Cat out of the bag

“Tell me all about Wriggly,” ordered Pooja as she hugged me. “Where did you meet, how does he look, how long have you been together, tell me all….now!”

I was a little taken aback. I was meeting her after three years, so I assumed all questions would be about me. “Okay, I’ll show you his picture,” I resigned, and beamed her the display on my mobile…

Stunned silence…. “A cat…..!!!!”

“Yes, what did you think?”

“I thought Wriggly was your boyfriend…, “ she said, despondent.

“You think I would date a guy named Wriggly?” I was chuckling by now, about my cat being out of the bag.

‘So what? You have a name like Lalli…that’s silly enough…”

It all came together. Pooja had been following my Facebook status updates, where Wriggly featured as the latest love of my life. He incidentally is a rambunctious kitten, recently adopted by my best friend and has turned our collective lives upside down. Yes, I am guilty of status messages like “Lalita is wondering what to wear to her date with Wriggly tonite” or “Lalita is unable to stop thinking about Wriggly” or “Lalita is distraced by Wriggly” or “Lalita is wondering when she can squeeze Wriggly again…

Surely, she couldn’t be thinking I was writing about my beau! I mean, what kind of person would put their love lives on Facebook?

Turns out, it is not as implausible it seems to be. Because, weirder things happen on this superficially effervescent networking site. A friend’s boyfriend who has never made any conversation with me in real life, inundates my wall, my super wall, my funwall and god knows what else, with random messages all the time. Some randoms want me to take the ‘sex appeal quiz’ and the stalker quiz and ‘how alike we are’ quiz and the ‘likeness unrated’ (find your inner criminal) quiz. Others want me to answer their questions and share movie tastes or share their garden or hatch their eggs or something equally absurd. I have been guilty of succumbing to a few of these advances, before I realised how silly and distracting it all was.

I feel like saying, dudes and dudelets, I don’t know how you made it here, but I don’t really ‘know’ you, so I have no reason to know how like or unlike we are, or to evaluate which one of us has more sex appeal. I am very confident in that department, thank you!
Yes, but I am guilty of adopting a pet, playing scrabble and learning my chess moves, because I think, might as well use the services of people who can teach you some skills. And why not?

As for the rest who are oh-so-random or just oh-so-inactive, I just want to know, if I delete them quietly, will they receive a notification that they have been deleted? Because that might be a tad rude, even for a superficial medium like Facebook. Someone please let me know. I am clearing the clutter, and yes, that is my current status update.


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Scrabbling me softly

I have come to realise that there is no such thing as an innocent sport. Just as there is no such thing as a good loser. When you get down there, you have to play to win. And when you don’t, it’s a miserable feeling. So whether it’s scrabble or cricket, it’s pretty much the same thing.

Recently, I was beaten hollow at card-scrabble (a meaner variant of board scrabble) by the beau — we had just graduated from regular card games and aborted attempts at double player PS2. So, instead of killing and shooting strange looking figures on screen with his controllers, he was doing it to me with words this time. Sigh!

I actually thought that since the forum was words, I wouldn’t have to try too hard. But nothing could be further from the truth. I was doddering along like someone who had just learnt the alphabet, while the beau was making words in every direction and scoring doubles and triples with patterned élan. Not just that, he also went on deducting from my already poor score by playing something called the category card, which allows you to punish your opponent for using an S, or an E or something equally inane. Welcome to card scrabble!

It all felt a bit gloomy. At some point, I got so desperate, I even made up words and was suitably caught. Had I totally lost it? So much for thinking I had an equity in words..

Which is when I realised that the one thing scrabble is not about, is vocabulary. It’s about strategy. It’s all about optimizing your consonants, manipulating your vowels, and minding your Qs and Zs.
An extremely erudite poetess friend of mine and I had a chat about it and she said she had the same problem. While she waxed eloquent on the fecundity of spirit and the peripherality of belief, the husband beat her hollow with his judicious scoring.

Because, in any case, seven letters is all you have, as the beau reminded me. So it hardly matters if you can weave in serendipity into a phrase or know exactly what an onomatopoeia is. Or how intelligently can you use the word obliterate (my favourite word, incidentally) in a sentence.

The beau played by the book (as usual) and every time I contested something, he would show me the rules …so what appeared to me as slang words or prefixes or suffixes, were rendered completely legitimate according to the dictionary (much to my annoyance). So there I was, struggling with a vowel too many, wondering how to get rid of so many Is and plotting on the ‘right time’ to use my Z. And just when I did, he piggybacked on it, totaling up to a ridiculous score, laughing all the way to my defeat. The gall!

A few years ago, I joined a scrabble club thinking I’ll have fun with fellow wordsmiths, but was cleaned out in five moves by fellow players who one couldn’t exactly classify as great conversationalists, but who had copious lists of two to seven letter words and knew them by heart. As an act of charity, I was given a list of two and three letter words on my third meet. And before they invited me for their tournament (I am sure they needed me just to get a headcount— I wasn’t going to be a star player anyway), I fled. And never turned back.

But now, I am going to get back like a woman on a mission, and when I do, you’ll read about it on this very page. Until then, QUIZ on to triple word glory.