercise watching women prescribe a series of video games for a man; both parties are utterly helpless, neither is going to be satisfied with the results. I sort of gently pointed out that she had missed some key ones, but her reaction told me that she felt I was being unfair. She had wanted credit for thinking to do this at all, and me responding with a metaphorical “you missed a spot” was not going to play out in my favor. I quickly adjusted my performance, because in truth I do appreciate that this occurred to her, and all three games she left me are regularly on my itinerary. I doubt many wives out there could have done better.