I had a really great night last night. One of my co-workers was having a late Passover Seder and so another of my co-workers picked me up and took me there, in a car even. It felt like it had been years since I rode in a car and because the car smelled like cigarettes and the air fresheners you use to cover them up, like old boyfriends’ cars, it was somehow nostalgic. And exhilarating. The coworker having the party lives in Washington Heights, where I’ve only been once before; its slight hills and slightly different mix of bodegas and Starbucks seemed very exotic. And the coworker with the car, a gallant soul who has taken it as a personal mission to chaperon newcomers around wherever he is, whether he knows the area well or not, drove me by Gracie Mansion afterwards (that’s the mayor’s house) and told me about his days working as a doorman on the Upper West Side and his earlier days growing up in Poland.

It took a while to figure out why the evening seems such a crystal of perfection. It wasn’t all that novel; I was going through the exhilaration of being mobile without mass transit, and having some really intense conversation after weeks of self-imposed seclusion in my house, sure. But I didn’t even leave the bounds of the five boroughs.

It occurred to me at some point that it was the first period of contiguous hours in some time when my brain wasn’t spending all its free moments calculating whether I was far enough away to survive a nuclear blast in mid- or downtown Manhattan. I do that every day on the way to my office, which is thirteen blocks from Times Square. Some nights I think about sleeping in the basement.

I beat Final Fantasy IX today. This is a problem. For the last few weekends I’ve devoted inordinate amounts of time to the game to the detriment of my pets and laundry. It was very explicitly escapist. Nonproductive weeknights are easy enough to excuse on grounds of fatigue, but I was wasting whole days on this game.

It was an imperfect escape; the plot of the game is your work to foil a suicidal lunatic -- your half-brother --who intends to take the planet down with him using weapons of unimaginable destruction. Same thing as anime. Nuclear weapons are hiding everywhere.

Television could not offer this kind of escape because it requires no participation. The Final Fantasy games need just the right amount of nudging on your part to keep the plot unrolling. Little catlike creatures give you hints; a question mark appears over your head when you should interact with something on the screen; the signs are all there -- the ominous music, the flashing and shuddering -- when you’ve got the big boss on the ropes. It’s so reassuringly doable. Yes, the lush little planet you have come to love is threatened, but with a little knowledge of your party’s strengths you are going to save it.

I simply don’t hold that kind of sway with Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.

God knows I wish I did. I think about going to school for international policy or government, but you can’t just fly your airship right up to the doors of Congress to solve the problem, nor can you equip diplomacy. My boss keeps alluding to my inability to be politic as if it’s a congenital defect. I can’t think of any way I can help, with my skill set, and starting from a part-time desk job at a leftist nonprofit I don’t see that my role in all this will be anything other than to sit back and wait to get nuked. And don’t get me started on activism and civil disobedience, because I’ve fucking tried.

The only time I ever binged this badly on role-playing games was when I was home from college one January avoiding dental work and hating myself for it. I was depressed then. This time I didn’t figure I was depressed; work was going OK, the love life was pretty good. The amount of time I was playing was depressing me. But then, it’s the same question of origins I had after September 11th.

War is just another word for depression.

Is it? Or is depression another front of the war? I want to run away from the city, too, to find a job at a little newspaper someplace, or an organic farm, or France, but I always have those kinds of escape fantasies once I’ve fallen into a rut at work. Is a lack of novelty the problem, then, or is it the sporadic outbursts of novelty which make everything else seem so crushingly slow?