I wrote this a few days ago, during a really tough day at the 2011 Scrabble Nationals tournament.

Scrabble seems like an innocent past time, a game you play with your cousins around the kitchen table during the holidays while sipping hot cocoa. Appearances can be fooling, however. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that Scrabble can cause serious mental and even physical harm. If you are prone to depression, obsession, paranoia, and homicidal tendencies, or if you just suffer from low self-esteem, Scrabble will highlight these conditions and tendencies, especially if you are playing tournament Scrabble in the 110 degree heat (okay, so we’re playing inside, but it’s still Dallas) and are having a day when the blanks and S’s are as foreign as ancient Abyssinian coins.

I suffer from three of the four conditions above (I’m not even including the self-esteem). I’m convinced my opponents are sending me secret messages. A man played KILLED this morning, which I’m sure is part of a plot to do away with me, although I’m not much of a Scrabble threat. It is Day 2 of the 2011 National Scrabble Tournament, and I currently have a record of 3 and 9.  I’m in Division 3 (out of 5) and am seeded in the middle: 3 and 9 is very bad. I feel as if God doesn’t love me, though this is idiotic—I wouldn’t trust any deity who spends His or Her time making sure that certain people get the blanks while others are stuck with multiple vowels instead of working on world hunger or fixing the national debt.

“Gee, I thought Daiva was a better player, but here she is at Table 24,” I imagine people whispering.

“Yeah. Maybe she has some kind of mental disability we don’t know about.”

“Or maybe she’s playing in Lithuanian.”

Norma Lovett, the other loser at Table 24, looks me in the eye.

“I never want to see you again,” she says firmly.

“Excuse me?”

“I never want to see U, the letter U, again. I got all the Us the last game, two of them at once.”

When you are doing poorly at a Scrabble tournament, you begin to dislike the people around you. You become a grump, complaining about all of the damn kids who play too quickly and how when you take time to find the best play they start yawning and tapping their fingers. You complain about the senior citizens as well, the way they can’t hear (or pretend not to hear) you announce the score, so you have to repeat it several times.

Of course, there’s a way to deal with the kids, who are mainly male adolescents. You can say things like, “See that cute word judge in Division 2? I think she (or he) has a crush on you.” If I were ten years younger I would have said to the youngster who’s in first place, “Would you like to see my breasts?” If I did that today, he’d probably call the director and tell his parents (after running away in horror), and I’d be banned from Scrabble forever.

You begin to dislike your husband, who has forced you to come to Dallas in August to play 31 games of Scrabble over the course of four and a half days. You even begin to dislike the people at the Starbucks in the hotel.

“You don’t have soy milk?” you ask in an incredulous voice, as if this is the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of.  “Is this some kind of Texas thing?”

You bring your soyless, joyless coffee back to the playing area.

“How are you doing?” people stop to ask.

They don’t mean how you’re doing in life, which doesn’t really matter here, but what your win-loss ratio is that morning or afternoon. You could have been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature or discovered the cure for cancer–people will nod their heads impatiently, mouthing boring to passersby.

If things get really bad, you are reassured by the fact that you have your two secret weapons snugly tucked away in your overstuffed purse: your cyanide tablets and your rosary.

During the lunch break of this horrible, terrible, very bad day I went back to the hotel room where I checked my email messages, hoping that perhaps I’d won a hundred dollars in a sweepstakes I had entered.  What stood out, however, was a message with the subject heading of Burial Insurance, which I took to mean that someone wanted to see me killed and was willing to pay good money to make sure I stayed buried. (I know—it doesn’t make sense. Why would I receive the message?)

God hates me, I posted as my Facebook status.

When Marty came back from lunch, he found me curled up in a fetal position, thumb in my mouth. He gave me a little pep talk: “Cheer up, Bunky. The tournament isn’t even half over.”

“My name’s not Bunky,” I sulked.  (Secretly, I like it when he calls me Bunky.)

Now here I am at Table 24, and I have just lost to Norma Lovett, in part because I challenged DRYLOTS, thinking, “She’s at Table 24. Surely, DRYLOTS can’t be good.”

She is a gracious winner and a very nice person, younger than the name Norma might imply.

“If being at Table 24 is the worst thing in our lives,” she says, “heck, we’re pretty lucky.”

I look around. At least three people are in wheelchairs (and not from Scrabble-related injuries). Another is in a cast; he’d broken his leg the day before the tournament and had to be taken to the hospital. A woman much younger than me has no hair, and I suspect it isn’t a fashion statement. None of these people are visibly whining. None are downing glasses of wine, thinking this will improve their game. (Okay, I never did this, but I do remember sitting next to Stephanie Steele years ago at one of the loser tables. She was loudly sipping from a large plastic tumbler something that was not soda. “Gee, that smells good,” I said, hoping she might share.)

I decide to apologize to God for saying he hates me. I suspects he ignores me most of the time, but a well-timed MY BAD can’t possibly hurt. I win the next game, in part because my opponent challenges UNFITS.  I have a little string of words that take S’s, all having to do with King Lear: OLD, MAD, GLUM, UNFIT KING LEAR CAME AND SAID FUCK YOU.

And the last game of the day is a bye, which means there is no opponent for me to play, which means I get an instant win.  I go upstairs and lay down to rest my weary brain, but not before I check Facebook. Kind and thoughtful people have responded with love, concern, and gentle humor. I feel like a schmuck, though I’m not sure at this point how to even spell schmuck.