but, how do you WIN? Last man standing?

You just play until recess is over or you get bored or tired or someone gets hurt.

With dodgeball at my school, my strategy was generally to try to be one of the first people tagged out, before everyone had gotten really into the game, and then sit at the sidelines reading or go play on the monkey bars for the rest of the game. I didn't really mind playing, but what I couldn't stand was all the "How can you be so stupid? It figures we'd lose, since we have you on our team," that I'd get if I was tagged out toward the end of the game, when it "mattered." (When we played in gym, the gym teacher wouldn't put up with that stuff, and I usually had more fun then, but all of that would get pretty bad if our regular teacher took us outside to play dodgeball.)

I usually prefered either gym, where the teacher actually knew how to get us to work well in teams, or unstructured recess, where we could split into smaller groups.

but, how do you WIN? Last man standing?

No winning or losing really. If you managed to hold on to ball for a long time, people would remember, but basically you played until you didn't want to play anymore (or were too beat up to play anymore).

Maybe "game" isn't the right term. "Agression release" perhaps?

But my doctor did say that female fertility does drop significantly as you get into your 30's.

Yes, I've heard this, and it worries me. My younger sis is pregnant again. This will be her second. My older sister has two boys. Me? Thirty and single, with nary a prospect on the horizon. I'm not even sure I want kids at all, let alone want to produce them myself, and yet I still hear that damn clock ticking. This is why I would like to get married in the next five years, though there's a voice in the back of my mind saying I'm still not ready for it. But by the time I am ready, adoption may be my only course.

I used to enjoy People's Most Beautiful issues, because I like pretty pictures. But when I started really paying attention to pics, I realised that the ones they use often (if ever) aren't original, and don't even represent the best that celeb has taken that year (there were better pics than this in the same (GQ) shoot, for instance). And I know there must be a better 2004 pic of Jamie Foxx than this. Hilary Swank should sue. Mischa, on the other hand, never looked so good.

I have a friendly viciousness.

Heh. This describes my mood today perfectly.

I played dodgeball in the 70's and have no scars--physical or emotional.

I wasn't a popular kid, but I was a good athlete who was always did well at those kinds of games. There were times the cliquey kids tried to keep the ball away from me, but that was often self-defence on their part. I was/am always a little over-competitive in those kinds of situations. I did hate foursquare because people would just cheat (to get rid of the unpopular kid), so I avoided it.

This describes my mood today perfectly.

Just today?

As for violent childhood games, we never played it on the playground (to hard a surface and they wouldn't have let us), but I used to love what some call "Kill the guy with the ball" but what we called by the very un-PC name of "Smear the queer". Basically, think of rugby, but no rules, no teams and no scoring. Whoever has the ball tries to keep it; everybody else pretty much has carte blanche to do what they can to get it away from the person who has it. If you get the ball away, you try and keep it and everyone comes after you. Maybe it's closer to a sort of reverse tag, but with more violence.

I played this all the time, though not at school. It was a neighborhood game. Unfortunately, some of the boys I played with were kinda scared of my dad and wouldn't tackle me.

Drive to work this morning was awful. There's a place where 4 highways meet and split again. One of the splits is on my way to work- an 18 wheeler was going to fast to make the split, wrecked and shut down one of the highways. Took me an hour and 15 for what's usually about a half hour drive.

Mathy people: I just used algebra at work! There is simpler way to do it, but I needed to see the number relationships to figure out original pricing on stuff that had been marked down 25%. So, I wrote out the formula, and then whizzed through pricing them back!

I should be doing homework, but the finale of the Surreal Life 4 is really distracting. What is wrong with me?