Estrogen and English Degrees Make You Fail At Scrabble.

I came to a conclusion while talking to my friend Hot Musician II (to differentiate him from the first Hot Musician that I introduced you to earlier) that my beloved Scrabble is more than just a game - it is an allegory for my life. It all began when I foolishly started challenging any and all iPhone carrying friends to Scrabble games, thanks to the iPhone app "Words with Friends". I have a BA in English and sometimes like to think it makes me the greatest of all Scrabble players because, duh, it's words and the spelling of them and I derive a sick, sick amount of pleasure doing that every day as it is. (I won't even begin to detail how excited I get when I catch things my spell checker doesn't. Now you know my shame.) Reality, however, is annoyingly far from that misconception and it really just means that I feel worse about myself when I lose... which is frustratingly often.

Anyway, it just so happened that I was losing spectacularly to Hot Musician II and... 3 other friends in 3 other games at the same time. Huh.

"Clearly the Scrabble gods are trying to teach me humility," I said to him. "At present, I am losing 4 games. And guess what my major was in college? Oh, yeah. English. I minored in French and Italian because I always had such an easy time with language. UNTIL SCRABBLE. That proves how useless college is right there."

"That's why you never play songwriters, college girl, I didn't even graduate high school!" Hot Musician II laughed at me. Damn it.

"What an allegory for higher education versus the real world. Book learnin' is great but if you don't have the smarts to know how to work with what's in front of you, you're just as fucked. I think my failure is also reflective of being a woman, too, because my brain keeps trying to complicate it. Like, I could have all the letters for 'zoo' but my head will be like, 'dude, you could totally do 'zoology' if you could just get another g, o, and y and can find a place to play it.' While most men would be like, 'Fuck it! ZOO! Woo 38 points!!!' But because I feel compelled to hold onto my letters and wait because something amazing will surely happen! And then, it's the end of the game and there is nowhere to play and I end up with something as anticlimactic as 'zit'. So thanks, Scrabble, for exacerbating my disgust with a useless degree and cementing the fact that I am a crazy, over thinking woman with too much education, no common sense and an overabundance of estrogen."

Hot Musician II laughed at me again and played "COZ" for 16 points.