Mystery Player

My last opponent in the Silver League this season was very elusive. Not on the court, but in avoiding my attempts to schedule a match with him. By our last week, he'd only played two matches (out of six), and I'd heard stories from other players that he was impossible to get a hold of.

On the Sunday of the week our match was to be played, I emailed him to set up a match. He didn't respond. There was a phone number next to his name on the league roster (labeled "work phone") but every time I tried to call it, the phone just rang and rang and rang. What the hell is this guy's deal? I wondered. Why would you sign up to play in a league, pay $90, and then not bother to schedule your matches (or even respond to attempts to schedule)?

He had an Asian name, so I wondered if it was a language/culture thing. He did finally respond to my email on Friday, to tell me he could play on Sunday and to ask me to schedule a court. So I did and told him what time to be there. (He neither confirmed nor denied this was a good time for him.)I showed up at the scheduled time and waited. I'd never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like, and none of the people I talked to had any idea who he was. Most people have to either win their way into the Silver League (like I did) or have some proven qualifications to get in. But it was a complete mystery where this guy came from. From the looks of the two matches he did play, he didn't appear to be qualified. He'd lost both of them badly.

I was hoping, indeed counting on it, that I would beat him to avoid getting last place for the third straight session. Ever since my amazing run of 12 straight victories to win the Bronze League last fall, I'd been in a slump. The Silver League offers much tougher opponents, and although I was fairly competitive in most of my matches, I had an overall record of 2-15 so far.

In the first session I went 0-4, which should have sent me back down to the Bronze League, but since they didn't have enough people to fill out the Silver, I got to stay. The same thing happened after the second session, when I went 2-5 but still got last place because the other two guys who went 2-5 beat me. (In a fluke of epic proportions, both my wins were against the top two players.) So far, in my third Bronze League session, I was 0-6 and playing to avoid the cellar three times in a row.

But I was confident that, whoever he was, I would take the mystery guy.

After keeping me waiting in suspense as to his true identity, he finally showed up about five minutes late. He walked up to the guy at the counter and said in a tiny voice, "Tim?" (Like the guy at the counter would be opponent.) Two things struck me about him immediately:

1.) He looked to be about seventeen years old.
2.) He had a glassy vacant look that made me wonder if he was high.

During warm-ups it became apparent that he had no business being in the Silver League. Part of me resented that he was even allowed to play in it, since I'd had to win my way into it. Another part of me was thrilled with the prospect of an easy, unambiguous smack down. After the season I'd had, I really needed a win like that.

But the actual match didn't start off according to plan. Although he didn't move well and his shots didn't have much power, he got everything back. His style was so different from what I was used to that I got impatient and made lots of stupid errors. We had some long games and points, but his consistency, my erratic play, and a few questionable calls on his part gave him a big 4-0 lead to start off the set.

Despite my slow start, I was still 100% sure that I would beat him. I don't know why, but I just refused to believe that he could beat me. I was still on track to a 6-4, 6-0 victory. With that plan in mind, I won the next three games easily, only losing two out of 14 points. At 3-4, we had a long deuce game. At one point I hit a shot down the line that landed at his feet. He put his hand up, indicating that it was wide. I thought the shot looked in by a good six inches, so I walked up to the net and I asked him to clarify, "Did you call that shot out?"

He immediately changed the call and said it was in, then mumbled that he didn't feel well. He said "4-4" and started to throw me the balls for my serve, but I told him that I hadn't won the game yet. I'd only won that point, and we were still at deuce. After a few more points I won the game, and then won the next game easily to go up 5-4. By this time he was hardly moving around the court at all.

At the changeover I asked him, "Are you OK? You don't look so good." He didn't answer me, but just kept that stoic, drugged-out look on his face. I repeated the question four or five times. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His behavior was so bizarre I entertained the thought that maybe he was autistic.

I would have suggested we stop playing, but I was one game away from winning the set, and I'd be damned if he was going to take that away from me. The next game was ugly. He could hardly get his serve over the net, and when he did and I returned it, he wouldn't even try to hit it back. When I won the set, 6-4, it was obvious he couldn't play anymore. I walked up to the net and asked him if he wanted to continue. He said he wanted to stop.

If I were playing anyone else, I would have suggested we reschedule the second set for another time when he felt better. But it had taken so long to schedule this match, and I knew he had three other matches to schedule, I wanted to be done with him. It was like playing tennis with a zombie: no fun and a little frightening.

He said I could write 6-0 for the second set when I recorded our match result, but that didn't feel right. So I treated it like a "retirement", which is what the pros do when someone can't continue a match due to illness or injury. I wrote "6-4, ret."

Even though I won, it was a profoundly disappointing victory. I never got to really prove that I was a better tennis player. I was annoyed at my opponent for being so out of it, being so uncommunicative, not giving any effort during the warm-ups, winning the first four games, and then just giving up once I started to turn things around. Lest I come across as an asshole, I don't believe for a minute he was actually sick. I think he was just out of shape (or maybe on drugs) and couldn't handle the strain of a real match.

Afterward, I saw him in the parking lot smoking a cigarette. That douchenozzle had no business being in the Silver League.

Pangaea

Reference Question of the Day

Student: Do you have any maps of the world from 3,000 - 4,000 years ago?
Me: Um, yeah, we have some historical atlases.

[I show her some maps of Europe, North Africa, and the world from 1,000 BC.]

Student: No, I mean, like, when all the land was together.
Me: Oh, you mean Pangaea. When there was only one continent, before they all split apart?
Student: Yeah.
Me: That's called Pangaea and it's millions of years old. You won't find that on a world map from this time period.
Student: But I don't believe the Earth is older than 10,000 years.

Then you don't believe in Pangaea!

B3DOP

I remember an episode of The New Twilight Zone that I saw over 20 years ago where this man begins to notice that people around him are using the wrong words for things. For example, a colleague asks if he wants to go get some dinosaur, and he responds, "Dinosaur? Don't you mean lunch?" As the episode progresses, he gets more and more confused by the words people are using. It's not gibberish the people are speaking, they're using English words, but the words take on completely different meanings. The episode ends with him sitting down with his son's picture book to relearn the meanings of so many basic words.

That's a little what it's been like for me since I've started learning the Cyrillic alphabet. Many of the symbols look like things from our Latin alphabet, but they make completely different sounds. So when I'm reading Cyrillic, I have to re-train myself that H makes the "N" sound, P makes the "R" sound, and B makes the "V" sound. And it's not like the H, P, and B sounds don't exist in Cyrillic, they're just represented by X, a table-lookin' thing, and a symbol that looks like a lower-case b with a flag on it, respectively.

I'm learning Cyrillic because I'm trying to learn Russian, and I'm learning Russian because, well, because of a girl. My new girlfriend is a native speaker of Russian, and since I'm all about linguistics and languages and learning new things, I thought this would be a great opportunity to take on this challenge. Every few years I get engrossed in a new hobby or project that bores and annoys those around me, whether it's German or poker or beer or tennis or blogging. So my latest such project is learning Russian/Cyrillic.

Cyrillic was invented, sorta, by two Byzantine monk/brothers named Cyril and Methodius. (Dude, I am totally naming my next cat Methodius.) They used a mishmash of symbols and sounds from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, which is why there's just enough resemblance to my own alphabet to fuck me up.

There are 33 characters in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. About five of them (A, K, M, O, T) share the same sound as their Latin counterparts. Six others (B, E, H, P, C, Y) look like Latin letters, but have different sounds. Some resemble Latin letters that have been written by a Kindergartner or a stroke patient: A backwards 'R', a backwards 'N' or a rounded backwards 'E'. The symbol for the number three (3) also makes an appearance, as the 'z' sound.Other symbols allow various levels of comparison with our alphabet. There's a squarish 'U' with a tail, two squarish 'W's (one with a tail, one without), an upside-down lower-case 'h', and an 'I' joined to an 'O' with a horizontal line that makes them look like Siamese twins. And then there are the symbols that don't resemble anything in our alphabet: a Space Invaders spaceship, a table, an 'O' with a vertical line through it, a double-sided K that's often described as a bug.

As if this isn't confusing enough, the written script differs from the printed one. The letter for the 'D' sound, for example, looks like a Space Invaders spaceship in printed form. The handwritten script looks like a capital 'D,' but the lowercase is written like a 'g'. The 'G' sound, meanwhile, is represented by a sorta r-lookin' symbol, but in handwritten script looks like a T (capital) or a backwards s (lowercase.)
If you write out the name Rita in Russian, it looks like Puma. But if it's printed in a book, it looks like: P[backwards N]TA.

It may sound like I'm complaining, but I love the challenge. There's a real sense of power in uncovering the meaning behind these symbols, like getting my Lone Ranger decoder ring to figure out the secret message on the back of a cereal box. What once was gobbledegooky gibberish actually has meaning to me now. It's been over thirty years since I learned the alphabet, and now I once again get to experience that sense of discovery, frustration, and accomplishment as I slowly sound out a word on the page. I'm learning to read and write all over again.

I'm usually pretty good at guessing the right consonant symbols, but the vowels drive me nuts. There are eleven vowels in Cyrillic, and Russian has the impudence (like English) to pronounce the same vowel in different ways depending on the word (or even placement within the word.) The O is constantly (but not always) being pronounced like an "ah." So that pivo is pronounced 'piva,' for example. (Or rather, 'piva' is written pivo. It's a chicken-and-egg question.) One of the most common vowels in Russian is a sound that doesn't exist in English, and it's a bitch to pronounce. I always have to scrunch up my face and repeat it like six times before I get it right. (If I get it right.)

Every day I pick a new word to try to write out in Cyrillic. The first word I wrote was "vodka." That's been followed by the Russian words for "thank you", "nonsense", "beer", "chocolate," "tennis", "kiss me", "please", and "repeat." (This has lead to my first Russian conversation with Margaret: Kiss me. Thank you. Please repeat.) I've found myself sitting in meetings and trying to figure out how to transcribe English words on my handout into Cyrillic.

I've checked out a bunch of books and CDs from the library. Some are more helpful than others. Some books, like Russian for Dummies, turn me off by saying things like, "We're not going to teach you a lot of boring grammar rules." Boring grammar rules!? But that's the best part!!

The title I've selected for his blog entry (B3DOP) is my attempt to represent a Cyrillic word in Latin script. Except for the 'D', all the letters look close enough to resemble a Russian word. The word is pronounced vzdor, and it means "nonsense." But I'm slowly starting to makes sense out of it.

Capitalist Paintbrush

On my commute to work this morning I saw it again. The Sherwin Williams truck. It always gets my dander up. It features the disgusting image of a can of paint turned upside down covering the entire planet, with the slogan "Cover The Earth."

Short of using racial or minority epithets, I can't think of a more offensive way to advertise your product.

"Hey," it says, "We're Sherwin Williams Paint, and we want to cover the entire world with our product! Wouldn't that be awesome?!"

No, it wouldn't. Seriously, what's more depressing than the prospect of the entire world covered in paint? Trees, rocks, flowers, beaches, mountains, pizza, mushrooms, kittens, your mother-- let's paint it all!!

Just who exactly is this logo for? I could totally see executives of the company sitting in their underground lair and getting off on the image of the entire world covered in their paint. It will all be ours! Bwahahahahaaaaa!! But is that the message you want to convey to the general public? Maybe you want to keep your goal of world domination under your hat there, fellas.

Because of their stupid, extremely offensive logo, I will never, ever buy SWP. The good thing about capitalism (when it works, anyway) is that I can vote with my wallet. If a company pisses me off, I will never give them any of my business, if I can help it.

I had to add that disclaimer, if I can help it, because capitalism does have a fundamental flaw.

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I love capitalism. It's not perfect, but it's the best, most realistic economic system that we've been able to implement so far. The thing that makes it great is that it's driven by competition. (Something about "harnessing greed" too.) I do think that competition is one of the best human motivators. Without it, people get complacent and lazy. The best companies survive because they are good at what they do (for the most part.)

But ultimately, each company's goal is to eliminate the competition. That's where capitalism's huge flaw comes in. If left to their own devices, every company that gains an advantage would grow so big as to squeeze out all the competition. No competition = no more capitalism. If left unchecked, capitalism would eat itself.

People love to think of corporations as evil. I do it myself. But corporations are neither good nor evil. They're just entities that exist to make money. Calling a corporation evil because it tries to maximize profits or eliminate the competition is like calling an owl evil because it eats cute little marmosets.

The only way we can prevent the marmoset from getting eaten is to contain the owl. It's the same way with companies. We need government regulations in place to contain them, to make sure they don't eat all the cute marmosets or poop on our homes. (This applies to both owls and corporations.)

I'm no economist, so I'm mostly talking out of my ass here. I like to throw around words like competition and regulation and monopoly and marmoset, but I don't have all the answers. I know that Sherwin Williams isn't unique in their wet dream to cover the world in their sticky colorful paint. (Are we really talking about paint here?) I'm sure the folks at McDonald's have a similar dream that one day their food will be the only thing that feeds the world. I'm sure Wal-Mart has a dream of being the only shopping option for thousands of small towns. (Oops, I guess that one came true.)

But SWP does have the audacity to put a truly tasteless idea on all their goddam trucks. And for that, I will exercise my capitalist option to avoid their product. At least until they get their paint all over my marmoset-skin wallet.