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Spent the weekend mostly offline again. Odd feeling.

Sunday, read subs in the park (with occasional brief naps), did some editing, sent a few rejections, hung out with Kam.

Saturday somehow managed to fritter the first half of the day away on little magazine tasks and assorted other stuff, then headed over to the East Bay for a parlor-games party. Some parts went well, others not so well.

Telemarketer, a.k.a. Telephone Oracle, a.k.a. Telephone Survey, went fairly well, I think. It's a game invented a month or two ago at Swarthmore by current SWILfolk Rachel, Mark, Kyra, J.C., and Nick; it's sort of like a pictureless version of Telephone Pictionary. (Click the link on that page for a description of Telephone Pictionary.) In Telephone Oracle, you sit in a circle, and everyone has a sheet of paper and a writing implement, and everyone writes a question at the top of their page. Then everyone passes their paper to the left, and writes an answer to the question posed on the paper they received from their neighbor. Then you fold over the paper so the original question is obscured, but the answer is still visible, and pass to the left again; then you write a question that can be answered by the given answer. Continue folding over the paper, passing it along, and alternately questioning and answering until you run out of paper or you get all the way around the circle, whichever comes first. It goes way faster than Telephone Pictionary, and people are less self-conscious because they don't have to draw anything. We played with 11 players, and I think it mostly went well, though I got a little too pushy in trying to make faster people wait to pass their papers until the slower people were done.

Later in the evening, after that game was over, I had occasion to remember for the nth time since high school that some people have the enviable talent of being able to make anything at all sound like fun, while others (like me) don't (or at least can't do it effortlessly). I think many of the attendees weren't really quite sure what to expect from a parlor games party; several of them wanted to either hang out and chat or play Hearts, and didn't seem terribly interested in other stuff. And I didn't realize until I'd thoroughly botched one game introduction that many of the attendees didn't really have the spirit of fun/play/willingness-to-experiment that I'd been assuming anyone at such a party would have. If I'd had a better sense of where people were coming from, I might've been able to make things sound more fun, but it didn't come together. The question "How do you win?" really threw me, as did the remark "Let's try it and see if it's as stupid as it sounds."

The group wasn't quite large enough to effectively split in two, and there were a couple of games that would've meant leaving out one person (a different person in each case) who didn't want to play, so there were a couple of obvious games that we didn't play.

There was also one person who really really wanted to play Mafia (or rather, a variant on it called Werewolf). In keeping with my general incoherence that evening, I couldn't manage to concisely explain why I thought that was a bad idea (besides my general unhappiness with various aspects of the game, it would've taken the rest of the night, making it impossible to play anything else), so I suspect I came across as arbitrary and petulant in vetoing it. Sigh.

I was startled to hear after the party that Kam hadn't played Charades since unpleasant forced-fun gatherings as a kid. I tend to think of Charades as a baseline parlor game, something everyone's played, something almost everyone enjoys if it's done right (especially if they're not forced to go up in front of the group and perform if they don't want to); but clearly I don't quite live in the same universe as most people. Ah, well.

Long and interesting conversation with Kam after the party about group entertainment (I feel that it usually goes better if there's a good leader/facilitator who can guide, without pushing, the group into increasing the Maximum Fun Quotient, rather than letting the group flail about without a direction; while Kam feels (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you, Kam) that it goes better if nobody's in charge and the group gradually finds its own unique ways of having fun, rather than someone imposing their own approaches to fun on the group) and social dynamics and the problem of lack of shared culture in playing the Name Game, and so on. No solid conclusions.

Didn't sleep well (or much) either Saturday or Sunday night. Haven't slept well, or much, too many nights lately. (I should note that I only complain about it when I'm not sleeping well, which gives most people the impression that I never sleep well; in fact, I've sometimes gotten enough sleep for entire weeks at a time.) Sometime mid last week I tried NyQuil again and was reminded how blessedly helpful it is; two capsules produced eight hours of solid deep sleep. It's weird: the capsules that I take contain no alcohol, and their primary sleep-inducing ingredient is exactly the same as in the over-the-counter sleeping pills I've tried, but NyQuil works incredibly well for me (if I don't use it more than one or two nights in a row, and if I don't need to be alert for a while after I get up), and other sleeping pills do absolutely nothing at all.

Anyway, the result of all this is that I woke up this morning from bad dreams feeling fretful and out of sorts and consumed with a general malaise, and am thus staying home from work. (I've also had various cold symptoms on and off for the past few days.) Later, I hope to nap. May try and get some work done too.