Even when I win, I lose

M and I played Scrabble last night, for the first time in ages. Last time we played, about six or seven years ago, he kicked my butt. I got stomped. I will admit that my journalistic pride was wounded, and my vocabularic ego was knocked down a notch.

I mean, really. He's an engineer after all. Not that he's not brilliant, he is, it's just that his idea of fine literature is "I Am Spock" by Leonard Nimoy. He's the type of guy who would try to make the word tricorder on the board.

And he kicked my ass. This wasn't a close-call...it could go either way depending on the tiles we have left at the end sort of thing. Nope. It was a full-on trouncing. He won, hands down. To put it in sports perspective, it was the Scrabble equivalent of when the Cardinals played the Red Sox in the World Series a few years ago. It was disgraceful, and I hung my head in shame.

I also put the Scrabble box away and didn't even look at it again until last night.

Feeling quite cocky (for whatever reason, who knows), I brought it upstairs after spotting it on a laundry run. "Hey...wanna play?"

I was in the mood for takin' down his cute little engineer butt and proving my worth as a self-respecting grammar queen.

We played, and I won, which was good, and I felt great, until I read the directions on the inside of the box lid that said, "A good player will score 300-400 points during a 2-player game." I had 255. Ego slashed, once again.

Damn you, Milton Bradley.