Since my metaphors are a bust, then let me just stick to sweetly recalling the reasons I love you. Prominent among these many brazillions of reasons is your love for wordplay. No one is more adept with the screwiness and indecency of English, and Chinglish, than you. I would forego all the sleep in my life – as if I haven’t already! – to stay up late with you and laugh at the dumb puns we think of.
We have been thinking of turning the following list into an impulse-purchase book, to be published by a quirky imprint like Klutz and sold at the counters of franchise bookstores across the English-speaking world, and making sacks of cash, and then spending the cash on blow (JK, California state bar moral character committee, JK!!), but since you have temporarily devoted yourself to your dissertation and I have temporarily devoted myself to jumbling all of the elements of intentional torts and levels of constitutional scrutiny, I present it here, for other people to be amused by your big beautiful brain (housed as it is in your B.B.H.). We play these games with each other. You think they just kill time, but I think they make me crazy for you.
Smellera
This is a game of metaphors. I know I am supposed to be shying away from metaphors today, but I think if I had played this game more diligently then perhaps you would not have been offended by my nonsensical blogpost about those seven bright spots in the sky, because it would have made more sense.
The object of the game is to describe what the smell of an object would look like. You suggested the ingenious and silly portmanteau “Smellera” (smell + camera) as a name. One must disassociate the smell with the thing that produces the smell, consider the mood the smell evokes, and then describe another image that would evoke that mood.
Example: What would the smell of burning tires look like?
Incorrect answer: A flame consuming a stack of black rubber.
Correct answer: A little girl beaten by clowns.
Example: What would the smell of lilacs look like?
Incorrect answer: Crushed purple petals of lilacs. [That’s just too literal, folks!]
Correct answer: Four people staggering arm-in-arm down the middle of a city street just before dawn on a Sunday. One of them trips and the rest go down with her.
Respeck Direck
A simple game that mostly just makes fun of southeast Asians. (Did I write that? Oh, no! It’s backwards day! I actually love people who love music created by shaking nuts and bolts in a jar!) The game originates in an extremely tedious documentary about women-loving-women that you prefaced with your brilliant commentary one long night last May. The object of this game have a conversation incorporating as many words that end “-ect,” except to pronounce them to rhyme with “-eck.” A simple, easy-to-understand, direck game. Profoundly entertaining, but only starting in the second hour of play.
A-P-P-L-E
This game has its origin in something I saw when I returned to Brooklyn from a trip to California in the summer of 2006. You had put a single yellow Gerber daisy – I love those! – in a single-stem vase and attached a note that said, “I miss you, Lemcy!” Underneath “Lemcy,” in faint pencil, I could see that you had considered writing “Nuñez” but erased it. What was “Lemcy”? And what was “Nuñez”?
I soon learned that these were the results of a new game you had invented while I was away. The object of this game is just to create encoded words. The coding system is simple. Each letter of a word is replaced with an adjacent letter. For consonants, it’s the next or previous consonant. For vowels, it’s any vowel, and sometimes Y. Or sometimes you just ditch the requirement of adjacency and the different treatment of vowels and consonants, and you go with whatever feels right. Hence M-A-N-D-Y became N-U-N-E-Z and L-E-M-C-Y, and S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E becomes S-T-A-O-G-U-M-O-I. Most of the time the new words make no sense, but sometimes they’re great.
But you didn’t tell me the rules of this game and you started calling me Lemcy and left me to figure out what the hell you were talking about! This game is called A-P-P-L-E, because of some obscure reference to the cryptex in The Da Vinci Code.
For example, a recent actual email exchange:
Mandy: Oh Staogumoi, you're always the cleverest!
Stephanie: Nooooooo Lemc, YOU are the dmititits!
Bacne
Another very simple game. The object is to be the last person to say the word “bacne” on any given night. (“Bacne” is a portmanteau that describes the volcanic dermatological activity on the backsides of certain people’s brothers, and Gwyneth Paltrow. (I have seen the latter in person, and truth is an absolute defense to defamation!)) This game must be played in bed while both (or all) parties are extremely tired. The last person to say “bacne” wins, simple as that.
I won the first and last time we played this game!
Bacne!
I'm China Work on My Korea
One of my favorite games of all time, also a simple one. This is a game of puns on geographical names. The object of this is to have a conversation incorporating as many geographical names as possible. Everyone wins in this game.
For example:
Mandy: Staogumoi, get Djibouti in the kitchen and help me roast this Turkey!
Stephanie: Lemcy, I Canada right now! I’m China work on my Korea by finishing up this dissertation!
Mandy: Jamaican me horny. Does that Sweden the deal?
Lettuce Souprise You
There is actually a salad buffet franchise in the metro Atlanta area called “Lettuce Souprise You.” I’m not sure who thought that one would be a good idea. This game is just another variation on the pun theme, except using words related to foods found at a salad buffet and describing feelings of excitement or “souprise.” Example: “If we cantaloupe, lettuce marry!” and “You will always have a pizza my heart!”
Closely related to Women’s Reproduction, another pun game using words describing parts of female anatomy. Example: “Do you want to go out for fallopian food?” “Sure, as soon as this show is ova.”
Mondegreens
This is a game of homophony, and isn’t something we created but is something we practice. The rest of you may be familiar with this one. A mondegreen is a word or phrase that is homophonous with another. “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” is a pretty famous mondegreen. The way you make this game ours is by using your B.B.B. housed as it is in your B.B.H. to come up with incredibly weird shit. See, e.g., http://bananarchist.blogspot.com/2007/12/step-on-me-shoe.html. I am supposed to understand that, “inspiritu?” I can’t even think of an example to put here because I’m not half as clever as you.
How Big is a Crumb to a Mouse?
This is not necessarily a word game but is another game we play. It is a game of comparisons. It began because for years I have wondered the question in the game’s title, “How big does a crumb seem to a mouse?” The conclusion that you came to was simple: “As big as a biscuit seems to you.” I found this delightful, and for one hot summer we filled lazy hours asking these questions to each other. The object of the game, I think, is pretty clear, and I will illustrate by example rather than explain.
Example: How big is a ping-pong ball to a dog?
Incorrect answer: As big as a fist to you. [The answer is incorrect because it should be compared with an object of similar shape, color, texture, or theme.]
Correct answer: As big as a softball is to you.
Example: How big is a hamburger to an elephant?
Correct answer: As big as your kawaii Japanese hamburger erasers are to you.
Example: How big is a water bottle to an ant?
Correct answer: As big as a grain silo to a cat, or a sperm whale is to a minnow, or the Lipstick Building is to you.
This game is related to Miniature Dinner Party, which is not a word game at all but just a flight of fancy we like to take from time to time. We imagine how we could have a dinner party where we serve edible simulacra that will make our guests feel like tiny people. We could steam entire heads of broccoli and pretend each head is just a spear – because broccolis are fractal dendrite formations! – or boil and peel a thousand potatoes and fill a baby pool with potatoes and have our guest hold two hiking poles like chopsticks and pretend the potatoes were rice! We could spear whole chickens on sugarcanes and call them kabobs. This is also an endlessly entertaining game, and is closely related to Giant Dinner Party, where we do exactly the opposite and serve edible simulacra meant to make our guests feel like giants. Baby corn is always on the menu.
Acrostics
We fell in love fast and furious in the fall and winter of 2005-2006. For certain reasons that will go unenumerated here, we had to find a clandestine way to communicate with each other. Turns out we hid in plain sight, and I filled my blog, and you yours, with our secrets to one another. The object of this game is to tell your lover you are sorry for the ways you have wronged her, and you have faith now, and you will do better. You should do this in as direct a way as possible, e.g.:
But now I’m back in Palo Alto, and it's harder to communicate these things from afar. Unclear why I'm here. You can't do a damn thing after 9 p.m. in this tiny town, and I miss our city and our shitbox and our lives. And so I walk around with a dog that misses you terribly, and look for answers in the sky, and then misinterpret them and miswrite them and upset you. Oh, what am I saying? We've gotten out of practice. Actually, it may just be me. No one could be expected to put up with this, and I understand you want to leave. Go, sally forth, but come back soon. Just about three months will do it, right? I couldn't stand more. We can do it in less. Or, I think we should just talk until we figure something out. A lot of talking may be required. In New York. Night time, or any other time you prefer. I'll be there in a week.
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