“Don’t fall in love with your son’s girlfriend.”
This directive was recently offered up by Cathy, my best friend from high school. We were together at a small reunion and we resumed our natural roles, me sitting at her feet as she dispensed advice. Cathy married first and had children first, so she’s always been a bit of a mentor to me.
Cathy was the one who, early in my parenting, told me, “You can’t force a child to eat or sleep or poop, so don’t even bother trying” – a piece of information that saved my sanity if not my life.
In fact, I’ve taken to heart most of the mothering advice she’s handed down, so, I admit, her cautionary words did dance around in my head the first few times I met my son’s girlfriend. But I’m afraid, for the most part, Cathy, it’s too late.
Is that because The Girlfriend is fresh-faced and dresses like Stevie Nicks? No.
Is it because she has an infectious smile and an easy laugh? No.
And it’s not because she’s smart or funny or upbeat or urbane. In fact, I don’t know if she’s any of those things, because I barely know her. But what I do know is that she’s a girl – a commodity this household has been woefully under-stocked with in the last seventeen and a half years.
“Hi,” she says to me when she walks in the house. “How was your day?” (This is a sentence that has never been uttered by my own offspring. No, not once.)
“My day was great,” I say, and I begin telling her about the jewelry show I’d been invited to that day. I tell her how a woman in town makes interesting costume jewelry and sells it at a very reasonable price and that I normally would just go to look, but today I ended up buying five pieces and the whole experience made me downright giddy.
I notice, as I tell her this story, that there’s a fluidity missing to my speech. I hear myself deliver it in tentative chunks, waiting for her eyes to glaze, as my sons’ do whenever I offer more than two words of detail about anything that has to do with clothing. Or jewelry. Or haircuts. Or me.
But there was no glazing. Instead, she responded in a way that was so remarkable I found myself replaying it in my head for the rest of the day and even for days beyond.
She said, “Really? Can I see it?”
She just asked to see my jewelry!!!
I bounded upstairs and reemerged a minute later with a silly smile on my face and a fistful of baubles in my hand. I showed her one piece at a time, offering detail after detail of the event itself – how three strangers told me that the turquoise piece was perfect for me, and how I just went ahead and bought it even though it was a little more of a “statement” than I was used to making.
“Ohhh, it’s so pretty,” she said, in a sing-song girly way that couldn’t be more foreign in my burp-and-grunt home.
Is she blowing smoke up my butt? I wondered. Maybe. I don’t even care. In fact, like it.
As a mother of boys I’ve told myself certain stories over the last many years: Girls are high maintenance. Girls have too much drama. Girls are petty and bossy and mean. As an ex-girl myself, I know all too well how vicious and rude girls can be to their mothers. I tell these stories to feel ok about living in house full of boys – boys who don’t want to discuss the nuances of nail color or the finer points of feelings – and I’ve convinced myself that I’m somehow better off in the long run because I don’t have all that gooey girl stuff to deal with.
But I’d forgotten about this. The authentic and palpable excitement about some very important aspects of life that, let’s face it, boys can’t even be bothered to feign.
Am I really in love with my son’s girlfriend, Cathy? No, of course not. But I do have a wicked mean crush.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
No Sorries
I played mixed doubles last night for the first time.
It wasn’t exactly an accident, but I didn’t know until I got on the court. I’d gotten an email during the day from Rachel, a woman I usually only play with in the summer. She told me to meet her at 6 p.m. When I got there, she was standing next to a tall, slim guy in his forties. “Do you know Peter?”
I actually did know Peter, as he’s the husband of a friend of mine. “I usually play with him,” said Rachel. “Is it ok if you play with Joel?”
I nodded, sure, but what I wanted to say is, “Really? We’re playing with guys?”
As it turns out, I knew Joel, too. I had played with Rachel once last summer against Joel and his wife. Aside from pros stepping in during clinics, that was the first time I’d played doubles with a man. And it’s a little different.
First off, men hit hard. Fortunately, my Friday group hits hard, so I’m somewhat used to it. But there is something different, almost ineffable, about the slam of a man. The power is similar, as is the satisfied afterglow. But if you pried open a woman’s brains and could actually read the thoughts in her head, that slam of hers might be accompanied by a “Take that!”, whereas a man’s thought balloon is almost certainly, “Crush! Kill! Destroy!”
A woman’s slamming face is full of retribution. A man’s is filled with glee. It takes a little getting used to.
However the biggest difference is this: Men don’t say “sorry.”
I’ve always known this intellectually, but I had never experienced it firsthand. Starting with the warm-up, hitting gently to each other across the net, it’s commonplace, if you hit too high or too wide, to express regret to your hitting partner. In women’s play, that is. Here, that was not done. I was “sorrying” all over the place, and other than that, the court was silent.
We gathered at the bench for a quick drink before starting the match and I mentioned the phenomenon. “Y’all don’t ever say sorry, do you?” (Sometimes I talk like I’m from the Deep South.)
I may as well have been speaking in tongues. I could see them both trying to figure out what there might be to be sorry about and they were simultaneously drawing blanks.
“Women say sorry all the time,” I offered.
Joel said, “Well, maybe if I hit my partner, by accident, I might say sorry. But to those guys over the net…?”
And with that, I commenced upon my very first, sorry-free game of tennis.
It was sort of remarkable. I felt exhilarated afterwards in a way I haven’t in a long time. It reminded me of when I first started playing and just being on the court created boundless energy. There is something very liberating about not having to say you’re sorry.
What do we women mean when we apologize every time we hit a ball that’s too high, too wide, too short, too hard? When we’re rallying and warming up, do we mean “I meant to hit it right to you but I didn’t execute properly (sorry)”? When we’re playing a game, do we mean, “I feel sheepish and slightly undeserving of the fact that I just hit an amazingly good shot that there was no way you were going to get (sorry)”?
Or maybe in all cases, we mean, “I just acted careless/reckless/thoughtless/selfish; I hope you still like me.”
If that’s what we’re saying (and I think it might be), it is exhausting. The feeling that you not only have to play good tennis, you also have to make sure you don’t offend anyone. That dynamic was completely absent last night, as these guys hit one brutally aggressive shot after another and not only didn’t apologize – they rocked a little fist pump afterwards.
Joel hit one shot from the baseline that whizzed past Peter and literally knocked him down. We all stopped for a second while he got to his feet and regained his equilibrium.
He wasn’t hurt, he’d just lost his balance. At that moment, even in my apology-free jubilation, I said to my partner, “I think you could have said ‘sorry’ on that one.”
It wasn’t exactly an accident, but I didn’t know until I got on the court. I’d gotten an email during the day from Rachel, a woman I usually only play with in the summer. She told me to meet her at 6 p.m. When I got there, she was standing next to a tall, slim guy in his forties. “Do you know Peter?”
I actually did know Peter, as he’s the husband of a friend of mine. “I usually play with him,” said Rachel. “Is it ok if you play with Joel?”
I nodded, sure, but what I wanted to say is, “Really? We’re playing with guys?”
As it turns out, I knew Joel, too. I had played with Rachel once last summer against Joel and his wife. Aside from pros stepping in during clinics, that was the first time I’d played doubles with a man. And it’s a little different.
First off, men hit hard. Fortunately, my Friday group hits hard, so I’m somewhat used to it. But there is something different, almost ineffable, about the slam of a man. The power is similar, as is the satisfied afterglow. But if you pried open a woman’s brains and could actually read the thoughts in her head, that slam of hers might be accompanied by a “Take that!”, whereas a man’s thought balloon is almost certainly, “Crush! Kill! Destroy!”
A woman’s slamming face is full of retribution. A man’s is filled with glee. It takes a little getting used to.
However the biggest difference is this: Men don’t say “sorry.”
I’ve always known this intellectually, but I had never experienced it firsthand. Starting with the warm-up, hitting gently to each other across the net, it’s commonplace, if you hit too high or too wide, to express regret to your hitting partner. In women’s play, that is. Here, that was not done. I was “sorrying” all over the place, and other than that, the court was silent.
We gathered at the bench for a quick drink before starting the match and I mentioned the phenomenon. “Y’all don’t ever say sorry, do you?” (Sometimes I talk like I’m from the Deep South.)
I may as well have been speaking in tongues. I could see them both trying to figure out what there might be to be sorry about and they were simultaneously drawing blanks.
“Women say sorry all the time,” I offered.
Joel said, “Well, maybe if I hit my partner, by accident, I might say sorry. But to those guys over the net…?”
And with that, I commenced upon my very first, sorry-free game of tennis.
It was sort of remarkable. I felt exhilarated afterwards in a way I haven’t in a long time. It reminded me of when I first started playing and just being on the court created boundless energy. There is something very liberating about not having to say you’re sorry.
What do we women mean when we apologize every time we hit a ball that’s too high, too wide, too short, too hard? When we’re rallying and warming up, do we mean “I meant to hit it right to you but I didn’t execute properly (sorry)”? When we’re playing a game, do we mean, “I feel sheepish and slightly undeserving of the fact that I just hit an amazingly good shot that there was no way you were going to get (sorry)”?
Or maybe in all cases, we mean, “I just acted careless/reckless/thoughtless/selfish; I hope you still like me.”
If that’s what we’re saying (and I think it might be), it is exhausting. The feeling that you not only have to play good tennis, you also have to make sure you don’t offend anyone. That dynamic was completely absent last night, as these guys hit one brutally aggressive shot after another and not only didn’t apologize – they rocked a little fist pump afterwards.
Joel hit one shot from the baseline that whizzed past Peter and literally knocked him down. We all stopped for a second while he got to his feet and regained his equilibrium.
He wasn’t hurt, he’d just lost his balance. At that moment, even in my apology-free jubilation, I said to my partner, “I think you could have said ‘sorry’ on that one.”
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Ready for the Real World?
I hate so many things about this college search process, it makes my head spin. I hate having too many choices. I hate looking at schools (largely because I hate traveling). I hate the guesswork involved in trying to figure out where The Teenager will be happy and thrive over four (or five, or six) years. But the thing I hate most is the random, arbitrary feeling of it all. It seems like a process that lacks anything that even remotely resembles fairness or order.
You’re playing the odds in a game whose rules seem totally capricious and are likely to change from school to school.
The teenager told his college counselor that he may be interested in a particular engineering school and she told him that as a white boy from New Jersey, his chances of being accepted were very slim. He’s got the grades. He’s got the scores. He’s got the interest. Not enough. “It would be easier for you to get in if you were a girl,” she said to him. And I start to wonder whether there’s enough money in his college savings for a sex change operation.
“The system is broken,” said a friend of my husband’s whose daughter applied early decision to a certain Ivy League school (his alma mater) and was wait-listed. His daughter has excellent grades, great test scores, does lab work as in intern at Harvard, has her own research projects and is an accomplished equestrian. Here’s what happened: Her classmate’s dad is friends with the Ivy’s crew coach – good friends – and he called in a favor for his own daughter. The coach spoke to the admissions office and the classmate was accepted early decision as a recruit for the crew team.
My friend’s daughter was devastated that she’d been wait-listed and to have a spot given to her classmate seemed beyond outrageous to her. Why? Because the classmate has never rowed crew a day in her life.
The classmate is apparently an ok student and a very good artist. Perhaps an artist who would have thrived at an art school. But maybe the art schools she was drawn to didn’t have a crew teams, or at least not teams that were coached by her dad’s friends, so she was better off, I guess, taking a spot the Ivy that her more qualified classmate could have had.
Who knows whether the our friend's daughter was next in line for that early decision slot. Who knows whether the young artist will turn out to be a star coxswain.
Deep down most of us just want our kids to spend time at a school that will prepare them for the real world. Still, to tell The Teenager a story like this, and then when he looks at me all mystified and full of disbelief, to simply nod my head and say, “I know. That’s sometimes how the world works.” Well, I hate that, too.
You’re playing the odds in a game whose rules seem totally capricious and are likely to change from school to school.
The teenager told his college counselor that he may be interested in a particular engineering school and she told him that as a white boy from New Jersey, his chances of being accepted were very slim. He’s got the grades. He’s got the scores. He’s got the interest. Not enough. “It would be easier for you to get in if you were a girl,” she said to him. And I start to wonder whether there’s enough money in his college savings for a sex change operation.
“The system is broken,” said a friend of my husband’s whose daughter applied early decision to a certain Ivy League school (his alma mater) and was wait-listed. His daughter has excellent grades, great test scores, does lab work as in intern at Harvard, has her own research projects and is an accomplished equestrian. Here’s what happened: Her classmate’s dad is friends with the Ivy’s crew coach – good friends – and he called in a favor for his own daughter. The coach spoke to the admissions office and the classmate was accepted early decision as a recruit for the crew team.
My friend’s daughter was devastated that she’d been wait-listed and to have a spot given to her classmate seemed beyond outrageous to her. Why? Because the classmate has never rowed crew a day in her life.
The classmate is apparently an ok student and a very good artist. Perhaps an artist who would have thrived at an art school. But maybe the art schools she was drawn to didn’t have a crew teams, or at least not teams that were coached by her dad’s friends, so she was better off, I guess, taking a spot the Ivy that her more qualified classmate could have had.
Who knows whether the our friend's daughter was next in line for that early decision slot. Who knows whether the young artist will turn out to be a star coxswain.
Deep down most of us just want our kids to spend time at a school that will prepare them for the real world. Still, to tell The Teenager a story like this, and then when he looks at me all mystified and full of disbelief, to simply nod my head and say, “I know. That’s sometimes how the world works.” Well, I hate that, too.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Getting Ready For College
People have been asking how’s our college search going. Specifically, they ask: What are you doing?
I’m sorry to report, not much.
I am armed with books and websites that I don’t look at because they’re too overwhelming, or because The Teenager has no idea what kind of school he wants to go to. He vacillates between Ivy League and County College, depending on how onerous his workload is that week.
I’ve tried to do the questionnaires on websites like College Board, an activity that’s supposed to narrow your search down to a manageable number of schools that you can then research further. I’ve done this particular questionnaire three times, each time pretending I’m The Teenager and answering questions as I think he would (or should). Each time, when I reach the end of the questionnaire, there are no suggestions. Zero. Apparently, there’s not one single college that fits my criteria.
I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
In between my bouts of inertia, I’ve been dismantling all our old Lego sets so I can sell the pieces by the bag. There’s a local consignment shop that I give quart-sized Zip-Locks filled with hundreds of dollars worth of colorful plastic and the proprietor says there’s a waiting list for them. I sit in the basement pulling apart Harry Potter sets and Star Wars sets that result in the same back aching stiffness as when I sat for hours with my kids putting them together in the first place.
I have five huge shopping bags of Legos in my trunk right now.
Lately, The Teenager has been broaching the subject of California. As in, Would you consider letting me go to school out there?
I’ve said no to this in the past. It’s a long ways away and, you know, they have earthquakes out there. But in some ways, California would really suit him and I’m now trying to pry open my stubborn mind and at least try to consider his applying.
I’m not a big fan of earthquakes (or most any destructive act of God, really), but the main reason I don’t want him to go to school in California is because I’m afraid he’ll want to stay there forever. Should I live my life in sunny California, or should I move back to New Jersey? Duh.
He says things like, “I like such and such school, but they don’t offer a Latin minor,” and I say, “For God’s Sake, do not pick a school based on whether they offer Latin,” even though I know that if he spends a lot of time studying Latin in school, there’s a really good chance he’ll end up close to home after college; maybe even back in his old bedroom, which would address at least one of my concerns: deep down I don’t really want him to leave.
Many of the Lego sets I’m pulling apart are structures that The Teenager and I worked long and tireless hours on. The instructions have no words and you simply do the best you can to interpret what the diagrams are asking of you. There’s something about the pictograms that level the playing field for parent and child. You teach each other how to build together.
I’ve never been a Sporty Mom or a Video Game Mom or (perish the thought) an Action Figure Mom, so Legos became one of the few things I could spend time doing with my boys where we’re both really engaged – where I wanted to be doing just that.
So, not to get all goopy, but breaking down the Legos feels a little like taking apart a childhood.
There will be mothers at the consignment shop who will happily plunk down five bucks to score a bag of random Lego pieces. Mothers who have never thought about Subject SATs or how they might manage to nag their child effectively across several time zones, and are only trying to find something to occupy their kids for a time – to engage their creativity and delight them with something new.
I try to make each bag unique by distributing the cool Lego accoutrements evenly. One gets a little yellow life boat. Another gets some teeny gold Lego coins. Lego snakes in one. Lego-copter in another.
I want their new pint-sized owner to stick his smooth, perfect hand deep into the bag of plastic parts and pull something out that makes his eyes go wide. Something that he holds out to his mother and says, “Look what I got!” and it becomes another little thing that the two of them have together – that they can cherish and marvel how lucky they were to pick a bag that held such a special little secret, just for them.
I want the mother to treasure the look on his face – the look that says, You got me this…You did this for me! I want her to burn that look into her heart so she always knows where to find it, long after she herself has packed the Legos away.
I don’t think it’s getting me very far, but that's what I've been doing to get ready for college.
I’m sorry to report, not much.
I am armed with books and websites that I don’t look at because they’re too overwhelming, or because The Teenager has no idea what kind of school he wants to go to. He vacillates between Ivy League and County College, depending on how onerous his workload is that week.
I’ve tried to do the questionnaires on websites like College Board, an activity that’s supposed to narrow your search down to a manageable number of schools that you can then research further. I’ve done this particular questionnaire three times, each time pretending I’m The Teenager and answering questions as I think he would (or should). Each time, when I reach the end of the questionnaire, there are no suggestions. Zero. Apparently, there’s not one single college that fits my criteria.
I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
In between my bouts of inertia, I’ve been dismantling all our old Lego sets so I can sell the pieces by the bag. There’s a local consignment shop that I give quart-sized Zip-Locks filled with hundreds of dollars worth of colorful plastic and the proprietor says there’s a waiting list for them. I sit in the basement pulling apart Harry Potter sets and Star Wars sets that result in the same back aching stiffness as when I sat for hours with my kids putting them together in the first place.
I have five huge shopping bags of Legos in my trunk right now.
Lately, The Teenager has been broaching the subject of California. As in, Would you consider letting me go to school out there?
I’ve said no to this in the past. It’s a long ways away and, you know, they have earthquakes out there. But in some ways, California would really suit him and I’m now trying to pry open my stubborn mind and at least try to consider his applying.
I’m not a big fan of earthquakes (or most any destructive act of God, really), but the main reason I don’t want him to go to school in California is because I’m afraid he’ll want to stay there forever. Should I live my life in sunny California, or should I move back to New Jersey? Duh.
He says things like, “I like such and such school, but they don’t offer a Latin minor,” and I say, “For God’s Sake, do not pick a school based on whether they offer Latin,” even though I know that if he spends a lot of time studying Latin in school, there’s a really good chance he’ll end up close to home after college; maybe even back in his old bedroom, which would address at least one of my concerns: deep down I don’t really want him to leave.
Many of the Lego sets I’m pulling apart are structures that The Teenager and I worked long and tireless hours on. The instructions have no words and you simply do the best you can to interpret what the diagrams are asking of you. There’s something about the pictograms that level the playing field for parent and child. You teach each other how to build together.
I’ve never been a Sporty Mom or a Video Game Mom or (perish the thought) an Action Figure Mom, so Legos became one of the few things I could spend time doing with my boys where we’re both really engaged – where I wanted to be doing just that.
So, not to get all goopy, but breaking down the Legos feels a little like taking apart a childhood.
There will be mothers at the consignment shop who will happily plunk down five bucks to score a bag of random Lego pieces. Mothers who have never thought about Subject SATs or how they might manage to nag their child effectively across several time zones, and are only trying to find something to occupy their kids for a time – to engage their creativity and delight them with something new.
I try to make each bag unique by distributing the cool Lego accoutrements evenly. One gets a little yellow life boat. Another gets some teeny gold Lego coins. Lego snakes in one. Lego-copter in another.
I want their new pint-sized owner to stick his smooth, perfect hand deep into the bag of plastic parts and pull something out that makes his eyes go wide. Something that he holds out to his mother and says, “Look what I got!” and it becomes another little thing that the two of them have together – that they can cherish and marvel how lucky they were to pick a bag that held such a special little secret, just for them.
I want the mother to treasure the look on his face – the look that says, You got me this…You did this for me! I want her to burn that look into her heart so she always knows where to find it, long after she herself has packed the Legos away.
I don’t think it’s getting me very far, but that's what I've been doing to get ready for college.
Friday, March 23, 2012
To Poo and Back Again
A few days ago, I started writing a blog post about why I haven’t written any blog posts for a while, and now I can’t find it. It’s taken a lot of resolve to stop looking for it and start again.
It began with me explaining how, every so often, I decide that I need a Real Job and I kick around the idea of getting my Realtor’s license. And then some kind of divine intervention occurs and I end up with a writing gig or in a writing workshop or basically doing something that has everything to do words and ideas and nothing to do with houses and closing costs. As if the universe is trying to tell me something.
I would actually make a good Realtor in some ways, because I really like showing people around and telling them nifty little things they might not know. About a house, or a neighborhood, or a town. It would also give me the opportunity to wear some of the cute outfits my Dresser put together for me last year when I broke down last year and paid someone to help me figure out what to wear.
But instead, I’m in ratty jeans, sitting in front of a computer screen that I’m absolutely certain is the cause of my failing eyesight. This is because I’m six weeks into a writing class.
I come to writing classes in perhaps the most arrogant way. I must need to conjure up a certain amount of egotistical overconfidence just to get myself to sign up. Because, writing workshops are kind of scary. At least they are for me. You’re basically paying someone a chunk of money to allow you to sit in a circle and have 10 people tell you why your essays don’t work.
So, all puffed up and full of myself, I walk into a room of other writers, fairly certain that I will be the most competent of the group. I soon discover, quickly and incontrovertibly, that I suck.
Ok, maybe that’s too harsh. Let’s just say, it dawns on me that not only am I not the best in the room, I may possibly be the worst.
As you might expect, this is not an ideal mindset for churning out blog posts.
This exact process has transpired so many times in precisely the same way that I feel like I should know by now to just walk in humble in the first place. But my brain is a rat bastard sometimes and it won’t let me just decide to be humble. It requires experiential proof.
I’m not sure if it’s like this for everyone, but I find Being Humbled very liberating, but absolutely exhausting. And not for just an hour or two; I’m kind of wrung out for a long time.
It also makes me really hungry.
So between spending the last many weeks writing, reading other people’s submissions, commenting on those submissions, overeating and generally feeling like poo, you can see how blogging might get shelved for a little while.
I think I’m back now, though. Thanks for being patient.
It began with me explaining how, every so often, I decide that I need a Real Job and I kick around the idea of getting my Realtor’s license. And then some kind of divine intervention occurs and I end up with a writing gig or in a writing workshop or basically doing something that has everything to do words and ideas and nothing to do with houses and closing costs. As if the universe is trying to tell me something.
I would actually make a good Realtor in some ways, because I really like showing people around and telling them nifty little things they might not know. About a house, or a neighborhood, or a town. It would also give me the opportunity to wear some of the cute outfits my Dresser put together for me last year when I broke down last year and paid someone to help me figure out what to wear.
But instead, I’m in ratty jeans, sitting in front of a computer screen that I’m absolutely certain is the cause of my failing eyesight. This is because I’m six weeks into a writing class.
I come to writing classes in perhaps the most arrogant way. I must need to conjure up a certain amount of egotistical overconfidence just to get myself to sign up. Because, writing workshops are kind of scary. At least they are for me. You’re basically paying someone a chunk of money to allow you to sit in a circle and have 10 people tell you why your essays don’t work.
So, all puffed up and full of myself, I walk into a room of other writers, fairly certain that I will be the most competent of the group. I soon discover, quickly and incontrovertibly, that I suck.
Ok, maybe that’s too harsh. Let’s just say, it dawns on me that not only am I not the best in the room, I may possibly be the worst.
As you might expect, this is not an ideal mindset for churning out blog posts.
This exact process has transpired so many times in precisely the same way that I feel like I should know by now to just walk in humble in the first place. But my brain is a rat bastard sometimes and it won’t let me just decide to be humble. It requires experiential proof.
I’m not sure if it’s like this for everyone, but I find Being Humbled very liberating, but absolutely exhausting. And not for just an hour or two; I’m kind of wrung out for a long time.
It also makes me really hungry.
So between spending the last many weeks writing, reading other people’s submissions, commenting on those submissions, overeating and generally feeling like poo, you can see how blogging might get shelved for a little while.
I think I’m back now, though. Thanks for being patient.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Sublimation vs. Sublime
My partner and I were at a big disadvantage today, just based on who our opponents were. One of them has an insanely powerful serve and groundstroke, the other can get almost anything at the net. My partner and I are both recovering from injuries that kept us away from Friday Tennis for a lot of the fall and then, after that, left us fumphering around the court, trying to compensate for our shortcomings, an activity at which I’m all too well-practiced.
She and I shouldn’t even play together, but we do.
We lost the first two games quickly and embarrassingly. We swung at balls and missed them entirely. Repeatedly hit shots into the net. Not here and there, but over and over. By the third game, we were high-fiving that we had simply scored a single point.
The subject of sex came up (as it often does in Friday Tennis) and after a short discussion (the details of which are better left unshared), my partner and I started playing the littlest bit better. We took a game. Then lost a game. Then took two games in a row and we were tied 4-4.
The reason this is important to mention is because there are different ways to lose a set. There’s the humiliating way (6-0 or 6-1), and then there’s the way that we did, 6-4, with our heads held high.
We started a new set and my partner and I made the mistake of switching sides, something you should certainly try if you’re getting creamed (6-0), but not if you’re playing decently with lots of close games, as was our situation. This was because we convinced ourselves that our short sex conversation had been the key to our success. That we had found ourselves in some sort of Bull Durham Reverse Universe where the transmutation of sexual energy was enhancing our strokes (so to speak), a phenomenon Freud may have considered a type of “sublimation.” If we just continued thinking about sex while we were playing tennis, we reasoned, we would be unstoppable.
This conviction proved very, very wrong.
I’m not sure what was responsible for our inexplicable underdog comeback in the first set, but whatever it was, it was gone once we switched sides and no amount of lascivious thought or innuendo seemed capable of getting it back.
My partner and I went from being Roadrunners back to being Coyotes, with shot after shot leaving us tail-singed and gape-jawed. I looked around for some Acme dynamite and in doing so, managed to miss yet another ball.
I think we ran out of time before we could finish the second set, but we played about five games and my partner and I only won one of them. I think that one was a fluke. I had stopped thinking about sex head on and instead began trying to remember the name of the Bull Durham movie, not actively, exactly, but like Muzak in the background – using just enough brain power to wrest my mind away from berating myself for our bad judgment and occupy it enough to let me go about hitting a proper backhand, which is likely the precise function our sex talk served to begin with.
By the end of the game, I still didn’t have the movie title. All I could conjure was Susan Sarandon writhing around while Kevin Costner is painting her toenails, a scene I remembered as itself sexy and unexpected and, in the world of movie scenes, perhaps even sublime.
She and I shouldn’t even play together, but we do.
We lost the first two games quickly and embarrassingly. We swung at balls and missed them entirely. Repeatedly hit shots into the net. Not here and there, but over and over. By the third game, we were high-fiving that we had simply scored a single point.
The subject of sex came up (as it often does in Friday Tennis) and after a short discussion (the details of which are better left unshared), my partner and I started playing the littlest bit better. We took a game. Then lost a game. Then took two games in a row and we were tied 4-4.
The reason this is important to mention is because there are different ways to lose a set. There’s the humiliating way (6-0 or 6-1), and then there’s the way that we did, 6-4, with our heads held high.
We started a new set and my partner and I made the mistake of switching sides, something you should certainly try if you’re getting creamed (6-0), but not if you’re playing decently with lots of close games, as was our situation. This was because we convinced ourselves that our short sex conversation had been the key to our success. That we had found ourselves in some sort of Bull Durham Reverse Universe where the transmutation of sexual energy was enhancing our strokes (so to speak), a phenomenon Freud may have considered a type of “sublimation.” If we just continued thinking about sex while we were playing tennis, we reasoned, we would be unstoppable.
This conviction proved very, very wrong.
I’m not sure what was responsible for our inexplicable underdog comeback in the first set, but whatever it was, it was gone once we switched sides and no amount of lascivious thought or innuendo seemed capable of getting it back.
My partner and I went from being Roadrunners back to being Coyotes, with shot after shot leaving us tail-singed and gape-jawed. I looked around for some Acme dynamite and in doing so, managed to miss yet another ball.
I think we ran out of time before we could finish the second set, but we played about five games and my partner and I only won one of them. I think that one was a fluke. I had stopped thinking about sex head on and instead began trying to remember the name of the Bull Durham movie, not actively, exactly, but like Muzak in the background – using just enough brain power to wrest my mind away from berating myself for our bad judgment and occupy it enough to let me go about hitting a proper backhand, which is likely the precise function our sex talk served to begin with.
By the end of the game, I still didn’t have the movie title. All I could conjure was Susan Sarandon writhing around while Kevin Costner is painting her toenails, a scene I remembered as itself sexy and unexpected and, in the world of movie scenes, perhaps even sublime.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Ok. I'm Still Doing It.
During my time with Therapist Number 2 (Number 3 if you count my short stint with The Woman Who Only Wore Purple), I felt like I had some really big fish to fry – namely, I wanted to quit smoking cigarettes, leave my job and lose weight, three things that were unlikely to ever happen together.
I would lay on her leather couch with her Dachshund on my belly and bemoan my inability to become waiflike despite how meagerly I ate or how ferociously I exercised.
“We don’t exercise to be thin,” she told me one day, her long, reedy legs crossed at the knee in her massive leather shrink chair.
“We don’t?”
“No, we exercise to have a relationship with our body.”
That was one of those statements that, depending on my mood, could strike me as either totally asinine or absolutely profound. On that day, it was profound.
Everything I understood about exercise suddenly shifted. It no longer became a means to an end, but an end unto itself. I stopped caring about results. It stopped being about my self-esteem. I stopped doing things simply to suffer through them and made a commitment to stoke that relationship that she talked about in a good way, every day.
I just had a similar revelation at a writing workshop I attended last week.
Surrounded by a dozen women, writing from prompts, reading aloud, sharing reactions, reading some more, I began to remember why we write. As Natalie Goldberg says, “We write to study mind.”
Maybe she didn’t say exactly that, but that’s her general gist: writing helps us understand how the mind works. The writer’s job is mostly just to show up and write.
This is a perfect revelation for today, because today is our third birthday. I started this blog February 1, 2009 with this post. I wrote then, “I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea…” and in retrospect, I can say it was a very good idea. It did, in fact, keep me out of trouble. It landed me a bit of work. It keeps me connected to a lot of folks.
But mostly, it helps me understand how mind works. That delicate mystery machine that I delude myself into thinking I have control over. It is here that I learn what’s important to me, when I sit down to write one thing and come up with quite another. I’ve posted things that crack me up and that scare the shit out of me, and doing so has created that relationship that Therapist Number 2 was talking about: no ends, just flexing and stretching and trying to engage my heart.
Thanks for being here with me for our birthday. Sorry, no cake.
I would lay on her leather couch with her Dachshund on my belly and bemoan my inability to become waiflike despite how meagerly I ate or how ferociously I exercised.
“We don’t exercise to be thin,” she told me one day, her long, reedy legs crossed at the knee in her massive leather shrink chair.
“We don’t?”
“No, we exercise to have a relationship with our body.”
That was one of those statements that, depending on my mood, could strike me as either totally asinine or absolutely profound. On that day, it was profound.
Everything I understood about exercise suddenly shifted. It no longer became a means to an end, but an end unto itself. I stopped caring about results. It stopped being about my self-esteem. I stopped doing things simply to suffer through them and made a commitment to stoke that relationship that she talked about in a good way, every day.
I just had a similar revelation at a writing workshop I attended last week.
Surrounded by a dozen women, writing from prompts, reading aloud, sharing reactions, reading some more, I began to remember why we write. As Natalie Goldberg says, “We write to study mind.”
Maybe she didn’t say exactly that, but that’s her general gist: writing helps us understand how the mind works. The writer’s job is mostly just to show up and write.
This is a perfect revelation for today, because today is our third birthday. I started this blog February 1, 2009 with this post. I wrote then, “I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea…” and in retrospect, I can say it was a very good idea. It did, in fact, keep me out of trouble. It landed me a bit of work. It keeps me connected to a lot of folks.
But mostly, it helps me understand how mind works. That delicate mystery machine that I delude myself into thinking I have control over. It is here that I learn what’s important to me, when I sit down to write one thing and come up with quite another. I’ve posted things that crack me up and that scare the shit out of me, and doing so has created that relationship that Therapist Number 2 was talking about: no ends, just flexing and stretching and trying to engage my heart.
Thanks for being here with me for our birthday. Sorry, no cake.
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