Notes

- This morning I remembered that I get this Friday off. Short weeks always make me happier than long weeks. It sure is gonna be a "Good Friday" indeed. I'm going to be making some form of that lame joke every year, so better get used to it.

- Got home from work yesterday to catch the horrific end of the 2004 White Sox season opener. The adventures of Billy Krotch continue, and I guess his crappiness spread to Dumbasso Marte during the offseason, as I watched them two blow a 7-3 lead and go on to lose 9-7 by giving up 6 combined runs, all in the bottom of the 9th. Not a good start to the season, and why do I have the sinking feeling that there's plenty more of those groin-wrenching moments to come? Better get used to it.

- Barry Bonds is awesome. I can't say that enough. When he plays, it seriously is like he is the only pro and everyone else is a little leaguer. Now, maybe he's on steroids and maybe he's not, but I don't care how many steroids someone takes, you still need a ton of skill and talent to do what this guy does. And if he has been roided out all this time like everyone says he is, why hasn't he flamed out with injuries yet? Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, and Ken Caminiti all had good seasons too, but they couldn't sustain their success. Bonds is almost 40 years old, been putting up crazy numbers consistently for a while now, and still more dominant than ever. By the way, with baseball season underway, I will definitely be talking baseball and fantasy baseball here a lot more. Better get used to it.

- After about 4 years with a Capital One Visa as my only credit card, I decided to get an American Express Blue card too. This was partly spurred on from an experience a few weeks ago at Neiman Marcus when I was paying for Olivia's lip balm and they wouldn't take my Visa. What kind of backwards place doesn't take Visa? Well I didn't have any of the accepted cards the lady listed, and the only names I even recognized were Diners Club and American Express. It was only a few bucks so I paid it in cash at the time, but after that experience I vowed never to let those "hoity-toity" (Olivia's phrase) people get the better of me again. So I added American Express to my arsenal. The other benefit of this new card is that now I finally have a card where I earn some rewards (instead of getting absolutely nothing back for my purchases with that stupid Capital One Visa).

Unfortunately, the addition of this new card also means my wallet has grown even fatter and heavier than it already was. I already looked through it and there's not much I can take out. Definitely not getting rid of my Britney Spears stickers. So I guess fat wallet is here to stay. Better get used to it.

*****

Playing For Fun

Reading Rich's blog last week reminded me of what it was like to play kids games back in the day. And it made me think about how much our games and our idea of fun has changed since we got older.

Like when I tried to recall and explain the rules of Running Bases, we both pretty much realized that the game didn't really make sense anymore. Questions like "why wouldn't you just stay at one base?" or "how do you determine a winner?" popped up right away, and I didn't have an answer to any of them.

It's weird, because I always remember that playing Running Bases was always the most fun I had as a kid. But now that we think about it, it's kind of hard to figure out why. How can a game that doesn't have good solid rules, and where nobody wins, be fun?

I mean, you look at all the "games" we play at our age, and it's totally different. First of all, so much of what we do (cards, NCAA tournament pools, fantasy sports) seems to always involve at least some amount of money. Even if there's no money involved in our games, at least some amount of pride or bragging rights are still at stake. Whether you're playing video games or sports or whatever, the winners and losers are always clearly defined.

And because money or pride is at stake, the rules also have to be clearly defined too. So in poker, we have to raise blinds or else everyone would fold all the time. In fantasy baseball, we have to agree on a set system of scoring beforehand, such that there's no disputing who wins and loses at the end of the season.

When we played Running Bases, I don't remember anyone ever having to make a rule that said "no staying on one base the whole time", because we always ran no matter what. We just played on without ever thinking that you could avoid getting caught by simply not leaving the base.

Would this be the case if we had to buy in $10 per round? Or, imagine how different would the game be if they kept ladder rankings of the best baserunners and best defenders? I think the spirit of the game would be thoroughly ruined and all the fun taken out of it in the end.

This could kill a lot of other kids games too. What if the neighborhood kept stats like "Successful Find Percentage" of all the kids who played Hide & Seek? What if in TV Tag*, you could only save yourself by naming shows that were included in a national standardized list? What if they used Instant Replay to enforce the "no tagbacks" rule by checking elapsed time between tag and tagback? What if people kept track of individual "+/-" in Red Rover, like they do in the NHL?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't play for money, or play to win, or have rules in our games. I just wonder if sometimes we end up taking the fun factor of games away from ourselves by making it too much about money or pride or bragging rights.

It was kind of funny on Sunday, when Greg suggested the crazy idea of playing 31 "for fun", and by that he meant a game with no money involved. And in the end of the game, with one winner and 7 losers, we made the observation that 7 of us were happy with the result (no penalty for losing) and only 1 was unhappy (no monetary reward despite winning).

Contrast that to a hold'em tournament, where only 1 or 2 people at the end come away happy, and the rest are left with no more than a sob story of how they got beat.

Anyways, I'm not one of those idealistic hippies who believes that everyone's a winner and that any competition is bad. I still love playing poker, and fantasy baseball, etc., in which money and/or pride is involved, and I'm definitely not gonna stop doing those things anytime soon.

But, I do miss those days when I could play a game purely for fun, not worrying about anything else but having a good time. I think I just need to approach some of the things I do differently, and maybe find new non-competitive hobbies that can still be fun and fulfilling.

* I'm not sure if it's as universal a game as H&S or Red Rover, so I'll explain the rules: TV Tag was like normal tag, except if you were about to get tagged by "it", you could say the name of a TV Show and sit down, making you immune to being tagged. So if you were getting chased, you could say "Flintstones" and sit down until "it" left. As far as I can remember, there were no rules saying how long you could stay on the ground, but this usually wasn't a problem either.