List five things you do for fun.
- An old D&D player am I, and other role-playing games like Call of Cthulu. Somewhere I still have a bag filled with many-sided dice. And board games like Monopoly, Risk, etc. These days my current favorite table-top game, and my husband’s, is Train Dominoes. There is nothing like gathering with good friends, good wine and good food for a good, long, twelve-round game that settles your brain into soothing number patterns.
- The Sims. I have played it since Sims 1. Currently I play Sims 4, or, as longtime Sims players who remember Sims 3 call it, Sims 2&1/2. (Don’t get me started on EA corporate decisions and their customer service. That’s for another post. A long and angry one. )
- Reading. There is always a book in the offing, sometimes literary, sometimes pop ephemera. Usually one of each.
- Movies and TV, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly picky because the older you get, the more predictable are the stories and the more exacting I’ve become about plotting. I try to avoid the “just add water” genre of comic book adaptations. I prefer classics, pre-code, and foreign.
- Walking. I am lucky enough to live in a good walking city, with hills, stairway walks, a waterfront, interesting shops, etc. Every day I walk for at least an hour.
Without a cellphone. I’ve watched, at noon, a French executive throwing a massive tantrum on the corner of Sutter and Kearny, waving his fists, sputtering subjunctives, surrounded by half a dozen alarmed American executives in expensive suits trying to calm him. I’ve watched a fleeing shoplifter on Market pelting a female security guard pursuer with the socks he’d stashed under his coat. On Post Street, just after sunset, I’ve been accosted by someone stepping in front of me from a doorway who looked solemnly into my eyes and said “The briefcase is bullet-proof” before stepping back into the doorway. (Neither I nor this person were carrying briefcases.)
In each incident I looked around to see other pedestrians who were completely oblivious, their heads bent over their cellphones.
Pam Troy 