Choices

I'd like to tell you I spent a few years playing cards for money, but it isn't strictly true. Sometimes we got a little cash, but mostly the money fed the lifestyle: the gas, the tournament fees, and of course, the game itself.

I'd like to tell you we counted cards or played poker or blackjack in a big casino, where we saw fortunes made and lost while coolly sipping our drinks at the bar, waiting our turn, but mostly we sat in event centers at one of hundreds of fold-up tables, elbow to elbow with our neighbors, flicking the card sleeves as we nervously passed the cards from one hand to the other.

I'd like to tell you that I had been serious about playing competitively long before meeting my partner-in-crime and at-the-time boyfriend, Jace, but realistically I had only played casually at best in high school, and I picked up the game as a way to spend a little more time with him.

Mostly, I'd like to tell you we weren't playing Magic The Gathering.

For those of you not dorky enough to know what that is, it's a strategy card game with a base set of rules, and then a large number of cards. The rules of the game more or less continue to change according to what cards are in play. Another way to imagine it would be "what if you could play chess but players could choose to use 4 knights instead of 2 knights and 2 bishops" but with literally many thousands of such options.

Without getting too far into the game, there are three kinds of competitive decks: control, combo, and aggro. Aggro decks start strong but lose in the long game. Combo decks do almost nothing, but then via a carefully engineered combination of things, suddenly blow up and win, generally in the mid game. They're irreparably screwed if you remove enough chunks of the combinations which make them tick. Control decks win by interfering with the other two in the early and mid games, then cleaning up the late game.

Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. Jace held his cards in the other hand now. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick, they were in the first hand again, impatient as ever.

He sighed, "Would you pay attention?"

"Why do so many people around here play control?"

"Better players play control."

"No, you play control."

"Not at all of the bigger tournaments."

There was a pause.

"Control decks," he explained, "are full of choices of when to stop your opponent and when to permit their actions and save your energy for a bigger threat. Simpler decks have less choices. Every time you have a choice, you choose what to do and your opponent chooses how to respond. Each of you has many choices. The better player will make good choices more often than the dumber player. This means that if you believe you're the better player, you want to force as many choices into the equation as possible, and wait for the dumber player to mess up. It decreases how much you count on luck, and increases how much you count on skill."

Jace almost always played control. I almost never did. It meant that he almost always did better at the small tournaments, but that at the end of a lot of the big tournaments where we played tiring rounds for 6 hours straight against some really good players, that the final scores were often in my favor.

It took me a long time to realize this lesson applied outside of a card game, but basically it applies to almost any zero-sum game: contract negotiation, trading, haggling: the rules are the same. When I'm the more clever one we lay out huge lists of options, and generally at the end I come out with something that normally would have been rejected if suggested outright. When I'm not, I explain that my hands are tied, that this is all I have been permitted by my peers to offer, or in Hong Kong, I'd fall back on the language barrier and pretending to not understand complicated offers. It doesn't make you instantly win, but it makes you very hard to completely scam.

At the end of the day, you can't force people to make good or bad choices, but you can present them with the right number of choices to benefit you.

Living

"She doesn't like me because I argued against her proposal, and maybe wasn't kind about it."

Kalei walks a few feet behind me this time in her never-ending attempts to avoid my eyes when she's being confrontational. She's looking at the stack of grocery baskets instead.

"We talked about that, she's not mad."

"What then? She thinks I'm obnoxious?"

"You're a lot of personality to take at once, especially for long periods of time."

Mint. Limes. Club soda. Kalei likes testing the limits of how mean she can be.

"Do you have any idea what I'd give to be the kind of person that other people want to be around?"

***

"Oh, where is the train going?"

I lean against the window and hold the phone close to my ear in an attempt to not be that ass on the train that dominates the air with a phone conversation, "North, grandma, I'm going to see a friend."

"Oh, well that's wonderful."

I have fond memories of this grandma from when I was very young: building a birdhouse, and how proud I was the first time I could bat a ball the whole way over her house. There were kittens in the abandoned barn next door, a bay window where I use to sit, and an empty concrete slab in her back yard where I use to stand and look out over the field. She had a hummingbird feeder, but I lacked the patience to ever see many birds.

I remember jars of fireflies, and plastic mugs with zoo animals on them, and the excitement of spaghetti-o's in a glass dish that the microwave heated unevenly.

I remember watching her fight with my mother, and slowly realizing as I grew older that my attention was one of the prizes. I remember Christmas dinners where she would insist on something, and all of my aunts and uncles would get upset and fight. What they were arguing about and what they were talking about must have been different, because nothing they ever talked about seemed important enough to fight over.

I remember reaching the age where my questions about the world were more uncomfortable than adorable, and I remember grandma becoming more and more distant through this.

"You're getting all grown up you know!"

"I'm 11."

"You were so much fun when you were little!"

We didn't talk for years. There wasn't really anything to say. The question isn't so much if you love each other but if you can stand each other.

She's dying now, some sort of cancer. She's been thinking she's dying for decades, but now it is actually happening. I call her now, and we can talk about nothing, because we know this relationship isn't really going anywhere. We don't need to worry about how she'll never change, and how I'll never change, because it isn't going to matter.

The dying are so easy. The living are hard.

Turpentine

"Miss?"

"What?" It hadn't snowed for days but the wind ripped the crystals around off the streets and into your face, your hands, and your lungs where the cold tore at you.

"Miss?"

They always called me Miss, or Miss Pika. At 19 I didn't feel comfortable with anybody calling me Miss Chu, but they didn't feel comfortable calling me just Pika.

"Miss you have to hurry!"

"I'm coming as fast as I can, and it isn't time for practice yet. You're going to have to learn to be patient Trinh."

"No you have to hurry! There's gonna be a fight in the machine shop!"

I burst into the room to find the team in halves standing around the robot, sharpies on the floor, shouting at one another. I had told them they could decorate the robot any way they wanted, and apparently the girls had formed an argument which cleanly divided them by the high schools they attended.

I slammed the door so they turned and looked at me. "What the fuck is going on?"

There was a pause, then all the voices started at once. "You know what?" I bellowed, "I don't give a fuck, you're all going to clean every inch of this robot and take all the markings off it, and I'm going to have a little chat with each and every one of you." I nodded to my co-mentor, and she understood that she was going to oversee the cleaning. We were both terrified that a newspaper reporter was showing up in two hours to do a heartwarming story on how our team was bringing two sides of a bad city together and help high school girls get their lives back in line.

"We haven't named the robot yet, for the paperwork."

I brought a pile of rags from the corner of the machine shop and put it next to the bottle of cleaner. "Robot's name is turpentine," I said pointing to the bottle, "because this is the day you're all going to learn that this is one team, and you're all going to work hard alongside each other."

Dramatic moments normally don't make sense anyway after the fact.

When Mechi came up for her talk she hid the knuckles of her right hand from me, under her left. I asked her to show them to me, and they were swollen and red.

"What is this?"

"I punched a wall."

None of the other students looked like they had been involved in a fight, so I let it pass.

"Why?" I asked.

"I was angry."

Mechi was always boarderline too angry to work. She was the sweetest girl, but her emotions often tangled her up when she was frustrated, and then fell out as rage. It isn't hard to imagine how. I know she once left practice to pick up her brother from a gang fight and get him to a hospital, and I know that like so many little sisters she idolized her big brother. I knew that if she had been born to a different family that her teachers might have noticed her tendencies, and that there might be therapy and medication for her. Now they just saw another at-risk-kid slipping, and threw her in suspension.

"You need to work on dealing with your feelings," I said.

"And what? Count to 10? Does that actually work for anybody?"

I smiled, "Not for me. Just remember that in a few minutes you'll care less, that it isn't worth being upset about, and that you just need to hold on until then."

"I'll try."

"You're a good kid, and I know that. You always give me 110%. We're going to show everybody what a good kid you are inside."

She smiled.

The next girl who I had a talk with looked scared and upset. She was the best friend of the girl Mechi had most likely been about to punch when she took it out on a wall instead.

"What... did I do wrong?"

"Oh, I don't think you did anything wrong. I just said I was going to talk to all of you about your behaviors, and it is important that I be fair and do not appear to play favourites, but I think you're doing fine."

"Oh."

"We've got about 5 minutes to kill here, is there anything you want to talk about?"

"I don't like to see them disrespecting you."

"We're working on it."

"They don't realize how much you're giving us. You came from winning teams, you like winning, you deserve a winning team, and if we behaved, you could make us win."

"Yeah, well this is the team where I can make a bigger difference."

***

Mechi and Trinh were crying. "We can't write like that, all fancy like you talk, and like our teachers want us to."

"Then write it another way, and we'll translate it."

"We can't do it!"

"You can do it, you're going to give me 110%, and I'm going to give you 110%, always. I will sit here with you for as long as you will keep trying. Whatever group of people finish this essay will be the co-captains of the team."

The sentences came back garbled and rambling, with the word "with" substituted for "wid." The essay was about four pages, but after hours and hours, we had translated their intentions into a proper essay. The girls were beaming. They showed their essay to everybody they could find. I was so proud of them, and so terrified. At 14 this should be easy, and they had so much catching up to do if they were ever going to make it against the kids I went to high school with.

Mechi couldn't go to the competition because she was suspended, but we told her how we were doing each day. The robot did well though, right up into the semi-finals.

The city was thrilled. They threw us a dinner which all sorts of fancy people attended. A member of the school board who had sometimes attended our practices gave little speeches about of us and thanked us as he gave us awards, except for Mechi. When he came to her he poked fun at her and her disciplinary issues, and asked her to promise to do better next year.

I could feel the girl's eyes on me. I had always promised them that as long as they kept trying that I would fight for them. To stand by as this man humiliated Mechi would mean they would never trust me again, and it would be the end of my ability to help them. However, to do something now would mean our funding would never be renewed. We had two sponsors, and the regional director of the league at that dinner. The team was over, and the only remaining question was how I wanted it to end. I stood up, and I finished the school board member's speech for him, highlighting all the good Mechi had done, and thanking her for her contributions to the team.

I tried to keep in touch with Trinh, but it was difficult. She went into AP US History as a junior. I was thrilled. I got stacks of books from my high school AP US History teacher to tutor her through the exam online, but I never was able to make enough time to memorize everything to answer all her questions, and I couldn't get her to practice essays. Eventually, she said she didn't want to talk about the exam anymore, then she didn't want to talk at all.

I saw one of the girls bagging groceries near the school. I asked her how things were. She was doing great and had the part time job to help her family. She was applying for some pretty good colleges in the fall. I told her I was so proud of her, and she shrugged and looked at me and asked, "What, isn't that normal? You didn't think I could do it?"

Mechi was thrown out of the school before I had even finished the paperwork of the season. I remember the school board member showing me a photograph on his desk. He explained to me that it was of a student who he had tried to save, but who was in juvi now. I didn't recognize his kindness, and was rude to him a second time, insisting that I would never give up on Mechi, and that she was a good girl, and going to make it. In the coming months Mechi was thrown out of her second school, and out of the special disciplinary school. I continued to write to her, but eventually she said she was worried I was ashamed of her, and stopped writing back.

I've still got the newspaper article they wrote the day we cleaned the robot with turpentine. The reporter was thrilled with us, and really believed we were going to save these kids. It breaks my heart.