Education and Racquetball

A friend I'll call Sarah and I like to play racquetball together. Sarah isn't very good at sports and has in mind that I'll teach her how to play. We've worked our way into a rhythm of hitting the ball around a bit and then playing a few games. Yesterday Sarah got frustrated because she couldn't return my serves and declared I wasn't doing a good job teaching. I was certainly able to admit that could be true, but I didn't know what to replace it with. Sarah didn't have good form hitting the ball, didn't have good timing, didn't use the back wall effectively. She knew it, too, but couldn't fix it.

I thought about our lesson the rest of the day and realized that there were several factors contributing to my ineffective teaching.

First, I don't know how to correct the bad habits Sarah can't correct. Simply put, she hits like a girl: her arm moves like a shaken hose, only having force at the tip. I noticed that was different from the way I hit, but we haven't made much progress getting her to be less noodly hitting the ball.

Second, I learned racquetball on my own, so I have no authority in telling people what's good and what's bad. In juggling, for example, if you can do a pattern, you must know how to do it. Racquetball takes two people, though, and just because I frequently beat Dan doesn't mean I actually know what I'm doing. I feel bad telling Sarah she's doing something wrong when I might be doing something wrong, too, and just not know it.

I mention this only because it made me think about a theory of education. I think education is naturally like this picture:


The dark red is your knowledge area, and the light red is your ability to communicate it. The most basic parts can be communicated easily: there probably isn't a lot of difference in the way I explain the rules of racquetball and the way an expert would. His dark red square would be five times the size of mine, but my light red is almost as dense as his would be at the middle. The closer you get to the limits of your ability, the less able you are to explain what you're doing. I can barely juggle seven balls, so if I saw someone struggling, I'd just be able to root them on. What's wrong with their pattern? They're not doing it right, I guess. I don't know. Why can't Dan beat me in racquetball? I don't know, I'm just a little bit better than he is.

If someone teaches you something, you have an additional layer of knowledge: you remember how you learned it.


Now your light red has paths so that if you barely understand something, you can still explain it to others parroting the way you learned it. I'm not great at differential equations, but I can still talk people through my notes.

And so, since I never learned how to play racquetball and didn't have to fix the same problems, my light red area is pretty thin. Now to just convince Sarah it's not my fault I can't teach her, it's just that I don't have a lot of light red...

The Gay Guy and the Fat Girl

Today's theme is contentious, so I start with an anecdote.

I had dinner with April tonight and she asked how I was doing. "Pretty good," I said. "I late-added a Chinese class, then dropped that and another class to be able to adjust back to America better."

"I know," she said. "I read your blog."

It's tricky, this blogging thing, trying to be interesting but not so much that I'm boring in real life. I have to think deeper for people who read my blog. Just wait till you get a fake name from me, April.

Take, for example, my friend I'll call Ron. I imagine he'd be shy about hearing his real name because he this is a story about rejection, and he isn't used to it. I, on the other hand, am rejection's right hand man. Fresh off rejection, it always helps to go back to the basics, so Ron and I have been theorizing about how relationships develop. Or don't develop.

It sucks to realize that the girl you're interested in doesn't even have you on her radar. Ron and I have decided to call this being the gay guy: a different kind of male to girls. One who can be confided in, one who is nonthreatening, unarousing, removed. It's like a girl clapping for Pinocchio's performance and then laughingly skipping away with a brawny man while Pinocchio is left protesting with wooden lips, "But I'm a real boy!"

Don't take me to mean that I expect girls to flirt with every straight guy they know. I just mean that it's nice to be on a list even if you don't want to be selected. For example, consider this dialogue:

"I'm so mad at Francine."

"What for?"

"She didn't invite me to her party."

"Sharon, you're out of town that weekend."

"Yeah, but she still should have invited me."

Ron and I phrased it differently, but with the same message: each country must have some kind of a list of how much any other country is a threat. Would a country want to be a threat? Of course not, but you at least want to be considered. And even if you've had a summit at which you decide that you're not a huge threat, and are just going to be friends, at least you earned a meeting. Guys don't want to be human Switzerlands.

Then Ron and I realized that guys do it, too, stereotypically to the fat girl: you just expect her to know that she's out of the running and treat her like a bystander in the great race for a spouse. She's less than a girl.

I remember in junior high there was a girl I liked who was way too cool for me. She liked one of my friends, and I would ask her to tell me about it because I'd rather hear her talk about liking someone and pretend it was me than not hear about it and puff myself up to thinking I was under consideration.

I'm not sure if I chose the best path. Currently dispassionate me would say neither approach was good and I should've just gotten over her. But if you could just get over someone, you wouldn't need to invent explanations like Ron and I have for why it hurts.

Pushing Girls into Sprinklers, Etc.

Kim raises an interesting question: isn't it presumptuous for me to think that what I saw in my last post as a triumph of spontaneity--pushing a girl into a sprinkler--was an experience she enjoyed? Kim, I'm afraid the answer is no. You may not be aware, but girls have a special look of ecstatic outrage that is every flirtatious guy's reward. Girls from elementary school on perfect it for better mating success. The proportion of ecstasy to outrage varies by the girl. Some like the shock to be dominant, some prefer the barely-contained laughter. In any case, the look gives the same message.

The look--eyes bright and wide, mouth agape but curving toward a smile--is a rare one because it corresponds to a narrow line of thought. Angry faces, for example, are a response to the vast array of circumstances that can make someone angry: lack of sleep, late bus, bad test, etc. This look, however, only maps to one thought (personal internal rephrasing permitted): "I can't believe I'm special enough to deserve such attention!"

I have to take the time here to note that adults always peg the attention-grabbing on the boy. He--the one pulling the girls' hair or running through their jump rope game or otherwise causing a disruption--is "just trying to get attention," they say. But pay careful note: the girl's look is her acknowledgment of being singled out. The look is a heart-fluttering response to being noticed. The boy isn't trying to get attention as much as he's trying to give attention. The look is the girl's appreciation of that. It's not as simple as the lustful boys trying to corrupt the girls on the playground with their dirty tricks. It's sub-verbal communication of desire on all ends. Realizing this equalizes the situation: "it's all about attention." Duh. The teachers playing wise aren't immune from the game either if they've noticed.

But I digress. That was a lot of abstract verbs. Let's bring it back to sprinklers. You may wonder why boys are always doing such horrible things if all they want is to talk. The answer is that they don't want the situation to be unfair. A guy being sweet to a girl equals him being sweet on the girl. And he doesn't want to play his hand when he doesn't know how the girl feels in response! You can see, then, that love is only developed against the neutral backdrop of slightly mean things.

Here's an example. One year in school, a guy I'm really tempted to use his real name on but will resist and call Tyler instead knew that a girl I'll call Stephanie liked him. They had been "talking" and would go on to date. But at this point in the relationship Tyler just wanted to test the waters. It was homecoming season and practically the only thing anybody talked about was who was going with whom. Tyler, knowing this, walks up to Stephanie during the passing period and asks her a question. "Hey Steph, will you go to homecoming with me?"

Stephanie, who's ridiculously longing for Tyler, instantly agrees.

"Oh," Tyler says. "I forgot, I'm not going to homecoming."

And then he didn't.

If naivety is a good defense, Tyler's original planned called for this as a warm-up to the other girl he wanted to try it on. He was a little disappointed that Stephanie was friends with the other girl and cried to her about it. The nerve of some people.

My point is that I don't consider Tyler a completely horrible person. Mostly horrible, maybe, but he got most of the steps right. He wanted to make Stephanie feel noticed. He showed great forethought in his timing, word choice, and so on. His problem wasn't even that he wanted her to know that she would say yes, he just didn't contribute to an even distribution of knowledge. He roped her in but stayed out himself.

But as long as you're willing to engage, anything is fair: sprinklers to be pushed in, toilet paper to be lovingly wrapped around houses and cars, Facebook statuses to be updated with cryptic inside jokes. It's the still certainty that comes with a defined relationship that can capsize some people. But Kim, who could resist a face full of Florida sprinkler water? You should find a guy and try it out some time. If you want to sub-verbally communicate and all that, you know.

Just a Little Spontaneity

I hastily arranged to eat lunch with some people at the Hub who were bringing a bag lunch. I was at home when the plans were made, so I said I'd have a quick lunch and then head over to hang out with them. But after I started eating I realized that if they were going to bring a lunch in a high-school throwback, it'd be fun to join them.

Four wasted Ziploc bags and a short jaunt to the Hub later, I unpacked my already partially eaten lunch:


The idea of wrapping a half-eaten sandwich amused me to no end. All the Chick-fil-A stuff in the picture is what my friends ate. So much for the picnic.

I think embracing a little spontaneity can go a long way. If your life always has to be planned out, you're not going to know how to handle it when you just can't plan it. So when you do things spontaneously it's like practicing being impulsive. Impulsiveness is a skill, of course, which sometimes you succeed at (I pushed a girl into a sprinkler last night--she loved it) and sometimes you don't (I drafted an eBay ad to sell my skin ball and donate the proceeds to charity--it's not even allowed).

But if you don't learn how to be impulsive, then when you really get seized by an impulse, like dropping two of your classes and quitting Chinese, say, then you just do it and might regret it later. So I packed a lunch to stave off withdrawing from a class today. Just wait till Wednesday comes...

Too much spontaneity can be overwhelming, of course. Like when your hat spontaneously disappears. That's right, one minute I was eating my sandwich and debating the theological implications of The Shack, the next minute I'm at Library West and my hat is nowhere to be found. I loved that hat.


Bought in Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, that hat has a long history with me. It's made it through a trip with Alex, who had previously only accompanied me on hat-losing adventures. It's been to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, various parts of China, and back to America, to rave reviews. I was standing in Turlington recently when I noticed a girl staring at me. I tried to figure out how I knew her and couldn't. "Oh," she said when she saw me looking back at her. "I just liked your hat."

And now I'm pretty sure my hat has gone on to other heads. But if you find a blue derby-ish cap with a label on the inside in faded Chinese characters describing the size (56 公分) I'd be so excited I'd even think up a reward for you. I bought too many souvenirs, for example, and don't have as many friends as I do presents. I'd give you this really cool pipe I have left. It's extendable and everything. As my good friend Ron told me today, "Put that in a blog and smoke it."

The Apple Twist Game of Life

I offered Ron an apple today and he did what I, for lack of a better term, am going to call the apple twist game. You know it. You have some girl you're interested in, and you convince the apple it's meant to be by twisting the stem off as you recite the alphabet. When the stem comes off and it happens to be on the first letter of the girl's name (or, if you're desperate, her last name, or middle name, or any of the letters in her name or that make you think of her name...) then you know it's true love.

That's kinda how my week has started, only my twisting has met with a lot of resistance. Now that I'm in Advanced Chinese, I realized that I really don't want to take Chinese any more. I started taking Chinese freshman year because I hated Spanish but thought cultured people should learn another language and study abroad. So I learned Chinese and went to China, and had crazy experiences and sucked at Chinese in decreasing amounts for seven months. And now I'm back and I can have a brief conversation with any Chinese guy I meet at the pool. I can impress my language partners because they don't know an American with as good of Chinese as mine. I can talk about Chinese culture and life.

And I'm still horrible at Chinese. Some people ask me if I want to go back, but right now when I think of going back I dread not being able to say anything. This sounds silly, and I might've said it before, but in America any word I can think of I know the word for. "Drowning"? It's "drowning." "Recoil"? It's "recoil." "Magical"? I know that one, too. Taking another year of Chinese would make a dent in what's left to cover, but not enough for me to set a goal to do it. I don't think there's anything to be gained by continuing.

I haven't done anything drastic, although Dan urged me to. I get to withdraw penalty-free from two classes every 60 credits and I'm seriously considering withdrawing from both my Chinese classes. Culture class is a waste of time, and I'm coming into language class a month behind. If anyone has any wisdom, speak now or forever hold your peace.

And with that matrimonial phrase, I return to the apple twist game. I remember when I was little I liked some girl whose name started with 'e'. My twisting skills weren't highly developed at that point, though, and the stem didn't come off when I got to 'e.' So I kept twisting, subconsciously making my fingers slip so it had an air of legitimacy when I finished the alphabet, came back to 'e', and broke the stem. "Wow," I thought. "It's meant to be." I think in some way this is a good analogy for my life right now.

Before I end this post, I wanted to mention a few housekeeping issues. First, I've decided to start labeling my posts, so when you visit the real website and not the Facebook version, you can sort all my posts by the labels. So any post where I've used a fake name you can see already catalogued with the "fake names" label. Or entries in which I talk about entries (or almost blow up my house) under "housekeeping." And so on.

Also, my blog has Gator colors now. In fact, I looked up on UF's website what the official hex codes were so I'd get the color right. Links, even to my old blog, have yet to appear in the sidebar because life is too stressful for that. Next twist, please.