Competition

I'm a bad loser. Maybe not as bad as some, but I get testy when I'm behind in a game. My parents are here to visit their grandkids, and last night we played Phase 10. Is there any worse game to be behind in? Your opponents pass phase after phase, and you're left repeating the same rounds.

When we were kids, we played games during dinner, or afterwards, just about every night. We went through phases, so to speak. For months we'd play nothing but Spite and Malice, or King's Corner, or Rummikub.

I remember other phases from my childhood. There was the Presto Fry Daddy we got at one point leading to a spate of deep-fried items. On the other end of the spectrum was the stir-fry kick that lasted a few months. When Mom took a cooking class and got a crepe pan, we froze stacks and stacks of thin pancakes, enough to last a French family for a year.

Maybe that experience has led me to a kind of all-in mentality. When I get hooked on something, I go all the way. I buy every book, every accessory, spend hours doing research, obsess over it, dream about it. Sometimes the phase only lasts through the first burst of shopping, since eventually all that stuff that seemed so essential when I bought it ends up gathering dust. But most of the time I will stubbornly stick with something I jumped into too quickly and too deep, just to keep from admitting defeat. Because I'm not a good loser.