October. A guy down the road is washing his car and doing yardwork, with the Seahawks game blasting on the radio. It's 1:15 in the afternoon, and despite daylight savings time, the sunlight outside has a creepy golden look to it, suspiciously autumnal. Somebody, somewhere, must be burning leaves; funny how, you never SEE anybody burning leaves in the fall, but you can always smell: smoke, and wood, and something decaying.
...And of course, there's that unmistakable feeling of blocked sinuses, clogged ears, stuffiness, dizziness, lightheadedness, preceeding a cold or a sinus infection. Fucken hell. It NEVER fails.
Here, fall is the most insidious season. Winter isn't any big deal, really. It gets cold, sure, but not so cold that you can't walk to the mailbox in bare feet. In winter, there are no arctic below-zero windstorms, no blizzards... Nobody owns a snow-shovel: a fact that has been astounding me for the past two years. It doesn't snow here because the Califonians would have fits. It probably snowed in Olympia a long, long time ago, before Californians got the idea to wander on up this way, but they elected some "liberal" government officials who passed some legislation banning snow. "Liberating" the Californians. Well, whatever; doesn't bother ME a bit. I hate snow. Winters are okay here. It's the autumn that's awful. I can't really explain why; it's just a vague feeling of waning...
Jake and I had a very interesting night last night. We were feeling sort of bored, so we slipped downtown to the Alano Club, a little building on Fourth Avenue (Olympia's version of "Main Street, U.S.A."), dedicated to serving cheap coffee (fifty cents a cup! ...but no refills, and no decaf...), and facilitating Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It's got one room that's sort of like a coffeehouse room, where everybody wanders around and socializes and drinks coffee and smokes, and a meeting room, where the AA meetings are actually held. There was a meeting at 8, and another at 10, so in between, Jake and I played chess.
I'd never played chess with Jake. Matter of fact, I haven't played with anybody for a couple of years. Jürgen refused to play chess, due to some traumatic chess experience he remembered all too vividly, but would never speak of. I don't have too many friends anymore who even know how to play. I don't even remember my last game. When Jake asked if I wanted to play, I was hesitant. I've never won a game of chess, EVER. Once, I stale-mated a game with Mike. But I never, ever won. I'm too defensive. And my brain can't process more than one or two moves, MAX, at a time. Once, I think Mike (who taught me to play) was trying to arrange the game so that I WOULD win, but I still didn't.
Jake and I are fairly evenly matched at most intellectual things. He reads a little bit faster than me, and types a little bit faster than me, but I can spell better and I make fewer typos. I'm good at creative problem solving; Jake's good at remembering millions of details. Jake knows how to do things I can't even fathom (i.e., things under the hood of the truck; I didn't even know how to open that thing up...); and I'm good at knowing bizarre little facts (the Chinese word for "vampire," for example: "kiang-shi") that occasionally come up in conversation and make me look way smarter than I am... All in all, there's no team in the world more prepared for catastrophe than Jake and me. Once, we took the same IQ test, and got the same score, although we got all different answers right. Together, I think we're probably two halves of a genius. Separately, we're pretty evenly matched at everything. Except, of course, in tickle-fights, which Jake invariably wins.
But CHESS?
I suck at chess.
I learned to play in 1998, and NEVER WON A GAME.
I informed Jake of this. He didn't care. He wanted to play anyway.
Dammit. I've seen him play chess online a time or two, and he really looks like he knows what he's doing... Certainly, he does, compared with me; I'm usually standing over his shoulder yelling, "don't let him get your Horse-Thing!!!" Occasionally, for effect, I whinny.
*sigh*
Well, I'll be damned if I didn't win the game last night. I think it was just dumb luck. When I made the final move, I knew it was a good one, but I didn't know I'd WIN... Reagrdless, of course, I announced my victory to everybody in the Alano Club, and everybody congratulated me. Jake sort of sulked. It was a merry sort of sulking, though. He's not a sore loser. We played again, and of course, his chess pieces beat my chess pieces to a bloody pulp. He killed my Horse-Things almost immediately. Horse-Things are my favorite pieces.
Anyway, there's not a whole lot of a point to this story. Just that I won my first chess game EVER last night, October 25, 2003, at approximately 9:30 PM. Make a note; this will probably never happen again.
Love, peace, and all things warm and delicious...
~Helena*