Every other year a special day arrives in our house: cleaning out the garage. Father’s Day is once every year, so at least that’s twice as often. This year, the day has arrived and this time there is a small problem: I don’t want to. I’d rather sit on-line and play blitz GO all day. I’m a beast at on-line blitz GO. I can just as easily play 10 games as lose 10 games. But, if I have to clean out the garage, that could interfere with my blitz GO.
I am aware that I only have to do this once every 730 days (731 if there’s a Leap year. Usually, Leap Year is once every four years, making Clean-out-the-garage Day twice as often). But as the saying goes, are you a glass 729/730 full or 1/730 empty (x/731 if there’s a Leap Year)? Oh it’s easy to be a 729/730-type of person on any of those days when you don’t have to clean out the garage. But, when its Clean-out-the-garage Day, I’m definitely a 1/730-empty-type person. It’s not hypothetical anymore, it’s real!
GO requires flexibility, GO requires thinking, GO requires a kind of ruthless discipline. My wife who doesn’t play GO is better at all of these things than me. Maybe I should be glad she doesn’t play GO. No one wants to share a hobby with your spouse where killing them is not only one of the goals, but also makes you glow a little inside. I love my family and I love playing GO and the only thing in GO I’m good at is killing stones (unfortunately for the people I love). Did I mention that I predict my wife would better at GO than me? I don’t want to give her any ideas. I don’t want to end up on some docudrama about spouses who kill.
A quick cultural digression—I’m sure I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs that my wife doesn’t play GO AND that my wife is Japanese. There is actually a little story about why she doesn’t play. There is joke that in Japan that there’s a law that you have to be “a male over the age of 50 to play GO,” so there’s that. But seriously, folks, the story is, on her first day of high school, all of the new students were required at one point to report to the gym for the purpose of joining a school club. Her high school had several cool clubs, including a film club and a British pop music club. But for some insane reason, her school also had a rule that each club had a limit on how many new members they could have. I guess if they didn’t, then everyone would join the film and British pop music clubs. As it happened, my wife, then a high school freshman on her first day of school, arrived late to this session and, you guessed it, not only were the cool clubs all full already—ALL of the clubs were full save one: the GO club. Thus, she was basically forced to join the GO club, along with 3 or 4 other young girls. On the first day the club met, the teacher (who was male over the age of 50) tried to teach them how to play. At every other club meeting for the rest of the year, the girls met and talked about movies and British pop music.
Anyway, back to Clean-out-the-Garage Day. I tried to explain all of my thoughts about being an optimist and playing blitz GO, and yadda yadda yadda, to my wife. I even threw in a joke about being over 50 and that basically makes it the law that I have to play GO. She was unmoved. Her reply was, in the time it took me to come up with the 729-thing, I could have been cleaning the garage.