When friends tell me that they are trying to give up smoking, I suggest they take up solitaire. As a reward for having completed a task, as a mini-holiday from everyday stress, as a means of improving one's mood without a doctor's prescription, the game offers many of the same benefits as cigarettes, only it's cheaper and doesn't have the harmful effects of tar and nicotine. When I gave up smoking, it wasn't because I'd replaced it with the pleasures with solitaire. It's more that the pleasures of solitaire remind me of what I used to like about smoking.
I learned to play solitaire as a child. Its advantages over other games were obvious, even then. No need to persuade a friend to play or explain the boring rules, no hard feelings when someone won or lost, no lessons required, no costly equipment to badger my parents into buying. I could play whenever and wherever I wanted. All I needed was a deck of cards.
The cards were a problem: 52 slips of paper conspiring to hide in the couch cushions or at the bottom of my toy basket. Laying them out required space: a dining table, a desk.
Computer solitaire solved all that. I remember when I learned. I told the department secretary at the college where I was teaching that I was having trouble switching over (young people won't know what this means) from using computer key commands to using a mouse. She said that playing computer solitaire was a great way of getting comfortable with the mouse. She demonstrated the basics — and that, as they say, was that.
I know maybe a dozen writers hooked on computer solitaire. It's the ideal writer's game. It even feels a little like writing, only more relaxing. You're sitting at the same desk, working with the same keyboard and monitor. You don't even have to get up. Like writing, it's entirely private, the exertion is purely cerebral; you're playing against yourself, against your previous best, against the law of averages and the forces of chance. You're taking random elements and trying to put them together in a pleasing way, to make order out of chaos.
No wonder so many writers (including myself) play more solitaire than we should. All I have to do is complete a decent paragraph to feel I've earned the right to take a break and play a few games. Like many sports, it's right on the border between addiction and pastime. That's why teaching someone to play computer solitaire can feel like the equivalent of a giving a junkie that first shot, though the toll it takes isn't in money or health, but in time, the writer's most precious gift.
Of course, there are moments when I think: what a ridiculous waste! I keep resolving to quit. But how could I ever give up that little burst of hope whenever a new game deals itself out, or the lightly adrenalized buzz of seeing the cards, when I've won, bounce in joyous cascades across the screen and set off computer solitaire's version of fireworks?
Continue reading "Games People Play": Tennis: Love-Love by James Atlas, Ping-Pong: Head Game by Pico Iyer, Poker Is America by Charles A. Murray and Frisbee: Ultimate Sport by Jason Lucero.
Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of "The Turning."
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Opinion: Solitaire: Me vs. Me
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2013/02/opinion-solitaire-me-vs-me.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Opinion: Solitaire: Me vs. Me
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar