My sister pointed it out over the phone a few months back, mostly as a joke, that I’d described a sandwich shop in a five-out-of-five kind of register, unprompted, in the middle of a story that had nothing to do with sandwiches. I laughed it off at the time. I have not been able to stop noticing it since, which is its own kind of trap, now I’m aware of the habit and the awareness hasn’t slowed it down at all, it’s just added a layer of self-consciousness on top.
I think it started honestly, from doing this seriously for long enough that the mental machinery just doesn’t turn off when I close the laptop. You spend enough nights working out why a game’s setup time matters more than its box says it should, or why a book’s ending earns its ambiguity instead of just dodging one, and the muscle that does that work doesn’t come with an off switch you can find later. I catch myself doing full teardown-and-rebuild critiques of things that were never supposed to be reviewed. A coffee place near my apartment. The new coating on the break room microwave door that apparently makes it heat unevenly now. A route home that shaves four minutes off but costs you the good radio signal for half of it.
Marcus thinks it’s funny and occasionally useful, he’s started asking my opinion on unrelated purchases with a straight face, like I’m a consumer reports column that happens to also write about board games. The Thursday group finds it less charming when it turns inward on their own house rules mid-session, and I’ve had to actively bite my tongue more than once rather than deliver an unsolicited verdict on somebody’s decision to house-rule away a mechanic I think is load-bearing.
What I’ve landed on, mostly, is that this isn’t really about rating things, the actual habit underneath it is closer to just refusing to let an experience pass without deciding what I actually thought of it, which sounds almost virtuous when I phrase it that way and probably isn’t. I don’t think most people walk around with an unformed opinion about the sandwich they just ate. I think most people just don’t say it out loud, and somewhere in doing this seriously for long enough, I lost whatever filter used to stop me. My sister still brings up the sandwich. I stand by the sandwich, for the record. It was a three, not a five, I misspoke on the phone and never corrected it.