All day long I'd planned to go home immediately after work and just work on a bunch of loose ends I needed to tie up in, oh, just about every area of my life. But when 4:35 rolled around and I stepped out of the bank, I knew I couldn't spend the evening that way. I was still feeling the loneliness of the night before (which I know had to do with this being the first weekend my son would be spending two consecutive nights with his dad and away from my home), and I knew that if I went home I would just feel Monkey's absence that much more intensely. Kenneth and Dave had invited friends over and even promised vegetarian chili. That sounded like a much better idea.
It was a small gathering tonight, which was kind of a nice change of pace. I got to see my gal Nessa, which was nice because some recent events in her life had her heavy in my thoughts of late. I was happy for the opportunity to give her a great big hug.
In a space between songs on the karaoke machine, our friend Kurt decided to present squares of paper he'd prepared for
Today's New Activity: Pictionary Telephone
So everyone knows Pictionary. And surely you'll remember the game Telephone from your childhood (meant to show the evil of rumors, you start by whispering a secret into the ear of a kid on one side of the classroom and, one by one, each kid in turn whispers to the kid next to him or her, until the last kid is asked to say aloud what he heard, which of course is nothing close to the original secret. It's actual a pretty salient lesson if you ask me). Well this game combines the two. Maybe it's a well-known game but I'd never played it before tonight. For those of you similarly unfamiliar, here's how it works:
So if you have 7 people playing, as we did tonight, you distribute a stack of 7 squares each to them. Each person is asked to think of a common phrase or movie title or anything that everyone else is likely to know (big fail in that department on a few counts tonight) and to write it on the top paper.
Each person passes the whole stack to the person beside them.
The next person reads that phrase, flips to the next, blank square, and tries to draw a representation of that phrase.
Everyone passes their stacks again, and the next person looks at the drawing, flips to the blank square and writes down the phrase they think the drawing was meant to depict.
Pass stacks and repeat until each person has the phrase they'd come up with in front of him or her.
Then you just take turns showing everyone the (de)evolution of your phrase.
Most were altered beyond recognition tonight, though a few managed to stay relatively close and one I started--"I'm a lover not a fighter"--ended how it started, despite having briefly changed to "Make Love Not War" somewhere in the middle. I thought that was pretty cool! It was late by the time we started the game, so we only played two rounds, but this is definitely one I will be revisiting. I loved that, unlike real Pictionary or Telephone, each person is always participating at every moment. There's none of that boring time spent sitting around. And the worse the drawers are, the more entertaining the outcome! Hip Hip Hooray for choosing fun, innocent games over lonely brooding tonight :)
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