Reader, my humility. Humility, all my readers. Have the 2 of you met?

Clearly I turn multiple shades of fierce when it comes to certain things *cough*. This list includes but is not limited to:

• how I feel about Charmed
• who's allowed to touch, nay look, at my personal computer
• how I feel about leaving glasses of water around the house (I do this. A lot. And it is good.)
• how I feel about baristas attaching the lid of my coffee cup so the opening is RIGHT on the seam (just... don't)
• flickr's "design"
• my lifelong desire to go skinny dipping

Included in this list is how I feel about playing games. How much do I love it? I *FUCKING* love it, almost as much as I *FUCKING* love getting foot massages. Card games, video games, board games, you name it and I'm totally there. The only real negative to my insatiable love for the competitive is that I *HATE* losing. Boy oh boy do I hate losing. Let's just say it's good for my mental health that my skill level is higher than the norm when it comes to these mental gymnastics (Grand Master World Champion MarioKart 64™ title-holder 7 years and running, Duke Nukum 3-D phenom, No One Lives Forever 2 girl wonder, and I can hold my own when it comes to Scrabble) or I'd be probably be one of those people spending 14 hours a day in World of Warcraft getting a life.

Basically every game comes down to strategy. For me everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) deconstructs to patterns, mathematical equations, quickly sussing out and exploiting weaknesses, but mostly just puzzling out the most efficient route to victory... whatever the cost. If I could mathematically chart the electrical drama playing out in my brain, this performance would read like Fibonacci's Book of Calculation. Beautiful and elegant in every way... aaaaand completely indecipherable to most everyone, including myself.

Last night I played 5 and a ½ hours of Rummy 500. Five. And a half. HOURS. But the most interesting thing about 5 ½ hours of card playing is not that I'm constantly winning (*yawn*), it's that it's nothing at all like 5 ½ hours of video game playing. You can be dirt tired, eyes half open, moving your little thumbs around a console controller in complete darkness at 4 in the morning and still winning, but not so much in a game where you're physically interacting with another human being. What's my biggest weakness when it comes to playing cards? Definitely not my transparent poker-face (cuz that's usually true), it's that when I'm tired I am *FUCKING* tired.

Fatigue people.

My mental threshold can only take so much before I physically collapse on the floor in a heap of numbers and strategy and strings and suits and equations and a mental catalogue of everything in my opponent's hand and a mental catalogue of everything that's happened in the game up until the point when I'm on my back with my eyes closed waiting for the opponent to fucking take their god damned turn already. Shit. I am only one person and can only win so many times before I'm completely wiped (and not to mention bored with winning all the god damned time).

Let's just say it's a good thing my record is 6-2 8-2 or I wouldn't be forming complete sentences today. That's right bitches, when it comes to Rummy 500 you can suck it long and suck it hard. I am the queen and I will school you. And when you lose I will happily take payment on the foot massage within 24 hours of said victory... just in case there was any confusion and you were thinking of fleeing the state before paying up. I mean, I'm just sayin'.

That is all.

[Oops, now it looks like I'm 8-2.]