Underpants On The Outside

Recently, I signed up for Facebook. Not to talk to my friends, of course; at this point I’m a bit old to use the Intermajig to communicate with my friends. Social networks are great when you want to tell everyone that your house is throwing a kegger, but these days  the biggest news is if one of my friends buys a couch, so it’s really okay if they’d rather just surprise me.

There’s only reason I signed up, and it’s the same reason I log on every day: online Scrabble. But my love for Scrabble goes beyond the pompous intellectual nerd-high I get from knowing that “Qi” is an alternative and acceptable spelling of the word “chi.” I developed my Scrabble soft spot years ago, when I spent a semester abroad in Israel. It was a tough time for me: I don’t speak any Hebrew, I didn’t learn much in my six weeks of language training, and on top of that, I found that Israelis could be a bit abrasive. (Read: they’re kinda pricks. Then again, I would probably be bitter too if we were constantly at war with Mexico while Canada refused to admit that we were even a country.) There’s really only one thing to do in that scenario, and that’s find a group of Americans and drink.

Mostly we sat around drinking shitty wine and frying frozen French Fries in butter, which makes apple pie look about as American as borscht.  (USA! USA!) Then one day (that I don’t remember) someone brought out a Scrabble board, and from then on it was a daily exercise, usually three or four games in a sitting. If I wanted to romanticize it, I might muse how Scrabble was our way of celebrating the English language, as it cured our homesickness and provided a respite from the unease of wandering around where you don’t understand what anyone’s saying and they all have rifles. If I was a little more true to myself, I could say that we played Scrabble because there’s nothing like the moment when someone attempts to explain why ‘jizz” should totally be legal. And if I was REALLY being honest, I’d say that I loved playing Scrabble because I usually stomped the living shit out of everyone.

Unfortunately, Scrabble gets a bit harder when I’m playing against the entire 34 million unique users on Facebook. What’s that? You doubt that there’s a network-wide conspiracy to rig the games against me? Oh, well then how do you explain the following, Professor Einstein van Hawking? Currently, I have 8 active games. These are my tiles for three of them:

#1) ATIIIOAA
#2) ITEOEIIE
#3) IIOLOSI

That’s 37.5% of my games that officially qualify for “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this crap?” status, and in a serious oversight, the programmers didn’t think to include a “Slam Table With Fist, Scattering Tiles Across The Floor, Then Pour Yourself A Glass Of Wine And Pout In The Corner” button. I now feel obligated to mention that there isn’t an actual point to this post; I just want to mention it because most of my opponents are Underpants readers and I’m trying to make an excuse for why I’m losing.

If only I was playing Hawaiian Scrabble or “Scrabble: Fellatio Edition”. Then those letters would be kick ass. ATIIIOAA: The blowjob transliteration of “Attire”. 57 points!