Mars Square Mercury

With this perfecting at 4:40 am, I did wake up at 5:00, but I think that had more to do with drinking three beers last night than with the aspect. I did do a lot of shopping, for me, assuming Mercury means commerce - E was coming to spend the night so I bought smoked salmon and scallion cream cheese for breakfast, Stilton cheese, Granny Smith apples and a wicked looking (and tasting) pepperoni and tomato bread stick from A&V for lunch, but I think the real Mars square Mercury was getting out the Mah Jong set in the evening and attempting to understand how to play.

I've had the set for at least 15 years, a "legacy" from two gay friends who died before the advent of AZT, so there's a bit of baggage attached. I opened the case once, saw how beautiful the tiles were but also how ridiculously complicated the rules were, shut it immediately and decided to sell it on eBay. As with most of the other things I've thought about selling on eBay, it's still here.

E's been playing Mah Jong on her computer for years and telling me how much fun it is, while I've rolled my eyes and thought well buster, you should see the real thing, but last night was obviously the time for the real thing. I had bought a book - not Mah Jong for Idiots, which probably does exist and would have been a better choice, but Mah Jong, Anyone? A Manual of Modern Play, which again, I had looked at once and put away.

We sat at the round table in the kitchen, each with a beer, mistake number one, no tablecloth, mistake number two, as the Sweet Pea immediately retreated under the bed because of the noise the tiles made, just when he was getting used to E, opened the case, oohed and aahed over how beautiful the tiles were, and E began to read from the book. We began by sorting out all the tiles, which took about an hour with most of the time taken up by trying to understand the rules about the flower tiles -

"The flower tiles (sometimes called seasons) consist of two sets of four tiles each, numbered one through four, with one set marked in one color, the other in another color." Try figuring THAT out when you're on your second beer, Two sets of four tiles EACH? Is that eight or sixteen? Numbered one through four? Is that each set? One marked in one color, the other in another color? One what? One set? How many? What color? By the time we'd groped our way through this, E continued to read and informed me "Some Mah Jong sets, however, contain one set of eight different flower tiles." Aaarrrggghhh! Is that what this set is? Is that why we can't figure it out? How do we know if these are different flowers or dragons or winds? No wonder the miserable nerdy teenager in Portnoy's Complaint hung himself in the shower with a note pinned to himself about his mother's next Mah Jong game if this is what he had to contend with while he was home.

By beer number three, there was much putting on of glasses and passing the book back and forth, reading instructions very slowly and hoping some glimmer of comprehension would jump into the other's brain and explain all, but when E got to "Flower tiles are not used in actual play, but represent a bonus to the holder, as will be explained in the discussion of the game," a great shout of frustration was heard over First Avenue, the Sweet Pea retreated even further under the bed and the Chinese Checkers came out. E won.