I had a problem. Life gave me a solution. It was a somewhat distressing one, though. You see, I collected all these blog-worthy pictures, but I had no story behind them. Go to some local state park, get back home with a bunch of pictures, repeat. How do I write a post about that without making it appallingly boring and losing half my already thin audience? Internet loyalty goes only so far, after all.
Well, now I’ve got a story to tell. It has absolutely nothing to do with photography or state parks, but so what? My blog, my rules.
The story was provided by the internet itself in the form of a game: wordle. If you know the game please go get a coffee while I explain it to the few who don’t (hi, mom). You have six tries to guess a 5-letter word. In each try you are told which letters from your guess are in the target word, shown green if they are on the correct position, yellow otherwise. And that’s it. It’s become hugely popular because it’s seductive, and because you can play it only once a day, and the target word is the same for everyone each day. Of course, the fewer tries you need to guess the word, the better the feeling, and the holy grail is to guess it on the first try.
I’ve been playing it for more than a year (483 times as of this morning, to be precise), and very early on I stuck to the same starting word, IRATE, because it has five of the six most used letters in English. Until one fateful day, when I decided to free myself from my own chains. Strangely (and ominously) enough I chose STEAL as my break-from-routine starting word. I was feeling proud of myself. Even brave, oh so brave! I got the T, the E and the A yellow. Hmm. Interesting. Feeling that the coolest thing in the world to do next was to try IRATE, because it has those three letters and it doesn’t have an S or an L, I went ahead.
After you hit ENTER, wordle reveals the color of each letter slowly, one by one. The I turned green. The R turned green. When the A turned green my smugness turned into panic. Time slowed down. I knew it at that moment. I had the glory at the tips of my fingers and it slipped, just because I wanted to be cool for one day.
I threw my phone away and began cursing and writhing. I didn’t say anything intelligible, but Kathy, who was sharing breakfast with me, only needed to know two things: that I was playing wordle, which was easy to guess since it’s part of my morning routine, and my starting word, which she knew. With the most diabolical gaze I’ve ever seen in her, she grabbed her phone, opened wordle, and stole the holy grail from me.
Salt Point State Park
Mendocino
Los Padres National Forest
Robert Louis Stevenson State Park
Home
Thank You so much. My but it’s been too long since we’ve seen eachoher
It’s been a while, my friend!
IRATE indeed. I laugh heartily and use a new first word most days.
I love your discipline and eternal cosmic humor.
Are you Playa bound this season? We are Commissary again so you can probably drop in for Early Man 8/19 if the invite parameters are the same.😊🌱🔥💖
Thanks Kim! No playa plans again, but keep us posted… you never know 🙂
That actually happened to a group of friends who played the same lottery number every time, here in Brazil. It was on the news. The day their number came up, the one whose turn it was had entrusted purchasing the ticket to his son, who decided to buy cigarettes instead, using the lottery money. The rest of the guys were partying when they saw their number had won, but um, couldn’t get hold of the friend who was to appear with the winning ticket.
Wow, that makes me feel better, thanks! Wait… on a second thought, it may very well be that no lottery ticket was ever bought — perhaps the money went to cigarettes every single time?