Thanksgiving

[indigo_rose99]

T, Dad and I went to visit the nieces for 6 days. Long flights to get there and back. Stayed with the in-laws + nieces, who were all sick.

I learned that my tolerance for small children, even doing my very very very best... is about 2 days. And perhaps next time I should not stay in the same house. *sigh* So 2 days is the limit I can hide how very much the small children grate on my nerves. Learning lesson for next time.

On the good side... there were some very very good sides.

Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful. My sister-in-law is a genius of planning. And she was miserably sick for most of the visit. After dinner she insisted that we play a card game. Cards Against Humanity? Oh. My. God. I have always known that I am a terrible person, lacking in empathy for anyone I personally do not know. And that I laugh at inappropriate things. But this game... I laughed so hard I cried. And more than once. Playing it with a table of strangers and in-laws just made the whole experience more... Yeah, I should have been drinking more. Wow.

We went to pick out a live Christmas tree. I don't remember doing this as a child, though I remember that we had live Christmas trees up until I was about 10. I enjoyed tromping around, listening to them argue the relative merits (the elder niece wanted a small tree). I truly loved watching my husband, his brother and his father tie the Christmas tree on top of a car. I couldn't stop smiling as I tried to take embarrassing photos of them.

My other favorite moment was when we tried to talk Dad into dating again. We proposed signing him up on one of those online websites. We asked Dad what he wanted. "A 28 year old." Understand, he is ~77. He had a whole logic behind it... *wipe tears of laughter from my eyes* I still suspect he was pulling our collective chains, but T swears that Dad had thought it through too much for it to be a joke. Ask me about it sometime. I wrote it down in my Dad Stories, but T swears that this is one story I am Not Allowed To Tell At Dad's Funeral. So that probably means I am not allowed to post his reasoning here. But it is such good story...

Comments

[reedrover]

I'm with you on the "not a kid-person" issue. And my various sobrinos are 11-18.

Cards Against Humanity is colloquially known as "Assholes to Assholes" in my crowd.

And I'm totally for your Dad's hilarious reasoning for dating a 28 year old, so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Given the laughter, I'm doubly curious.

[texpenguin.livejournal.com]

The asshole aspects of C.A.H. don't bother me--I find all sorts of socially unacceptable humor, well, humorous. What I don't care for are the really just plain disgusting cards. Gross out humor I've never gotten. I tend to avoid the game for this reason. Instead we play Apples to Apples with dirty minds. Still loads of fun for adults, but without the gross.

[reedrover]

When we play Apples to Apples, musicals break out. When we play Assholes to Assholes, physical humor breaks out. Because we don't particularly care for gross, we go for reality-bending. "I drink to forget.... being abducted by Peter Pan."

[texpenguin.livejournal.com]

Yes, but eventually you end up with only the gross cards in your hand, unless you've culled the deck. I've played maybe 3 times, with 3 distinct group of friends, and all three times it devolved into nasty. :-( Guess I'll have to play it with you guys!

[reedrover]

Oh, no, we have all kinds of house rules. You can scratch your whole hand on account of "lack of inspiration" (stupid and gross) if you are willing to put up with some ribbing about it. You can also call a mulligan if you draw the perfect card for the question just asked if you can get it onto the stack before the reader collects all the cards up. We're pretty loose about those pesky rules, anyway. If it is a small group, the deck plays too. It gets frustrating when purely random cards keep winning, but it's also amusing.

[texpenguin.livejournal.com]

Random Man (as we call him) is remarkably good at Apples to Apples too! We've never used the 'scrap hand' rule, but we do play with a goodly sized hand (we have multiple sets of cards, so plenty to go around). We use your other rules too. We also let people put in 2 cards if they 2 that are both just perfect. And of course, we always play to the judge, because when we play, it's usually the oddball or punny answer that makes the judge laugh most that wins. We also started a tradition at with our game that at the end we have everyone initial the cards they won, so when we play next time, we can add in a element of poking fun ("Too bad, Bob, looks like you lost your sex appeal, now I'm sexy!").

My biggest problem with many of the cards in CaH is the way they describe/depict things of a sexual nature. I'm not a prude by ANY stretch of the imagination--I think sex in its many forms is quite lovely. The extremely crass and/or disgusting descriptions on CaH cards though leave me feeling unsettled and unhappy. It just bothers me when something beautiful (whatever that may mean to me, or you) is presented in such a mean, belittling way, repeatedly. It eventually tarnishes something shiny in my life, and makes me feel almost attacked for having ever thought it was shiny in the first place.

Huh. Can you tell I have a rather visceral negative reaction to this game? I know I'm in the minority. The game is hugely popular, even among friends that I would have bet money on never being willing to play a game in the first place!