INSTRUCTIONS

1 Player, and that player is you. You are totally being played.

Ages 14 to Adult

NOTE: You will not actually feel like an adult. While this is around the age where you can legally star in a porno, you are absolutely forbidden to drink your parent’s leftover liquor in the privacy of their basement with your soon-to-be alcoholic frenemy named Caitlynn, except she spells it with an ‘8’ on all of her social media platforms.

OBJECT

Collect high school diploma so you can leave as quickly as possible from the unexciting, barren town that your parents thought would be a viable option for breeding and subsequently raising their offspring. Should’ve accepted that job offer on the Big Island, Dad. But no, you had to “stay near the family” all so Mom could continue her weekly Bingo Night with Nana and Aunt Jeanine. Where exactly is Nana right now, Mom? That’s right, she’s playing the slots with Jesus and the Holy Ghost. You people sicken me.

Spinner ring, spinner dial and spinner arm
25 LIFE tiles
4 Textbooks
5 Notebooks
Overpriced binders of various girth
Dividers
Less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep
Scoliosis
Lean, picturesque lockers
Advanced projector technology that your Calculus teacher will spend fifteen minutes trying to operate before realizing that she had previously unplugged it to make room for her “World’s Greatest Teacher” mug
Food?
Handouts
Lots and lots of handouts

SETTING UP

Pick out a cute locker-mirror at Target so you can keep your lip gloss looking fresh and alluring throughout the day. Scratch that. Just buy one at the dollar store. It’s going to pretty much fall apart anyway after a few weeks of overly dramatic locker-door slamming. Can you believe Stacey said that? I actually can, if I’m being honest. I mean, you did sleep with her boyfriend of 3-and-a-half weeks. That’s almost a whole month of raw commitment that you single-handedly soiled in the back of a Ford Fiesta. I guess I can’t blame you. That sounds like a nice fiesta to me.

What was I going to say? Oh, right. Before school starts, go to your local department store for a new backpack. Your current one smells like the middle school gymnasium, and no one wants to relive that. Get something that says, “I’m a good student when I need to be, but I also know how to let loose every once in a while. Call me.” The only reason I say to go to the department store is because the dollar store draws the line at backpacks, apparently, even though I’m pretty sure you can buy a bundle of lawn flamingoes there for an excellent bargain. Did I mention that you won’t have lots of money to throw around while you’re in high school? Because you won’t.

Next, you will need to get organized if you want to be ready to learn. Place the dividers in your binder in the intended order. You will probably end up using a couple of the tabs for, like, a month before giving up and stuffing everything between the pages of your Honors Physics textbook. Why did you decide to take Honors Physics again? To challenge yourself? Yeah, good luck with that.

GAMEPLAY

All players find the strength to climb out of bed in the morning. Those with their own transportation reap the benefits of said transportation. Everyone else dies a little inside. Youngest players cry first. Crying then continues clockwise.

On Monday through Friday, appear at the bus stop around 7 in the morning, give or take a few precious minutes. Your bus driver will either arrive too early or too late. Either way, you are screwed. You will suffer at the hands of a vicious, unforgiving winter, OR your heartbroken mother, who can’t believe she is going to be late for work again. She doesn’t ask that much of you, you know. She wants you to start listening again. You used to be such a good little kid who ate all of his vegetables and liked to scrapbook on Sundays with Mommy. Now you spend all day in your bedroom doing God knows what. How can you even think with that music playing so loud? Anyway, if you do end up driving in with your mom, she will ask when you intend to start acting like a real family again. Then it is your turn to spin the wheel. The number the spinner lands on is the number of months it will take to get her to stop bringing you up to her coworkers.

HOW TO WIN

After all players have graduated, all players will go to college, or the military or whatever, or delude themselves into thinking that they will make it into professional hockey. You know the odds of that are very slim, right? Okay, just checking.

Then, after x years apart (you have to spin the wheel to find out the exact number), some players return for your high school reunion. All players in attendance turn their LIFE tiles message-side up and add up the dollar amounts shown on their tiles. You can judge the winner based on highest dollar amount, but as long as your nemesis since freshman year has become somewhat more fat, poor, or ugly…

YOU WIN!

SATIRE

1. A dog searching for a bone walks 3.50 m south, then 8.20 m at an angle of 30.0° north of east, and finally 15.0 m west. He begins chasing his tail for about an hour-and-a-half before realizing that the appendage is in fact attached to his own rear, and therefore cannot be caught. He then realizes that life is pointless, so there’s no use burying a bone in the first place. Enjoy the bone right now, goddamnit, while you still have it. Life is fleeting; tomorrow is never guaranteed. Use graphical techniques to find if “he” is the correct pronoun for the dog in this scenario, or if I’m just a lunatic who thinks all life has inherent value.

2. A young man – let’s call him Albert – is lost in a maze. He makes three consecutive displacements so that at the end of the walk he is completely lost and likely to die a sad, overweight virgin. The first displacement is 8.00 m westward, and the second is 13.0 m northward. Albert’s path vaguely resembles a triangle, which sort of reminds him of a misshapen donut, which in turn makes him hungry for a Boston Kreme. He’s also turned on somehow. Use the graphical method to sort out Albert’s priorities.

3. A rock is dropped, I guess, at the same instant that a used condom at the same elevation is thrown horizontally from a seedy hotel window during an overzealous housekeeper’s Christmas shift. Which will have the greater speed when it lands on a drunk mall Santa in a nearby alley? How long will it take for the group of children walking by to realize that their innocence is newly deceased, along with Mall Santa’s dreams? Merry Christmas. And no, I don’t care about the other holidays. Get over yourselves.

4. The staples inside a stapler are kept in place by a spring with a relaxed length of 0.115 m. If the spring constant is 51 N/m, how much elastic potential energy is stored in the spring when its length is 1.150 m? These are the important things in life, kids. You’re just gonna have to trust me.

5. A 40.0 kg child is in a swing that is attached to ropes 2.00 m long. I just realized that you probably don’t know how long that is, considering we use feet and inches in America, but it’s whatever. Also, how heavy is 40.0 kg? I guess you can call me Alicia Silverstone, because I’m totally clueless. Let’s just humor me and find the gravitational potential energy associated with the child relative to the child’s lowest position under the following conditions:

a) when I decide to put my foot in front of the child’s face mid-swing

b) at the bottom of the well that I will undoubtedly end up throwing the child into, like the girl from The Ring

c) Seven days

6. How long does it take a 19 kW steam engine to make a delicious pot roast, an estimated 6.8 × 107 J of work? Disregard that it’s gluten-free and smells like pig’s feet, which means that, yet again, all of that hard work will go unappreciated. I’m sick of being the family punching bag.

7. Derek leaves his physics book on top of a drafting table that is inclined at a 35° angle because he is a forgetful douche. Seriously. He’s completely insufferable. I heard that he has gingivitis and bad credit. The fact that he happens to be my ex is simply coincidental. Find the net force acting on his stupid book, and while you’re at it, remind him that today was supposed to be our anniversary, not that he even knows what that means anymore. He was too old for me, anyway, considering that anyone still using a drafting table must have some years on them.

8. Jamie Lynn, who happens to be the namesake of Britney Spears’ younger sibling, is a museum curator moving artifacts into place on various different display surfaces. I’m just kidding. She works at McDonald’s. You should’ve seen your face.

9. A zookeeper named Annabeth is recently and inexplicably broken-up with by her boyfriend of 5.2 years. She feels like crying, but her body has been unable to produce tears since the operation. To make matters worse, she finds an escaped monkey hanging from a light pole at her dead-end job. After shouting, “Not today, Satan!” she aims her tranquilizer gun at the deranged ape, assuming that “monkey” and “ape” are terms that can be used interchangeably. No? Well, then… I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t ask you. She kneels 10.0 m from the light pole, which is 5.00 m high. The tip of her gun is 1.00 m above the feces-ridden ground. At the same moment that the monkey/ape drops a banana, Annabeth shoots. If the dart travels at 50.0 m/s, will the dart hit the monkey, the banana, or will it somehow bounce off of something and put Annabeth out of her misery? Keep in mind that she has a wooden leg. I don’t exactly know how that would have an impact on anything; I just thought I should let you know.

10. Something something rollercoaster. Isn’t learning fun?