Does not play well with others

Last night, following a lovely dinner party, I roped three people into playing crokinole with me. It's a board game where you flick little wooden discs around; I couldn't remember all the rules, not having played it for many years, so we decided we were playing the "Hamilton Rules" version of the game. 
Playing with those three was immensely fun; people even came in from the party-on-deck outside to see what we were laughing about. But, at some point early on in the game, my evil, overly competitive snarky inner bi-atch surfaced, and I found myself saying the craziest things. And I noticed I was saying them, but I couldn't or wouldn't stop. I won't detail them here, because that would be like saying them out loud all over again, and I don't think any of them were very nice and should not have been put out into the universe. I like snarky humour as much as the next person, but from a comedian, on stage, who does it for a living. I really don't like getting that way when I play crazy board games, or when I'm drinking a bit and playing board games, which was probably part of the problem, you know, that losing-your-inhibitions thing that happens when alcohol soaks into your brain. I really didn't know any of those people well enough to be that snarky. I now have post-snarky regret clouding my brain and making me feel sorry for myself ... all day ... ruining my Sunday. I'm doing this to myself, snap out of it, SELF!
Now that I'm rethinking the whole episode, maybe snarky-Alice wasn't as extremely horrible as I recall, because the other three people kept playing and playing and playing for more than a hour, and we laughed altogether quite a lot; and I was actually the one who broke up the crokinole session ... when my flicking-finger started to get too sore. Ah, self-doubt, what would a post-party, blue-day, Sunday, last day of weekend, deep low-pressure system sort of day be without you? Blergh.

On days like today, I need to find my own "Ego Kevin" to achieve homeostasis ("look it up: wikipedia it" LOL).

None too giddy

As I sit down to write my first blog, I'm thinking about tone, about how to keep a reader interested in my random ramblings, and how when I write I tend to lose much of the giddiness that fills my brain and my conversations on a daily basis. I know I've made people laugh (with me, and of course at me, or at my antics) from time to time, and I laugh at silly things like the movie Nacho Libre or Lego Indiana Jones or lolcats pictures; but when I write, serious old Alice creeps down my arms and seeps out the ends of my fingertips onto the keys. It's with irony that I chose the blog moniker Alice from one of the silliest books ever written to sign off on these blogs that will probably rarely read as silly. I don't want to force it, the giddiness, the silliness that have been filling my days with joy this 2010, and the last half of 2009, so I will just write, to get into the habit of writing, and hope that giddy Alice will peek out once in a while. Now, onto the blogging.
One of the best decisions I made about four years ago was to try a social experiment on myself, some CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) if you will. I don't have children, so I had to run this psychosocial test on myself. I found that the Canadian behaviour of saying "I'm sorry," "Sorry!" "sorry about that," "Oh, I'm so sorry" was diluting the real meaning of that word to the point where the phrase was more a verbal tick than any true indication of regret. I decided to try to reserve saying "I'm sorry" when I really meant it, when I was regretful or wanted to express a sense of loss. I say "try" because I am not always successful, of course, since hearing that tick all the time from fellow Canadians certainly makes it harder to avoid saying it. What do I say instead? "Excuse me" or "pardon me" in physically awkward situations, and other polite expressions of cordial good nature in appropriate circumstances (there's serious-Alice again). The best (and scariest) part about avoiding "sorry" is that when I removed that phrase from a situation in which I made a mistake, I had to start taking responsibility of my mistakes. I had to own the error, ("my bad" as some of the hip kids say these days); that owning was a terrifying prospect at the beginning of this experiment, or lifestyle change as the case may be. And do you know what happened when I started saying, "I made that mistake"? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis. People opened up to this statement of my human nature of erring, identified with me as a fellow flawed, vulnerable being, and I followed the owning of the error with the spoken resolution to fix the mistake or to do better next time, and everything was just fine. A revelation.
A liberating phrase, that I am so glad I found at some point in my life: "I made a mistake." Say it out loud, say it proud; I do, and it changed my life.