Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The games people play

I am a poor sport. I am a sore loser. I admit it. (That makes it O.K., right?)

Winning is everything. Second place is last place. I don't care how you play the game or how hard you try. In fact, last Thanksgiving I gave a delightful little speech about how participation awards were ruining America. The basic message was that America was for winners and not runny nosed, scrawny little kids clutching purple ribbons. I'm in favor of "cuts" in junior high school and teachers telling kids to try something else. My Thanksgiving guests were a bit frightened. If any of them had received the dreaded participation ribbon, they certainly weren't going to admit it.

Tonight Jeff and I decided to play a game instead of watching TV. Good idea in theory, but ask anyone who's ever played a game with one of us, and they'll tell you it's a bad idea. We're both competitive and, well, mean.

I chose Monopoly because it's a game built on chance. Surely Jeff and I wouldn't get into a fight playing a kids' board game that's not based on intellect, right? Wrong. At first Jeff was getting really low dice rolls. I was traveling around the board at high speed, buying up all sorts of property while he wasn't landing on anything. He was so mad he couldn't speak. Luckily, he could still yell and slam his fists on the board, so I knew he was fine.

Then that darned game took a twist. I was sent to jail seven times. Four of them consecutive. That's four times of missing "go" and not collecting 200 dollars. I had Boardwalk and Park Place and Jeff only landed on them when I was in debt and had sold all but one house on each property. Meanwhile, I landed on Jeff's spiffy motel on Marvin Gardens about 1000 times. O.K. three times. But still.

Anyway, I lost the game. Instead of congratulating Jeff on his win, I threw the bank's play money at him, accused him of cheating and sulked while he put the board game away.

Maybe next time we'll just watch TV.

2 comments:

Anne MM said...

You can't be serious. You know you and Jeff are NOT, and I repeat NOT, allowed to play board games without supervision. And Why, Why, ooo Why would you pick monopoly?
You HATE that game. And if you ever played this board game (which happens to be my favorite) with me when we were little you would have known Marvin Gardens is better then Board Wal.
At least you didn't flip the board over and storm out of the room calling all of the other players not so nice names and ordering them to do jumping jacks. See you've grown.

Karly said...

I think your maturity might be more suited to Candy Land.