Make Up Your Own Rules

Yes, I spawned a maniac.

It all started with board games.

You and your family may be like many families during a quarantine, and if so, you may have been playing some board games. I’ve played my share during the last few months.

As for the maniac, I blame chess. It all started when I taught my son how to play chess. I taught him the rules…but loosely. I would let him move the pieces any way he wanted so he would get the idea of capturing. Then I taught him a rule here, a rule there. How pawns capture on the diagonal, how bishops do the same, and how rooks command rows and columns. Each time we played, I taught him a little more. I would let him win just to teach him the rules. Eventually we got to the most difficult piece to move, the knight.

Whether you call it a flower pattern, a sun pattern, a series of L-shapes, a queen killer, the knight moves can be the most difficult to see in your mind. He started to understand it until he could finally win legitimately. Now I have a challenge when we play, he’s so good.

Regardless of whether I won or lost, I told him it was fun.

We used to take apart old board games, mix them up, change them with markers and make our own. Making our own rules was a lot of fun. We still love to play the Monopoly game we altered so the Chance cards have added zeros. (Instead of 100 dollars, you pay 1000.) It adds some surprise to the game.

One of my favorite games when I was younger, was Risk.

When I tried to teach my son how to play Risk, he wanted to make up his own rules. I honestly had no idea how to implement his rules into the game. Risk is a lot more complicated than chess. There are rules on how to gain armies, when to place armies, how to attack, how to defend, when to get cards and what to do with them when you get them, plus 17 other rules with their own timing.

We struggled for a while, him trying to make up newer, better rules, me trying to make them fit in smoothly with the rest of the rules. We would still play Risk, but it hardly ever ended with a clear winner. It usually ended with us upset at each other (sort of how real-life international politics end up, but that’s a subject for another time).

Recently, we pulled the box out of the closet and started a war, a board game war, by reading the rule book. Yep, we played by the rules, and I didn’t let him win; he won with some skilled chess-like strategy.

And at the end, he said, “Hey, that’s a fun game.”

What Do You See?

You see heights. I see rollercoasters.

You see rocks. I see playgrounds. Every rock is a challenge, but in different ways to each of us.

Maybe we see the scene differently. It doesn’t mean either perception is wrong. It only means we come from different places; we see what our own environment encourages us to see.

Possibly we see what we want to see. Our will-power, will-strength, inserts itself into our reality. The mountains shift from dangerous to entertaining according to our will.

This is true for life in general, really. You can look at a pandemic and find great things in it, or you can lay on the floor and weep for all the torment you feel.

I still don’t think either of these is wrong, though one may not be very beneficial for you.

Can you believe there are both kinds of people out there, right now, doing the above? There is someone out there crying because everything is “going wrong”. There is another someone out there finding solace despite losing loved ones, grinning despite the loneliness of social distance, and keeping their chin up even though the economy has taken a dive.

It only takes a moment, if you’ve been pessimistic, to shift your perspective in the slightest. The steep crags could become less intimidating if you think of them as a beautiful, scenic view.

Can You Relate?

The cat wants to know: Are you writing?

You’re a writer.

You’re always writing something, whether it’s a list, stream of consciousness prose, a song, a poem, a novel, a screenplay, graffiti on a wall.

You love the smell of stationery and stationery stores, paper, pens, printers, and sharpened pencils.

Ideas for what to write come in floods. You can’t possibly use all the ideas you have. You have lists of ideas everywhere: in the notes function on your phone, on scraps of paper, in a notebook. You’re always forgetting ideas too. You think, “I should write that one down,” then you don’t write it down and forget it. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?

You’re always mulling over something you’ve written, editing it from all angles, adding juicy adjectives, trading one word for another, removing excessive adjectives, and rotating word positions like rotating tires on your car. Okay, not like that. Nobody rotates the tires on their car that often.

You can’t help but read everything you see with words on it (repeatedly, such as that sign on the side of the road that you’ve read over and over again even though you know what it says, or the label on the inside of your refrigerator, or the graffiti outside on the trash bin—your eyes refuse to avoid it).

You love words and languages. You may be fluent in other languages and you for sure know multiple phrases in multiple languages. Latin, French, Spanish, Navajo, you don’t have a narrow attitude toward languages, just an unstoppable love of all words everywhere.

You’re critical but progressive—you may change your harsh opinions of some things once you see the beauty of them. You have a cringe-worthy desire to edit everyone else’s writing.

It’s likely that you have a pet—and if you’re a stereotypical writer, it’s a cat. Are you a stereotypical writer?

You can see the beauty of less than desirable things like blotty pens, old books, and ancient word processors.

Books draw you in and collections of books draw you in sevenfold. You have haunted, and shall always haunt, libraries (though you would probably arrange the books by a different method than the present one). You love collections of books. Wherever books are, you will be.

And you love the sounds of a typewriter. The cadence of tiny hammers and the ratcheting sound of the carriage return is pure bliss to you. Sure, a keyboard on a computer is an amazing thing, but your soul loves the visual and audible thunder of a typewriter being manipulated.