Saturday night, I had a nightmare featuring Chris May, an elite Scrabble player of international renown. He played some gobbledygook word, I challenged, but then typed it in wrong on the lookup computer and it came back acceptable. I woke up sweating.
Tamar was tickled. "It's nice that you're not dreaming about work for a change," she said. Which I suppose is true, even if I'd rather dream about flying.
Chris was tickled too. "Ah good, I'm getting inside your head!" he said gleefully. Turns out this is a "classic" Scrabble anxiety dream, there's a canon of 4 or 5 that Scrabble experts typically have.
This weekend I holed up in a community centre with 30 other Scrabble players to play my first real tournament in fifteen years. I arrived not knowing quite what to expect; tournaments were major highlights for me in the 90's, but I'm not exactly a teenager anymore. Would it still be fun? Stressful? Exciting? Draining?
Overall it was great. I forgot how fun it is to meet other geeky people you'd never otherwise find. Samantha is the lead guitarist in a feminist punk bank, Glitoris. Chris just finished his Ph.D. on Arvo Part. Ronnie is an 11-year old skaterboy. John works in a daycare part-time and otherwise devotes himself to fostering a Scrabble subculture in this corner of Australia.
This weekend's emotional highs and lows were quite something. I won seven of eight games on Day 1, despite only having started to learn the Collins dictionary a couple of months ago. I was comfortably in first place and felt jubilant. Then yesterday I lost 4 of my first 5, including one absolutely idiotic loss where I tried CUREX when REX would have won the game. New horizontal creases were appearing under my eyes in the mirror between every game and my hair was froofing up to new heights. But fortunately the last three were straightforward wins and I ended up 11-5, good enough for second place.
In a twisted way, CUREX might have been my favourite moment of the weekend. It has been a long time since I did something so acutely boneheaded that I seethed and stalked around angrily outside. Why is that? My kids seem to mess things up all the time, so their minds are constantly being jostled onto new tracks as they struggle to become competent at a hundred things at once. As adults, we're competent at those hundred things, and it's so easy to cruise on them while congratulating ourselves for having some hobbies or interests on the side. But if those pastimes aren't occasionally making you burn or swear out loud or feel like a complete idiot, well, most people only notice becoming complacent once it's too late.
Playing Collins is definitely fun. I got to play weird words like YEVEN and WOURALIS and ESTOILES. People played words I'd never heard of like FIGO, GARPIKES, and CANTREFS. I got REGIMENS across two triple-word scores for 140. Sure, it's intimidating to not even know all the twos-to-make-threes (which are the Lego blocks of Scrabble, like if someone plays EX, you can hook in front with a D, H, K, L, R, S, T, V, W, Y or Z). It would (will?) take hundreds of hours of studying before I feel even remotely solid in this lexicon, a questionable investment of pretty scarce free time.
But this weekend makes me want to keep going. Excitement and frenzy can be found in all sorts of improbable places, and I forgot how much this nerdy game conceals. Plus Tamar and the girls were a wonderful cheering section - Aurora's tournament chart alone was enough to make me want to play in another one :)
Tamar was tickled. "It's nice that you're not dreaming about work for a change," she said. Which I suppose is true, even if I'd rather dream about flying.
Chris was tickled too. "Ah good, I'm getting inside your head!" he said gleefully. Turns out this is a "classic" Scrabble anxiety dream, there's a canon of 4 or 5 that Scrabble experts typically have.
This weekend I holed up in a community centre with 30 other Scrabble players to play my first real tournament in fifteen years. I arrived not knowing quite what to expect; tournaments were major highlights for me in the 90's, but I'm not exactly a teenager anymore. Would it still be fun? Stressful? Exciting? Draining?
Overall it was great. I forgot how fun it is to meet other geeky people you'd never otherwise find. Samantha is the lead guitarist in a feminist punk bank, Glitoris. Chris just finished his Ph.D. on Arvo Part. Ronnie is an 11-year old skaterboy. John works in a daycare part-time and otherwise devotes himself to fostering a Scrabble subculture in this corner of Australia.
This weekend's emotional highs and lows were quite something. I won seven of eight games on Day 1, despite only having started to learn the Collins dictionary a couple of months ago. I was comfortably in first place and felt jubilant. Then yesterday I lost 4 of my first 5, including one absolutely idiotic loss where I tried CUREX when REX would have won the game. New horizontal creases were appearing under my eyes in the mirror between every game and my hair was froofing up to new heights. But fortunately the last three were straightforward wins and I ended up 11-5, good enough for second place.
In a twisted way, CUREX might have been my favourite moment of the weekend. It has been a long time since I did something so acutely boneheaded that I seethed and stalked around angrily outside. Why is that? My kids seem to mess things up all the time, so their minds are constantly being jostled onto new tracks as they struggle to become competent at a hundred things at once. As adults, we're competent at those hundred things, and it's so easy to cruise on them while congratulating ourselves for having some hobbies or interests on the side. But if those pastimes aren't occasionally making you burn or swear out loud or feel like a complete idiot, well, most people only notice becoming complacent once it's too late.
Playing Collins is definitely fun. I got to play weird words like YEVEN and WOURALIS and ESTOILES. People played words I'd never heard of like FIGO, GARPIKES, and CANTREFS. I got REGIMENS across two triple-word scores for 140. Sure, it's intimidating to not even know all the twos-to-make-threes (which are the Lego blocks of Scrabble, like if someone plays EX, you can hook in front with a D, H, K, L, R, S, T, V, W, Y or Z). It would (will?) take hundreds of hours of studying before I feel even remotely solid in this lexicon, a questionable investment of pretty scarce free time.
But this weekend makes me want to keep going. Excitement and frenzy can be found in all sorts of improbable places, and I forgot how much this nerdy game conceals. Plus Tamar and the girls were a wonderful cheering section - Aurora's tournament chart alone was enough to make me want to play in another one :)
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| I didn't take any pictures, but here's one from 2000 |
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