It all started with Word Challenge. My fiancé Preppy found a Facebook application that’s sort of like what would happen if Boggle and Scrabble had a baby, and within a week it was consuming every free moment. He was delighted. I’d sit by him on the sofa and help him find words, but spend half that time arguing with it about words it refused to recognize. Despite what that know-nothing Word Challenge will tell you, “indices” is a word. I looked it up to prove my point. But it’s a hollow victory when one manages to outsmart something that isn’t actually, you know, ALIVE.Anyhoo, eventually I signed myself up for Word Challenge, and my sister Shannon quickly followed suit. That’s when things turned ugly. My sister is a college graduate who spends all day feeding her insatiably hungry newborn. She beat Preppy’s and my high scores within two days. This roused the competitor in me. Emerging as the Word Challenge champion became an obsession. We would have hour-long conversations about strategy.
Not coincidentally, around this time my fiancé lost all interest in the game. Apparently my sister and I had raised the stakes beyond his ability to enjoy it. We have a tendency to do this in my family. My mother’s mother, Memama, would play remarkably contentious Scrabble games with my Uncle Paul. The games would last entire afternoons, and none of us would be allowed in the room while the death match was being held. So we’d sit by the door and listen, since the language was much more colorful than anything on TV.
“God…Dammit, Shirley! That is NOT a goddamn word.”
“Go ahead and look it up, Paul, if you’re willing to risk the points. You were wrong about ‘striven,’ but maybe you’ll be right about this one.”
“God…DAMMIT, Shirley!”
Then we’d hear her delighted little chuckle.
“Alright, so that’s a triple-word score…”
Memama was a teensy slip of a woman from Arkansas without much education, up against the 300-pound Shell Oil executive who’d married her daughter. In any other scenario imaginable, he’d have the obvious upper hand. But Memama had one hell of a vocabulary, and on the battlefield of Scrabble, she was a formidable opponent who could knock your highfalutin’ ass down a few pegs, ‘til she could look you in the eye.
She taught her grandkids that simply by sharpening a few well-chosen skills, you could take down any opponent. The trick was always making sure you were playing your game, not theirs. It was a life lesson that served us all very well.
Leaving my sister and I to battle it out over Word Challenge, Preppy moved on to a new Facebook game called Pet Society. It’s a benign little enterprise where you create a big-eyed cartoon animal which you can play Frisbee with and dress in little outfits. You can also earn coins to purchase home furnishings for your pet by visiting strangers and washing or feeding their animals. Once my Shannon and I discovered this, the game was once again on.
“I’ve neglected my own children all morning while I sat online bathing strangers and feeding them pineapples,” says Shannon on the phone. “But I got four hundred coins and bought a chandelier!”
“Preppy says we’re ruining another game,” I say, brushing a random rabbit and stocking up on coins.
“He’s just saying that because we’re winning. If you’re that worried, buy him a present.”
So, sitting in my hotel room hundreds of miles away from my man, I send my pet over to his pet’s house. Preppy was a few beers in when he created his animal and accidentally misspelled its name, which apparently one cannot change, so he’s stuck with a cat named “Butterscotche.” I spend the coins I was saving for a new sofa and buy a bunch of presents for Butterscotche. This may all sound insane to the uninitiated, but it’s a significant choice in Pet Society: I’m not winning anymore.
But the next time he opens the game, instead of seeing how high I’ve managed to push my score, he’ll find a room full of gift boxes. It’s not the same as me being home with him, but it’ll do, and it’s another good life lesson for me. Sometimes, when you lose, you win.
