Friendly Competition
It’s a sign of adulthood when you pull every muscle in your body painting the family room. So, clearly I’m an adult. But in so many ways, I’m operating on a 7th grade level. Fortunately for me, my friends are no better. I have a friend we used to call the Organizer. But it’s weird to call people by titles like that unless you’re in the mafia, which we aren’t. So we’ll just call her Matilda. Matilda and I have always competed. At everything. But it’s always friendly and all in good fun. And you never really know who’s going to win, because we are both insanely obsessed with victory. (At the end of the post, you can watch a YouTube clip where I was clearly not the winner.)
This morning was a little unusual in the sense that I had to stop by Todd’s office to deal with some documents. While standing around waiting for a page to print, I started throwing darts. I was just killing time, chucking darts at the board like bricks. It was more like a shot put contest. Matilda saw my form and in my form she saw an opportunity. She’s pretty good at darts. And again, she likes to win. So she piped up.
“I’ll play ya,” she said, with a game on tone to her voice. Well, duh.
“OK,” I said. “But I’ve never played an actual game of darts.”
“I’ll teach you as we go. We’ll play 501,” she said.
She sniffed fresh game. She was on the hunt. I went first. My first three throws were nothing special. I was mediocre with a technique that could get its own reality show. Matilda went next, throwing just enough better to worry me. We traded turns, whittling down our 501 and trying to be the first to 0.
When you get to the end, you have to be precise. If you are 20 points from 0, you have to get precisely 20 in your turn. She got down to 7. Bummer. That’s hard to do. I got down to 30. And in one fell swoop, I hummed up a beauty and it landed in 15. I hummed a second one and it landed in 15. 15 + 15 is 30. Booyah. Guess I don’t stink at darts even if I do look like I need a horse tranquilizer while I’m playing.
So Matilda did what any 40-something would do when they lose. She threw a tantrum and invited me to stop by tomorrow morning for a rematch.
Game on, sistah. Hope she practices. Sheesh.
Snappshots.com 