Life is not like a box of chocolates. Forest Gump's mom - you're wrong. Life is like the game of Trivial Pursuit and we're the little plastic playing pieces that scoot around after the dice are rolled. We race around, back and forth, and up the middle trying to stuff our pie-hole with wedges so we feel complete. Now, a part of us do it as fast as we can just so we can puff our chest up, take a bow, and shout, "I win! That's how it's done Cousin Ricky, you big dumb ass. I win!"

But the greater reason is more virtuous--it grounds us and fills us with that sense of inner well-being.

I like that the game requires you to obtain six different category wedges to win. It's like the game saying, "OK dude, you're a Botanist, and yes you're gonna whoop ass in all the green nerdy "Science and Nature" questions, but how good are you with show tunes? And how many yards is a cricket field? And who the hell is Samuel Taylor Coleridge? Ya busted. Exactly.

It's just the way life is. It seems to work best when you spread your time and goals in different arenas. What's the point of making half a million bucks a year if you haven't seen your kids awake for 3 weeks? What's the point of having sex with 50 new people a year, if you actually haven't gotten close to any of them? It's all in the balance. You aren't a fully filled player without rolling around in a little bit of everything.

And that's the challenging part. There's no point in only lingering around the "Literature" section if you're a professor. You're not going to truly move forward until you push yourself into those other zones. For some of us that means working on our dating or sex lives, quitting a nasty job or putting the hoagie down and hitting a treadmill.

And sure this game has luck and so does life. That's why your college roommate always rolls doubles and gets to go again. That's also why your college roommate has a perfect set of teeth and girls throw their panties at his face. The playing field isn't always level.

But we play on. We dig in. We set up strategies that work best for us: Get the easy things out first. Hunker down next to the hard stuff 'til we nail it. Visit in the in-laws and then get drunk. Get drunk and then visit the in-laws? You decide.

But, hear this Guy Speaklets: Sometimes it's best to take a breath--skip a turn, just be happy you're on the board. Who cares that your best friend's wife is a hot gymnast and is one easy US capital question away from winning today's game. The bottom line: play dude. Play.