When I was about nine years old, an online role-playing game was advertised on television - and you might have heard of it. It was called Toontown Online. It was developed and run by Disney, and it was amazingly fun. I played the free trial twice, once with each of my parents emails. Finally, they agreed to pay for the game monthly. At that time, the free version was the same as the full version, only you were locked out after a certain period of time until you paid up. I played the game often, but never with any of my real-life friends, because so few of them had internet in addition to parents would pay the $10 a month.

Fast forward to college, just one year after the game officially closed, and about three years after I asked my parents to cancel the subscription, since I did not play the game anymore. I flew threw elementary and secondary school, but I am essentially one of those students who received a swift kick in the butt when I got to college, because I only ever learned to learn and regurgitate - never to actually study or master a concept. I never had to think as critically as I have been asked to in my many semesters here at the university. I had been feeling so stupid, so incapable of being the intelligent, educated woman I so desperately want to be. I looked back on my childhood with disdain, thinking how I could not be as smart as everyone thought I was back then - otherwise, why would I be struggling so much in college?

Then Toontown came to mind. I'm not sure why, but it did. I decided to Google it - only to discover that the game had been re-uploaded by some super fans of the Disney original. This version is missing a few elements, but it's entirely free. I downloaded it and got playing. Playing the game again made me realize something I had forgotten - while I wasn't necessarily as "book smart" when I was a kid, I was clearly pretty good at figuring stuff out. I made it fairly far into the game, which wasn't easy - heck, I'm still not as far into it now as I was when I was a kid.

So in some weird way, playing this childhood game again was a confidence booster. And in another odd twist of events, it brought my new roommate and I together. She moved in last October, and I hated her on the principal of having a freshman move in with me just two months before the end of the semester (my original roommate rushed and went to live in the sorority house). She saw me playing one day and asked how to download it. Through playing this game together, we became great friends. So thanks, Toontown Rewritten, for the new friend and for making me realize more about myself than Millsberry ever did.