Mind games

I love to play games with myself. I establish goofy challenges and criteria to entertain myself. I make up elaborate stories about strangers and create tiny worlds with any little facts I can glean.

I worked for my little sister for a while, and my job involved data entry of customer contracts. Making up games about people in the contracts distracted me so much I’d rush into my sister’s office to tell her the story: “Look! This guy’s birthday is this weekend! Oh my God, he’s almost 70. I bet his kids don’t love him enough and that’s why he’s alone. Look where he lives. I bet he’s going to throw a party for himself this weekend. Isn’t that sad? His kids should throw the party. I hope people go to his party. I hope his co-workers show up.”

She’d look up at me from her computer for a nano-second, “Mmm-hmm.” We’re sisters. We have decades of experience at tuning each other out.

My current favorite game is one you can play too—in addition to making up facts about strangers. It’s called “Next Blog.” I didn’t actually invent this game, but I swear it’s tons of fun anyway. At the top of my blog on the right hand side in the Blogger toolbar, there’s a link that says “Next Blog.” Click on it. But then use your back arrow to come back here!

Every time you click on that button, you’ll get a different result. I love it. Now I get to make up stories about the bloggers who went to the trouble to create such wildly varied destinations for me. I went through a phase where every time I played “Next Blog,” I’d end up on a site written in a different language. That made me sad. I felt left out of the fun. It added a new dimension to “Next Blog” though because I’d try to pick out the words I knew and see if I could figure out what the blog was about. Lots of the blogs were in Spanish. I know “corazon,” cerveza,” “bano.” Not really helpful at the blog game. Once I found an Asian language site that was all about flowers. Oh I loved that one. The flowers were beautiful and exotic confections of swirling pink, but I didn’t know where they were or what they were.

The only “Next Blog” game website I’ve bookmarked was a self-help site about finding your spiritual center. I got there by following a link from a clinically depressed person’s blog. The site made me laugh because it was so serious, but it kind of scared me because some of the self-improvement tips were deeply inspirational. I don’t really want to be inspired by the “links I enjoy” on a blog that says “Today I found a new guru.” It just sounds too out of context to my life.

Tonight I “Next Blogged” I Heart to Blog. It’s kinda weird stuff about graphic design and Apple computers, but I like it. It looks like there’s some entertaining links on there that I look forward to following.

So what’s “I Heart to Blog’s” story? I thought he was a guy. My first made up story starred “I Heart to Blog” as a guy. Guys like Apple computers. He’s not. He’s she. I think she thinks about stuff too much like I do cause the title is tongue-in-cheek. She also thinks too much about shoes. I also think she’s the go-to-guy at her company for computer questions the tech support crew can’t handle. Or she’s totally free-lance and that’s why she loves Apple. I don’t think she’ll ever “Next Blog” me because she doesn’t have the standard-issue Blogger toolbar. It’s a shame. She’s missing out.