Thursday, September 11, 2008

rotting apples

having extensive experience as a young, unmarried mormon in utah valley, i have played "apples to apples" quite a lot. and i've gotten pretty good at it. that is, if there is any strategy to the game. as much as anything, the biggest factor is how well you know the person choosing the card. many years ago, jenny ricks and i would almost always choose the other's card, just because we knew each other that well. i wonder what she's up to...

in fact, i'm getting a little tired of the game. don't get me wrong: it's wonderful. mensa has endorsed it. there's an "apples to apples: jewish version." it's just that it was cool and new to me in 2002, and now i get a slight nausea at any game night whenever it's suggested, because, being the great game that it is, it is invariably selected.
such was the case at the game night i went to tonight. but i smiled and played anyway.
as i said, the trick is knowing the crowd. for example, i will choose the "charging rhino" card every time, no matter what, because charging rhinos are so great. the scort could be counted on to choose "a barrel of monkeys." and so forth. tonight i was with a group of mostly hyper-active byu theatre students, and was soon befuddled when their choices... made sense. i was sure my "the inside of the sun" was a lock for "glitzy", but it was passed up for something that i've already forgotten.
oh well, you win some, you lose some.
all the same, i won three in a row, and went on to win the game.

before and after the game, i talked with a girl who said she is thinking about illustration as a major, and offered to show me her sketchbook. in the process, i realized that i am fascinated by such objects. i'd like to have a beaten and battered, tattered and torn, ink, glued, and painted sketchbook of my own someday. i have a few moleskines, one that has primarily become a record of my favorite text messages, and a larger one in which i keep lines and scene ideas that i have for movies, but it has yet to yield much. but a black book filled with pictures, clippings, drawings, notes, ideas, markings, color, and doodles, is sheerly fascinating.

note to self: draw cool things in my big moleskine.

1 comment:

~Bekahjo said...

The next journal I have in line, that I should be starting in the next couple of weeks, is a moleskin. At least, it looks like it should be called a moleskin if it isn't. It's brown and sort of fuzzy, and it has an elastic to keep it closed. I like it because it looks like an old traveler's log or archaeologist notebook. I'm excited to use it; though that's just for journal writing. I keep writing ideas in two of those expandable files, and magazine clippings and pictures in this cool black portfolio. You never think journal writing is so amazing until you do it for a while, and can flip back and look at your life on a page. And there you are, forever engraved in that little book. It's like making your mark on the world.

And I just wrote you a novel.