Girl to Boy By Emma Gariety
I slept in until about 11:00 and when I woke up, “Call of Duty” was just waiting for me. Sweat built up between my fingers and the controller as I sat playing “COD,” my eyes fixed on the screen for hours.
If anybody is wondering what I’m talking about, I spent one Saturday in a guy’s shoes. I did stereotypical boy activities and found out what it feels like to spend a whole day in front of a television screen playing video games.
Due to the fact that I rarely play video games, I didn’t really know how to work the controls. I had to have my brother help, and at first, it was kind of stressful.
For example, it was nerve wracking when I was supposed to be shooting a gun, but kept hitting the wrong button and doing some sort of a crouch thing that got me nowhere. It’s the worst feeling in the world when you’re getting eaten by a zombie and you just can’t figure out how to shoot your gun.
After failing miserably at defending myself from Nazi’s playing in “COD,” I decided I would switch to “Left 4 Dead.” I had remembered playing the game with my brother and his friends before, so that helped when my brother left me to play all by my lonesome. I was pretty good at it, and finished the first campaign in about 45 minutes. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I sure felt special.
I got in my brother’s Lazy Boy and put on my Xbox live headset. Even though I didn’t need it, it made me feel like a hard-core gamer. I cranked up the volume and absorbed myself into the game zone. Pupils adjusting to the darkness, socks glowing in the black light, controller in hand, I began to get my game on.
I stared at the controller in my hands for a while before finally pressing the button that would un-pause the game and get things going again. As I started playing, I realized it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be; I was actually pretty good at killing zombies.
On parts that I was terrible, I just thought “when in doubt… shoot and spin in circles,” which was a surprisingly effective tactic. Though for most of the time I hid and let the people I was playing with do all the work, killing a few zombies here and there.
I was really starting to get the hang of things, and soon it was about 5:00 in the evening. I don’t really know how guys can spend all day playing video games, it got quite boring after a while.
As boring as it got, it felt like a very productive day to me, learning to play video games so well from an expert gamer, my brother. Now I’m just left with a nice hand cramp, and some wonderful memories of my manly day.
Boy to Girl by Adam Mateos
I’ve been to the mall maybe 10 times in my whole life and don’t know where anything is or how to get there. I become overwhelmed and lonely at the mall in a record rate because I’m a pretty self-sufficient person. My reason for going to the mall in the first place was to trade places with a girl for a day. So I had to spend all day doing the girliest thing I could think of: shopping.
My adventure in the mall started out unsuccessful in getting a male to go with me. “Yeah, I’ll call you back when I find out,” one person said. I waited 35 minutes without a call back, until I finally just went by myself.
I found myself wandering aimlessly watching the endless ranks of random people. The most fun people to watch were the middle-aged women, who scoured the jungle that is Dillard’s, clawed each other and tore through clearance racks like they were starving and the only food source lay beneath the garments. Their eyes darted side to side ready to fight to the death for the last color or size or whatever else they valued in their hearts.
Noticing what the women were like, it occurred to me what the men do must be completely different, so I was off to the nearest sports store. In there, men had some similar qualities, their eyes darted from side to side, looking for their wives, bodies tensed and ready to jump into the clothing racks and hide if they heard her coming. There were always exceptions of course. There were the men who had no choice but to help their “shopping buddy” carry bags and tell the alpha-female she looked good in everything. Some of them were discovered in their hiding places and others had their eyes glossed over as their man cards were slowly and painfully torn in half.
The first detail that jumped out at me in a store called Forever 21 was the floor, white tile of some sort, so sparkly and shiny I couldn’t help just walking around looking at the ground. Next a worker at the store saw me smiling at the ground and started walking toward me; I needed to find a clothing rack or a dressing room, any place to hide. The man part of me screamed, but it was too late.
“Can I help you find anything today?”
“No.”
That was the trend all day. I walked into a lady store, all the workers put on fake smiles and asked if I needed any help, and women growled at me and showed their fangs, protecting their sale racks. The men popped their heads out of changing rooms, making sure the coast was clear. Everyone acted like it was completely normal. Leaving the mall was my favorite part of the day, there was a fresh smell. A haunting aroma all the men around me could sense. Hope. Hope that they would never have to go back there again.
