Playing Scrabble at Ipanema

Last night I hung out with Mandy Dunn and a few of her friends.
"We're going to play Scrabble at Ipanema," she told me when I called her. "Meet us there in 20-30 minutes, okay?"

A word about Ipanema-
Ipanema is a bar where I don't feel comfortable. I'm told that I imagine it, I even believe that I imagine it, but when I'm in the place it seems like people all look up at you to see who you are and then roll their eyes in disappointment. I am a sad little person who needs for everyone to like me, and though the greater part of me knows it's silly, the lesser part of me gets really uncomfortable seeing a lot of vegans with gauged out ears roll their eyes. This lesser part shook when it considered the amount of eye rolling that would take place when someone challenged me for using the word "qat" (an alternate spelling of "kat", an African evergreen shrub that acts as a narcotic when chewed).

A word about Scrabble-
I am crazy when I play board games, particularly when the game seems to depend on skill or intelligence. A few years ago my friend Nick got really into Scrabble, and I ended up playing a lot of games with him, always losing by at least fifty points. The competitive part of me took this as proof that Nick was at least temporarily smarter than me, and my frail ego decided that if I could not beat Nick at least I would never lose to anyone else. That's when Nick taught me about the word "qat." He also gave me the two letter word list. There are over ninety words in the English language that are spelled with two letters, and memorizing these, or a fair number of them, dramatically increases your score (knowing xi and xu alone is worth a good twenty points).

So I'm in this scenester bar playing Scrabble, torn between a competitive nature that wants to play "ef" and get a triple word score, and overpowering self-consciousness that wants to avoid any situation that would require the dictionary being read aloud. Of course, that's a silly problem and not important at all. It wouldn't even be worth mentioning, except that it gives you an idea of my state of mind when Mandy's friend Sara pointed to the emblem on my chest and asked me "What's on your shirt?"
"Haha, Andrew's always wearing school t-shirts," said Mandy.
I laughed, relieved at the opportunity to tell a funny story. "Actually, I didn't get this t-shirt from school, I got it at a thrift store. I found an MWC Catholic Student Association t-shirt at the thrift store. It's got the top ten reasons to be Catholic on the back."
The table was quiet.
"I'm not Catholic," I told them so they would know it's okay to laugh. Several of them did.
"Well get up so we can see the back," said Sara.
"Nah, then I'd have to get up."
"Oh come on, why would you tell us about it and then not let us see it?" asked Mandy, who had a good point.
So I got up awkwardly, almost knocking several drinks over, and turned, hands in pockets, to show them my back.
"I don't see anything," someone said.
"Yeah," said Sara, "There's nothing there."
That's when I looked down at my shirt and remembered that I had changed it earlier that afternoon.
"Oh yeah," I grinned, my face bright red, "I forgot I changed."
"Hilarious! " said Mandy. "Okay, mortify. That's 50 for using all my letters, and it's a double word score, so 50 plus 3,4,5,6,7, 4 and 4 make eight, so that's 15, so 65, times two makes 130. Awesome!"
"Wow Mandy, that's great!"
"Woo, good job Mandy!"
I could feel the eyes everywhere. They were on me, and they were thinking, "Why is that loser so red? Who plays scrabble in a bar? And what's with him standing up for no reason and then sitting back down? I totally hate that guy. JEEZ."