Things that are a waste of time: #1 Monopoly

I was at my fave coffee copy on Saturday afternoon and kept getting distracted by a child's voice with that particular demanding tone. A boy aged probably 7 was sitting in one of the booths with his Dad playing Monopoly - the tone usually emerged when he was reading out one of the cards.

I once spent a few days in Boston with a family who were all mad and hotly competitive players of word games, like Scrabble and Jumble and everything else you can think of. Near the table where the games were played was a shelf full of Scrabble dictionaries and other reference books. A girl came over, about my age and the age of the son who I was visiting, and she'd been part of this scene for years and was just as competitive as the others. I was still feeling bad about being completely crap at Scrabble - if you're a writer, if you're good with language, well then why wouldn't you have a huge vocabulary and be good at crosswords and Scrabble and games like this?

I think I'm over it now - spelling is not writing. Crosswords do sharpen the mind but they are a craft that you have to practice and get good at like any other. And Scrabble is more a game of strategy than anything about communication, and I absolutely suck at any game like that. Not just game, anything in life. I'm a good communicator, and I'm good at improvising to make the best of my current situation and environment, but if I have to plan more than two moves in advance I absolutely suck at that.

Monopoly, too. I could see yesterday that it was useful for the boy because he was learning to add and subtract (money) and to read, and maybe a little bit of strategy and sportsmanship and that kind of thing. But I'm not seven. The only way I could see playing a board game of any sort, at this stage in my life, would be if I was at a holiday cabin and it was raining so hard you could neither go out and do outdoorsy things nor drive to the nearest town to do indoorsy things. But even then I would probably have brought a book along. Or my guitar. Or a pen and some paper to do some analog-style blogging. Or perhaps there would be other conversationalists there and we could just talk. I can't imagine hardly any circumstance where a big, rollicking game of Monopoly would be anything for me but a colossal waste of time.

(grumpy old woman)