Friday, Shaun and I transformed our tiny apartment into party central. We hauled the bed into the storage room, converted the dressers into semi-comfortable seats with pillows, spruced up the place with candles, Christmas lights, and bowls of snacks (Thai-spiced rice cakes are my new favorite food). The fridge was stocked with libations and a back-up frozen pizza, lest our guests become ravenous. Our grooviest music floated through the two rooms we call home. And most importantly, guests bearing board games were on their way.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with board games. Games like Life, Monopoly, Sorry, Risk, Uno, and most card games (with the exception of Go Fish, which is fun because you get to shout “GO FISH!” like a crazy old Southern man), are enough to make me weep with boredom. As far as I can tell, these games are just about following rules and nothing remotely fun happens during them. They are like a particularly dull day at work: formulaic, predictable, lasting forever.
I do have fond memories of one dull game: Battle Ship. My dad and I used to play it occasionally at his massive dining room table, with a bag of Twizzler Cherry Bites and fizzy cups of Doctor Pepper between us. I liked screaming “YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!” I also liked chewing on the boats and pegs. For some reason, I preferred them to the Twizlers; both taste like plastic, but Battle Ship bits score points for authenticity.
The chewy goodness of Battle Ship aside, I much prefer games with fun and spontaneity as key elements to winning. Taboo, Jenga, Cherades, Exquisite Corpse, Balderdash, The Name Game, Mad Libs, MASH, Pictionary, Scrabble, Boggle, and Cranium all promise a good time.
There are also the trivia games, which I generally suck at. You’d think that for how much I read, I’d be pretty up on Trivia, but unfortunately, my memory is pretty crap. When I read things, I automatically get sucked into stories and then my imagination takes over and creates mini-fictions and soon facts are mere threads in a story I find much more fascinating. Weirdly enough, I don’t do this with actual fiction that I read. I can recal the tiny details from fiction with stunning accuracy. So I’m pretty rubbish at Trivial Pursuit type stuff. But I like to play anyway. Because I like the cute little pie pieces and because I like to learn new things and sometimes I actually contribute an answer or two and you get to feel like a smarty-pants for those fleeting moments.
During my Freshmen and Sophomore year of college, while other the other chikas in my dorm were heading out into the cold Michigan nights to attend frat parties in halter tops and open-toed masochistic strappy things that they thought were shoes, I could be found sharing a sack of animal crackers with friends as we played yet another round of Cranium in Libby’s dorm room. This was before I left Michigan for Chicago, before everyone ditched Cranium Night and started smoking monster bongs and eating entire animal cracker sacks by themselves like hapless little undergraduate stereotypes. Luckily, I missed that bit, moving to Chicago before the fun stopped being had. Sometimes people ask me if I feel I missed out on the “true college experience” because I got married mid-way through my studies. Whenever people ask me this, I think back on the disintegration of my beloved Cranium parties. I don’t think I missed out at anything at all.
Anyhow, Friday at party central, Cranium Night was resurrected at last with a new cast of friends: Dan and Bryony came with the game in tow, followed by Susie, Laura, and a new (to me–she and Shaun go to school together) Icelandic friend named Saulka. We had a blast, sculpting and humming and drawing things with our eyes closed. Luckily, I didn’t draw any cards that required me to do spelling tricks; when it comes to spelling I got no game. I want to make game night a monthly party affair. We had such a great time and everyone devoured the cookies I baked for the party, which is always a good feeling. I like making nice people fattening treats.
We have acquired a really nice group of friends here. Although oddly enough, the women from the International Club that I shared such a strong bond with in September have scattered to the wind. In the fall, we enjoyed weekly lunches and took solace in our shared experience of being new to the country together. But then, we stared to loose touch. I’d invite them out, but 9 times out of 10, they would decline; two of them that I was particularly close to are Muslim and I don’t know enough about that culture/religion to say that is the reason why they refused to hang out in public without their husbands, but it seems like a possibility.
Not only were my invitations declined and never reciprocated, but also this week, they suddenly employed a new level of rudeness via technology that shocked me.
When I sent out an invite to the party, one friend from the International Club responded with an email to tell me that she’d left the country and moved back to Pakistan! This wasn’t just a person I ran into at International Club gatherings; we lunched together, worked out together, she came to our parties, and we just talked the other week–you’d think she’d at least call to tell me that she was leaving the country, never to be seen again. Or at very least, let me know in the email if everything is okay–in her correspondence there was absolutely no indication to as why she left. Very weird.
Later, another friend from the International Club responded to my Cranium Night invitation via text message. “Sorry I can’t come to the party–I’m pregnant now and my nausea is not just in the morning.” WHAT?!? Pregnant! Who tells a friend she is pregnant via text message? WTF? Manners people. Manners.
The obvious craziness of texted pregnancy announcements aside, I am not a fan of the text message. I think it is creating a curt society, so impatient for information that they cannot be bothered with the pleasantries of actual conversation when asking someone something. I know that I am the only person my age who hates texting, and perhaps it has something to do with my texting being so slow that it is faster for me to get information by actually calling someone and bothering them with pleasantries, but I like to think its because I like the humans that I want answers from. I like to hear their voices, inflections, sub-texts. I need to know their mood before I ask something. What if I’m about to ask someone to go dancing and unbeknownst to me their cat just died? Now, if I texted the invite, the message would seem trivial and stupid and probably get lost in the grieving. And no one wants to text back: “Sorry. Can’t. Cat died.” But if I called to ask, I could hear their tears before inviting them to something lame and instead of boogying together, I’d head over to their apartment with a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and Kleenex. Potentially dead cats are abound in this world and texting isn’t helping any. Sheesh!
The rest of this weekend has been blissfully chill. The weather is grisly, which is fine by me since my loving mother-in-law sent my Buffy, Season 3 on DVD for my birthday. Rainy days are the perfect excuse for way too much quality entertainment viewing. I’ve also been laying in bed for hours on end, reading Zorro. Lots of action-packed adventure in my imagination must be buring off some calories while I loaf around hiding from the rain this weekend, right? It better be. We still have to finish off that party pizza at dinner tonight.
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How’s your weekend going? What are your thoughts on text messaging? What’s your favorite game?
::Random Tangent::
I like being 25 so far. It’s like being 21 with a tiny bit more money and no additional charges when renting a car.
