So I learned how to play Gin Rummy yesterday. I might have learned how before, I’m not sure. I pick up things like this pretty quick and then forget them just as easily. This is also the case with media, for me; I forget what happens in books and movies right away and can’t really tell you very much about even my favorites unless you really sit me down and make me focus. I think this isn’t so much that I’m a bad reader or viewer or stupid so much as it is a defense mechanism I’ve developed — I’m so affected by those experiences that if I can’t forget them I’ll a) go insane and b) never get anything done (those two are kind of the same thing, I think; I realize I just equated productivity with sanity and I hope you all know I mean the healthy kind of productivity, not the manic pointless kind that isn’t really productivity at all). The point is the only card game I can ever remember the rules to is Egyptian Ratscrew and that’s only because it’s pretty much all muscle memory and I always always win at it and so have really good mental associations attached to it. This means there’s a steep learning curve for re-teaching me any game, and little time in between that and when I start getting super good, super competitive, and super annoying at it. I am only really fun to play games with for like… one or two rounds of anything, or after I’ve been playing a game consistently over like ten years and I’ve tempered out all these emotions (I.e. soccer, for example, or Mario Kart).
So Gin Rummy. The learning curve, this time, was not only really steep (wow, SO MANY RULES) but also overly emotionally involved. Which is expected given that it’s the end of the semester and so a point of reflection over my latest chapter in life, and all the little integrity-conscious parts of my brain are running everything through an evaluative “how does this all fit together in the grand scheme of things” filter. So I just CAN’T figure out Gin Rummy at first. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m having the hardest time figuring out which cards to keep, which cards to play, which cards to discard. It feels like instant death every turn. And everyone else thinks it’s sooooo fun but I don’t see how that can possibly be the case, and then my subconscious and conscious selves bump into each other in some hallway in the back of my head and then I get it: the whole thing is this big jokey metaphor for how awfully unpracticed I am at making decisions.
Then I get really excited and I want to, have to learn how to get good at this because I realize it’s not just about winning a game, it’s about being able to live. That is a huge jump to a huge conclusion I know, but it’s not untrue that games like this teach and inform our understanding of the world around us and how we interact with it. At the Glen West fiction workshop this summer, Melissa Pritchard told us to make a list of all the games we played as a kid — she said it would help us understand the way we understand power structures. She’s totally right. Games are like war and love, but no one dies or cries. Well, sometimes — and that’s how you know they’re not just games and all that. They mean something. There are reasons we have fun.
The guy teaching me Gin Rummy, when I quickly glossed over this whole theory with him, pointed out: “Yeah, you’re having a really hard time discarding stuff.” He’s totally right… I kept ending up with a hand full of almost-awesome-but-never-played straights, and negative points. The analogy here being: the problem I have in life is that I want it all. That this results in an inability to make decisions which ultimately plunges me into paralysis, where I can’t finish my turn and so other people can’t take theirs. We never get anything done. It becomes insane. It stops being fun for everyone.
We gotta get things done, though. There is a lot to do in this world. So I will try to remember Gin Rummy. Practice picking cards up and discarding them. Keep playing, keep having fun. Crying and dying and all.
