I've had a sort of big-picture life quandary over the last several months, and then I saw Being Elmo.

Being Elmo is a documentary following Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who's always played Elmo. Even though it's a documentary in format and presentation, the story is heart-warming enough to be as good as the Oscar winners from a few hours ago.

Clash came from very humble origins - a house that could've passed for projects on the outskirts of Baltimore and no means to travel - but his passion for puppetry was spotted at a very early age. He put on puppet shows for local kids and survived constant heckling from classmates. That grew into a spot on local children's TV shows, which grew into a spot on the popular broadcast show Captain Kangaroo. 

In his senior year of high school, he got his big break and met his heroes: Jim Henson and his entire crew. He succeeded before Henson and eventually settled into a steady career on Sesame Street.

Elmo is his creation, his character made from a spare puppet that was rarely used on the set. The real pivotal point in the film - spoiler alert (if such a thing exists for documentaries) - is the revelation that each Muppet character is based on a very focused character. Fozzy Bear is a Vaudeville performer, first and foremost. Elmo's character, on the other hand, is a concentrated and raw form of love. Elmo always gives hugs and kisses. Elmo loves you. 

Everyone who was interviewed for the film, from fellow puppeteers to Henson's contemporaries to Whoopi Goldberg, pointed to that Elmo character as a hidden side of Clash that only gets to come out when he's in character. 

While I'm glossing over a lot of wonderfully heart-warming details, the sum of the parts is that Clash had this passion for puppetry from his youth, and he followed it with such whole-heartedness and dedication that it led him to meet his heroes, become part of that tribe, and win great professional success along with it.

At 27, I've started to fear that I've missed out on my Elmo moment.

When I was 4 and first saw a video game, that automatic, natural connection went off in my head the same way it did for Kevin Clash when he saw the pilot episode of Sesame Street and Bert and Ernie talked to him by looking straight into the camera. 

When I was 9, I tried to learn C++. When I was 10 or 11, I subscribed to Game Developer Magazine. All the while, I played with every level editor for every major PC game that was a part of my childhood: Doom, Descent, StarCraft, Quake, Unreal. I was trying to be creative, the equivalent of sewing my own puppets together. 

Opportunity knocked for me, the same way it did for Clash. I attended Dallas gaming conventions and met heroes like John Carmack and John Romero. I worked in the gaming press - the dream job to end all dream jobs, if you were a young kid. I even worked at an actual game studio and had so much fun I preferred work to home life. I was invited to work - not just attend - E3 2009.

Yet in each case, things fizzled. The Dallas gaming empire collapsed, and my heroes fell from the spotlight. I lost my gaming press job after a couple months. I lost the game development job after mere weeks. The publisher that tentatively hired me for E3 backed out. 

The games industry - my own calling since birth, as I saw it - chewed me up and spat me out multiple times. My desire to work a job that would last, and one where I'd be taken seriously, led me to Rakuten. 

I feel good about Rakuten - it connects a lot of dots from my past including the Internet business, business strategy, working globally, and of course the Japan thing. 

My ultimate, eventual goal is to be part of a creative place. The Pixars, Nintendos, Sesame Workshops and Apples of the world have in common one thing: love. As Al Gore put it at the global tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple has it. Pixar and Nintendo both have it, if you go read the books about those companies. Valve, too, has it, as its legions of fans will attest.

Kevin Clash has it in spades, obviously. And if you watch his documentary, you'll notice that the same Henson Workshop puppeteers from the 1970s are still around and have aged very gracefully in lives filled with happiness and passion.

My only fear about Rakuten - a company which is kindly giving me a job, a paycheck, training and a position with advancement capability in a sector where I have passion and experience in my favorite city in the world - is what happens to creativity in a business (and consequently a career) with success and failure defined by metrics.

"Suck it up," you may say to me. I should be thankful I'm employed at all. I should have to do some real work and pay my dues. Everyone else does "work work" and I'm not deserving of escaping that.

Feel free to say those things to me. Just keep the volume low enough that the four-year-old me can't hear. 

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Back in early January, I got to use a birthday gift I was given back in December: two tickets to the Legend of Zelda performance at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

I got a couple questions pretty frequently following the show. From Dallas Arts District regulars: "How was Jaap?" That referred to the DSO's celebrated conductor and was an easy question to answer: he wasn't there. An Irish woman conducted the performance as part of the touring company that was putting on the Zelda concerts around the nation. 

The other question - "How was it?!" - is much harder to answer. It depends on what you think about games and what you know about music. 

"It was definitely an experience," I wrote to my brother, who I had unsuccessfully begged to come down from Oklahoma to join me at the concert. A professional musician and a devout Zelda player who even managed to sneak an Ocarina of Time reference into one of his successful compositions? Who should come but him? (On an aside, the excellent writer, world traveler and equally passionate gamer Hudson Lockett was an even better bromance-date for too many reasons to list here.)

The definitive trampling all over classical music tradition was in plain sight from the moment we walked in the place. Dress was all over the spectrum, from dating couples in suits and black dresses to cosplay groups in little green, elf-like Hylian outfits. The giant white board above the stage, visible in one of the pictures with this post, is a washed-out video screen that showed video clips from the games being referenced in the music.

The idea, it seemed obvious, was to educate listeners about what places or moods are being evoked within the music. The piece that we had all been assembled to hear was the "Symphony of the Goddess," a four-movement 'symphony' composed by an American spanning the Zelda franchise and a name derived from the latest game, Skyward Sword. 

The 'symphony' was, Hudson and I agreed, just an elaborate medley. Individual movements were medleys from individual games, so there was very little depth of atmosphere. Smaller details typical to the classical music tradition, such as the conductor's handshake with the first-chair violin, and not applauding between movements, were forgotten entirely.

Worse, the DSO sadly didn't do this music justice. The pianos and fortes were all in the right places on paper, but the group generally had a lack of chemistry that would move the audience. It sounded like the DSO hadn't had much rehearsal time at all with our Irish conductor. Criminally, the Fairy Fountain theme (you know it from every Zelda game's file selection screen)...

...was utterly butchered. No other way to put it. The poor harpists had to play their shortest strings to get those notes out, but by the looks I got on a video screen close-up, one player was older and had arthritic fingers that caused her to miss most of her notes. Stranger still, our composer thought it wise to do some call-and-response thing between the two harpists, but all that did was mess things up further when one player hit her notes and the poor other one didn't. It was cringing, dear-god-look-away awkward and equally painful to listen to.

So the performance itself really straddled the range from awful to (for tiny fractions of seconds) blissfully euphoric. And to cap it all off, our conductor left the stage two or three times, giving the audience the impression that they were being treated to a whole series of encores. That resulted in multiple (unnecessary) standing ovations.

That brings us back to your opinions on games and music. If you think games are art, then to celebrate them in the hallowed ground of a major city performance hall is an honor that they've earned. If you think games are the devil's work, it's sacrilege to let them into that hallowed ground. And if you're educated about classical music, then serviceable orchestration don't make up for blah arrangement, a wildly inconsistent performance, a huge video screen floating in the room shouting "HAY THIS IS THE PART WHERE ___", and all the smaller details of classical performances thrown out the window. But if you're not educated, you probably wouldn't have been bothered by any of those factors.

"You were probably not right not to come; you'd have hated it," I also wrote to my brother. A classically-trained musician, he wouldn't have enjoyed what was academically a lackluster piece of music and a bad performance to boot. Many real musicians probably committed suicide that night just so that they could roll over in their graves in response to the lack of musical convention and tradition. I honestly don't know if Kris would have been in that group.

Regardless of opinions, however, the facts speak for themselves. The Zelda symphony is the DSO's only sellout in its entire season and the fastest sellout in the organization's history. The arts, always more susceptible to patronage than we like to admit, will soon notice that gamers are a powerful, loyal and untapped demographic. In their (our) defense, is it so wrong that we call into question four hundred years' of tradition and appropriate classical music as our own when we pay for the artists? Who says we can't applaud if we hear something cool? Who says video can't augment a performance? Who says we have to be educated before hearing a symphony if we now have the technology to be educated while we listen?

As a birthday present, it combined pomp-and-circumstance and one of the greatest gaming franchises of my life. How could I hate on that?

Three or four standing O's, however many there were, were one final nail after another in the coffin of musical tradition. But from those gamers, those fans, those guys and girls across generations rocking Triforce tattoos and elf cosplay: I have no doubt that all of them were from the heart.

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