Mondays on the Margins: Words and Friends

I don't play Angry Birds. Or Fruit Ninja. Or Zombies vs. Watermelons or whatever. My ipad has tons of game apps on it because of my kids, but it's just not something that activates my pleasure centers. When I'm stuck waiting for my kids in the car or outside dance class I generally read or, if I don't have a book, clean out my purse or something - my phone doesn't even have games, or the internet.

But every now and then I get hooked on a word game on Facebook. The one where you use the letters to make up as many words as possible, or the other one where you... uh, do the same thing but in a grid? I was addicted to these for a while but it was a long time ago, they sort of catch fire for a bit and then everyone moves on.

But I kept hearing about Words With Friends, and I kept thinking hey! I like words! I like friends! I really need to check this game out sometime. So this past week-end I became probably the last person in the Western World to start playing Words With Friends. Which name is a VICIOUS LIE, let me tell you, because it's SCRABBLE.

I FUCKING HATE SCRABBLE. As my friend Collette says, Scrabble is NOT about vocabulary. it's about strategy. Vocabulary I have. Strong skills on the strategy front? Not so much.

Why should it matter, right? It's just a fun game between friends. Except I can't just have fun. No fun exists without subtext. When my friends all beat me, and they do all beat me, because I'm busy spelling 'it' and adding an 's' to 'car' and figuring out that I can spell STEAMIER with all my letters, but not anywhere on the actual board, I think that they're secretly revising their opinion of me as an intelligent person, and feeling really embarrassed for me, and wondering what the respectable length of time is before they can quietly unfriend me and pretend this horrible unpleasantness never happened. I'd probably be less mortified if I'd thrown up on their sofa while their mother-in-law was visiting. Not to mention the fact that when Sarah Piazza said on Facebook that she "needed more partners for Words With Friends" she neglected to add "to chew up and spit out". Quaids? What the fuck are quaids? She's brilliant, and articulate, and she knows words AND STRATEGY. And yet I keep going back for even more humiliation and wordish carnage.

While I was crawling away from a WWF debate in ignominious defeat, I stumbled across another app called  94 seconds. In this one, you have 94 seconds to give as many answers as you can for things like "mammals that begin with the letter T", "flowers that begin with the letter R" or "auto manufacturers that begin with the letter W".

It's really hard. Especially for someone like me, who tends to go: Uh, a mammal. DOG. No, that doesn't start with a T. Uh...TOG. No, come on, a mammal that starts with T, this is easy....I suspect the whole point is that the mind isn't flexible about things like this, it tends to fixate on one result and can't easily find another one, although some people probably are naturally better than others.

There's a fish category. I kept not being able to come up with anything, so at one point I just started typing a random word and putting 'fish' after it. Zebrafish! And then I was surprised as hell when it was right, so I kept doing it. Railfish! Thornfish! Razorfish! Penisfish! (I think I made that last one up, but honestly it's hard to be sure). I'm not entirely sure what the point of the game is, since the same question tends to come up in subsequent games so your result gets better by default because you start being able to memorize some answers, although just when I think I've really got it figured out I forget that the 'M' element from the periodic table is Mercury, or that Drum is a pretty freaking obvious answer for musical instrument that starts with D, or I get "Country that starts with C" and don't automatically put THE ONE I LIVE IN. But I can't stop playing it anyway. I'm probably creating some very specific and odd new neuronal pathways. I might start craving razorfish on toast any moment now.

So yeah. If you need me, I'll be over here wondering if I can close the hundred-and-forty-seven-point gap between me and Sarah, or trying to desperately to think of a foreign capital of a sovereign nation. That starts with a V.