Our New Year's pirate party plans have just been cancelled - should you feel the piratey vibe coming on, or have a P party coming up, or just like to dress like Jack Sparrow at home (hey, I don't judge), see my gumtree posting here:
Go on, you know you want to!
At the urging of my lovely sister, here's my first rockitgirl book review.
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players - Stefan Fatsis
Okay, so I'm a weirdo about some subjects. I have an interest in vaguely academic or geeky things that can stretch to reading a whole book about, say, competitive scrabble. So the author had me at hello. But he hooked me with a strong, non-fiction story about his own ascent (or descent) into becoming as similarly obsessed with the game as those he set out intending to profile. What started as a quirky little news piece became an engrossing, 3-year long project for him, and he is very frank about his own participation in how the story unfolds.
The competitors are kooky, the word strategies and letter combinations they use bizarre and nothing near conversational, and the dollar pay-off for devoting your life to the game minimal. But while you pity the players he profiles, it's warming to read about their victories and interesting to see how they bicker among themselves while remaining fiercely protective of each other. You identify really strongly with Fatsis when he ponders what led these people to do this as their life's work, and why they didn't go the straight route, get a job, and play with their families on weekends - and why he himself, with his ever-growing competitiveness and interest in the game, never had even a fleeting thought about taking Scrabble up professionally in his youth. The author taps into your (my) own small interest in geekiness, in languages, in math, to make you relate, just a little, to these strange people.
But maybe if there was a little more money involved it wouldn't seem so strange, and that's really where the heart of the book lies. These players are in it for little more than the rush of playing the perfect game of Scrabble, and that element would most likely disappear should the tournaments ever take place on a larger scale, with more of a payback. Proper weirdos they may be, but dedicated ones too.
An interesting read, 7 out of 10.
Next review: JM Coetzee - Slow Man
One of the magazines I work on is a North London property showcase magazine, wrapped up in a pretty celebrity cover. I love working on the mag, don't get me wrong, but the fact that's it's a 164 pager with only 32 pages of editorial stands to show how sales reliant it is.
As it's a monthly, every month I have a pagination meeting that takes place 4 working days before we send the files to the printer, wherein we place the property pages in the magazine, giving certain pages certain placements due to varying factors. So while it's a mag that most people who see Charlize or Jennifer or George on the cover would drop after a quick page flick, everything about the less street-cred parts of the mag is actually carefully considered.
So, in the run-up to this meeting, I chase down property copy and get most of the 100-odd pages in the day before the meeting. It's been an effort to try and commit to memory the many ampersand-joined names of estate agents... who all sound the same... all starting with a G... yup, the Goldhott & Barrets, Gordon & Hollasts, Gargoyle & Hounds, and Gurgle & Splutters of this world all get in touch with me once a month. So once everything's in, I take down The List of Pages, and sit at a desk far far away from my incessantly ringing telephone, and compare the pages in my hands with said List. Now, being new to this whole system before my promotion about 5 months ago, I have stumbled and bumbled my way into getting it badly wrong sometimes, getting it perfectly right sometimes, and somewhere in-between the two extremes most times. And when it does go wrong, even for the slightest second, the weirdest thing happens to me.
My face goes HOT.
This is a completely new thing for me. To be 24 and have a brand new bodily experience is something very, very strange. I have handled far more stress and responsibility than this in the past but somehow, the combination of 100 estate agents' pages staring back at me, silently whispering "you're confused! you don't know which of us is which, do you?" and the distant sound of a deadline clock steadily increasing in tempo and volume as the time draws to a close, seems to throw up the switch that turns my face hot. Even sitting here now, thinking of this happening to my face today as I counted up (the figures eventually all worked out, thanks for asking), I can't actually recreate the feeling at will. But it ALWAYS happens at this particular time. Even when I come up with one page short when I expected to.
Freaky right?
The good news is, the intensity of the heat seems to be diminishing with every issue. While I can step back and tell myself, no-one is judging your capacity to handle responsibility by this, because you might have just not counted right, it could be a problem elsewhere, and hey, you're the only one who knows about this right now so you can remedy it quietly, this mechanism seems to have burrowed into the bit of my brain that deals with this activity every month.
I'm not cracking up, I promise! But if you feel like a small gift of chocolate would remedy the situation, by all means...
Or, in our case, cheap tree with fibre optics and sherry.
Christmas is rolling around and, the horror of it all, our plans have fallen through, as the friend we were spending it with is lucky enough to be flying home to SA.
Christmas has always been this huge deal for my family, with everyone going to visit my folks in Knysna, and it sounds like this year is no different.
The second year away from home is maybe harder than the first, as at least in the first year you have a really obvious reason for being homesick. We were lucky in that we were living in a huge flatshare last year, so had a huge, fun-filled Christmas without having to really make any major plans.
So now, we might be going to Scotland. It's not guaranteed yet - I'm not really sure I'm in synch with my expendable income even talking about going - but it may be nice to play in the snow and see something new this year.
Whatever your plans are this year, have a lovely one, and don't snog your boss at the Christmas party.
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