The Games People Play
017
“If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
I love games. Board games, card games, trivia games, etc. I love playing them, I love doing well, and I love winning. But I also hate it.
There’s a misconception out there that I am inordinately good at games, and that I always win. This doesn’t necessarily discourage others from playing games with me but it puts enormous pressure on me not to screw up. Like I feel if I don’t meet their expectation to be spectacular then I am a failure. I know this is a screwed up perspective, and yet I can’t escape it. I also can’t deny that I am usually pretty successful when it comes to game play, but I am far from infallible. I just happened to have grown up in a highly competitive environment, raised by a pathologically competitive mother, who — along with her siblings — fostered the development of my strategic thinking skills. I can’t not see opportunities and weaknesses when it comes to game play, despite being awkward and lost through most regular human interactions. I can’t not predict the moves of my opponents, and often out of sheer instinct I will cut them off at the pass because that is how the game is played and that is how I am expected to act.
That expectation is also wrapped up in the competitiveness I inherited, and sometimes it gets the better of me in ways that I truly despise about myself. Once my first husband tried to teach me chess and checkmated me before I had any grasp of how the pieces even moved. Frustrated, I threw a tiny tantrum that amounted to maybe a single outburst and some pieces being knocked off the board (I don’t remember if I threw one that knocked into others or if I pounded the board and a handful fell over) and he got VERY MAD and vowed never to play another game with me again. So much for learning chess. And I know that’s my fault. I mean maybe he wasn’t a great teacher and maybe he overreacted to my outburst, but I definitely shouldn’t have had a little fit over it just because he beat me so quickly. I mean, how childish am I?
Another time I was playing Clue with my family and I had procured none of the answers myself but had kind of surmised what they were based on the guesses of the other players. As my husband was about to enter the center space to win the game, I took my turn and beat him to it on a flat out educated guess just because I could. I hated myself for that, I really did. I mean, what a shitty stupid thing to do. I did none of the work, but swooped in ahead of him to take all the credit. Why couldn’t I just let him have that small victory? What would it have cost me? I swear, this happened years ago and it still bothers the shit out of me. And that’s not the only game-related memory that haunts me.
Once I was playing at a game night with extended family of the man I was dating and in moments of triumph I meant to throw up the rock ‘n roll horns with my fingers, but the configuration — the physical movement required — eluded my brain, and I realized much later that I had been flipping everyone off instead. I almost can’t even wrap my head around how I managed that mess, and yet I did.
I also have a lot of Scrabble-related guilt, going all the way back to my formative years when my mom and I would frequently play. My mother was not someone to let you win a game, it didn’t matter if you were her kid or 10 years old or not. Go fuck yourself. Earn your win or get the fuck out was basically how she saw things. But we played a lot of games, just the two of us and with extended family, and Scrabble was a big one. Now, an important thing to know is that my mom taught me to play Scrabble wrong. I don’t think I ever actually read the rules, in fact. My mother had a Scrabble dictionary she kept in the box and she let us both riffle through it on our individual turns, or whenever the other one wasn’t using it, to find words. So instead of creating a board full of words we knew, we made boards full of obscure and sometimes ridiculous nonsense known only to the Scrabble dictionary in service of scoring the most points. We never challenged or anything like that because we both knew all our words came straight from that damn dictionary. This practice made it impossible, really, for me to play Scrabble with anyone else. I know for a fact I’m not very good at it — only above average on my best day — but I feel like I absolutely have to win the game or else everyone will know I am a fraud. I don’t know if this is because I spent basically my whole childhood getting trounced by my mother, only to beat her one time after receiving a Scrabble strategy book for Christmas and have her immediately take the strategy book back from me so she could utilize the same techniques to continue to trounce me for the next two decades or whatever. I don’t know if it’s because I have been told (verbally and nonverbally) that I am not good enough in a hundred different ways and am desperate not to let anyone else down in the one area they have faith in me. All I know is that it makes me uncomfortable, this compulsion. I played Scrabble with my second husband one time and he got so mad at my agility with the dictionary and my knack for best point placement that he vowed never to play it with me again. And this was the man who never minded me running over him in Trivial Pursuit or, to a lesser extent, Ticket to Ride. He’s the one who recognized that a lot of my game play wasn’t driven so much by the need to win as the need to do my absolute best — competing with myself and my own demons more than anyone else. Still, I eventually drove him away like everyone else. I have dozens of games in my house and never get to play any of them. It’s incredibly depressing.
Family Feud
My mom’s whole family is competitive. This is driven largely by my mom and the oldest of her brothers, who is less than 18 months younger than she is. She and her older sister were very much thrown to the wayside when he was born, being not only the first son but the first male grandchild. He was doted on and favored in countless ways, and in my mother’s childhood mind she decided to become an even better boy than he was. The sibling rivalry was real. She was an athletic tomboy, she was an academic, she was in marching band, she graduated at the top of her class, and she was a celebrated thespian in junior college before finishing her BA at a renowned research university where she worked in the medical field until ultimately getting her masters and PhD in education. My uncle went to the rival state university for law and has taken on tort suits for mistreated patients his entire career. My mom and uncle even got married to their college sweethearts on the EXACT SAME DAY and my uncle is still salty that their parents went to her ceremony instead of his because hers was closer, despite the fact that her marriage ended decades ago and his is still intact.
When Trivial Pursuit came out in the early ‘80s, my uncle would pass the time on the drive up to my grandparents’ house by having his son read him the game cards. And he is just as cutthroat with every other game he plays, be it Oh Hell or Chicken Foot Dominos or Gin Rummy. We used to all get around and play together, my mom and several of her six siblings and their partners, plus even some of my cousins and I, and have huge marathon game nights, but now I think most everyone is sick of dealing with my mom and that oldest uncle, who are the worst. I’ve already mentioned how my mom will bad mouth and insult people who upset her during game play, but sometimes she also will smack your arm in a way that she thinks is playful but is actually painful. It’s not fun to be around. What chance did I have of being a normal person growing up in this environment, I ask you?
Mind Games
I started this Substack to process my own anxiety and ADHD, among other things, but in doing so I’ve also contemplated the anxiety and ADHD of so many people around me that I find are struggling with similar issues of late diagnosis and never having realized this was what they were dealing with — why they were the way they were — until adulthood. As a lot of these people are of the GenX or Xennial (bridging the GenX and Millennial categories) generations, I have some theories as to what made us all so anxious and it has a lot to do with our childhood games.
Have you ever looked at the things we played with as kids? Game after game after game had a mechanical element that yelled at us or rapidly counted down to a detonation/devastation point, or both.
Operation: Here’s a metal tool that will simulate electrocuting you with a loud, disruptive, jump-scare buzzer every time it touches the side of these impossibly narrow openings.
Pong: A pixelated white dot going back and forth across a screen, faster and faster and faster and faster and faster until your eyes literally can’t keep up, the sound effects keeping pace to make sure your heart rate increases with the stress and pressure of the task.
Tetris: If you missed a slot by one square, those cursed shapes would fall on top of each other at ever-increasing speeds until they suddenly reached the top and you lost the game. Again, the music sped up as well to keep your blood pressure rising.
Simon and/or Bop-It: This is kind of generational, determining which of these you played with, but the idea for both is the same. There’s a pattern or a task you have to repeat and it gets longer and more complicated the longer you play a round, incrementally speeding up along the way until you are frantic and frenzied and screaming at the flashing toy.
Perfection: This one is perhaps the worst. A “game” literally called Perfection, in which you had like 60 seconds to insert something like 64 different tiny shapes into very specific, individualized spots before the whole thing exploded in your face. To make sure you weren’t too methodical about it, there was a rapid ticking clock sound that got so fast at the end it was almost just a buzz.
I’m sure there are more examples, but these are the ones that most tormented me. What the hell are we even doing to our kids? What did people do to us??
Love Game
My divorce finalized in June and sometime around July or August I clicked on something on Facebook that kind of inadvertently (on my part) signed me up for a “mature” dating app. I deleted that within a month or so because it became very obvious that every man my age is old as hell. Like, seriously take your Lipitor and go to bed after your 5pm dinnertime, old man. Hard pass. I wasn’t really ready for dating energy anyway, so no harm no foul. By October, though, I wanted to dip my toe in the dating pool, just for some companionship. I wasn’t looking for any kind of relationship, and I’m still not, but going out with adults and maybe getting some nookie is not the worst thing I could think of. So I activated Bumble. This week, I deleted it.
Dating apps are both entirely the same and utterly different than they were in their infancy 20-ish years ago, i.e. the last time I joined a dating site. Like, men still think they can send you contentless messages like “hey” or “what’s up” and expect to sweep you off your feet when they don’t even stand out from the crowd of literally dozens if not hundreds of men who show interest in any random woman’s profile. Only now, all you have to do is swipe and apparently men swipe right on EVERYONE in a law of averages / “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” Wayne Gretzky philosophy so I ended up with literally between 1500 and 2000 “likes” at any given time. That is not a manageable number. It’s also entirely misleading, because the idea is you have someone who has “liked” you and you “like” them back with your own swipe to make a match, indicating that theoretically you have both checked out each other’s profiles and are into the basics. But these men who have swiped on everyone don’t actually check out your profile until after you’ve matched with them, at which point they might 1) never talk to you, 2) briefly talk to you and then unmatch, 3) talk to you for a while indicating some level of interest and then ghost you out of literally nowhere before you even meet, or 4) be morally repugnant. There are some that might also be decent and interesting people but this is a statistically insignificant number and doesn’t bear mention. I also try to stay in the general 40s to 50s age range, but there are a LOT of people in their 20s or 30s that hit on me like I’m a damn fetish and it’s weird not because I’m new to the whole MILF idea but because they have no follow through. (In truth I believe these people don’t understand actual mom bodies, which are soft and changed by pregnancy in ways that they are perhaps not into as much as they think they are.)
I gotta tell you, I do not have the time or the patience or the mental bandwidth for this nonsense bullshit. I have been emotionally abused and cheated on and fucked with and ghosted too many goddamn times to put up with one more trifling man. I am a very open, upfront person and I say what I fucking mean, so I made it very clear from the start that I am interested in very casual situations. If I’m up for sex I will say so and if I’m not comfortable I will say that. I am not interested in making any kind of commitment and am not asking anyone to make a commitment to me. I don’t care who else they’re seeing as long as they don’t care who else I’m seeing, but I do require someone to tell me where I stand so I don’t feel like a stupid idiot trying to figure it out on my own. Not in a complicated way, just in the most basic sense: Do you like me or not? Do you want to see me or not? Do you want to fuck me or not? Be clear. Say what you mean. Accept my answers. If I’m too much say I’m too much, if you need space say you need space. If you want to get together once a week or only once a month, say that and I will say whether or not that works for me. Is it really that hard? I don’t know, maybe it is. Maybe that’s why I’m impossible.
I met one guy who was a nice and unassuming artist. We got together like 2 or 3 times on little mini outings and while he wasn’t extraordinary there was potential for something nice and uncomplicated, I thought. Except after the election I was talking about how women were angry and happened to mention an example of how one guy I had been talking to had discounted my experienced-backed opinion on something because he didn’t like it and this “nice guy” FREAKED OUT that I was talking to another guy from Bumble and immediately ended our situation. Okay, weirdo.
I had plans to meet up with three different men who all claimed to be very much into me, saying things like “everything about you is perfect” to “I can’t stop thinking about you” to “I can’t wait to get my hands on you” and all three of them vanished into thin air before we even met in person. Back in my day, you left the chick high and dry AFTER you fucked her, my dudes.
A different guy got waaaayyyy TOO into the idea of hooking up without commitment and I was like, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to meet you in a secure location first. I’m not just going to head over to your place and take a ride on your disco stick (tm Lady Gaga) ESPECIALLY without a condom, which he was weirdly insistent on foregoing, despite me saying it was my preference (before we ever met). It was a very weird vibe and every time I backed off he got kind of angry but in that way that pairs aggressive statements with laughing emojis. Eventually he asked if I wanted to come over one day and I said maybe but no promises and he got weirdly angry again saying like “what do you mean no promises?!?” And I had to lay it out on the table and tell him that I did not sign a blood oath to fuck him and had every right to say no to fucking him at any time and would not be coming close to fucking him at all if he was going to continue to be weird about me setting fucking boundaries. Needless to say I never heard from him again. Good riddance. I mean, honestly.
I did meet up with one guy for a couple months who I liked quite a bit (like, genuinely just enjoyed his company) because he was funny and thoughtful and a bit of an overthinker like myself, plus we were both very much on the same no commitment casual hookup page. But he couldn’t communicate anything, like at all, ever. I constantly felt like I was walking blindly through a corridor, trying to feel my way from one end to the other, not knowing where I was or where I was going at any given point in time. This makes me feel stupid and incompetent and that is just about the worst feeling for me. I hate it more than almost anything. I would love to be his friend. I would even love some benefits. But not like that.
As for women, that is a situation that deserves its own post. There is one I am particularly interested in, even though she lives a ways away and is essentially unavailable, but I am going to meet her this weekend anyway and I am very much looking forward to it, even knowing it can’t really go anywhere.
There are also three or four others that still have my contact information outside of Bumble and have therefore survived the purge, but who knows if any of that will amount to a hill of beans. To quote the Magic 8 Ball I used to have, “All signs point to no.”
What a Bunch of Girly Men
You know, I’ve always scoffed when guys have complained about how hard it is to be them. I mean, give me a break. White men especially do not have a leg to stand on here. The world was literally made for you. But as of this week, that’s no longer the case! At least in the US.
Newly inaugurated President Dipshit, in his infinite very good braininess, signed an executive order stating that a female is everyone who, at conception, produces the large reproductive cell (the ovum or egg) and a male is everyone who, at conception, produces the small reproductive cell (the sperm). He did this so he and his Project 2025 buddies could sneak fetal personhood into federal law while also denying trans and nonbinary rights. The problem with the way they did it (aside from being morally and ethically void) is that, at conception, all embryos start off as female. It isn’t until after 6 or 7 weeks of gestation that specific genes on the Y chromosome intervene to form testes and not until 9 weeks that testosterone (which assists in sperm production) is made.
What this means is, if those genes don’t express (as happens in a naturally occurring medical condition) the fetus will continue to develop functional female gonads (ovaries). So in a very real way the President of the United States just declared that all of us are female, even all you supposedly cis-gendered men.
There are also many natural — created by God, if that’s what you believe — biological conditions that feature a human having both sets of gonads or none or various combinations of chromosomes and biology that don’t meet the basic XX=girl XY=boy standard, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms that’s frankly way over Dipshit’s terribly coiffed head.
Anyway, if you’re feeling very unsure of your new ladyboy status (nothing but respect to the nonbinary queens of Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia who use this term) and what it means to your manhood, I am playing a very small, sad violin with my fingertips. Incidentally, I went to the same high school as a genius named Ilene (she was a year behind me but in the same accelerated math class, so she was two years ahead of her grade in math) who is now a doctor who works with intersex patients and who ALSO wrote an awesome YA novel about being intersex called None of the Above. Y’all should read it.
If you have your own competition horror stories, or want to start a game night, or simply want to welcome all these new guys into the sisterhood, my messages are open. Do not send me dick pics.