Month: February 2024

If you like words or trivia or intellectual nonsense, let’s talk games.  Are you game?

The tune that played through my head while pondering this subject was Game of Love, the 1965 American version by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.  However, upon further examining the lyrics, the only thing I found useful was “…Let’s play.”

I wonder what might make love, a game.  Love doesn’t seem so much a thing that you play at, if playfulness is key to the game of love.

I guess if you’re one who perceives that “love is a battlefield,” with “no promises and no demands,” (Pat Benatar 1983), it might be that love is a war game.  But is this love?  Or, is it playing games?

With love, I believe that if it’s a game, it has to be a win-win or lose-lose.  Love as a game certainly is not a game of chance.  Come to think about it, the game of love might not be a spontaneous game but one of strategy.  Premeditation and planning are required for the win-win goal of this game.

There is some skill involved in the game of love.  Just ask anybody who has partnered with another for many years.

They’ve learned some things about juggling; about tolerance of differences; how to obey the sixth (kill) and ninth (lie) commandments – well all of them help out in long-term relationships; they’ve mastered the balance beam; how to be angry and sin not; they’ve learned their history lessons, household economy, and the temporariness but vitality of the five-year-plan.

I’m of the mind that love is a thing that grows out of challenges borne together over time, rather than a thing that culminates one time a year with dinner out, strawberries dipped in chocolate, champagne, and flowers.

Some people like to play games others don’t – what’s the difference?  I question this both literally and figuratively.  Some folks bow out of playing board games, card games, solving puzzles, video games, and electronic games.  Are games too trivial for some, or childish?

I believe some people literally avoid games because their temperament is too competitive or maybe not competitive enough.  We’ve all been there in a game of sport or even a board game, when folks who make a mistake get angry, seemingly way out of proportion to the spirit of a game.

I guess since I mentioned games of sport, I should surmise that “game animals,” the wild kind, hunted for their meat, are treasured in particular for the sport of the catch.  Hunting is a game of sport.

I mean, people who act deceitful or manipulative in a relationship are said to be “playing games”.  In this scenario there has to be a winner and a loser in the game.

Long-term relationships might be compared to the Olympic Games where only the most dedicated athletes make it to the podium.  Or some might compare their love relationships to the Invictus Games where although wounded, they can still win amongst their peers.

Card games involve both skill and luck.  For example, you have to work with the hand you’ve been dealt.  Some folks have the ability to win the game in spite of a few “bad” hands dealt to them.

What does one get out of watching a game show on television?  Do such folks consider it a personal game of skill to have picked the winner, thus considering themselves winners?

War games, I suppose are the epitome of games of strategy.  “Game theory” is a branch of mathematics that postulates a scenario. The scenario is played out and analyzed against other possibilities and outcomes.  Then another scenario is put onto the table.  I think that theory, analysis, and strategies, of war games would be potentially fun for certain minds.

Since you were so very gracious to follow me down the rabbit-hole of my thoughts about the concept of games, what do you say we go forward as “game changers?”  Maybe we could completely change some upcoming situations with new ideas or decisive plays that will make somebody’s world develop better than expected.

Along with Dean Martin, I have found myself singing, “Everybody loves somebody sometime….  My sometime is now.”  Apparently, songwriters Sam Coslow, Irving Taylor and Ken Lane are my tribe (lyrics licensed by Barton Music Corporation).

So, I have questions.  Can anybody answer everything?

I want to know something about everything.  Does that make me a busybody?

Nobody knows everything.  But somebody knows something.

How does anybody become somebody?  When do you become somebody?

I was just pondering that everybody knows somebody.  But the other way around, not so much.

Maybe somebody will tell me I’m clever.  Perhaps nobody will.

Everybody will have an opinion on everything.  A busybody will however, “know it all.”

Nobody knows everybody.  I know somebody.

Anybody can be somebody, right?  I’m not just anybody, I’m somebody.

A busybody thinks they know something about everybody.  But, in reality they know nobody entirely.

I think nobody can really know everything about anybody.  Everybody has private thoughts.

I’ve worked on this little ditty now and again for some time.  I really hope somebody, if not everybody who reads this realizes that I’m nobody to be telling anybody that I know anything.

In fact, I’m not at all sure if my grammar is altogether correct.  But somebody will surely tell me about it, thusly educating everybody.

They say hindsight is 20/20 so everybody out there has perfect hindsight.  But they also say nobody’s perfect.

“Everybody finds somebody someplace….  My someplace is here.”

I seem to be learning lessons about life rapid-fire lately.  Even as I grow older, “learning my lesson” keeps on coming, maybe even more so than earlier in my life.  So, kids of all ages shouldn’t feel called out when they have to “learn their lesson” over and over again.

Something I learned while playing matching games on my phone, usually when most people are sleeping, was not fresh knowledge but more of a refresher course.  The nugget that I received as a eureka moment was this, “there is an optimal time for everything.”

I know this fact but it came as brand-new knowledge when I found myself awakened after several dreams in the wee hours of the night, and decided to play a game on my phone.  When I opened the game app I remembered that I had closed it in frustration last time I played.  You see, I had nearly completed the game when I inadvertently tapped the home button and the game progress I made was wiped out only to start over.  I closed the app in exasperation.

When I opened the game this time, I played it lickety-split without any ads butting in, and as it was a typically long game with lots of points, I finished it in record time.  I said to myself by way of a reminder, “there’s a right time for everything.”

I’ve learned this same lesson hundreds of times, why don’t I remember it?  For example, why don’t I just simplify and erase some needless frustration by stopping an endeavor when exasperation first sets in, saving it for another time.  But no, I usually let the tension build way too much before abandoning it for that better moment in time.

Only until the better time presents itself and the task goes smoothly, or as it should, do I see the difference.  Some people have to learn lessons by seeing it or doing it for themselves.  They learn by doing, not by hearing.  Is that you too or is it just me?

Some of us call it trial and error.  We can’t see the end result abstractly; we have to actually do the task and see that it was the wrong choice (or the right choice) before we get it.

In the same vein, we can’t see in the moment, that if we had just WAITED, we wouldn’t have needed to worry or stress because it worked out better than we imagined.  That’s the downside of imagination, seeing a negative outcome when a positive one was on the way.  That’s an example of “hurry up and wait,” usually borne out in a hospital or doctor’s waiting room.

Many years ago, I had a dream that I got the job, in the waiting room.  Specifically, a bunch of us were waiting to be interviewed for a job.  It was an inordinately long wait.

There was a closet in the waiting room.  People who already worked there came out periodically and retrieved outdated office equipment like manual typewriters, shorthand pads, and Dictaphones, from the closet.

Some of the younger folks in the waiting room exited the building when they saw the old, unfamiliar stuff being unearthed.  Others of us just waited.

Morning dwindled into midday.  I took a train home to refresh myself and came back in the afternoon and just a few of the interviewees remained.  A child began to act out and it was too annoying for a couple of people who then left.

It was the end of the day and the interviewer came out and asked one question of the three of us who remained.  I got the job.

It seems that there truly is a time for everything.  Sometimes you just have to wait for it.  And if it’s not the time and you try to force it, you end up banging your head against the wall in frustration.  It won’t happen until the time is right.

Have you ever observed that some people have good timing and others just don’t get it.  Not until they blurt something out at the wrong time, do these folks realize they should have waited.  It would have made all the difference.

The origins for “a time and a place for everything,” comes from the Bible’s Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes.  “For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven,” is how I remember it.

Ecclesiastes, along with Proverbs and others, is considered wisdom literature.  In particular, Ecclesiastes ruminates about the meaninglessness of life without God.

Therefore, this quote about time and place, put into the context of meaninglessness, explains the frustration we experience when we get the timing wrong.  “If I had just waited… maybe I wouldn’t have had to suffer….”  The wisdom and simplicity of sometimes just waiting, is highlighted in this Scripture.

In popular psychological parlance, we’ve been told to chill out and (pause), wait for it….  If you’ve been hanging out in the waiting room for a while, I’m your sister.

Try making the best of the wait.  “Whistle while we work,” is a little chorus I remember from lessons learned in childhood, originally from the 1937 Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it reminds us to go to work as usual, putting one foot in front of the other, while we wait for that other thing that we’re so tempted to force into being. 

The time will be right sometime.  So, dreams, jobs, waiting rooms, needless frustration, worrying for nothing… just wait for it.  Or not.  Maybe you’d rather learn your lesson again the next time around, like me.