“Oh joyous crunchings and munchings!”
                -Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three

                The last three nights, after crawling in bed, my partner and I have been reading a novella out loud with each other. Well, we finished the novella, actually, and tonight we’re starting the sequel, and it’s so lovely to fall into story together. To feel the rise and fall of different voices. To get drowsy (and awake! We stayed up too late last night, but there were only 60 pages left) in these shared places.
                Growing up my parents read to us. My siblings and I all still read to each other sometimes. As an English teacher my students and I would read in class, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes excitedly (though I always have a rule: you don’t need to read aloud if you don’t want to), and so many of my lovely friends are the kind who every now and then share a page aloud from the book in their hands. Or read a play, divvying up the parts. Or speak a whole book of poetry while sitting at an empty bus stop even though the bus isn’t running today. These moments live through me in a way I can’t really explain. Four years ago, for instance, I might’ve said I barely remembered Alexander’s The Book of Three. Then I heard my brother reading it to his kids. And I was a kid. And I read a chapter aloud, hearing others’ voices in my voice. And I remember all those rhythms. Those places. These people. These crunchings and munchings are treats I eat and eat again, months later, years later, circling back, remembering, circling forward and becoming. And how delicious they are.

“Each player takes a quilt board, a time token and 5 buttons…”
                –Patchwork rulebook; game designed by Uwe Rosenberg

                I don’t have a “finished” thought today. Maybe, instead, I have a kind of game.
                The board game Patchwork is pretty new to me, and I keep thinking about the way it mixes two game mechanics I’ve played lots of times. Part of it is arranging blocky shapes on a grid—like Cathedral when I was a kid, kneeling on the carpet, or Tetris. Part is “engine building” by creating a collection that earns you increasing “income”—a core mechanic for so many things, from Spice Road to Res Arcana to Monopoly. Patchwork simplifies both ideas and puts them on top of each other. I start playing and think I’ve played this before. And I think no I haven’t.
                So for a few months now I’m going around and around, interested in the kind of newness that happens when two familiar things sit on top of each other in an unfamiliar way. The game equivalent of a kimchi quesadilla (new to me, at least, and delicious)? Maybe: but it feels more like the time a coworker and I played frisbee golf inside the empty high school as a break from grading finals. Spaces we often walked through, games we often played—and now we’re wondering, wait, what is this? And I’m wondering, what would you put on top of what?

                “[…] what do you think games do? What are they about?” [asked Jedao.]
                The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but [Captain Kel Cheris] had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”
                -Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

                Years ago, in college, I started playing pool–and ended up liking it!–because “Do you want to play pool?” seemed like a more socially acceptable question then “Do you want to hangout and see if maybe we’re friends?” In graduate school I’ve played a lot of board games for a similar reason: I like the games, and I especially like the space they make to spend time with people. Although that’s not all they do: they also end up frustrating. Sometimes they encourage a kind of competition that ends up changing my interactions in ways I don’t like. Although that’s not all they do: they play out little versions of reality. What if we were kids trying to crack someone’s codes (The Initiative)? What if we were a group of explorers lost below ground (Sub Terra)? And of course, that kind of “what if” also isn’t all games do.
                I love Yoon Ha Lee’s playful (and in context, deadly serious—if you read the book you’ll see) explanation of games because it opens into answers behind answers. What a game does, what it’s about, depends on how we engage with it. How we pick it up. I’ve been thinking about that today because I’ve been playing games on boardgamearena.com and just getting more frustrated. But then again, the way I’ve been playing, I wasn’t enjoying the time with other players. (In 2020 boardgamearena.com was a wonderful and bizarre way to share twenty minutes with people social distancing all over the world). The way I was playing, I wasn’t relishing how a simple set of rules makes different strategies possible. I was playing as I worried about the other tasks I had. Playing as a kind of pretend avoidance, or as the pretense of doing something while I worried about being productive. Yoon Ha Lee reminds me that “playing a game” isn’t always an answer for what I’m doing. It’s also the beginning of a question: what’s that “doing” about? What are all the different things that “doing” might do?

“This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
                -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

                Since starting this blog — 441 weeks ago! — I’ve noticed something bewildering. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed the same thing. I’ll finish a post, revise it, get it to a place I like. I’ll post it on Wednesday night. And then the very next week, Wednesday comes along again.
                Remembering back to Adams is a lot of fun. He’s been part of my head for — twenty years? More. And here he is, celebrating the fundamentally mysterious in the blatantly obvious. I’m having trouble getting the hang of Wednesdays, myself. And the funny thing of being a me who remembers me but the other mes agree and disagree on different things, and want different things, and memories blur them together. And trying. That’s a weird one. I’ve been rock climbing more, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when I’m really, really trying, pulling on the rock with everything I can, and when I’m kinda sorta trying. A few days ago I didn’t get the hang of that and came home with a bruised hand. Or dishes! Has anyone gotten the hang of dishes? Or mornings? Or evenings? Or eating a last chip but only after the chip bag’s closed so you don’t get another last chip, but how can you close the bag properly when you’ve got a chip in one hand?
                I spend a lot of time thinking. Learning. Working things through. Adams makes me chuckle with the thoughtless, the perfectly possible but somehow always impossible, the spilled, the confused. I never could get the hang of Wednesdays.

“You don’t talk about the shadows with your classmates, right?”
“Right. I think a lot of kids in my class can’t see them.”
                -Shima Shinya, Glitch (Volume 1)

                A few days ago I had one of those moments where I wondered, really wondered, about some kind of common natural process that I usually take for granted. It wasn’t what happens inside a lightbulb to emit the light, but it was something like that. A foundational “how does that work?” while looking at the world. I can’t remember what it was because I thought about it for a moment and let it go. Reading Shinya, I start thinking more about some everyday mysteries — about the ones I see, the ones I don’t. And about how easy it is to stop talking about them, especially when I’m not sure anyone else is “seeing” them. Or when I can so easily stop seeing them myself.
                Years ago, in undergrad, my friend Ryan and I fell into an excited conversation about some famous philosophical problem. (The Ship of Theseus, maybe, or Leibniz’s thought problem about a brain the size of a windmill so you can walk inside). It was a lovely conversation. A few days later I brought it up with Ryan and some other friends. I turned to Ryan to help explain whatever the philosophical problem was. Ryan smiled — interested, but not taking the lead. They said something like: “I’m not seeing it right now. Can you help get me started?” At the time I was surprised—just two days ago we’d been excited about this together, and now they didn’t understand? Looking back, I’m struck instead by how my own interest — my ability to see, and to connect, and to wonder — changes day to day. And by Ryan’s gentle recognition that they weren’t connecting, and that, through the right conversation, they might start seeing something that caught their eye.

                “You genuinely believe a person can sum up her life in just three words?” -Mirinae Lee, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster

                My sibling Maple’s visiting, and lately we’ve been talking about the way stories say and don’t say things. I’m coming off a couple-year kick of being pretty frustrated by how the stories I write seem, in my mind, to make lies: they arrange moments and experiences into a sequence that ‘makes sense,’ that ‘has a direction,’ but that sense and direction is imposed by the story making. The writing (I’ve been feeling) draws lines that weren’t there in the living. My sibling resists, insisting that they appreciate stories — and music, and photography — precisely because all these help them understand what they’re feeling. All these are different camera lenses turned toward a piece of life, and showing something.
                One of these talks happened while we were waiting at the laundromat. Our clothes went round and round. So, I suppose, did we, playing through how our ideas curled and flopped. Maple is also a wonderful photographer. They wouldn’t say that: they would say they like looking through a camera, and they love how that practice changes the way they see light. Then today they turned around their laptop to show me a picture I love. It’s a sink, half in shadow, half in bright sun.  “Where’s that?” I asked. “At the laundromat,” they said. And I know the sink they must have been looking at when they took the picture. I’ve seen that sink, and used it. And I missed something about its fullness until I looked at it in Maple’s flat picture.
                So I don’t think that anyone can sum up her life in just three words. I’m frustrated by stories. I’m also excited about how words (and pictures) show something beside what they’re showing. How, in this moment, my window (which mostly reflects the kitchen) shows also a street lamp outside, the suggestion of a tree, a world I mostly can’t see but can’t stop feeling here.