On Bingo

I've always hated Bingo. It was one of those games they made you play in elementary school when there was nothing to do on half days, and I always suspected there was some sort of strategy involved that everyone knew but me. I have a Bingo ring, because it looks cool, but I feel like a poser when people recognize it and get nostalgic about the only game that is worse than Seven Up.

If I had to pick a game that I liked from elementary school, it would be the word scrambles we did around holidays, the ones that were usually themed after whichever holiday was nearby. They were fun for the same reason that writing is appealing. There's always an apparently infinite number of possibilities, but only a few make any sense. Also, like writing, you usually have to relax to get the hang of it. The really intense kids just went up and down rows one by one, which takes forever and is exhausting, like understanding an film student's final project, or trying to convey emotion on AIM. It's unsatisfying. Word scrambles were also the least competitive you could get in third grade, which was nice. I was a twitchy kid and I got freaked out by too much social comparison, but word scrambles always seemed pretty Zen.

At some point, as we got smarter, crossword puzzles became popular, but it wasn't the same. I think it's comforting to know the answer's literally right in front of you. It's the mindset I've brought to my adult life, that most problems can be figured out if you stare at them long enough. When it comes to ruminating, it's the method to my madness. Until puberty, thinking things out solved most of the problems I came across. At that point, of course, complications arose, and I suppose they'll just keep rising as life goes on. I can't say I'm nostalgic for the problems of childhood, because that's insulting to myself as a child, and to kids in general. Shit was hard, and getting ignored by adults and fucked with by older kids didn't help matters. But I'm sure Kid Kelsey would agree that there's a sense of empowerment that comes with having only recently discovered logic. It might not be a brand new world from that point on, but it's a brand new strategy, which can't help but leave you feeling like a modern day code talker. Subtraction? Piece of cake. Critical thinking questions on James and the Giant Peach? Please. I was a little bit more brilliant than before, and I knew it.

I try to go back to that sometimes, with varying results. We've all acquired a few additional levels of reasoning, of course. Just because something's logical doesn't make it right, and just because it's right doesn't make it nice, and even if it's both right and nice, it might not be prudent. I realize that these layers of reasoning are a blessing, and to some degree they've made my life easier. I know that it's possible and, in some circles, popular to ignore value contexts in favor of supporting the purity of matter-of-fact logic, but that's not my goal here. All I'm saying is, elementary school was a shiny new frontier and sometimes I miss that.

Also, fuck Bingo.