Hurricanes Make For Belated Birthday Parties

Thanks to Hurricane Power Outage, S's birthday party was postponed over a month later. Instead of cooking out with a summer theme, we grilled, ate inside, and rocked the PS3.

The game of Life is very similar to life itself. It is very long. I involves highs like graduating and lows like being forced to go to a wedding and chip in for an expensive gift. It allows you to buy a house, but you can choose only from those you match up in a game of memory. It encourages you to have children--actually, it forces you--so that you can cash them in at the end of the game when you retire. Mr. Potato Head runs a dance contest and acts as the judge any time someone sues someone else. You can make long term investments that grow when other players land on your number when they spin. You can take a gamble on short term investments that don't pan out. You can go to college or go straight to work. It allows you to choose from a bunch of jobs based on how many pieces of real mail you click on instead of the junk mail that floods the mailbox. Sometimes you can buy a boat. You have to pay back your loans.

Really, life gives you more leeway, more flexibility, and more choices than the game of Life. That's why the game of Life was fun--it was really entertaining to watch everyone get forced into paying five grand for someone else having a baby. It was fun to choose two people to sue each other and get to sit back and stay out of it, them having no recourse.

And by the end of the game--that came much later, after a grilled dinner made by flashlight and a few glasses of Arnold Palmer, both spiked and not--we each tallied up our lives to see who was worth what at the very end.

Eddie finished first and lost much of his earnings having never paid back his loan. He had escaped to the countryside where no one could steal his life points, but there, he could not gain any more either.
S, R, and I all finished pretty quickly after that, none of us going out into the fields. Rather, we stayed in civilization and stole each other's life points as we could.

In the end, Eddie came in dead last. I was second to that. R won with S behind by a very slim margin. That of course leads me to wonder why the hell Mike is still smiling in very last place. Maybe that's what life is about. Since you can't take it with you, you can retire out in the middle of nowhere, broke but happy.