In which I play tennis with a smelly liar for 28 minutes

At the tennis club and the local university near where my parents live, there are large whiteboards where lonely tennis players can meet other lonely tennis players. You post your name, rating, preferred location, and phone number (or in my case, anonymous e-mail account), and then you hope/wait for someone to call/e-mail you. I go through this process and, after posting, I doubt anyone will actually contact me. I decide the best way to confirm that is to check my e-mail every 15 seconds until someone does.

Enter J, or rather, J's e-mail, after my 49th e-mail check. J (whose name is undeniably male) states that he is "a former hs champ" who has "just started playing again." He is about my level, "maybe a little higher lol" [More on this below.] At this point, I am glad that J has told me his name because otherwise I would have assumed he was a 15-year-old girl given that he punctuates his sentences only with "lol" or elipses. And, while J does not know how to use the shift key when he starts a sentence, he is able to end every third word with the letter "z," so it's safe to say he probably has at least one pinky finger. I decide I can overlook these flaws since J will not be a friend but a tennis rival.

I also decide that I will keep things close to the vest because J's freak potential remains high. I reply to J's e-mail in the following manner:

"Hi, I like to play at (court name) courts. How about 8:30 tomorrow? I have 11am plans."

J replies/accepts. We exchange 2 - 3 more e-mails, in which I inform him what I will be wearing and in which he uses even more Zs. J divulges no information about himself or his appearance . I decide that he's either ugly or a killer or both, but I need a tennis partner so I pack my bag for the morning.

As I pull into the court, I get a call that J will be 5 minutes late. I take this as a good sign that J is serious about coming. J shows up. He is wearing the following: forty extra pounds, a shirt that smells like cheap rum, black shorts with crayon-orange flames (my guess: clearance at Big Lots or maybe where they sell basketball gear for bikers), and black sneakers. J comments that it's cool that I have a "real" tennis bag. It's seems I have been misled about J's ability.

Instead of the normal 10 - 15 minute warm-up, J is ready. From this, I infer he would like to continue to hit balls into the net but just to have them count now. We begin, and even taking it easy on him, I win the first 13 points and he wins what looks like a minor heart attack. Downhill, quickly.

The set concludes (6-0), and J makes small talk about how he admires my slice. He states that he has always had a hard time gauging/hitting/getting to slice shots. Apparently this problem extends to all other types of shots as well, even some of the granny shots I give him just out of boredom.

A few games into the second set, I notice some parents of a friend playing on a nearby court and decide that I would get more exercise out of walking there and talking to them so I run out the last 16 or so points and mutter something about calling J and how he can keep the balls, and I leave at a slight jog.

Now I'm waiting to see if J will e-mail me again. Speaking of which, it's been 14 seconds.

Also crosswords since I refuse to do them on-line

One thing I will miss about good newspapers, once they fade away, is the amazing writing about otherwise mundane topics. This selection from a NY Times review of the DVD release of "Thirtysomething" is typical:

"The show was never watched as much as it was debated, worshiped, maligned and endlessly dusted over for markers of social and psychological relevance. (In 2007 it became the subject of a short book aspiring to academic pretension: “Thirtysomething: Television, Women, Men, and Work.”) Broadcast on ABC, it never made it into the Nielsen Top 20. The show achieved its highest rating during the first 15 minutes of the premiere."

In three sentences, you get the encapsulation of the review (unsurprisingly entitled "A Series Shows Its Age") and a killer last line. I don't really care about "Thirtysomething" or the review, and I'll never buy the DVDs. But I do like the writing.

Too often for my taste, blogs and the like (Salon, etc.) operate on a throw-it-out-and-see-what-sticks philosophy. When you post twenty or a hundred times a month, all it takes is one funny/interesting entry to make people hang around for another five or ten entries. (Reality television shows also work on this principle.) The problem is that in the other entries, too often the writing isn't good enough to save the remainder. So, while I can still say with honesty that I "read the NY Times" today and mean the whole thing, I doubt I'll ever be able to say that about Salon.

And I'm pretty sure one of them had a mustache

At Starbucks this afternoon, I watched as two women walked in together. One was in a dark teal sun dress" the color of late 80s leatherette couches and 1991 Chevrolet Corsicas; the other wore a mechanic's-style uniform and a manly walk. Obviously, I assume they are a couple.

They take their 800-calorie cups of frozen goo outside so we can all watch them sweat. They talk and laugh. A noticeably gay man comes up. All three talk and laugh, and then he goes back to his Prius. As they slurp the end of their drinks, Mechanic Lesbian puts her hand Teal Lesbian's hand, and just when I'm expecting a sloppy lesbian cheek peck, they proceed to close their eyes and pray together. For ten minutes.

It is then that I remember I'm in East Texas. They aren't a "couple." They're "best friends" who (with Prius Man) probably belong to the same Christian singles group which, like employment at Starbucks, is just a closet that your friends can fit in, too.

Drinklist - Activity Goggles!

Last night, M and C and I went to Leon's where I had a drink (ok, 3 drinks) called "Activity Goggles!". I'm not generally one for any drink with an exclamation point in the name or really that, outside of ice or soda, has more than three ingredients (gin, vermouth, olive; rye, bitters, Pernod/absinthe; scotch/bourbon, sweet vermouth, bitters; vodka, lemon, simple syrup; gin, cucumber). It's just a waste of my time. Even if I like it, I'm not going to make it at home. I did however, enjoy the drink.

A guess at the proportions and preparation would be,
1 1/2 - 2 oz gin
1/2 - 1 oz Lillet blanc
1 - 2 dashes Luxardo maraschino
1 - 2 dashes Orange bitters
Dash of absinthe (Pernod would probably work.)
2-inch strip of orange zest, as garnish

Swirl absinthe in a martini glass to coat and then discard. Stir remaining ingredients with ice, and strain into glass and garnish.

I won't be making it, but you should.

Playlist - Magnolia Electric Co. :: It's Made Me Cry

If you haven't noticed, Jason Molina is back, via his alter-ego, Magnolia Electric Co. The newest EP shows Molina hasn't lost his ability to channel the dark Harvest-esque energy of Neil Young into his own sound. Though the songs on the EP are barely a minute or two, each is a distinct vignette and together, they suggest that Molina has even better things to come.

I better have passed that exam.

Last week was the bar exam, and since then, I've been catching up on the things I would have normally been doing instead of studying/taking the bar exam -- namely, showering, Seinfeld re-runs, and reading the NY Times.

Mainly I read the Style section. I haven't read a newspaper for 'news' for at least five years. (Let's also face that gawking at the digital slide shows of other people's homes is more fun than doing what needs to be done at our own homes.)

I also, sometimes, read Modern Love. Often it's too sappy (mother/Alzheimer's/forgetting) or too disconnected from my own experiences (father/child/remembering) to be worth finishing, but sometimes it's good. I don't buyLaura Munson's July 31 column though.

Let me clarify: I get what she's saying, I get what she went through, and I even see why, for her situation, it might have worked. I just don't buy it. To summarize, a husband tells a wife that he doesn't love her anymore, and she refuses to accept it. She doesn't argue or plead; she just ignores him. He proceeds to act like an ass for a few months, which she also ignores. Then by Thanksgiving, he realizes his mistake everything is fine again.

My friend CC took issue with the piece, too -- he felt it wasn't her place to decide what was right for her husband. I agree with him to an extent. My main problem, however, is the neatness of the situation. At each turn following the initial dilemma, the twist always goes to the author/protagonist's favor. She accepts, the kids accept, and the husband, after awhile, capitulates.

For the last three months, I've been reading narratives that describe just the same sort of story but in the opposite direction. The prep for the bar exam involves reading dozens upon dozens of factual situations where every twist goes the wrong way, widening and complicating the dispute. The task is to unravel the mess (all the while being irritated by how stilted and synthetic the whole situation is). More often than not, the method for being successful is to ignore the artificiality of the situation and look for that one seemingly innocuous fact where you can point a finger and say, "That's the key to figuring this out."

You'll note at the bottom of Laura Munson's Modern Love column that her occupation is not a rancher as the column's text suggests but rather as a writer. That's how Munson's recollection reads -- as if a writer carefully chose each piece and then placed them together. The key to understanding Munson's column is not that she said what she did or that acted how she did. Rather, it's that she wrote it how she did.