I remember in high school when the drivers’ ed. teacher asked me if I knew how to drive. “Yes!” I said. I didn’t want to be stuck in the simulator room with the kids who said “no,” avoiding crashes on the big screen when I could be avoiding them in real life. Problem was, I’d sounded so confident of my ability to drive that the teacher took me out onto Government Boulevard in an actual car and told me to do my thing. As I’d never been behind the wheel before, this was not pretty.

When Steve Elliott asked me last week if I knew how to play poker, I took the same tactic. “Yes.” Possibly the most troublesome little word in the English language. That’s how I ended up at an actual poker table (you know, with little holes for chips and stuff), using actual chips, with a bunch of people who knew exactly what they were doing, playing something called “California Peach Grove,” when the only kind of poker I’d ever even heard of was Texas Hold ‘Em. Good thing the buy-in was low (yeah, I learned that term on wikipedia). My brother-in-law told me this story about bowing out of a game he was invited to by a prominent scientist at a governor’s mansion while in grad school, only to learn that the grad student who took his place lost $1800 that night. I was only out twenny dollahs, which won’t even buy a box of diapers. Which brings me to the sad truth: ladies who know the price of diapers have no bizness playing poker.

Read Elliott’s poker report over at McSweeney’s. (the June 9 entry)