Play

You probably haven’t noticed, but I’m a little eccentric.

Fun for me can be anything from tearing up a foreign nightlife until 6am to sitting in front of my computer figuring out a difficult programming problem. I amuse myself with small things like making a web page rank first in Google for stupid terms like gumball mogul. I have a friend who professionally sells gumballs in machines in malls and makes a killing off of it (hence mogul), so maybe my random obsessions will someday help a brother out.

But I never would have thought to tell people that that’s how I “play.” It’s a word that locals throw around like candy.

“How do you play?”

I’ve heard people use it to mean sports, video games, drinking, partying, sex and dating. First I wanted to correct their English, but really it’s such a perfect word. My man Aidan Killian, a “humour and presentation coach” AKA comedian extraordinaire, taught me that one of the most powerful things you can do in story-telling is make the person regress to a childhood emotional state. It feels good to think about playing as a kid. When and why did we stop thinking of all of these awesome things as, just, playing.

I don’t want to go rock climbing; I want to play, and rock climbing is what I want to play at. I want to play, and I’m going to grab some friends and dance to music produced by a man who looks like a giant mouse. I want to play, and it’s a happy, smart, sexy girl I want to play with.

It’s such a pure word, and it might be my favourite take-away from Changsha.

Enjoy irresponsibly.

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