Summer vacation on facebook?

Well, my vacation’s over, so it was back to the grind for me today. No more sleeping in till 9:00, no more naps, no more…hmm. No more what exactly?

I have to admit I kind of frittered away this two-week holiday. I didn’t actually do much, other than recover from Bluesfest. I played a little guitar. I ate a lot of fruit. And I finally found something worth doing on Facebook.

I’ve been on Facebook for a few months, but I just didn’t get why people liked it. I kept reading on other people’s blogs that they were trying to cut back on their Facebook time because it was a big addictive time-waster for them.

God knows I have an addictive personality, so how come I wasn’t getting hooked on Facebook?

I kept going back there and poking around, thinking there must be some whole other layer of Facebook that everybody else knew about but I hadn’t discovered yet. I watched to see what other people were doing, and it seemed they were all ‘poking’ each other and ‘tickling’ each other, and joining groups and leaving groups and posting photos of themselves drinking or looking in the mirror. And every time I went there, I’d run out of things to do after about five minutes, and then I’d get bored and leave.

I did run into a few people from the past, and that was kind of cool at first. But then it just felt kind of weird, like standing around awkwardly at some contrived intersection of the past and present, wondering what you’re supposed to do next.

Anyway, I’m not here to complain about how I don’t fit into Facebook, I’m here to tell you I finally found my Facebook niche. It’s Scrabble! I finished off my vacation with two days and 23 games of Facebook Scrabble. Sometimes I had half a dozen games going at once: I felt like that chessmaster who plays everybody in the room simultaneously, except he wins all his games.

I’m a pretty good Scrabble player but my stats aren’t great because I mostly play with Debbie and Robin and they’re both phenomenal players. However I do beat all the strangers regularly, as well as my little sister Kerry.

Kerry lacks that cut-throat competitive gene that the rest of the family shares. You can tell she spent too many years playing those cooperative hippie games with her children. She sees a Triple Word Square and immediately sets it up perfectly for me. She doesn’t care who gets it, as long as it doesn’t go to waste. I beat her 419 to 189 the other day.

At the other end of the competitive spectrum, I’m playing someone who refuses to end the game because I’m just one tile away from winning and she doesn’t like any losses in her stats! (Do you think it’s petty of me to be pissed off about that? Because I am.)

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