Wordle - a controlled substance
I have a problem. Or an advantage. I’m not sure which. I can focus forever because I have a very high boredom threshold. I’m that kid on the swing that keeps saying: “do it again!” laughing with delight when you’ve long-since gotten tired of pushing higher and higher. The opposite of ADD.
Likely my family could point out earlier examples, but the first I can think of is when I wrote my Masters Research Paper. I had three weeks to analyze the data I’d collected, do the literature review, and write the paper. I was starting a job after that and I knew if I didn’t get it done, I never would. For 21 days, I sat in the living room of my apartment surrounded by roommate activity. I bashed away on my old 1990 computer, surrounded by books, research notes, and computer printouts (no internet - all hard copy research). Nothing distracted me. I’d get up to make coffee and go outside for smoke breaks (don’t judge) and work from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. 7 days/week until it was done. I just did it.
In law school, I took a consulting job to create a concordance table between an historic piece of legislation and its replacement act. I’ll spare you the excruciating details but suffice it to say, this was a mother of a job resulting in a 1700 line 26 column sortable excel spreadsheet. Hours of painstaking work with the only reward being the much-needed paycheque. Boring? Objectively yes, but you find a way to make it interesting. Sometimes speed. Sometimes elegance of presentation. Whatever gets you through.
This is the positive side of my focus.
The less positive has reared its ugly head again lately. You all know Wordle, right? The online word game designed by some guy named Wardle to keep his partner occupied during COVID. You can read the story here. But Wardle didn’t invent Wordle - my sister, Cathy, and I invented it 25 years ago. We took the basic Mastermind game and turned into a way to entertain ourselves. We just called it “the game.” We got really, really good at the game on a train trip to Quebec City. We walked around the old city looking for benches to have another round quizzing each other with increasingly difficult words - words that contain unusual letter combinations, words longer than five letters, words that have multiples of the same letter, word where the only vowel is “y.” Point is, we didn’t get bored. At all.
Then came obsessions with various computer games. I did so much Spider Solitaire in my law school days, I finally removed it from my laptop. I couldn’t sit near people who played it in employment law class because it distracted me from the finer points of legal content. With the advent of Internet based games came new more communal ways to pass endless hours - Farmville for example, featured large in the early months of my relationship with Jack. After we moved into the house, we’d play online hearts together.
I have had a Sudoku addiction that has lasted decades, really amping up during early COVID when I was devouring books-full of it to distract myself from my anxiety about the future of the world. And then there’s jigsaw puzzles. They’re not really fun when all you can do is feverishly do them until they are finished.
Jack and I had our own card game - SkipBo - that we played for hours in our yard in the summer, over the dining room table in the winter, and on holiday (even the Rocky Mountaineer, photographed above). During his cancer treatment, we’d play in the hospital, our peels of laughter and good-natured cursing at one another attracting the attention of hospital staff, volunteers, and other patients. I’d take advantage of the dopiness that resulted from the Benadryl they’d give him to make the chemo go in smoothly and kick his ass at the game. Late in his life, when his brain started to lose its grip on reality, I’d use SkipBo as a tool to assess capacity. But never once did I get bored with the game.
When COVID started, I convinced my COVID comrade, my omicrony, Janice, to get her own Bananagrams banana and we figured out a social-distanced version of the fast paced game that tests our ability to rearrange letters to make our own crosswords. We have played countless games, some outside, some by Zoom, and for a brief period of COVID safety, some in the comfort of my dining room. We have laughed and learned; there is no way you can think of virus-spread when your opponent is saying Peel Peel Peel Peel every second. (if you know the game, you’ll know what I’m talking about - if you don’t, do yourself a favour and buy a banana).
But Wordle. Oh Wordle. When I saw Twitterers posting those green, grey, and yellow boxes it was like dangling a Beggin strip in front of Bidi and Molly. I knew I would have to test myself on this new craze. (The bloody thing was co-invented by me, remember.). I waited a couple of weeks and then couldn’t resist - I Tweeted a message asking whether I should try it. Immediate response - only one a day. You’re safe.
So every morning, while I eat my egg on toast and drink my espresso, I enter the methadone clinic at this URL: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/. I’m given one dose of Wordle which gives me a 10 minute high (at most).
Tick tick tick tick tick - the minutes turn into hours as I wait for the next to be posted.