My husband loves to beat me at Scrabble. If you ask him, he will say that he just loves to play Scrabble, but I know his secret heart and in that secret heart he loves nothing better than for me to play a 400-point game of Scrabble in which he just happens to score 425 points. "Good game," he will say graciously. I am, sad to say, usually not very gracious in return because my recognition that I need to be a good sport is invariably locked in a death match with my competitive streak. Generally at that moment Competitive is sitting on Sportsmanlike's head, engaged in a maneuver that would get it drummed right out of the WWF, so I flash a reluctant rictus in his direction and vow to practice anagramming before our next match.
I just started playing Words with Friends (I am a late adopter), and I mentioned to Elwood that he should give it a whirl. We never get to play Scrabble, because we play slowly and the kids interrupt us, and because I hate to lose with the fire of a thousand supernovas am often very busy in the evenings. I said, This way no one can bump the board and wreck our game. I said, This way I'll never push you to move faster when you're figuring out a bingo. I said, It'll be fun!
What was I smoking, internet?
He is kicking my butt, one seven-letter word at a time. I lost the first game, by [redacted] to 7,267,360,082 (but who's counting?), and I am on track to do even worse this time. In my first few games I never had one of those soul-sucking racks that make you want to eat the Scrabble tiles in hopes that you might be able to draw new ones without anyone noticing (C C V I I I V is awesome for making Roman numerals but not so much for actual English words), and I speculated that there might be some sort of algorithm that minimized soul-suckage in Words With Friends.
"I hope not," said Elwood in the lofty tones of someone who can anagram B P R Q V L C to spell "700 points for me ha ha sucker" and make it be in the dictionary too. "That's part of the game."
Well, it appears to be part of my game, says the person whose rack currently sports two Us and three Es, but not his. He laid down another bingo while I was upstairs putting Stella to sleep, but when I came harrumphingly downstairs (who was that person who was just blogging about being Wise and Mature and St. Francis-Like? because something is whispering in my ear that St. Francis might have been a little less bent out of shape about a Facebook game) -- anyway, setting aside my shortcomings for the moment -- Elwood announced that I had stolen his space. He was going to play "sedation" across the triple word and the double word so he could sextuple his score, but instead he'd had to make do with "donates" across the piddly double word.
Usually when he announces that I have stolen his space I say, "Here, I will play a very sad song on a very small violin for you." Tonight I said, "That doesn't even merit a microscopic violin." Because I am wifely like that.
Somewhere inside me, internet, lie the vestiges of Jamie Who Used To Try To Be A Good Sport, looking rather like a defenseless camptosaurus savaged by a particularly vicious and hungry carnivore. If you're looking for me, I'll be trying to anagram R N U U E E E into "I am totally coming back to win this game, so watch your back."
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