Stressed out by a Monopoly Devil - July 4th with C&C

原文多图 http://www.guiyanggal.com/2007/07/06/stressed-out-by-a-monopoly-devil-july-4th-with-cc/en/

For the 4th of July we did the drive up to Foster City to meet up with some of Marsha’s friends for the traditional American Independence Day celebration: barbecue and fireworks.

Crystal and Cashin had a beautiful home, one that had Marsha scrambling through their furniture catalogs in hope of getting something as nice. Marsha had brought enough food for an army of Atkins-eaters, and in combination with the spread that C&C had, we ended up with a Martha-Stewartesque buffet of culinary delights that looked like it was ripped from the pages of a magazine.

Like most of Marsha’s friends that I’ve met, the guy is low-key, friendly and nice, whereas the girl is on the far end of the bell curve for normality. Basically, turn right at the median and keep going and going to the end. Don’t get me wrong: the females are smart and attractive, but they also have steel cores wrapped by velvet covers, and they really know what they want.

The topics ranged from the possibility of using a magnifying glass as a barbecue grill to the critical terms every presentation must have (”synergy,” “paradigm,” and “make your business easier”) to blood types and the effect on personality. Which is how conversation goes when it’s a lazy day and you have good food and good company: random leaps between topics, just talking about whatever seems interesting at the time, with a breadth of coverage that seems surprising the day afterwards.

Crystal started asking me for biographical information — blood type, blood types of my parents, astrological sign, so on and so forth, and it eventually transpired that she was running a statistical analysis on me and came up with some really good guesses about my personality and tendencies. She builds financial and statistical models as a profession, so apparently she loves to apply the same principles in her everyday life! Some readers use tea leaves, some read palms, but Crystal goes with Rh factors and blood type and does a scarily good job.

Unfortunately, after dinner, we did the most exhausting thing possible: we played Monopoly.

Monopoly is a rite of passage for American children, the purest expression of Darwinian capitalism that you could ask for. The game started reasonably, but as we passed go it was apparent that there was an evil robber baron in town, and her name was Crystal. Crystal almost immediately captured the utilities, and then most of the railroads, and while the rest of us were struggling with our marginal properties she was grinning at her real estate tracts like a cat that just had cream.

Towards the end of the Monopoly game, of course, the situation is dire: little hotels dot the landscape like 5-star posh landmines. You know it’s bad when being sent to jail is the best thing you could ask for, because it means that you don’t have to venture into Crystal’s massively expensive gated communities for three turns. Cashin, Marsha and I resorted to buying houses — little green reeds among Crystals’ red hotel trees — and hoping like crazy that someone would land on them, but Crystal had this unholy ability to miss everything but her properties on her rolls. If she needed a 3 followed by a 12 and a 2 to avoid paying rent to anyone else, she would roll it while all laws of probability and statistics took a vacation. When Crystal started to let all of us stay at her places for free just so that we could stay in the game, we clearly saw who was dominating the market. We called it quits.

Afterwards, Crystal was bursting with energy, while the rest of us were completely exhausted and hungry: she claimed it was because she had finished her tea and an almond cookie, but I suspect that it is because transfer of property and money in Monopoly actually transfers life force. Clearly, the makers of Monopoly have entered into a dark pact with nether agents.

We walked over to the water to see the fireworks, which were really well done. Going to see fireworks is the new American tradition in the Bay Area. You see, when I was growing up, fireworks were not illegal, so a much-anticipated part of Fourth of July was running up to firework and lighting it with a sparkler and running away as quickly as possible. The other childhood ritual was sneaking away from your parents and trying to get as many fireworks and M80s as possible so that you could blow them up in one huge explosion. Apparently, a definitive part of growing up was being stupid!

Afterwards, we had a quick bite to eat at BJ’s and then called it a night. Cashin and I unfortunately got a “hint” from the two ladies that the iPhone should be a perfect birthday gift. And by “hint” I mean “Be sure to get me an iPhone for my birthday.” And by “birthday” I really mean “birth month,” since Marsha and Crystal apparently have it worked out so that they have multiple birthday dinners and presents and gifts.