Let's review. The moon symbolizes purity, chastity, and perfection. You live there. I live on the earth. The earth symbolizes imperfection, flaw, and desire. I'm the Earthbound kid.

Recently, I began playing a video game entitled "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask". In it, the planet must be saved from an impending collision with the moon.

According to my psychology book, neither permanent disfigurement nor winning the lottery has a statistically significant impact on self-reported happiness levels over the long term. Probably, video games don't either. I haven't checked the studies though. The thing is after a while you adapt.

In "Majora's Mask", you have only 72 hours in which to save the world. If you fail to do so, everyone will die in a cataclysmic fireball. To avoid this fate, be sure to use your time controlling ocarina to travel back to the first day of the adventure. Why not travel back further and prevent the world from being endangered by the moon in the first place? Eh.

Time travel, again. If I could send one bit of advice to my past, I'd tell lil' me that there are no time machines.

Life is all about adapting. That's what's called an over-generalization. Over-generalizations are the basis of didactic literature.

Dragnet is basically the best show on television ever. You probably caught a few classic episodes before you went to live on the moon. To refresh your memory, how the show works is in every episode our hero Joe Friday, LAPD cop runs into some punk kids. He can't bust the kids yet, because he hasn't the evidence, etc. So, he gives them a speech in his fast talking, low pitched, gravelly voice. Tells them to straighten up, because they're on the road to destruction. The good, honest, hard-working people of LA pay cops like him to enforce the law. When you break a law, you endanger yourself and others. The punks usually don't listen, and at the end of the episode, Joe gets call from the precinct. Seems the punk turned up in exactly the trouble Joe saw coming. He was strung out on dope and robbed a liquor store and shot a cop and abused a baby, all at the same time. So Joe arrests the punk and gives him another speech. Then he pauses as if to let the punk reply. The punk just makes a funny face, then Joe ends with a one liner, like, "Get this trash out of here," or something. The horns come in and then announcer talks about the manner in which the punk was punished.

In "Majora's Mask", my character, whom I named "Love me", must don a number of different masks in order to navigate through the many puzzles presented by the game. He needs the Deku mask to run on water. He needs the Goron mask to roll up hills. He needs the Bunny hood to run faster and jump further. At first, "Majora's Mask" can be somewhat daunting. You're in a new town, with new people with which to talk, and none of the weapons from the last Zelda game. After a while though, all video games get to be sort of routine. Roll up in a joint and scope out the puzzle. Use your shiny new mask to breeze on through. As long as you don't miss something obvious, your in and your out with no sweat.

Right now, I'm at home for Christmas break. In order to cope, I've put on my homebound kid mask. With the mask on I'm a new person. I don't ever swear and I spend my days watching TV. It's a yawn-a-day life. Adaptation is the key.

Joe Friday thought that there are two kinds of people in the world: good, honest, hard-working people and crooks. He also thought it was his job to protect the decent folks from the crooks. Thing is though, there are just maladapted people, no crooks. Maladapted is my psychology book's word for messed up. Everyone's got the same cracked soul. Sometimes that messed-up-ness spills into behavior. That's when Joe Friday steps in. He carries a badge.

Joe probably adapted to his job. Seeing scumbags try to get away with stuff each week. It probably turns his stomach to think about it. But, in the end, it always works out. Joe clocks in; he tells the scumbags to listen up and listen good; he clocks out. He counts the days until he can cash his fat police pension.

By the time Apollo 13 blasted off, moonshots were no longer prime time news. People got used to it.

Sometimes, I meet people, who are happy, all the time. It confuses me. My psychology book says we all float around a personal happiness base level. Once your stomach is full, life is as good as it gets.