Recently, Google placed a playable Pac-Man on its homepage to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. Everyone was all atwitter about it. Me, I was all ‘meh’. Do you know how many hours of Pac-Man I have played and watched being played. So damn many.

When I was about 11 or 12 I moved to north central Illinois to live with my mom and new step-dad. In a VERY small town called Metamora. (Now, I know that I say I am from Louisville, but I actually lived most of the time in a small town on the Indiana side of Kentucky called Georgetown. So when I say that this town in Illinois made Georgetown look like a metropolis, you can be assured that I have not resorted to hyperbole.) Metamora’s one claim to fame is that Lincoln once practiced law there. They even had a historic courthouse that was preserved from that era and everything. That’s it y’all. And don’t let the fact that it is in the top half of Illinois fool you, in the summer it was hot. Corn, pavement, and that damn historic court house was all that I had to look forward in the summer. So I spent a lot of time watching MTV and at the ice cream parlor. Watching my mom play Ms. Pac Man.

You don’t how much I wish I was kidding.

She played for hours upon hours, she was obsessed. I got an ice cream out of it, but I didn’t even bother asking to play Ms. Pac Man. And it was one of those cool table ones too! I think there was another video game there, but I only remember the Mrs. Pac Man. When I brought this up recently, my mother mentioned that she held the high score on that machine for a while. The geek in me was so damn proud.

So go ahead and play your Google Pac-Man, I think I’ve had enough.