Mahjong

I

am so tired. Will someone just shoot me? Don't they shoot horses to put them out of their misery? I feel a meek whinny ready to come out of my throat... Oh well. What kills me is: How could anyone who feels so over worked be so fat? With so much cholesterol and high levels of triglycerides? Shouldn't I be burning off this excess?

This Tuesday is game night at the language lab. The director decided that each language at school should sponsor a game in their respective culture to generate further interest. She contacted me and asked me if I wanted to play Mahjong on Tuesday "Game Night". In previous years, it would have been easy to say "no". Tuesday night was my film class and there's no getting around that. But this year, our fearless department chair asked to change days so that Korean students could take both Korean language and Korean film. I have, up until now, scheduled my life around my work schedule. Chip goes to night school on Tuesdays and Thursdays so we are both late on Tuesdays, and we have late suppers--after 10 PM--on these nights only. However, since I am the collegial type, I said okay and now we have late suppers three nights of the week. Not that this would matter to the chair, I suppose.

So, without any real excuse, I said "okay" to Mahjong night. It's only once this semester, and it would be fun to play again, although I believe I will be teaching more than playing. And as a teacher, I gotta do it right if I'm gonna do it at all. So what do I do? I spend the whole freakin' weekend creating handouts for this two-hour gathering. The rules of the game. How to deal the tiles--the play moves counter-clockwise while the tiles are dealt clockwise. The different hands to win with. I even made images of mahjong tiles so people will understand them better. There were some on line, but they were rather jagged looking so I spent a bit of time making them look better. (If you click it, you'll see it's original size.)

So I spent... oh, maybe 20 to 24 hours of the weekend on this. Why do I do this to myself? Cuz, I teach. If you're gonna do it, do it right.

But I think I'll scream if only two students show up.