it's just a game...

pfffshwwwt! what a fizzler of a long weekend. I can warn you right off that I didn't get to Etretat, or anywhere for that matter, grrrrr....
Being newly installed in our current district confers the extreme pleasure of being virtual neighbours to Mr and Mrs Smug & Self-Satisfied up the road, a recently married couple of teachers (yes, well therein lies your first problem*) that my boyfriend has known for a while.
We get a call from Mr SSS Friday night, would we like to come over for dinner on Saturday? Monsieur automatically agrees, reorganises our entire weekend schedule (and as far as I’m concerned sacrifices our entire Saturday so we can go to this dinner thing). Ok, admittedly since moving to Paris, I feel a little uprooted, and I need plans – especially for weekends. It helps me feel grounded and gives me something to look forward to during the week. And if the plans get changed in any serious way, I get quite surprisingly upset. This is a pretty recent neurosis, so I do hope I get over it.
Anyway, the dinner was fine, Mr and Mrs SSS were tolerably smug, and there were a couple of other mutual friends over as well, one of whom had brought a stack of board/strategy/society games with him.
Let the games begin.
So, I’m approaching the third decade of life, but there are some things that don’t evolve much beyond childhood. One of those things is probably boardgame politics. I’ve learnt to lose (ahem, relatively) gracefully (well, I don’t storm out of the room anymore at least). But another thing I’m used to is a standard initiation process of explaining the actual rules before the games massacre. The first game we played, well I lost in the ‘came last’ sense. Which didn’t bother me overly much, what did bug me was the general obsession coming from my left (Mrs SSS) regarding how many points I had throughout the entire game. Even though I had less than her, it wasn’t enough to keep her happy. Even though she finished quite ahead of me, she managed to throw this little barb my way;
‘but if I hadn’t had my bonus points I would’ve had one point less than you’
(say it in your best snipey voice, no - snipier, yup, better...)
?????! Evidently I’d committed a severe faux pas in not losing by enough.

Never mind.

The next day we ended up there again, for more board games (joy), in which we went through the same process of vague explanation of rules and you’re on your own. After another abysmal failure I got the hang of some strategies and tried to get a bit more proactive in the second game. This is where Mr SSS decided to quash any ideas I might have had about competing and proceeded to launch an attack on me at every turn. Let me point out that I wasn’t winning, I wasn’t going to win, I was simply holding my own. And then HE criticised me for playing to remove the handicaps he was continually putting in place (second faux pas, trying to stay in the game).

This all sounds terribly childish in the end, but it really irked me. And I don’t want to play with them anymore *pout*

*no intention to imply that all teacher to teacher marriages result in insufferable couples, if you're a teacher and reading this, and getting upset enough to want to write a big red F on your computer screen....