So I went to Fargo on Friday, got out of the car, warmed up for ten minutes, and proceeded to lose in embarrassing fashion to the second seed of the tournament. I need to learn my lesson. Games were to 17, I wasn't familiar with the courts, my opponent cheated, and I'm sure there are more excuses I could come up with, but the truth is, as usual in the case of individual sports, I lost because I didn't play as well as I should have. I made error after error, and it sucked a lot. That was one thing, but the worst thing was the fact that my opponent told me I was playing well, and lots of people were impressed with my shoddy performance. It was almost unbearable. Mat and I played doubles later that night (scheduled for 10:30, but we started a bit before that), and I was able to take out my frustration pretty successfully on our opponents. In the first game we played pretty strictly on our sides (him on the left, me on the right), and we won 17-11 or so. The in the second game I took over and basically hit every shot. We went up 5-0 right away, then 14-0 on my next time serving, and won 17-1 in rather spectacular fashion. My strategy was to park myself at the front and hit everything I could get to. It turns out I can get to a lot. It was like they thought I was getting lucky, because they just kept driving it at me, and I kept reflex-volleying it into the corners. "Surely he won't hit this one." Well I did. And don't call that person Shirley. In one of the last points Mat hit a pass shot down the wall I was on, so I jumped over the ball, then the guy right behind me killed it in the opposite corner, but I had started diving as soon as I hit the ground and got there. The guy just shook his head and glanced back at where I was (last he knew), a bit skeptical.
So that was fun, but mostly just a venting of frustration. Nothing came close to making up for my poor play off the bat though, so I was still fighting a bit of underlying unhappiness while distracting myself fairly successfully by bantering with my carmates. That is, until I learned that Rebecca would be sharing a car for her ten hour trip back for Thanksgiving with the guy she cheated on me with (twice). I'm not supposed to care about that probably. But I do, obviously. So that's a thing. I watched some magic videos on my phone after the girls turned out the lights and eventually fell asleep to the lulling sounds of obese people cursing their misfortune.
The next morning the four of us went to breakfast, which I skipped in favor of the free food at the tournament site. They had yogurt! So I had a couple bananas and a couple yogurts. I won my singles match 17-0, 17-2. Very few highlights. A mercy killing, basically. Then the tournament had a rarity happen. The matches got ahead of schedule, and we were all left with some free time on our hands, so I challenged the one seed to a game. Neither of us were giving 100% probably, since we were about to play doubles. I lost 19-21, but I felt pretty confident I had figured some stuff out I could use if we ever played for real. It reinforced in my head the fact that we should be the two duking it out in the finals. Mat and I lost our doubles match, but I feel confident in saying it wasn't my fault. The game we won was because Mat finally got back a good number of serves and I took over the front court, but we lost the tiebreak when they managed to get the ball at him more consistently.
At some point Kristina decided she was angry at Mat, which made things awkward for the rest of the trip. Apparently her mood changes about things daily if not more frequently. For instance, when I mentioned I wasn't going out with the group a few weeks ago, she said she didn't drink, and I countered with I didn't eat carbs after 5:00, and she re-raised with the fact she was on a diet like that too. Well, needless to say it has been more than a day since those claims were raised.
We went to a banquet after the matches on Saturday, and it started off pretty cool. There was a tab at the bar, but the fact I wasn't drinking seemed to slow down my tablemates. They got chocolate shakes instead of alcohol, which was actually much more tempting and distracting than alcohol would have been, since while I've never had alcohol, you can bet I've had more than my fair share of chocolate binges. We waited for quite a while for the restaurant to clear out of normal patrons so our banquet thing could get underway. In that time, two guys made their way to our table and started not-so-subtly hitting on the girls. One of them was still under 21, but loved to talk about how much he could drink. Of course, his ideas of interesting topics of conversation were incredibly age-appropriate (which of course means immature), and he was being secretly mocked. Well, not so much secretly as obliviously. Also, the girls kept texting each other about him, a few of which Jessica showed me. Another application of the ubiquity of cellphones, I suppose. Amusing until you wonder what they are saying about you.
The food was terrible. Refried black beans, dry-looking rice, deep-fried doughy pseudo-mexican things, and salad. Nothing I really wanted to eat, but I ate anyway because I wasn't about to go spend money when I had already paid for this stuff with my entry fee. Then there was the raffle. Again, my poverty convinced me I shouldn't partake in what looked like the more fun option. Tickets were pretty cheap and they had a TON of stuff to give away. With every item that went out to the crowd, a brief flurry of bartering took place. Jerseys, t-shirts, towels, and other clothing items were thrown around like confetti, and the obvious trend was that if a person was in college, they were looking to trade anything they got that wasn't alcohol for something that was alcoholic. There were only six or seven things I would have wanted anyway, so it's probably best I didn't buy any tickets, but if I would have gotten a jersey from worlds in Ireland (of which there were two), or this really cool jersey that was a combination of the Irish flag and an american flag/eagle I would have been thrilled. It was pretty awesome looking, and I have no idea where it came from or how to get one. I do take some solace in the fact that I will have an Irish jersey from frisbee worlds at some point in the future. A couple of guys with too much money had bought a ton of tickets and distributed them to those without, so between the three people whose company I was in, there were a total of eight bottles of wine by the end of the night. I even walked away with a new pair of gloves and some R48 handballs (a different brand I've been wanting to try), so I guess it wasn't a bad night. We got back to the hotel and didn't have a corkscrew, which was obviously fine with me. Yet again, my not drinking resulted in a sober night. We still managed to stay up too late, though.
There's a saying in Buddhism that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill it/him. This has been taken to mean that if you think you know yourself or that you have achieved enlightenment, you must immediately discard those assumptions and start from scratch. I'm pretty bad at that. I feel like I've been building a huge network of beliefs my entire life, and to admit I don't know anything (though it seems more and more likely that is the case) is a step I'll probably never be able to take, as nice as the theory sounds. This goes back to the thing I said the other day about not really thinking about people as entities of their own. There is a difference between knowing a thing and acting upon it. We all know abstractly that the sun is huge and we are moving around it, but it doesn't stop us from saying the sun comes up in the morning. I doubt we really think about what's actually the case. If we thought about how things actually work rather than how they appear to work or how they function in our lives, then we would be so bogged down (and overwhelmed at the same time) we wouldn't be able to do what we want with our lives. How are we supposed to worry about which pens to buy when just a few thousand miles away an endless vacuum waits to consume us into it's entropic demise? It's like this video If we thought about how insignificant we are, even compared with the scale of humanity, much less the scale of the universe, how could we be expected to keep it all in our heads? I struggle with things like that a lot. Objectively, I know it's pointless, but I can't really stop. So I fall asleep with my phone in my hand and a video playing.
So when it comes to people, I already know on some level I can't understand myself or the simple facts of the world around me, much less the motives driving the person next to me. Again, using objectivity, I know perfectly well they are as complex as I am. They have as many motives (well-reasoned or not, conflicting or not, subconscious or not) as I do, but if I can't even fully comprehend all of my reasons, can't figure out why I can hold two conflicting beliefs and not explode, how can I think of anyone the way they "deserve?" Can anyone? I actually don't think so. I think the best we can do is admit that we can't know. We can predict. I "know" what my friends will do. I "know" how they will react. I know these things based on our shared history, how they have behaved in the past, the things they've told me that motivate them, but "knowing" someone and truly thinking about them in their entirety as a person seem too disparate to put on the same scale. I can act "knowing" it will bring a smile, and be happy I made them happy, but I can't say I did it while treating them as an individual. I did it because I had good reason to think it would elicit a particular response and that would lead to future pleasantness for me in that we would both express pleasantness.
This is getting a bit twisted and repetitive. I think about stuff like this at the oddest times, so there are notes all over my phone about it. I have notes about groceries with little things at the bottom about how I still don't comprehend what I'm doing with my food, how it's still results-based and biased because for all I know I want it to work and am really losing weight due to portion control. I have notes of unfinished (and unstarted) poems that slide headlong into tangents of how the universe responds to us trying to figure it out. How we are chasing the wonder out of the world gradually under the guise of science, and yet it still persists in the oddest ways, with the silly equations not quite balancing, or the discovery that gravity may not be as constant as we thought. And then there are the simpler poems, the notes that are designed to prompt silly little anecdotes. Those will be in the next post.
For now, let me tell you how my weekend still turned out okay (because I wrote the title before the entry this time, and have been full-bore out of control for a while now): I won my consolation match 21-2, 21-9, making some of the best gets and shots I've ever made. I played better than I needed to by far, actually. It turned out that the guy's left hand was actually pretty bad if you got the ball above his waist, but I was too busy killing and re-killing it to figure that out until the end of the match when my shoulder felt like it was coming apart. I had a point where he passed me on my left, I ran back and dug it off the back wall between my legs and immediately started sprinting for the front, where he killed it only to have me dive past him and keep it in play, at which point he missed due entirely to shock. Multiple times I got just my fingertips on the ball and rolled it out. I felt good. And I won a handball for my troubles, which is approximately one handball more than consolation winners usually get. On the drive back I even got a sandwich and a cup of soup. Total spent on the weekend: $10.00. Oh, and $10.00 for gas. Worth it. Mankato tournament in two weeks. No excuses next time. All focus, and I'm going to play a game for real as warm-up. Except they only have four courts. But I'm going to try!
Thanks for reading!
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