Whenever I go home for Christmas I tell myself that this year is going to be special. This is the year that I’m going to be proactive! This is the year that I will call up old high school friends, then see if my 10th grade English teacher wants to meet up for a long overdue breakfast at the diner! After that, I’ll take a drive over to our old house on Powell Road to see what color the new owners have painted it!

Then, as soon as I drop my bags, the to-do list goes out the window, and a weird kind of inertia sets in. I suddenly don’t feel like going anywhere, calling anybody, or doing anything. For reasons I have never been able to understand, I want nothing more than to be completely isolated with my family.

There’s a funny gravity to being home. Once I get there, I can’t seem to escape it. During the afternoon of my first day home, after we’ve all had a chance to get caught up, after the newness of being together has worn off a bit, my mom says, “Well, we could either take a ride over to Wal-mart, or we could just sit around here and look at each other.” It’s the second part that gets me, the “sit around here and look at each other” part. It’s funny, because that’s a fair assessment of what we wind up doing a lot of over the holidays: 1. we sit around, 2. we look at each other.

My dad blinks at me across the living room. I blink at him. My mom blinks at me. I blink at her. My brother blinks at all of us and probably wishes we would all pack our belongings and get out of his house. Between blinks, we watch TV and eat.

Then my dad clears his throat. He has something to say. “Did you know that chocolate is like a poison for dogs?” he says. I will blink at him several times, somewhat mystified, because he has shared this exact same fact with us every Christmas for the last 20 years. “Even a little bit of chocolate can kill a dog,” he adds. “It’s true.”

Whenever he says this, I picture the same thing: dogs dressed in tuxedoes at a casino. Then a sexy Russian spy dog, wearing a low-cut dress, saunters in and discretely slips a square of chocolate into another dog’s martini.

My dad blinks at me two times. I blink back once. I wonder sometimes if he is trying to tell me something in Morse Code with his blinks. YOUR. MOTHER. BEATS. ME. AT. NIGHT. I don’t know Morse Code, so his messages, if they really are messages, are always lost on me.

My brother has a dog, a hyperactive cockapoo called Bella, who is named, I believe, after one of the Disney princesses. When my six-year-old niece emerges from the kitchen carrying an open bar of chocolate, and Bella sniffs at her feet, my father practically leaps off the couch. “DON’T LET THAT CHOCOLATE FALL ON THE FLOOR!” he says. Then he explains to my niece that chocolate is poison for dogs.

Silence sets in after this. A new program comes on TV. Something about people bidding on abandoned storage units at one of those storage places. People gather around the shuttered door of a storage unit. The bids climb: $100, $500, a $1,000. “I can’t believe what passes for TV programming these days,” my dad says, shaking his head.

My mother sighs. “I told you that we should have taken a ride over to Wal-mart.”

We watch the show, trading blinks during the commercial breaks.

Day 42 brings me to stage 4-10. What we’re dealing with here is a fairly expansive level–approximately four screens stand between the key and the door–that is littered with animated, dismembered alligator jaws. The object of the level is to get the key in the lower righthand corner up to the door in the top lefthand corner. In between, you’ll find plenty of danglers/vines, and small platforms, as well as two friendly, life-saving frogs. Let’s begin.

Now, there are two ways to navigate this level: the Conservative Way, and the Renegade Way. I tried both. The Conservative Way works every time (well, almost every time). The Renegade Way? It seemed like it could work. But after it failed, I went back to the Conservative Way.

The Conservative Way requires you to travel through the level twice. Your first time through is your chance to 1. gather all of the collectibles (Pauline’s dumb hat, etc.), and, more importantly, 2. trigger two death-dealing coconuts that can, if timed properly, eliminate up to three or four enemies, making your second pass through the level markedly easier.

At this point in the game, I should be awarded a PhD in triggering coconuts. The key is to wait until as many dismembered alligator jaws as possible are lined up–or more accurately, about to line up–underneath a coconut. Trigger the coconut by bumping into it, then watch as it leaves a path of wrack and ruin in its wake, and also–bonus–gives your score a healthy boost. One thing to keep in mind: take care not to let the coconuts destroy the two fun-loving frogs in this level. Doing so will only make your second pass through the level that much more challenging.

Now head back to the bottom of the level to collect the key and begin pass number two. Note the large, jumping frog near the key. With key in hand, jump onto the frog’s back. He will suddenly leap high into the air–whee!–transporting you and the key to one of the upper platforms.

If that frog is not there? If you’ve inadvertently killed that poor, google-eyed bastard with a coconut? Then you have to get the key up there the hard way. The Hard Way involves performing a leap-and-toss, so that the key lands up there, on the platform, followed by a mad scramble up the nearby danglers to reach the now-blinking key before it disappears.

Either way, once you’re on this platform, follow the path of platforms to the left, until you find the second frog. Again, hop on his back, and let this fly-gobbler carry you, in high style, to the level’s upper-most tier. And, once again, if you’ve inadvertently killed him with an errant coconut–even though I specifically told you not to–you’ll have to perform another near-miraculous leap-and-toss of the key, followed by another mad scramble up the danglers, etc.

Now that I’m here, on the same level as the exit door, there’s just one last dismembered alligator jaws to contend with. I wait until it’s well out of my way, chomping its way down a dangler, then hop left. Shazam, I’m done. The Renegade Way, in case your wondering, involves only making one pass through the level. In other words, you don’t scout ahead, triggering coconuts and collecting Pauline’s junk, as I’ve described here. You make one, single mad dash through it–that’s it. As I said, I tried it once. It didn’t work out for me. Maybe it’ll work out for you.

I wound up enjoying this level a lot. Maybe that’s because of the sheer variety that the level offers, the way that it allows me to find my way through it along several different paths. Or maybe it’s because I’m finally back home, playing Donkey Kong at my desk in my apartment in Vancouver (instead of hotel rooms in Las Vegas). This is, I believe, where I do my best Donkey Kong playing. See you tomorrow.