Last night Jen, Susan, and I nixed plans to go to the drive-in because Project Runway wouldn't be over before dark. They are hopelessly addicted. It turned out to be a fun, low-key evening and of course involved playing Speed Scrabble, which seems to be another addiction for them. They introduced me to Speed Scrabble last weekend at the lake. I was wary, because I am not a huge Scrabble fan. In a competition for the slowest moving activity, it would be a tie between playing Scrabble and watching the hair on my head grow. God. You have a turn, put a word down, and then 10 hours later you get to go again. That is if you are playing with just one other person. Play with four people and you might not get another turn until after breakfast the next day. You can spend some of that long wait figuring out where you can make your next word, but it is inevitable that someone will screw up your plan before you can go again. That is when I get impatient and just throw down words that make it appear I dropped out of school in 2nd grade- high scoring words like to, by, an, or go.
This impatience is why I have always preferred games played with ticking buzzers or tiny hourglasses, but because Speed Scrabble does feature the word speed in the title, I was intrigued. I also felt pretty confident, because I felt sure I have higher scores in TextTwist than anyone at the lake last weekend. (I am also probably the only one who even plays TextTwist on the computer because they all have better things to do with their time.) I thought some of those fast word-scrambling skills would come in handy.
If you've never played Speed Scrabble, the way the girls taught me last weekend was to make 2 piles of 7 and 9 tiles. At once everyone turns the pile of 7 over and you rush to form words with them. Everyone is working individually. As soon as someone has used all 7 tiles to make words, they say "Next" and everyone has to flip over a tile from the second pile of tiles and use that one as well. You keep going until all of the 9 additional tiles have been flipped over and used and the first person to make words, Scrabble-style, out of all 16 tiles is the winner.
Well, I was greatly humbled at how terribly I played the game. I would get two short words and then never progress further. I lost every time. But last night I was determined to redeem myself. After repeating my previous dismal performance in the first round, I realized what I was doing wrong. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched several times as both Jen and Susan would take apart the words they'd made and completely reconfigure them as the new tiles were added in order to make new words that would accommodate all the tiles. I, on the other hand, would make my initial word or two, be happy I came up with those good words, and then when I would have to draw a new tile I would try to make it work with what I already had. Most times I couldn't do it. It just hadn't occured to me to scratch my original words and try to do better with all new combinations. Once I realized this, I started to win rounds.
I think my Speed Scrabble technique is kind of similar to how I have lived my life in some ways. I get started with a good plan and stick with it and then when new events or circumstances get thrown into the mix I get stuck because I am reluctant to abandon my original words, I mean plans. I don't want to scramble them up again because they were so good when I made them and it is scary to start completely over so far along in the game, but unfortunately they don't always work when I get a "Next". This perseverance has served me well many times in the past and has helped me see many things to a successful completion, but I think my goal for the future is to be more willing to scramble things up and start from scratch when necessary to make new things work. Otherwise I am always going to be holding tiles that don't work with what I already have and watching everyone else race ahead of me. I am going to try to be more open to possibilities that exist outside of my original vision.
When I was leaving last night I realized that we had not been keeping any kind of score, so I tried to determine who had won the most rounds. Knowing my competitive game-playing nature, Jen and Susan both said, "You won the most. You were the winner." And I was happy. I know there is probably another lesson to learn here about not always having to win or keep score, but I will save that for another time. I was just glad that I won.
