So ever since that soul crushing Wednesday a few weeks back, I have decided to just accept my fate. Wednesday I will focus on my awesome class, and just deal with the humiliation that follows. The other people at the court on Wednesday night hate me, fine. I’ve tried to be friendly, I’ve tried to give them good games, but they still remain quite frosty to me and basically have to be begged to play with me.
I guess they call that “letting it go” right? So that’s what I did. And then Wednesday something magical happened: I didn’t suck.
I don’t know what happened. Before class I felt terrible. I was super tired from the night before, and I felt a bit nauseous and run down. Yet, I was hitting the bird strong, and with amazing accuracy. Like, finally what he had been teaching me was sinking in. About halfway through class, as we were picking up birdies, my teacher said,
“You’ve improved a lot today,” I kinda just nodded and didn’t say anything so after a second he said, “Do you think so?”
“I do,” I said uncharacteristically quiet. “But I don’t know why. I’m not feeling good today. I’m tired and my stomach feels weird.” Normally, I love praise from my teacher, he doesn’t give me a lot, but something about this made me want to stay quiet. Like, I was doing good. I was fucking killing it. But speaking about it might jinx it and I didn’t want to dispel whatever magic dust had settled over me.
After class he begged some poor sucker to play with me.
“Is he good?” I asked my teacher as the guy was walking over.
“Better than you.” I love my teacher’s sass.
But when we played I held my own. We didn’t play a game, just hit it back and forth, but my teacher watched and was clearly impressed at how well I was doing. Usually I just run all around the court trying to hit the birdie back. But this time I was in control of the birdie more often than not, and some of my smashes got by him.
Like Icarus, I had flown too close to the sun. I felt good and forgot that everyone hated me and no one wanted to play with me. So, when one doubles game ended, I grabbed my racket, trotted over and said “me?”
“No,” said my teacher looking at four other people beginning to play.
Oh right. Everyone hates me.
Thursday morning I went to the gym with my friend who is the captain of the frisbee team. I followed along on his workout, which was “shoulders and arms” day and while it wasn’t too hard or strenuous at the time, it basically did me in. I’m already quite tired by Thursday and with class, and badminton and working out, I was exhausted and played like crap at night. So crappy I ended it early and the next morning, as I lifted my arms to scratch my head, I couldn’t even get them up. I was sore as fuck.
