One of the Many Joys of the iPhone

Something about iPhones (and no, I don't have the 4G yet) is they can use up all your time and energy, sort of like an addiction/occupation/hobby. It's a little pathetic, really, that I always have my nose glued to the screen and I'm not even getting paid to do it. In fact, I'm paying Apple and AT&T to be the sucking vacuum that used to be my spare time.
One of the most consuming things I've found is an app, called “Words With Friends”, but don't let it fool you by how innocuous it sounds. It single-handedly has put a wrench in all my ongoing projects (except for raising my children) by causing me to practically have the phone surgically attatched to my hand.
For any Trekkies out there, I would compare this game to an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (much to my husband's chagrin). Remember the one where Wesley sees everyone on board playing a game constantly? He refuses to play it because he realizes it is part of an evil alien plot designed to distract everyone while the aforementioned take over the Enterprise. Silly, I know, but I hold to the analogy.
Now WWF (as I affectionately call it) is basically an electronic “Scrabble for Idiots”. Not to say you have to be an idiot to play it, but it definitely makes Scrabble more palatable. Firstly, it has a built-in dictionary and won't even allow you to play a word unless it is a word. My husband thinks the dictionary is a little too liberal in its word allowance, but that's not what bothers me. What is a problem for me is that I keep trying totally obscure letter combinations until I find one that works. And let me tell you, that can take a long time. I never realized how many combinations of the alphabet I could make that aren't actually words in the English language.
The upside is, there are many words that are in the vast memory banks of the game's dictionary that I never would have guessed. After a successful such pairing of letters (what joy!), I flip right over to my dictionary.com app to brief myself on the meaning. Now this exercise is strictly for my self-education, because there's none of that embarrassing “challenge” stuff going on. In fact, there's some major face-saving anonymity (in case you have an incredibly low-scoring turn) because you only know your opponent by their screen name. Unless, of course, if you actually decide to play a game with one of your “friends”, you may run the risk of not being friends anymore, because those games can get a little heated.
The second reason the game can fall into the “idiots” category is that you can take as long as you want for a turn. This can turn out to be incredibly irritating if your “friend” decides to take multiple days before they take their turn and you're dying to finish the game. But it can also be exceedingly helpful if you have a whole day where you can't play because you're throwing up or if you are stumped and have to find a word by trial and error, which like I mentioned before, can take hours.
I almost feel guilty, obsessing over the 26 letters of the English alphabet, using the poor defenseless things as pawns in my insatiable desire to win. Who would have known that he ABC's of my youth could use up so much of my discretionary time as an adult in my quest for supremacy? Just take my advice and don't assume that the mastery of WWF transfers over to the real-life game of Scrabble, because it doesn't. But that's a story for another time...