April 27, 2019

We were playing a variant of mahjong where the tiles were the shape of popsicle sticks with a hole through the center. Apparently this was for threading a foam cylinder through the pieces to hold them together. “So are we cooking or going out to eat later?” someone asked. We were each handed a different cookbook in response. I received a “Chicken Cookbook”.

The table kept swinging back and forth and I tried to stop it while telling everyone else to so the same. But no matter how hard I tried, the table kept swinging. Someone started singing, and a friend, looking annoyed, asked if we had already “claimed” (some kind of game terminology). Apparently a rule that we had failed to observe had drastically changed the potential outcome of the game.