This is the last time. Are you sad?

Last summer, I started a series of posts about the online word game Psychobabble in which Cara and I met, and that, as our friendship grew, we increasingly used to flirt with each other via sentences we made in the game.

First Psychobbable post (Note: this post includes an explanation of how the game worked. Since it's been so long since my previous post on the topic, it's probably worth including a very brief refresher here. The game was based on magnetic fridge poetry, and in each round, players in a room of up to twelve had one minute to pick some words from a set of around 60-70 tiles and arrange them into a sentence. Then all the sentences were displayed and players voted for their favorites.)

Second Psychobabble post

I intended it to be a three-part series, and now I'm finally getting around to writing the third part, which covers July and August 2006 including the first trip we ever took together, an event that was shortly followed by the end of the game Psychobabble. As before, I'll be posting screenshots of sentences, sometimes with corresponding in-game chat, along with my explanations of the sentences. And as I said in the previous post, "I will remind everyone again that she and I never collaborated on sentence making; every single time that we made sentences that went with each other it was a case of us being on the same mental wavelength by thinking of the same inside jokes or, in certain cases, by some bizarre coincidence."

Now, back to the sentences.

July 9

As shown in my previous post, we really liked to make sentences about going on walks together.

July 10

"Fishing" - as in fishing for compliments from each other - was something we often accused each other of, and made jokes about, in our online chats.

July 11

Cara and I decided that we were going to travel together to Washington, D.C. in early August to see a show by our favorite band, Ozma. This sentence by Cara celebrates our decision to go!

July 13

Cara's sentence was foreshadowing of numerous future walks on which we would hold each other's hands. My sentence is a reference to the fact that I had recently sent her a short video clip of me playing the piano (specifically, a snippet of the Ozma song "Gameover").

July 23

Here we both made sentences referencing the fact that Cara worked at a company called Garden City Group.

Our two sentences both referencing the Ozma song "You Know the Story" go together nicely.

July 29

Cara's sentence is about the fact that she liked a lot of the music I listened to. My sentence teasingly insinuates that Cara liked music we considered bad such as "In the End" by Linkin Park and "My Immortal" by Evanescence.

August 1

My sentence here kind of amazes me. As I talked about in my previous blog posts about Psychobabble, it's one that could plausibly be "just a sentence," but I have no doubt that in my mind when I made it was the fact that I had never been on a real date (something I had not directly told Cara!) and that if Cara and I went out on a date she would therefore be "my first date." Which did, of course, happen, but not until a little over three months after I made this sentence!

August 2

And here's one from Cara that could be "just a sentence" but was undoubtedly actually about her hopes that I did in fact "like her" (as more than a friend).

This was shortly before our trip to D.C. My sentence is obviously about the fact we were going to a show there. Although we were going primarily so that we could see Ozma, they were actually not headlining the show but rather opening for The Rentals (another band we liked), so that's what Cara's sentence is about.

"Speedy speed boy" is something Cara had called me in reference to my being a runner.

August 4

After we returned from D.C., we learned the dismaying news that Popcap, the company that ran Psychobabble, had announced they would soon be shutting the game down. My sentence is about this, with a classic Garden Fight reference. I should also mention that of the two people who voted for my sentence, one was (of course) Cara, and the other was... Cara's mother! But I didn't know that at the time. Actually, a while before Cara had told me that her mother played Psychobabble, but I thought Cara was joking, and when it became clear I thought she was joking, Cara decided to play it off as if she had been joking rather than continue to try to convince me. It wasn't until years later that I learned the truth.

Just days before we went to D.C., I broke my arm after falling down while running, which meant that Cara had to do all the driving on the trip. Here's Cara with a rather cruel (and hilarious!) sentence about my injury.

Another sentence by Cara about her hopes that I was into her.

A great sentence by Cara about the imminent demise of our favorite pastime.

August 7

While on our trip, we saw a sign for "Forks of Cheat," a winery in Morgantown, West Virginia. We thought this name was very funny. I love Cara's sentence referencing it.

Cara's sentence is about the fact that we had slept in the same hotel room in D.C. (but in different beds!).

August 8

In retrospect, my sentence is kind of cruel considering how apparent it was Cara had a crush on me and how uncertain she was of whether I felt the same way about her! Good thing it ended up not being Cara's imagination! Her sentence is a reference to the bowling outing that was the first time we got together in person.

One of the highlights of the trip was the fact that in the car, I read aloud to Cara Cretaceous Park, the sequel to Jurassic Park that my best childhood friend and I wrote in fifth grade. (In August 2015 I created an annotated version of Cretaceous Park and it can be found in this blog post.) This led to a lot of laughter on both our parts. The funniest thing to us was the absurd repetition of the phrase '"Run!" shouted Alan.'



Because I had a broken arm, it was hard for me to open a bottle of water. Cara's sentence is a great reference to this, evoking a scene of her watching me struggle with the bottle and waiting for me to ask for help (she did end up helping me open the bottle). My sentence comes from the fact that certain aspects of our trip were very poorly planned, mainly that we did not pick a dinner location ahead of time, assuming we'd come across something, and then (in those pre-smart-phone days) failing to do so after walking around the National Mall for a while and then taking the Metro to near the 9:30 Club, the concert venue. We were both very hungry, me especially. I ended up buying a bag of chips at a gas station across the street from the 9:30 Club. In the fall of 2015, on a trip in which I went to a concert at another venue in the same area, I discovered that there were actually numerous restaurants just blocks away from where we had been. Oops!

Cara's sentence is another reference to her helping me open my water bottle. My sentence is another reference to Cretaceous Park. 

August 9

Here's another Forks of Cheat reference.

While at my parents' house, I was looking at Cara's pictures from the trip on Flickr, and my mom saw that the name on the Flickr account was Communista, leading my mom to say, "Is... is this person a communist?" (Cara was not a communist.)

I really like this pair of sentences referencing the Ozma song title "Light Years Will Burn."

Aw, what a nice sentence by Cara.

Cara with another Rentals sentence. Me with another "is it flirting or is it just a sentence" sentence.

While I made a sentence about our D.C. trip and Cara made a sentence about hoping to go to another show with me, Jen (SA_shedevil) also made a sentence about Cara and me. She was someone who frequently played Psychobabble with us and who Cara had privately told about her feelings for me. I'm pretty sure I voted for "Your walks are really more than that" thinking that it was Cara's sentence and I don't remember what I thought of it when I saw it was actually Jen's sentence.

I feel like with the game soon ending, Cara was feeling desperate and was making more and more sentences hinting at her feelings for me. Although we did flirt some in our frequent AOL Instant Messenger chats, we were much more flirtatious in our Psychobabble sentences, because there was the plausible deniability factor of "maybe they're just sentences." The game going away would remove this outlet. It makes me wonder if things would have played out any differently, and perhaps sooner, had the game not gone away. My sentence, by the way, is about Cara driving the car on our trip while I controlled the music from the passenger seat.

Cara's sentence references the fact that we took the Green Line on the D.C. Metro. My sentence is a twisted reference, but one that Cara nonetheless got (and loved!), to a rest stop on the way to D.C. that overlooked the Youghiogheny River. (I combined the tiles "Yugo," "-ing," and "-ly" to make something that very vaguely resembled Youghiogheny.) This would be a good place to quote the first paragraph of Cara's wedding vows:

Even before we met, we finished each other's sentences. After we had actually met, I knew I wanted to get to know you better. And as we sat atop a hill overlooking the Youghiogheny River later that year, I knew that I was beginning to fall in love with you.

(Well, I have tears in my eyes now.)

August 10 - the last day of Psychobabble

Awwwww. Cara was going all out on the flirting.



My punny and topical sentence here was very popular.



These are my and Cara's final Psychobabble sentences ever, which we made in the same round. Very fitting.

Despite our incessant flirting in the game, it wasn't until almost three months later, November 4, that we finally revealed our feelings for each other and started dating. The long delay was partly due to the fact that after that trip to D.C., we did not see each other in person for over two months. This next in-person get together was for an Okkervil River concert in Columbus, after which I finally came to the full realization that I did want to give being more than friends with Cara a shot. And the time after that when we saw each other was that fateful November 4, Cara's first of many trips to see me in Cleveland.

Psychobabble was gone forever, but in the months and years to come there were multiple attempts at recreating it by fans of the original game. The best was called Pseudobabble, which we would enjoy playing many times over the years, all the way up to as recently as 2013. Sadly, Pseudobabble eventually died off, and to my knowledge there is no working Psychobabble-like game online today.

It really was amazing the way Cara and I hit it off after meeting through this game and then the way we used the game to create our own unique way of communicating with each other. What a fantastic love story...

She and Jeff will often come and go together, see?

This is a continuation of my previous post about Psychobabble, the online word game where Cara and I met. This post will be part two of three. It turned out that the number of sentences I considered worth sharing (even after paring down from the much larger pool of sentences I had marked as significant to my and Cara's friendship) was vastly larger than I initially imagined. Therefore, I decided it was best to do this in three parts. I will remind everyone again that she and I never collaborated on sentence making; every single time that we made sentences that went with each other it was a case of us being on the same mental wavelength by thinking of the same inside jokes or, in certain cases, by some bizarre coincidence. And now, picking up from where I left off, in May of 2006...

May 23

Cara and I both made sentences about Chuck, our nemesis from the bowling alley who had lectured us on the "etiquette of bowling."

My  earliest memory is of me and my best friend at the time, both three years old, arguing with each other over the correct pronunciation of our age - I was certain that we were "tree" years old; he was equally certain we were "free." (Eventually we went to my mom to settle the dispute.) I had told this story to Cara, and so when she saw the opportunity she made a sentence about it!

May 25

Continuing the theme that began in my last post, we became very, very fond of making sentences about calling each other. I'm not even posting nearly all such sentences. I guess the word "call" showed up a lot in the game.

May 26

Fellow player SAppyKitty correctly identifies the fact that my sentence was in praise of Cara. I then jokingly say that it's actually about Fluffalina (another female member of our group of regulars).

May 27

Cara recognizes my reference to the Ozma song "Gameover" (which contains the lines "I'm flying over, over, I'll fly right over you").

Gold stars were another inside joke for us. When one of us told the other about having done something good, the other would often say "Gold star!" in response.

My  sentence is a reference to the song "View of the Sea," a solo work of Ozma bassist/vocalist Daniel Brummel and a song Cara and I loved. Cara's sentence is about how so much of the music she listened to she had learned about from me.

Here I made a reference to the obscure Ozma song "If My Amp Had Wheels" from their out-of-print first album. I was thrilled that Cara got the reference!

We  both made sentences referencing the line "So sad, princess isn't here" from the Ozma song "Gameover" (which is itself, of course, a reference to "Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle" from the original Super Mario Brothers Nintendo game).

May 28

Cara with another "Gameover" reference ("I bet you don't know where to find, our extra life times 99, I know you tried, but still we died," also a reference by Ozma to Super Mario Brothers).

My  sentence is about me being sad when Cara was "away" or not active on AOL Instant Messenger. Cara's sentences asks me about a Pearl Jam song ("Why Go") from the concert I had recently attended; I answer her query in the chat.

My  previous opinion that Cara was old reverses!

We  both made sentences foreshadowing our future practice of making mixtapes for each other.

May 29

In  marching band, the trombone section of which I was a part was "C Row." I think it's pretty impressive that Cara saw the word "crow," made the leap to that representing "C Row," and correctly predicted that I, seeing her sentence, would be able to make the same mental leap!

Jeff, as I've mentioned, was a tile that sometimes appeared in the game, but Cara, of course, was not. We usually looked down on the practice of trying to represent a single word by using two words that together could sound like it, but here I made an exception with "car" plus "a" and Cara loved it based on her reaction.

Cara making another reference to her Galaga woes at the bowling alley's arcade. I don't recall whether we ever actually played Galaga again. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe we did once at a turnpike service plaza? I'm not entirely sure...

May 30

We  both made references to the Ozma song "Last Dance."

Strikingly similar calling themed sentences.

June 1

Another sentence about us calling each other, here also referencing the Ozma song "The Ups and Downs" ("Don't call me up, I'm so sick and tired of being down").

More gold star sentences.

June 3

It's like we were obsessed with the concept of calling each other (which we sometimes did, but only rarely - almost all our communication was by chatting on AIM). Actually, these sentences are also about how Cara had recently been "totally out of minutes" on her phone. That's a blast from the past, huh?

Cara with another slam on my Yakov sentences (I didn't make one in this particular round!).

We  both made sentences referencing the song "Winterize" by A Northern Chorus. A little more than two years later, the two of us would travel to Hamilton, Ontario to see the band's farewell concert, and I still consider it the best show I've ever seen (if you're interested, I reviewed it here).

And here we both made sentences referencing Ozma's "You Know the Story," which at this point was not at all surprising when all four words from the song's title showed up in the same round.

June 5

I love how in this round when we got the opportunity for a Garden Fight sentence, we not only both used "garden fight" but also both made sentences correctly predicting that there would be exactly two such sentences.

In  the message board thread in which we organized games, someone (undoubtedly a newbie) said something about "Communista's joyless deathmarch of a game" because he felt that Cara was taking the fun out of it by criticizing other people's terrible sentences. And here, when the word "march" showed up, we both made sentences about this (appropriately, this was the first round of this particular game).

June 10

I was very impressed at Cara's sentence construction here, and let her know it!

June 12

Cara loved high school marching band and at this point in time was a member of a community band, so I had to tease her about it.

And here the two of us both played off the previous sentence.

I would, in fact, "drive to see" Cara that weekend! Actually, I went to Columbus in order to be with my family to travel to our family reunion in Utah, but before we went to the family reunion I went to a Columbus Clippers baseball game with Cara - the first time we ever did something together in person as just the two of us.

This is definitely one of the most bizarre instances of us being on the same mental wavelength when constructing sentences, and it freaked us both out a bit. It was always fun when we came up with similar sentences that referenced one of our inside jokes, but by this point, it was no longer very surprising when that happened. Here, however, the "same very weird thing" was not in any way an inside joke or reference to anything we had ever talked about. (Seven of Nine is the name of a Star Trek character, but there was not a "Seven of Nine" tile; the three words were all separate tiles, and I wasn't even a Star Trek fan, although Cara was. I should also say that we did not have any malicious intent toward Christianity in making these sentences; we were just being silly.)

A very cute sentence by Cara referencing the "Skinny" nickname bestowed on me by Chuck at the bowling alley, and the arcade games we played there.

"Your Name" is another Ozma song. This round sparked a funny and sweet exchange in our AIM chat. Cara said that she thought I lied because she didn't see the poem. I proceeded to make a "poem" of her name: "C, cool. A, awesome. R, rad. A, awesome." Cara complained that I used "awesome" twice and said that she bet I thought of "ancient." I vehemently denied that and then, with a winking face, suggested, "A, annoying?" Cara responded with a crying face and then said, "J: jerk E: egotistical F: far too tall F: frankly." I then replied with my actual new choice for the second "a" in her name: "A, a friend." Cara said, "AWWW, now I feel bad," and I replied "it worked! ;-)." Yeah, we were silly.

June 13

I believe that the primary meaning I had in mind for my sentence here was the we often came and went together in Psychobabble games because we both enjoyed playing more when the other was also present, but obviously the sentence works on multiple levels, and is very poignant when viewed in retrospect.

June 27

After I returned from the family reunion in Utah but before I returned to Cleveland, Cara and I got together again, seeing the Pixar movie Cars at the AMC Lennox Town Center, and after the movie we went for a walk together on the Olentangy Bike Trail, where Cara would go for many bike rides (some with me) in years to come. This outing led to many sentences.

OoOoOoOoOo. (Cars wasn't really that great, but we both very much enjoyed hanging out with each other.)

Cara was 5'2". When we were walking together, the height difference between us was very striking.

While Cara made a sentence about our walk, I made yet another Ozma "Gameover" sentence (in this case, the line in the song "where we go, we don't need roads" is a Back to the Future reference).

"I'm not young" - me, age 23. Ha.

June 28

Giraffes are tall, get it? This is freaking adorable, by the way. And after she made this sentence, she would sometimes call me "Jeff Giraffe."

Ouch, Cara. Ouch.

July 1

It  was always so fun when we stumbled into making sentences that responded to each other.

Like here, where my sentence describes Cara's sentence.

Okay, so this is one of those that could be "just a sentence," but I suspect it was also Cara expressing frustration at the fact that she had a huge crush on me and she wondered whether I felt the same way and if I did, would I ever tell her. It's also, I have to say, a very nicely constructed Psychobabble sentence.

In  truth, I was very uncertain about whether I wanted my relationship with Cara to turn toward romance, but I already knew that I enjoyed her company in a way that was different from any other friend I'd ever before had.

  We never got tired of making sentences about calling each other.

A sentence combining Garden Fight with our real life outing!

Cara made me a birthday card and sent it to me.

The card was very late. (Pretty harsh sentence here!)

Another Ozma "Last Dance" sentence.

Followed immediately after by two more. (I imagine me saying things like "She's so dreamy" in sentences added to Cara's internal torment over her crush on me.)

Pretty amazing example of us making the same sentence. MOB stands for makeoutbus, another player in our group. Cara and I made nearly identical sentences (differing only by the exclamation mark at the end of mine) about losing to MOB, and then proceeded to lose to MOB's oh so witty "Just try and dive in my butt!" with all three sentences receiving two votes each (Cara and I voted for each other) and MOB's just barely winning the sentence length tiebreaker.

Cara had told me that she had never, in her whole life, actually watched a sunset. (Don't worry, we remedied that eventually.)

Taking walks, like calling, became another common theme of our sentences. After the Cars and a walk outing, later that summer we also had a Superman Returns and a walk outing.

Combining a reference to our real life outings with a Yakov joke, gotta love it.

I'll leave off there for now. As you can see, as we became better and better friends, we made more and more sentences about things we did together. In fact, making sentences to entertain each other gradually became our primary motivation for playing Psychobabble. This would only become even more true over the next month - until the game abruptly went away. But that's a story for my next post.