I JUST GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL.

Lately, Zack and I have been playing a lot of Pokemon. If you've been around us at all in the last two or three weeks, you probably know that and are annoyed by it. We bring our Pokemon cards everywhere with us, and we actually drove out to Roseville two weeks ago to buy me a used DSLite. . . because it came with Pokemon Heart Gold, and a Pokewalker, and it was a decent price. I gave Zack my old DS and we've been pretty inseparable from the damn things ever since.

In light of all this Poke-mania, I thought I should tell you all about the time I decided to start collecting Pokemon cards.

I was in fourth grade, merely one year after arriving at that school. If you know anything at all about my childhood, you know that I got made fun of a lot, and got into a lot of fights because of it, which also resulted in a lot of detention.

Everyone in my class had Pokemon cards. I didn't really have any idea what the cards were supposed to do, but I watched the show sometimes before school, and I thought it was okay. My classmates, though, were batshit about the stuff. Kids were trading at lunch, battling during Silent Reading, talking about who had the coolest holographic cards, and some even bragged about their legendary Japanese cards. Of course, nobody else could see those, because they were priceless.

One Thursday after school (Thursdays were detention days), my teacher left me alone in the classroom, presumably to go do teachery things that didn't involve sitting behind a desk doing nothing while one spazoid kid, who is also doing nothing, stares intensely at you. As soon as she left I got up and walked to her desk, knowing exactly what I would find.

There, on the upper right hand corner of her desk, in plain view, were eleven Pokemon cards. They belonged to a kid one grade below me, who'd been playing with them during class, and Mrs. Lambrecht had taken them away for the day. . . but she had neglected to give them back.

All at once, I had this ridiculous vision in my head. I would transform from being the geeky kid everyone picked on, to the coolest kid in school. All I had to do was take these Pokemon cards. So what if they'd belonged to somebody else? I'd take better care of them, mostly because I had no idea what they were used for. It was his stupid fault for getting them taken away in the first place. He didn't deserve them.

I stood there for about five minutes, waging this epic mental battle, with what I considered my own personal Dark Side telling me that I should, no, needed to steal those cards. I had a right to them. I was the finder, and everybody knows that Finders Keepers, Losers Stupid Little Crybabies Who Get Things Taken Away During Class And Given To Somebody Else.

I snatched them off the desk, stuffed them in the pocket of my jumper, and ran back to my desk just as Mrs. Lambrecht came back into the room. She didn't notice anything when she went back to her desk.

For the next week, I was super cool. I was in possession of eleven Pokemon cards, and one of them was a holographic Snorlax. I couldn't believe my luck. No one else had a holographic Snorlax.

It became a major scandal in my school once it got around t hat someone had stolen Matt Cherenzia's Pokemon cards right off of Mrs. Lambrecht's desk. Unfortunately for me, he remembered exactly what all of them were. . . and wouldn't you know it, I only had eleven cards, and one of them was the holographic Snorlax he was so proud of.

Oddly enough, I didn't get punished for it. My teacher was mad, but I think she actually completely understood. Like I said, it wasn't exactly a secret that I was a huge loser, and the teachers were usually pretty sympathetic to it.

Anyway, that's the story of how I got my first ever Pokemon cards. Needless to say, it's a lot more fun now.