WORDS WITH FRIENDS

As I've been playing Words with Friends with various people over the last two years, I've noticed a few patterns that I now feel able to verbalize into some coherent sentences. 

First of all, no one I play today will ever be as good as my first opponent. He beat me every time, and the only time he didn't was because of an unlucky letter pick. Kind of like playing tennis against someone who is better that you, he elevated my game. Now, I'd say I'm at a pretty consistent level, but I've definitely plateau-ed and still don't possess the logical mind (nor the time) that is required for competitive scrabble. As the movie "Word Wars" so aptly demonstrated, scrabble has nothing to do with your understanding of the English language and everything to do with logic and strategy. "English is fucked up language, says one haggard scrabble master, too many words got multiple meanins'." That's why the world scrabble champion is some guy in Taiwan who doesn't speak a word of English. 

Sometimes I get lucky, I put down a word whose meaning is completely unknown to me and that magical word "sending" comes up on screen along with it's little status circle. I feel elated that a word I had no idea existed actually worked out. That doesn't mean I go look it up afterwards or anything. It's a satisfying and totally addictive feeling, and one of the reasons I play the game. It's like, I tried to stop, but I just couldn't. I needed to see "sending" on my iPhone screen one more time.

HIGHSCHOOL

New York Magazine did an article on the nefarious effects of highschool on the human spirit. Of course, the title is meant to "grab your attention" by affirming that Highschool is a "sadistic institution", and while most of the article supports this view, it concludes with saying, hey, maybe this is just life. I find that the content of these articles just don't live up to their sensational headlines. Remember the article entitled "I Love My Kids but Hate My Life"? That concluded with, really, everyone should just have kids because they give meaning to our lives. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the article, it had some really interesting scientific facts about teenagers, but for the most part, the highschool part of the story was a tad weak. It's true that mixing up a bunch of very different kids who just happen to be the same age in a giant pot while they're in the middle of developing their personalities and bodies can be traumatizing for some, but it seems...kind of...logical...no? How else are you going to educate kids? Home schooling? mix them up with kids of different ages and developmental stages? Put them in school with kids who have very similar personalities? Skip school altogether and get them working alongside adults like back in the factory days? Adolescents are very susceptible to the pains of a highschool environment, but I'm not sure how better to do it. My HS was mostly girls of similar backgrounds but that didn't mean they were similar in personalities. There were the nerds, the bitches and the normals. Perceptions were heightened, I definitely gave some thought about these girls and what they represented in our little highschool social hierarchy only to realize later that we were all basically the same person, humbled by life etc, etc. Back then, our differences were perceived to be huge, we were all so damn special.  But I know now that these warped perceptions were just the result of our brains developing and adjusting to our adulthood. 

If I remember something I learned in sociology once, one of the important ways we define ourselves is by identifying who we aren't. This is why like-minded groups are formed in every society. The democrats and the republicans, the born again Christians and the Neo Nazis. Their existence depend on their animosity towards and perceived differences with other groups. It's kind of like bonding with a new friend over backstabbing mutual friends. That friendship might not have been so quick to form if you didn't find commonalities in pinpointing the faults of others. Since the article stipulates that we act in adult life similarly to the way we act in highschool due to the deep impact that HS had on our psyches, I wonder if this is more a chicken and egg thing. Is it really highschool's fault? Or are we just naturally prone to segregate ourselves into groups based on our talents or lack thereof? And don't other people affect who we become anyway? Isn't "the other" and how we live relative to eachother not one of the the most fundamental aspects of human life? In this case, highschool, no matter how shitty it is for some people, is a rite of passage that is hard to escape from. One way or another, highschool or not, we will learn that life isn't fair, that there are people who will always succeed better than us, as there are people who will do worse. It has to happen some time.