Just watch it. You have time. You'll have a way better weekend if you do.

My sister loaned me her boxed set of Battlestar Gallactica DVDs a while back, and I burned through all the seasons in record time. I just binged that show, I loved it so much. So many fascinating questions about humanity. While stumbling around the Internet, I discovered there is another series, although a much shorter one, called Caprica, which is set on Earth and shows how Cylons came to look like people. (There is a lot of other stuff that is not explained, unfortunately, but whatever.)

In the show, a guy played by Eric Stoltz invents a game called V-World. You get into V-World by putting on some whack glasses that remind me of the banana clip in Star Trek only these have lights. It's completely virtual there, and you can't die. If you get shot or stabbed, you de-res and you can't ever go back to V-World. You only get one life.

It's extremely dangerous in V-World, though. People play games of Russian roulette and carry machetes and guns and drive spaceships into buildings. Several characters ask how to win the game, and nobody seems to know. Most disturbing -- most people don't seem to care. They're just excited to fuck with as many people as possible while they're there. Maybe it's because they know they're not really killing someone. Maybe it's because the culture of the game is so violent. But these people shoot guns without even looking at what they're trying to hit.

At one point, one of the main characters asks another what the point of the game is. He doesn't know, either. The man who created the game didn't even give himself an extra life, and he doesn't really seem to understand any of it, either. I don't want to ruin the series for you if you want to watch it, so I won't go on any longer about the game or what happens there, but it occurred to me that I didn't like the scenes in V-World at all, because nobody seemed to care what happened there, if people got hurt, if people were sad. 

One of the things I struggle with most in modern America is accountability and the dissociative imagination at times brought out in certain people by the Internet. If V-World is to the Internet as Caprica is to the U.S. (it seems particularly the U.S., but that could be because I live here), then the people in V-World are physically acting out the racist tweets, ragey comments and hacking that goes on in real life on the Internet. 

While thinking about this yesterday, I had a flashback to ordering a sweater from the J. Crew catalog when I was in college and when I did not have access to The World Wide Web. I did not even have a cell phone, egads. I used the phone attached to the wall in my dorm room and called the 800 number and described the sweater and page number of the catalog to the woman who answered the phone. She was really nice, and we chatted for a while about what a cute sweater it was and whether I should get it a size too big as was the fashion at the time. I told her my credit card number (which was brand new, whee) and hung up. I had to be nice to her -- she was a person, after all, and we were having a conversation with our mouth-holes and everything. That level of personal interaction was pretty much everywhere. When ATMs came about, we were all overjoyed that we could get our money in $5 increments late at night to go to the bars, but also a little freaked out that something might go wrong and there was no person to help us sort it out.

Now we have to do almost everything ourselves. Book travel. Handle our banking. Shop without the aid of a salesperson. Scan and bag our groceries. (Although I think in the small town where I grew up, high school boys will still sack your groceries and carry them to your car for you. That is pretty rare outside of small towns, though.)

Somewhere in between convenience and alienation lies V-World. At some point in the loss of face-to-face or at least voice-to-voice interaction, some individuals morph into douchebags with no moral compass, no personal sense of accountability and pride that would stop them from hurting someone's feelings or even -- virtually -- their bodies, just for fun. Where on the continuum is the turning point? How do we insulate ourselves against the fuck-it point? How do we teach our kids to go on being accountable in a situation where accountability becomes counter-intuitive to the game?

What, indeed, is the point of the game? When did we stop saying "please" and "thank you"? Was it when we went from talking to the J. Crew person to chatting with her on the website? The whole Caprica thing freaked me out sufficiently that I'm going to be monitoring my behavior very closely. I'm very polite and welcoming in my neighborhood. I'm a nice neighbor. I watch people's cats when they go out of town and tell them when their garage door is open and keep an eye on their kids when they're in the cul-de-sac. I send thank you notes, paper ones, when people give me presents. I'm not a total douchebag online, but I could be nicer. Sometimes I think I will say "thank you" and then realize I'm talking to an autoresponder, and maybe that's a piece of it, too. Sometimes I don't even know if who I'm talking to is real or virtual. Does it make sense to be polite to Siri? Does taking her for granted translate directly into walking away from a gas station cashier without saying thanks for giving me directions? 

Where is the line in V-World? 

What is the point of the game?

I've become convinced recently that Americans are too concerned with return on investment. Besieged as we are by whether or not our houses are growing more valuable, we put in nice landscaping five minutes before we sell. We ask ourselves whether we'll take this job or that by how it will impact our resumes. In some instances, we are afraid to be seen walking an ugly dog.

And where does it really get us?

Maybe it's capitalism. Maybe it's our Judeo-Christian background, as a culture, and our relentless obsession with the principal of hard work. But really, who goes home after a long day of being nice to other people and thinks, shit, what a waste of a day? I really shouldn't have smiled at that old lady. I really shouldn't have waved to that school bus. I'm a reject of a human being.

The truth is that in these uncertain economic times (Beloved's most hated expression), almost nothing is a guaranteed win. Your life could become a bad Alannis Morisette song at any moment, what with the spoons when you really need a fork and all that. You could do everything right, jog every day and eat healthy, organic foods and still drop over dead at 35 whilst hiking to the top of Mount Everest on a clear autumnal morning with the earth shimmering beneath you.

Return on investment is a privileged person's way of measuring energy in versus energy out.

I'm finding as I get older that the only things that matter to my state of happiness are the ones that make other people's lives better. I'm no Mother Theresa and my income tax statements reflect that. I try, I do, but I'm often influenced in my giving by whether or not I think it will bring me something in the end, whether that something is a feel-good moment or a deduction or some form of social currency. Is it possible to do something nice just to do it? Really? I think so, but it's most commonly not the reason we do it, because we've all bought in to the concept of ROI.

The only thing that keeps me from feeling as though I've fallen into the American ROI abyss is my cat. Petunia, while a shelter cat (six points for altruism) is the worst cat ever. I mean, sure, she's nice to me, but Beloved can barely pick her up, she swats at the little angel except on the best of days and my niece E., who is two, says what Petunia says is "HISS." She's a bitch of a muted calico domestic shorthair, and there's really no good reason in the world to keep her. She has zero ROI.

This cat of mine I cling to because she's evidence that I don't do everything for a reason.

I have long railed against the idea of quarterly reporting and continuous financial gains. I think paying too much attention to short-term goals results in corner-cutting and -- let's face it -- unethical and inhumane behaviors. Yet I find myself measuring myself against short-term goals all the time, whether they be in months or in years.

Where did we get this idea of ROI, and why have we, as a culture, bought into it so? Because truly, the more you have, the more you stand to lose. I'm not trying to be Debbie Downer here, but it's true. So why not do things just because they are there, just because they are fun?

I'll tell you. It's because as long as everyone else is still subscribing to ROI, then you lose if you're just in it for the moment. We would all have to collectively decide to stop placing importance on income and social stature and agree to frolic in sunflower fields, and I have a feeling that as long as humans walk this earth, there will always be someone trying to convince you his sunflower field is way bigger and better and produces more seeds per acre than yours.

I haven't quite figured this problem of the human condition out yet. Perhaps another episode of LA Ink will help.

I spend a lot of time saying "you can't have that" to my daughter. That she asks for everything is a function of being seven, of being a kid, of not quite understanding the boundaries yet, how money works, how time works, how practicing works. That she's starting to get it sometimes breaks my heart.

The other day she said she wanted a cookie, but she knew she couldn't have one until after dinner. As she stared longingly at the cookies made by her grandmother and trucked 500 miles across Iowa, I realized that I could probably leave them out and leave the house and she still wouldn't eat one, because she is starting to get it.

Yesterday she brought home a baseball card she'd made for herself at school.

I thought about what it means to want anything, to wish for a magic genie to grant your heart's desires. I remember wishing for that, hell, I still wish for that. It's not even about money, it's also about accomplishments or love or friendship.

It stuck in my head, and as I went to bed last night I thought there are junctures in life where you probably could have anything, but to get to what you want, you sacrifice other things. You sacrifice time for money, money for time, family for career, career for family, dreams for peace, peace for dreams, relationships for autonomy, autonomy for relationships. It's all a trade-off. But you probably could have anything if you single-mindedly went through life focusing only on that one thing. I have a quote that I often read that says something like "the reason more people fail instead of succeed is because they sacrifice what they want for what they want right now." And what I want right now is usually a nap or a big Kindle download.

I've started saying more often to her, "You can't have that right now." That toy she wants? She might get it for Christmas or with her allowance or piggy bank money. That cookie will be hers in a few hours. That perfect turn-out might come with years of practice. It all boils down to what makes sense right now, in this moment, and maybe the key to happiness is accepting that.

So perhaps it's not "you can't have that," but "you can't have that right now." Or "consider what you'd give up to have that and decide if that's what you really want."

I can teach her to eat healthy food before she eats a cookie, but I can't teach her what her heart desires most. Only she can answer that for herself.