Medium Rare

 At my best, I was a wizard at Guitar Hero. On Medium. I cranked away and pushed myself through each and every song, including the bonus rounds. On Medium. For a prolonged period, way past when it was cool to be playing pretend guitar, standing in front of my television focusing all my attention on the screen, anticipating the flourishes of which there were a medium amount, and doing my very best not to fail.

But was it my very best? On a few occasions I took the opportunity to up my game. I flipped the lever that pushed me into the Hard Realm, and found myself clunking and thudding through songs I thought I knew by heart. I did. On Medium. Adding those extra notes. The Orange Button. I had watched others, savants who had visited my living room with the expressed intent of embarrassing me, take on that next level and showed me that it was indeed possible. 

For them.

I thought of all those plastic models that lined the shelves of my room and eventually hung from the ceiling on fishing line. I loved to construct planes and cars and monsters and ships and all manner of things from kits. I lived in a neighborhood where boys my age were all doing similar things. The difference? I was on Medium. I sometimes painted my spaceships and airplanes and creatures. Sometimes I would even remember to trim the excess plastic off the parts when I twisted them off the frames they came from on the box. I worked fast, but mostly stuck with the directions, but I was never at the level of detail that my friends were. One of whom took great joy out of showing me how he had taken an Afrikan Korps officer and painted his insignias just like a photo he had noticed on the box, and on this bit of plastic no bigger than the tip of his thumb, he had taken an needle to paint the lenses of the binoculars around the Kommander's binoculars that hung on his chest.

This was not me.

I was interested in completing the model. Then looking forward to slapping together the next one. I was, to put it mildly, "into completion." 

Fast forward to a few nights ago, when I sat in front of my computer, playing Civilization. Civilization IV, to be precise. I had been given the newest version a year before by my son, who figured that I must have finished the challenges available on a game that was nearly twenty years old. The one I continued to play after sampling the updated graphics and new details available in the update. I had become very proficient at the Chieftain level, one notch up from the beginning setting for Settler. I felt confidence in this realm and stuck with it, landing again and again at the Domination Victory. I had dominated once again. 

On Medium. 

Which seemed pretty victorious to me.