Monday, April 10, 2006

P-R-I-D-E

G and I are happily wasting our youth by staying home on Saturday nights to partake in a little scrabble. Mostly we do this so that the parents who read my blog don't have to feel jealous of our awesome exciting lives. (You can thanks me with presents)

At the beginning of the game I felt I was going to kick some white boy ass and avenge the horribly scrabble walloping I took early on in our relationship. I spelled "groovy" and "grumpy" sequentially -- after 4 turns it was Brianna 91, G 78 -- not an amazing lead but I'd been ahead for the entire game and I thought the tiles had turned in my favor. Then..disaster. He used all of his letters to spell the word "orbiting" for 76 points. There was really no coming back from that, I lost 221 to 296.

I don't really know what happened at this point but suddenly I was *SO* embarrassed. Unable to forget the game and move on with the evening I started pouting and eventually blurted out, "I'm stupid." G is smart enough to deny this and begin pointing out all the ways I'm very unstupid, but it didn't matter -- I couldn't get out of my funk.

I think this is the bane of having been the not too popular smart girl. I feel like I have to always be smart because otherwise, how will I be valuable? I do smart things most days at work (When I'm not busy doing stupid things like putting water in the coffee maker before I put the urn back under the funnel...) but nothing comes back graded with a sticker on it. If you're a left brained girl like me the clear scoring of scrabble feels like a grade -- the only one I've gotten in years -- and it seemed like I failed.

Scrabble score is not the only stick by which self worth is measured. I spent Sunday trying to focus on things I truly could excel at:Brunch and Video Games. I'm mostly back to feeling intellectually superior.

3 comments:

themikestand said...

Ooooh, orbiting. Good one.

Your reflective post has served to bring one thing (at least!) to light: You can't keep a good geek down.

That goes for you and G.

Also, if Einstein were around today, he may come up with the law of geek-conservation, wherein there is only a fixed amount of geek in the world; It cannot be created or destroyed.

Anonymous said...

Duuuude, I'm the person who spends most of her day talking to someone whose communication skills are mainly along the lines of point and grunt. (avoiding the joke "and then there's sam"... so hard... so very hard... must resist...)

I am jealous that you get to go to work and get a payceck-- paychecks are almost as good as little star stickers.

(I recommend you buy some at the drugstore. Whenever you do something good, put one on your forehead. G is allowed to put them on your forehead, if *he's* very very good. hee.)

alia
in a weird, exhausted mood.. and my mother wants to come tomorrow instead of saturday...

Anonymous said...

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