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Ping-pong intramurals

We had a ping-pong table in the basement growing up, and I always thought I was pretty good. I mean, I was a little kid, but I could hold my own in a game to twenty-one. I knew how to serve it just right, so that the ball sailed barely over the edge of the net. I could dive and rescue shots that would have knocked out most other opponents. And in between volleys, I could twirl the paddle around in my hand. I was good at ping-pong.

At least, I thought I was good at ping-pong. We moved out of our house when I was in the sixth grade, and for whatever reason, the ping-pong table wasn’t invited along. So for the next three years or so, I didn’t really have any outlet. I knew in the back of my head that I had the talent, but I never got to play anymore.

And so, when I got to high school, I was so excited when I heard about ping-pong intramurals. “When are sign-ups for ping-pong?” I remember asking the homeroom teacher on my first day of ninth grade. “Ping-pong?” he looked at me, confused. Come on man, I thought to myself, I could see it so clearly, when I went on that high school tour the year before, they handed us this folder of information. One of the pieces of paper listed all of the extracurricular activities. I think I may have even saved it somewhere, ping-pong intramurals were definitely an advertised thing.

But the homeroom guy didn’t know what I was talking about. And any upperclassman that didn’t outright dismiss my presence whenever I opened up my mouth was equally ignorant. And so I kind of had to slog through the first half of that year not playing ping-pong. Sometimes I’d show up for basketball intramurals, but I sucked at basketball, all I wanted to do was play ping-pong.

And then, after Christmas break, I saw it, a flyer for ping-pong intramurals. It didn’t look real at first. I wondered if someone was messing with me, trying to get my hopes up by placing flyers close to my locker. But no, word spread, apparently ping-pong intramurals were really a thing, and everyone was getting pumped.

Within a week it was all anybody was talking about, ping-pong. The hype got to be so much that administration started taking names to reserve spots. As the sign up sheet got passed around in homeroom that day, this kid in front of me laughed when I put my name down. “Ha, Rob, please, you’re just wasting everybody’s time.”

He’d never seen me play ping-pong, and sure, it was probably just a jerk high school thing to say, but I got pissed. “I’m actually really good at ping-pong. We have a ping-pong table at my house.” I don’t know why I said that, it was only partially true anyway, because I think the ping-pong table was somewhere in the garage, maybe, nobody ever went in there, we were all scared of spider-webs and mice droppings.

“I have a ping-pong table too,” the other kid said, and I don’t know why, but I didn’t believe him. I could just tell that he was full of shit. But back in high school, I don’t know, I could never come up with any comebacks, and I was really bad at playing it cool, making it look like I wasn’t hyper-sensitive and super pissed-off. But I resolved in my head to beat this guy.

And I carried that resolve to the wrestling room the first day of ping-pong intramurals. There were like twenty tables, all set up very tightly together across the gym floor. I had to wait like an hour until it was my turn, but finally the moderators called my name. I grabbed the paddle, gave it that quick twirl move, and turned my head to see where that kid from homeroom was playing.

That’s when my opponent got his first point. “Wait, that was a point? Don’t you have to volley for serve?” and this kid who I only kind of recognized from Earth Science class, he was like, “Volley for serve? What does that mean?” I tried to grab one of the gym teacher’s attention, to help clear up some ground rules, but he was dismissive, “Boys, we’ve got a lot of kids that want to play ping-pong.”

Worse, this other guy had no idea how to score. I always played where you could only score on your serve, but this guy was counting everything. Even worse than that, I found that I really wasn’t very good at ping-pong. I was holding my own for like three or four volleys, but after that, I’d almost invariably lose. I don’t know what it was, maybe the lack of space in between the tables, maybe because it had been years since I played, but the whole game was over in about three minutes, and I was booted from the gym.

“That’s it” I asked the gym teacher. “That’s it. Better luck next year.”

“Next year? Wait, you guys set up all of these tables for just one day?”

And that was it. I saw that kid in homeroom the next day and I asked how he did. “Ping-pong? I don’t play ping-pong. Ping-pong is for losers. Ha.”

And I just sat there, fuck ping-pong, fuck intramurals, fuck this kid, but I didn’t say anything out loud, I just sat there and hoped that my face wasn’t beet red.

A nice, slow, zombie movie

What I don’t get about zombie movies is how the zombie plagues inevitably wind up spreading so fast. It’s like, every movie starts out basically the same, everything’s fine, people are happy, there’s maybe like a random clue, a piece of background news or something about an unexplained riot somewhere else, and then it’s like a countdown, five, four, three, two, one, zombies.

And from that moment, it’s just nothing but zombies. You look outside and you’re like, what? Zombies? Only there’s no time to even really ask yourself that question, because a whole swarm of zombies is coming at you from down the street. And, oh look, your wife’s a zombie too, sorry dude, yeah, she did complain about not feeling so well, and was that a Band-Aid she had on her leg? You didn’t think to maybe ask her what happened, did it have any relation to the zombie fever she was burning up with?

Well, too bad, because now she’s trying to bite you, and go ahead and run out of the house, but the police are no help by now, the entire force has already collapsed from within. The few cops that are alive have undoubtedly secured whatever firearms they could grab before the zombies made that whole station a zombie cesspool.

Someone should make a zombie movie, but make the pacing really slow. Like maybe they could just start out with like two or three zombies. They’d be walking through the park, maybe they’d have their eye on an unsuspecting jogger, someone who stopped to tie her shoe at the wrong place and the wrong time.

And then right before they approach, some police officer shows up, he’s like, “Hey! Stop it! Leave that woman alone!” Of course the zombies won’t heed the warning at all, but he’ll try to interfere, and when the zombies try to bite, they cop just kind of whacks them in the face with his police baton.

So then some sort of an emergency crew shows up, they contain the three zombies, and nobody gets bit. Or maybe one person gets bit, I don’t know, but they keep him in isolation. Under quarantine, he eventually turns into a zombie, and now the heavy-duty government science teams are brought in.

Would they let the public know about this? Of course they would. Come on, not two years goes by without some ridiculous overblown epidemic scare. Everybody stay inside so we can spray the entire country with mosquito-killing chemicals because West Nile disease is coming. Did we say West Nile? We really meant SARS. SARS is going to wipe out the planet. Or swine flu.

If there was a serious zombie pandemic, you wouldn’t see random news clips in the background, clueless reporters standing in front of a riot saying things like, “Nobody knows what’s going on!” Everybody knows what’s going on. Everybody knows exactly when something even has an very small chance of turning into a disaster. Media thrives on this type of nonsense. A real disaster like actual zombies would be a frenzy.

Of course, I guess that wouldn’t really make for that interesting of a movie. I mean, I could picture it, the whole film being a regular family just watching all of the news safe and sound from their living room. Super boring, yeah. But come on, even that would have been better than World War Z. “The cure is, you have to be sick!” Oh yeah, thanks Brad Pitt.

Y’all got Dr. Pepper?

I always think it’s funny when people from Texas visit New York and try to order Dr. Pepper everywhere they go. This isn’t something that I picked up on right away. It’s only after years of working at restaurants in the city, thinking it really weird that every once in a while I’d get those out-of-towners who asked me for a Dr. Pepper, as if it was just the most natural thing in the world, giving me looks of confusion when I’d respond, “Sorry, we don’t have Dr. Pepper.”

Dr. Pepper exists up here, but it’s not like you’re ever going to find it outside of a grocery store or a Seven-Eleven. It’s just Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if restaurants had more of a soda selection, but I don’t sit down at random restaurants and start asking for cream soda or something equally obscure.

You travel away from home, maybe you don’t know. I certainly don’t know. I worked at this touristy place for a few years and I was initially really confused when Southerners started asking me, “Ya’ll got sweet tea?” I’d be like, “Well, we have iced tea.” I didn’t know there was a difference. But I guess if you add sugar to iced tea, you call it sweet tea, and everybody just kind of expects it.

Whatever, it’s all just funny regional differences. But again, it wasn’t until I actually met some Texans that I eventually figured out that it’s a Texas thing, Dr. Pepper, that apparently this stuff is more popular than Coke is in the rest of the country. Which is crazy, to think that there’s an alternate reality out there, where everybody speaks the same language, right, but Coke isn’t number one, Dr. Pepper is.

I like Dr. Pepper. I can’t tell you exactly what it tastes like, but then again, I can’t really tell you what Coke tastes like either. But they definitely taste different. Maybe I’d like it if we switched to Dr. Pepper. Coke is great and everything, but I don’t know, I feel like a lifetime of cola has sort of dampened my ability to appreciate it anymore. It doesn’t taste like anything anymore, not really, it’s just sweet.

One time recently I had this couple sit down at one of my tables at the restaurant. The guy had this big beard and when I asked him what he wanted to drink, he asked for a Dr. Pepper is that Texas drawl. And I smiled and I said, “Sorry pardner, you’re not in Texas anymore.” And he kind of just looked at me, and his girlfriend or wife or whatever just said, “That’s OK, he’ll have a Coke.”

And it sucked, because I wasn’t trying to be a dick or anything, I was just trying to be friendly. Like friendly funny. Like yeah, I’m making fun of you a little bit, but it’s all good-natured, nothing to get upset over. That’s what I was going for anyway, but I don’t know, every once in a while I’ll play it back in my head. Was I coming across as a jerk? Was it my intonation? Was it the whole “pardner” thing?

Whatever, there’s one thing that I can totally appreciate about Southerners and Texans. Not once have they every asked me for a Pepsi. At least we can all agree on that. Coke, fine. Dr. Pepper, yeah, I’d be willing to switch to Dr. Pepper. But Pepsi? Forget about it. Whenever someone asks me, “Is Pepsi OK?” I say, “No, Pepsi is not OK. Pepsi is never OK.” And usually that gets a laugh, but I’m not joking, I’m actually trying to be a little bit of a dick, if only to get the importance of my message across.

What does it all mean?

I remember when I was a little kid, a few times when I got really, really bored, I’d turn to a Spanish television channel and I’d try with all of my might to just do it, to just force myself to understand Spanish. I had nothing to work with at all, besides your basic hola mi nombre es. But I’d just sit there and try to will those words to make sense in my brain. And obviously nothing was happening, but it wouldn’t stop me from holding out just a little bit of hope. I mean, these people were communicating, there had to have been a way for me to access what was going on.

It’s like, I see some Chinese text on a billboard in Flushing, or the Korean church van that passes me in traffic, it has symbols or pictographs or glyphs or whatever they’re called scrawled along the side. And a part of me still tries the same trick. Like, come on, reveal yourself to me, just tell me what you’re trying to tell everybody else.

And again, there’s nothing there. But still I can feel my brain doing its best to stare intently at the line configurations, the two characters that look familiar except for maybe a slight difference that a non-native reader wouldn’t be able to pick up. Well look at that, I just picked it out. That’s something, right? What does it mean? Why can’t I read Chinese?

It’s like, when I go upstate in the summer, I like to stare up at the stars. I can always find the Big Dipper, I’m quick to point out Orion and his belt. But after that, I’m just like, where is everything? Isn’t one of these constellations supposed to look like a crab? And while nothing’s jumping out at me immediately, after a while I start to see claws, or one claw anyway, like something kind of looks like a claw. And it’s that same automatic process, all of these imaginary lines start getting connected in my field of vision. I’m seeing hamsters and racecars and, those can’t be real, right? I mean, there’s no way ancient people would have been able to spot stuff in the sky that hadn’t been invented yet.

Or if it’s a really nice day and I’m lying out in the grass, I’ll stare up at the daytime sky and watch all of the clouds mix and mingle. Here there’s not as much pressure to find something that I know is already there. Here I can just kind of let my brain do what it does, find something where there’s probably nothing. I’ll see an old man with a beard, and after I stare at him for a while he kind of morphs into a giant bowl of fruit.

And I just can’t help but think, why do we have to learn all of this stuff? Can’t we figure out a way to program it all into our DNA? Right? It’s like, you don’t have to teach a baby how to breathe. Why do you have to teach that same baby Mandarin? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could somehow inscribe all of those lessons right into our DNA? Think of the advantages our future babies would have if they came out of the womb already knowing how to read.

And Braille, man, I’m glad that there exists a system that allows blind people to read and write, but every once in a while I’ll be at some hotel somewhere, I see that all of the room numbers and elevator buttons have their Braille translations all embossed in metal underneath their alphabetical counterparts. And have you ever tried feeling Braille? Man, I’m sure you get better with practice, I mean, I know it works, but I don’t feel anything, it’s just a bunch of little bumps. How are you supposed to train your fingers to differentiate slight variations of the distances in between tiny little bumps?

And then, what if you do get really good at Braille? What if you’re able to slide your fingertips across a page and absorb information as fast as I’m reading with my eyes? Do your fingers get hyper sensitive? Do they start randomly trying to decode secret messages every time they grip a piece of sandpaper? Are they constantly struggling to make sense out of the nonsense bumps that constitute the skin of an avocado?

And what about Chinese blind people, do they have a different Braille than we do over here in America? What about sign language, is it its own language? Or do they have different signs for different languages? Man, I could ask questions for days. I should just look this stuff up. But I wouldn’t even know how to make any of these into searchable terms for Google. Wouldn’t it be great if we had like built-in search engines? I’d be able to do Google Translate right in my head. I guess I wouldn’t have to stare intently at Chinese billboards, futilely trying to comprehend messages that I’m simply not able to understand.

Thanks Ed!

I ran the Long Island Marathon yesterday, and all I’ve got to say is, thanks Ed! Thanks for taking the entire race and making it all about you, Ed Mangano, the Nassau County Executive. I was so happy when I went to the race expo on Saturday, when one of the workers handed me my race bag. Imagine how excited I was to see your name, Ed Mangano, printed on both sides of the bag that contained all of my race stuff.

“County Executive: Ed Mangano” front and back. Thanks Ed! And thanks for putting your name on everything that was inside the race bag also. Like the race t-shirt. Everyone loves getting race t-shirts, those wearable trophies that have become commonplace for even the smallest of races. I’m glad you saw fit to use these shirts as opportunities to further drive home the fact that you, Ed Mangano, are in charge of Nassau County.

Thanks Ed, thanks for printing your name in bold letters on both sides of that race t-shirt. This is perfect, because now it doesn’t matter if people are running behind me or coming at me from the opposite direction. Never again will anybody who sees me wearing my race t-shirt ever have to ask themselves, “I wonder who the executive is for Nassau County.” They’ll just see me and they’ll know that it’s you, Ed Mangano, Nassau County Executive. Thanks Ed!

But that’s only good for when I’m exercising. So thanks, Ed, for including that Ed Mangano Nassau County Executive lanyard in my bag of race goods. I’ve already attached it to my keys, so now the lanyard sticks out of my pocket, your name printed every three inches or so, Ed Mangano, over and over again. It’s perfect. I’m glad the seventy-five dollars I paid to run the race made it possible for you to have all of this political advertising printed across every aspect of race paraphernalia.

Like the race medals. Thanks Ed, for having the foresight to have your name inscribed in the back of the medal. Some lesser people might think it a little much, overkill even, to have your name forged in metal hanging around the necks of every race participant, but years from now, if I ever decide to go through all of my race medals, I’ll never forget just who happened to be the Nassau County Executive in 2014. It’s you. Ed Mangano.

The same guy who has his names on every taxi on Long Island. Ed Mangano. Thanks Ed! I was a little disappointed, looking back at all of those other races that I’ve run, the New York City marathon never said anything about Bloomberg. Doesn’t that guy know anything about being a politician? You have to get your name out there, everywhere.

Thanks Ed, that despite my political leanings, I now get to proudly think of your name every time I even casually remember running the Long Island Marathon. Ed Mangano, County Executive. Thanks Ed. Thanks a lot. Thanks for making me look at your name like ten thousand times this weekend.