Patchwork Psychology

It’s been a fantastic past few weeks. I’ve gotten plenty of time away from the cubicle, and I’m learning a lot about myself. I’ve been writing music, finding faith, meeting people and losing weight. Also, we traded Aer Lingus ~$1250 for three plane tickets to Ireland. Sweet.

It’s enjoyable to have several people come up and say, “Have you lost weight?” when you actually have. It’s also enjoyable to have some people whose opinions matter complement your art.

It’s not enjoyable, however, to play scrabble. At all. Last week Katie and Scott picked up Travel Scrabble so that we could play whenever we’d have time. It’s constructed quite well–you can pause mid-game, zip it up and easily resume without trouble at your next convenience. The pieces all snap in and blah blah blah.

But Scrabble SUCKS! I don’t know why, but Scrabble made me more bitter than the sum of anything either of my two travel companions have ever done. I think it started with Scott’s first word making him something like 62 points and mine equalling maybe 10. I think I can’t deny that I have a competetive nature, and I pretty much felt shut out from the first move. Every time I tried to muster the courage to look the adversity in the eye and believe that I could make a decent play, he’d make another 60 points with some word that completed three other EXTREMELY FAKE two-letter words.

And that’s the major gripe–Scrabble has further perverted the already bastardized English language to include words like “ef” (the sound of the letter “F”–properly spelled “eff”) and “de” (meaning from, probably in Latin or some other Romance language–but NOT English!). Thusly I am crushed in a game where the ultimate object appears to be memorization of all of the fake words so that you can….GAH! I don’t even care. Scrabble is a farce.

Ultimately I hope that there is simply not enough room in the luggage for travel scrabble to join us in Ireland. I can’t imagine being held captive to that game for 8 hours over the Atlantic in an aluminum box. I think it would negate even the most awesome experiences in Europe–especially when I’m faced with another 8 hours of death when returning.

That said, I’m excited to see Ireland, and maybe some other European destinations while we’re there. Airfare to many destinations is pretty cheap once you get to Europe. I think we each want to go somewhere different–I want to go to Prague, Katie wants to go to Paris (she’s such a girl), and Scott wants to go to Amsterdam. I’d be OK with any of the destinations, but I do already have the quite sexy Moleskine City Notebook for Prague. I guess I could get one of the others, but…but…

So until October, I’m pretty much stuck in my cubicle full-time, save a week of touring in Indiana, Ohio and Minnesota. It’s for the best, though. I need to stockpile about $1k-1.5k in my bank account for rent and loan paying. I also need to accumulate another $1k-1.5k to make an EP before we go to Ireland. Plus I need some cash to spend overseas. Basically, I need to work at least full-time until we hit the road again in October. Worth it? You betchya. Possible? I hope so…