<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For months now, GTB has been trying to get me to play a game of Scrabble with him. I’m an obnoxiously competitive person in general. It’s not even cute or charming. Really, it’s just obnoxious. I think you all know of my disdain for things like bowling and pool. Games that I’m no good at, but still feel an uncomfortable compulsion to defeat everyone I’m playing against. Right?<\/p>\n
Well, I SHOULD be good at Scrabble, so the competitiveness is a hundred times worse, and, therefore, I don’t play. Not very often anyway. And when I do play, I take at least half an hour each turn, get mad if I’m losing, and am quite bitchy when it comes to challenges. None of which I really want to exhibit in front of my boyfriend. Ya know?<\/p>\n
But last night, GTB caught me on a good night and I agreed to play. I had warned him over and over again about how not nice I am during a game of Scrabble. I think he thought he was prepared.<\/p>\n
He got to go first. He laid down DOZE. Not bad, especially given the double word score you automatically receive for going first. I wasn’t exactly intimidated, but I knew he was no word slouch and that I’d have to bring my A game. <\/p>\n
I stared at my letters for about fifteen minutes before using the E in his DOZE to spell RHEUM. As in rheumatoid arthritis. I was 98% sure it was correct. GTB was not. He challenged. As he thumbed through the pages of my very out-of-date Scrabble Dictionary, I calculated my points. A few seconds later, he found it. “Come on!” he whined. “28 points, baby!” I informed him.<\/p>\n
He next laid down VAPOR. Another good one. I think P even fell on a double letter score. I tried and tried, but couldn’t take advantage of either of the good letters in that word, so I did one of those plays where you lay a word down parallel to another word, creating at least three words both vertically and horizontally. A few of the words were questionable, and GTB being the skeptic he is, challenged me yet again. He decided to start with UM. He looked it up and again hollered “Come on!” when he found its entry in the dictionary. He was going to challenge NU, but I argued that if he wanted to go for a second challenge, he risked another lost turn. He decided against the challenge, but looked it up just for kicks. Yep, it’s in there. <\/p>\n
He was beginning to get frustrated. I was beginning to get cocky. “I told you you didn’t want to play with me,” I reminded him as I took my two turns in a row. “I’m not nice.”<\/p>\n
The game went on for a while. He challenged not quite EVERY turn I took, but we did go to that dictionary pretty often. <\/p>\n
An hour or so into it, I laid down a Y after RHEUM for RHEUMY and built another word with the Y. Because the Y fell on a double letter score, the play was worth about 50 points. <\/p>\n
RHEUMY would be the last time GTB would challenge me. (Yep, it’s in there.) <\/p>\n
Several lost turns later, down more points than a gracious winner likes to recall, GTB gave up questioning my superior word knowledge. So when I did another parallel word, one that created the word ZU, he made a snarky remark, but he didn’t reach for the dictionary. (We later looked ZU up and he should have challenged it. It’s not in there.)<\/p>\n
“Whorehouse Scrabble” he calls it.<\/p>\n
I like to think of it as “strategy.”<\/p>\n
We didn’t finish the game, so I didn’t technically win. But when we went to bed and chatted about how I sometimes read dictionaries for fun, he told me I was weird. I told him it was what made me a better Scrabble player than he.<\/p>\n
I don’t think we’ll be playing again anytime soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For months now, GTB has been trying to get me to play a game of Scrabble with him. I’m an obnoxiously competitive person in general. It’s not even cute or charming. Really, it’s just obnoxious. I think you all know of my disdain for things like bowling and pool. Games that I’m no good at, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}