Anna-Come-Lately (My Secret Life as Scrabble Addict)

I have always been a late bloomer and adopter.

I almost flunked kindergarten, was the perennial "it" in tumbang preso and touch-ball games; didn't go out unchaperoned until the eve of my wedding; didn't learn a sport until I was 40; didn't learn to bike, drive, swim, dance, sing .. period.

I didn't begin to wear the miniskirt until it was on the way out. I never even dared put on the hot pants. I was a late adopter of the shoulder pads -- am still wearing a pair now and have vowed to wear them till death do us part.

When I meet friends of my youth, they still manage to recognize me -- thanks to a hairstyle that I have stuck with through thick and thinning hair.

I caught up with the bus of IT just in the nick of time, but not until my heart fairly burst with huffing. I was a recalcitrant who refused to touch the computer with a ten-foot pole. A straggler who wouldn't surrender her BIC ballpens and yellow lined pads until she was threatened with "touch or go." As I didn't want to go, I touched, nay, embraced the technology. How was I to know I would fall in love with it? I now have a permanent love affair with Word, Excel, and Publisher. Incredibly, I had a fling with FrontPage when my director bullied me into updating our official webpage.

They say that life begins at 40. But true to form, mine began much much later. My online life, that is.

I was born the day I stumbled on an online game.

Now, there are games and games ... and there is internet scrabble.

Imagine yourself before your PC, playing your favorite word game with a live opponent miles away. As you wait for her/him to form a word, you chat: "hi," "good luck," "where are you from," what time is it where you are?" You might be playing with an American first. Next, a Canadian, an Indian, a Singaporean, a Thai, a Briton. Or most delightful of all, a fellow Pinoy, who might be living just off the campus where you work or as far away as Oregon or Hawaii.

Pinoys are easy to spot. They like to use give-away names. I clicked Taray, Manlalaban, Dagohoy, Kurdapia, Bongga, and Tubongph because I could giddily say "kumusta" at the start of the game and "ang galing" when they "bingo" -- which is scrabble jargon for when one uses all seven letters in the rack in a single move. Those who live far away would eagerly ask about the weather in Manila, the level of cheating in the last elections, the casualty count in yet another supertyphoon. Others would turn out, delightfully, to be Philippine-based Filipinos who would suddenly drop by.

As in real life, you meet all kinds. You tell them you are from the Philippines and the reactions are mixed -- from rave (wow! cool!) to rant (how did someone from the third world learn to play English scrabble?). There are those who play quietly all the way and those who would divert you from taking your turn by non-stop chatter. You meet players who would generously pass when you accidentally misplayed your turn, and those who jam the board to block every move, playing as though winning were a matter of life and limb.

The nice thing about the site is you can "buddy" the very nice and "no-play" the absolutely un-nice. You can see when a buddy enters and leaves the site, play and chat him, even observe and kibitz him when he is playing with another. As for those whom you have no-played, as far as you're concerned, they might as well be in limbo.

When you make a new buddy in the site, you begin to paint a portrait in your mind. You start with a silhouette seated before a PC. Then you add brushstroke after brushstroke -- man, woman or androgyne; young, old or middling; white, black or in between; plump, lean or just so. The more intricate strokes are for drawing the inner person -- family man or free spirit; happy or brooding; friendly or taciturn; straight-talking, subtle, or funny. So the portrait grows, but is never finished. You add, delete, refine. The wonderful thing is, unless you meet your buddies face to face -- which is unlikely -- they can be (more or less) what you imagine them to be.

You don't get too attached to a portrait you've made or you're a candidate for heartbreak. Be ready to junk a portrait because, let's face it, online friendships are so ad hoc. But you learn not to mind, because out there in the online world are thousands -- nameless, faceless, waiting to be clicked on and played with and made a portrait of. And let's put it this way -- what if your online buddy just collapses and dies -- and he will do it offline of course. Will anyone bother to inform you about it? Sorry, bud, online friends are in the category of illegitimate children.

We scrabblers in the internet -- we have affinity with each other. We talk about our neglected families, call our spouses scrabble widows/widowers, our children scrabble orphans. We talk about our family threatening to send us to Rehab. We discuss about organizing Scrabblers Anonymous -- similar to AA -- and worry there would be no one to attend the meetings because everyone would be -- where else? -- online!

What is in a computer monitor that makes you tell a stranger deep dark secrets you wouldn't tell your best friend? Someone told me she was gay and that only I and the closet knew. Another confided about having a terminal illness and a year to live. Yet another talked of having the most awesome telephone sex the night before.

And you know what, dreaded retirement suddenly seems tolerable.

Until then, excuse me, while I log on.