The many faces of accomplishment

Today was remarkably productive on a variety of fronts. I managed to wake up before noon, thanks to setting an alarm for 11 and then finally getting out of bed after hitting the snooze button four times.

I watched the disappointing Czech Republic-Turkey match in Euro 2008 (I won’t be wearing either of the t-shirts I got in Turkey for the next month and a half we’re in Prague).

And I damn near completed a task that’s been dogging me for the past several days: beating Super Mario Bros. 2.

I’ve actually developed a pretty good record with the Mario games in the last year or so. For much of my childhood I was dogged by the shame I felt for never having beaten the original Super Mario Bros., the game that came bundled with every NES and that seemingly everyone beat. I wasn’t alone in my shame, since Adam also fell just short like me (I think I made it as far as 8-2 or 8-3, but could never quite get to the final level in my childhood). And it was made worse by knowing that even Adam’s mom Danece, or “Mom No. 2″ as I call her, had beaten the game. And she’d make us feel worse by rubbing it in, sitting down to beat it for fun, trying to beat it without warping or without dying, all while we couldn’t beat it the easiest way possible (it only requires playing eight of the thirty-two levels if you know where the warp zones are).

When I got the Wii and had a dearth of games, I downloaded Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World (the title bundled with the SNES), figuring they’d at least be a blast from the past (though I never actually owned an SNES until I got my cousin’s console when we got into retro gaming my freshman year of college). To my great relief, I actually managed to beat Mario after several days, which avenged some tormented portion of my childhood soul. And you’d better believe that the next time I saw Danece, which happened to be waiting at the chapel for my own wedding to start, I made a point of telling her I had beaten Mario a few months before.

I also managed to beat Super Mario World after some extended play, though it took me longer mainly because there are a lot more levels to the game. In fact, when I got to the final level and faced off with Bowser, I was struck by the feeling that I had done this before. So, I can’t for the life of me remember whether I had somehow managed to play the game enough somewhere (maybe at Danece’s) to beat it as a child, or if I was merely experiencing the déjà vu of having watched one of my cousins or someone else beat the game. Either way, I managed to do it myself as an adult, and I have to say, I think Super Mario World is the best Mario title ever, since it has great depth of levels, a lot of new goodies and extras, and was good for plenty of fun.

More recently, I beat the New Super Mario Bros. on C’s DS Lite, back around the holidays when my Wii was temporarily out of commission while I waited for a new AC adapter. And then, over a period of several months, I beat Super Mario Galaxy, the Mario title for the Wii. I was actually very pleased with myself for that, since I managed to beat the entire game and discover all 120 stars without once consulting a strategy guide or getting any hints beyond those offered in the game itself. I liked Galaxy a lot, and thought it brought some interesting elements to the Mario series (and it caused me a lot less frustration than Sonic’s Wii debut). I think it has to be in the conversation about best Mario titles (with Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3), but I still have an aversion to 3D platformers rather than side-scrollers. Plus, for all the upgrades over the years, Mario is still exceedingly difficult to control underwater.

Anyway, to get back to Mario 2, this was another game that I didn’t play a lot growing up, since I never had it, but Adam did. I don’t think Danece or any of us ever beat it, and, sadly, that streak is still intact on my end. I’ve made it deep into the game, and tonight I finally made it to the final level, 7-2. I even managed to get to the very end of the level, just before the chamber with the final boss, but unfortunately when I reached that point, I died, and was out of lives and out of continues, so the Mario 2 quest has to wait another day. (I swear I’ll beat it tomorrow.)

Still, I consider the Mario 2 progress something of an accomplishment, even if I fell tantalizingly short of the goal.

Oh, and I actually got some work done on my outline today. Oddly enough, I decided to add a chapter to my dissertation, since I think what was to be the concluding chapter, the former Chapter 7, should be separate from the conclusion itself. And, for some reason that made sense to me at the time, though I can’t fully explain it now, I decided to renumber things, so that I have the Introduction, Chapters 1-6, and the Conclusion. I may well switch that up later and simply number them 1-8. But I created another chapter today! In a manner of speaking….

Actually, I also did yeoman’s work on my outline. I went back through the outlines I already created for the introduction and what I’m now calling Chapter 1, making lots of additions to the introduction and trying to incorporate more of things I keep remembering that should go there. I made a couple of minor tweaks to Chapter 1, then finally started on Chapter 2 (the former Chapter 3, just so you’re good and confused). I actually managed over the course of the day, sandwiched around extended periods of goofing off (I’ve read through the first four years or so of PhD Comics over the day, and will probably make it through the remaining seven years in the next couple of days), to complete an outline for that chapter, which brings my total to three chapters outlined out of the new total of eight. So I’m still not quite halfway there!

But I’ve decided to set some goals. I want to get through at least three more chapters by the end of this coming week, and I want to get through all of them in the next two weeks. I’m hoping to get some really heavy-duty outlining done in the month after that (our last month in Prague), where I start placing notes and references in the right places so I can write the actual prose from it. I’m going to pretend like I might make it all the way through eight chapters in that month, when in truth I’ll probably do well to get through half that much, but I’m always setting unattainably high goals for myself so that I end up getting a lot more done that I would otherwise.

And, as I discovered when I actually bothered to go back and read my seminar paper from last year, I’ve already written a lot of stuff that spans the years between 1963 and 1968, meaning there’s already good material for the bridge chapter I feared would need filler and fluff to complete. I’m willing to venture it’ll suck 50 percent less now!