No Wizardry Required

I wasn't a member of the Dungeons & Dragons crowd in high school. I love playing tabletop games, especially cooperative games like Hanabi or Pandemic, and we have a lot of games in our closet. Classics like Scrabble and Risk, strategy games like Catan, chance games like Deer in the Headlights and Pass the Pigs, kid games like Guess Who and Uno. We hadn't attempted any role playing games though, until recently. My husband bought me a game called Fog of Love for Valentine's Day... no, it's not THAT kind of game; it's a role playing game. But instead of diving into a world of wizards and elves, you play the plot of a romantic comedy.

For me, it took some getting used to the concept of the role playing game. I'm competitive, so I immediately start to try to see how to win the game. Where can I leverage those chips? How can I sabotage the other player? Which cards would be advantageous to have in my hand at the end of the game? But those questions don't belong here. In this type of game, you just do the things you believe your character would do and let the consequences play out.

So, how was Fog of Love? Well, I'm no professional game reviewer, but it was super fun. Players can be any gender and you get assigned some traits and a profession too. The professions include your standard RomCom fare (wedding planner, architect, marketing exec., etc.) but also some off-the-wall choices like criminal. I was an outgoing, confident, but sincere criminal. I named myself Carmen San Diego.

Then, you play through a series of "scenes" that may be light-hearted, serious, or dramatic and each player makes choices about what to do in the scene (acting is encouraged, at least in our house). Those choices bring the couple closer into harmony or push them apart, and also fulfill their own individual social/emotional needs, or not. In the end, the couple stays together or they might break up, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's the thing about this role-playing concept... if the two characters don't mesh well, then they break up, just like in life, but that doesn't mean they lose the game. Once I was able to wrap my head around the absence of the winner/loser dynamic and embrace the nebulous nature of just playing things out and seeing what happens next, it was a lot of fun to be silly and live a RomCom plot.

A Found Poem

I attended an educators' conference last week entitled "Equity in Action: Shaping Future Outcomes." We did a lot of internal work and external planning around systemic racism in our schools. On our last morning, we arrived to find the pages of history textbooks torn out and strewn across the tables. After a moving keynote, we were asked to engage in a found poetry task. We each used a random page from the table, and it was amazing to watch the ideas that had been percolating throughout the conference appear in our poems. (Found poetry or erasure poetry in this type of task is generally done by erasing words from a text to reveal a poem embedded therein.) Here is the poem I "found":

Data Update

Map and chart
people and where they live
Map and chart
Describe - rural or urban
one, two
Look at the map
the Profile
United States, South Africa
seacoasts, oceans
wealthiest riches
society divided
law, race, ethnic lines, language

How did such a system come to be?

seed starting in late winter (haiku, sort of)

seeds like sand, seeds like paper
place and cover, face
the sun, away from council

On Mac's Rejection of the Dinner Jacket

On Mac's Rejection of the Dinner Jacket on a Day of Political Outrage

It's not a statement.

no politics no straight no lgbtqia+
no optics of narritive
no religion no bias
no "who's the best anti-racist" environmentalist
no fake news, nobody to refuse
no slippery slope, no keep your hope
no stand on guns or lives or us
no Russian rise no inquiry protocol
no America first before we fall
no walls no dreamers our sacrificial lamb

just whimsy and tutu

pajama glam