For those of you who clicked on this thinking it’d be about the TV show . . . sorry. It’s not.
The MASH I’m referring to is the game we played as kids to try and get a glimpse of our future.
MASH stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House and to play the game, you’d pick a bunch of different categories like spouse, career, car, city, and number of kids. The person learning their future would pick the first three options for each category and, if I remember correctly, Lance Bass was usually featured in my three spouse options.
The fourth slot was filled out by whoever was administering the game and your friends were pretty much always assholes. They’d put in options so you could potentially end up marrying that weird kid in your class who ate his hair while working as a garbage collector, driving a wheelbarrow, and have 1,000 kids (which isn’t even physically possible).
Once all the spots were filled, it was time to learn your fate. There were various methods to this next part but the most common was to draw a spiral, as in the picture above, and count the spaces to get a number–we’ll use 6 as an example. Then the MASH administrator would go through the test and cross out every sixth item until you were left with only one option in each category, including the title which would determine what type of dwelling you would live in.
While I’m thinking about it, it occurs to me that we were really obsessed with learning our futures between MASH, cootie catcher/fortune tellers, and Magic 8 Balls. It probably has something to do with us being impatient little weirdos but I like to think it’s because we thought we’d be bomb ass adults wearing jellies in our mansions full of inflatable furniture we bought with the money we got from selling Beanie Babies and married to ‘N Sync.
Emily Regan 