This will seem like a diversion, but...

I'm going to write a little about this guy I used to know.

His name was Dan. To relieve any suspicions or concerns, let me specify that I never went to school with him and he is not married to any of my friends or fellow coworkers.

This is really about one specific night, where we were playing a game.

Dan was really good at games. He knew a lot of parlor games like call and response games and variations on Fruit Bowl.

This particular night, we were playing a game where a word was chosen and the two teams took turns singing bits of song lyrics with that word in it. You needed to know at least four words including that one. For example, let's say the word was "dance" and you wanted to use "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)".. singing "Everybody dance now," would not be enough. Do you know that the next word is "yeah"?

That game sticks in my mind for two reasons. Perhaps they both relate to how competition can bring out our ugly sides.

One word used was "Shenandoah." Ruth used "Oh Shenandoah", the obvious choice. I responded with a phrase from "Take Me Home, Country Roads"... "Shenandoah River. Life is old there..."

Ruth insisted that they were different words, because she was ending it on Shenan-DOH, not pronouncing the last syllable. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but she could not be convinced.

To be fair to her, earlier versions of the song were sometimes referring to an Oneida chief, which is how we get from the wide Missouri to West Virginia, Mountain Mama.

It's still the same word.

That annoyed me, but I remember the game more clearly because of my sense that I was annoying Dan.

Please understand, with my memory and my love of music and specifically my deep memory for music, this is exactly my type of game.

Something I understand better now is that it makes sense that a guy who specializes in games that no one else has played or even heard of before is going to like winning. I get that.

However, I am also very sensitive to being annoying, having a deep fear that being annoying is my basic nature.

I kept sensing that I was annoying him, especially when we were on the word "rose".

So many songs mention roses.

You need to know at least four words, but sometimes memory can't bring up just those four; you need more. I remember that for "The Rose", where that word only comes up once at the very end. I needed to start at "Just remember".

When we were almost out of rose songs I remembered one more that I had to work out; I had only heard it once in a movie.

In Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role sings "Did You Not Hear My Lady". It has a line, "shaming the rose and the lily, for she is twice as fair."

This is how I know this happened in 1996.

You might think that maybe he was really annoyed at Gwyneth Paltrow, but she was not generally seen as annoying yet. I think that started sometime between her marrying and consciously uncoupling from Chris Martin.

No, I think it was me. I kind of blamed it on my having to take a minute to come up with the words... that thinking out loud process. 

Now I think it was partly annoyance that anyone at all knew more songs than  him, but especially that it was a girl, and not even a good-looking one.

That is partly from my having had more opportunities to observe that specific irritation that comes to men when they can't get a woman to admit she is wrong (especially because she isn't). The other part is that Dan was kind of shallow. 

He was generally regarded as good-looking: tall, pronounced cheekbones, and impressively (but not obviously carefully) styled hair.

At the time, I knew a lot less about sexism, but I was fully aware that I was not considered attractive, that it mattered more for girls, and that no one was asking me out. Given those disadvantages, isn't it only fair that I at least have a good memory and know lots of songs? Is that asking too much?

If you put it that way, it sounds silly, but I suspect the irritation doesn't go away.

The big problem is that people don't think about. 

Generally, they just stay irritated and feel fully justified in that.