I am obsessed with chess. I wonder where it's been all my life. I'm 40 years old, and have just recently discovered how much fun this game is -- how intricate, how many possibilities there are for ways things can play out.

At first, I sucked. I mean truly sucked. I sucked with the sound of a thousand suckings. I lost EVERY game that I played, even against others who sucked. My main problem is that I tend to focus too intently on whatever nefarious plot I'm hatching against my opponent's king. Or queen. Or rook. Or whatever other piece seems to be in my way. (I know, I know...the only piece that really matters is the king!). But I get so focused on carrying out what I'm doing that I forget to watch what my opponent is doing. For example, maybe I'm thinking that if I could just get my bishop to spot A, then my queen on spot C can move to spot E and THEN I'll GET 'EM! Only problem is that while I was trying to get my bishop to spot A, my queen got captured on spot C, and not only that, it got captured WITH the thing I was trying to clobber on spot E, which is now sitting over there on spot C! But hey...I got my bishop to spot A, and that's...something...to be...proud of? sigh.

So I kept losing. EVERY game. But I kept at it. I was playing two or three games a day, every day, and reading up on everything I could find about chess and chess strategy in the meantime. Now I only lose a little over half of the games I play (which pretty much means that if you suck, I can beat you -- if you're any good, you can distract me by dangling your queen in front of my nose and I'll totally go after it and let you checkmate me while I'm not looking).

Jadyn beats me most of the time. I give her all the credit for getting me interested, and teaching me enough that it got to be fun. And she keeps me humble too. No one is better at dangling a pretty little queen in front of my face than she is. (She's also pretty good at dangling other things too, but that's a subject for a different post).

My PHONE beats me ALL the time. I downloaded a chess program for it and I play it whenever I'm waiting for Jadyn to come out of a store -- you have no idea how much time I spend waiting for Jadyn to come out of stores. I can't beat it. Not even when I set it to 'VERY EASY'. My phone scoffs at me. It has no respect me for whatsoever. My goal now is to beat my phone. Just once. On 'VERY EASY'.

But I don't want you to think it's all about winning, because it's really not. I enjoy playing even when I lose - especially when I learn something. I am almost always thinking about some chess game that I've played recently, running through different scenarios. It's what I'm thinking about when I'm falling asleep. It's akin to the post-coital analysis I tend to want to do whenever the sex was really good. 'Hey...you really seemed to like it when I did that one thing...and my god, what were YOU doing when I made that noise'? Only now it's 'Hey...did you know what I was doing with my knight when I took that pawn? And wow...the way you brought your bishop into play! Amazing!'

I am, in fact, in the middle of a game right this second - which I seem to be losing...so I'm going to concentrate on that for a while. And I'll let you know when I beat my phone.

If anyone is interested, I'm usually on yahoo games at lunchtime, under the name charlotteredman. Come play with me.