I made a note to myself at the top of my Gmail tasks list
about this time last year ago: racketball.
About all I was doing at that time was rewatching West Wing and Friday Night Lights.
In the first episode of the third season of FNL, everything is going to hell. For Smash, who had been a star player during
his senior year (and during the whole first and second season), shit’s
bleak. He’s recoverning from an injury,
but he;s told that he’ll never be back to the condition he was in before he got
hurt. He’s freaking out in the steaming
rage under the surface way that’s the only method of grief that
hypermasculinity allows for.
Coach Taylor (dreamy Coach Taylor) picks him up one night
without notice, and in the next scene, they’re in a racketball court, both
still in their work clothes. There’s
lots of grunting and sweat, etc., and Smash is like, “Coach, my life is over,
and also why are we playing racketball, ‘the Whitest sport ever’?”
They’re playing racketball because running football drills
ad nauseum would not do the trick. Smash
needs to restore his speed and agility, and racketball demands plenty of both. (Coach Taylor doesn’t say as much, but that’s
the unspoken reason.)
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There’s sometimes wisdom, I think, in not taking a challenge head on.
In coming around instead with creativity.
---
I never knew that selling wedding dresses and volunteering
in a prison was gonna work as a method for feeling purposed. But it’s turned out to be way more effective
than the linear path I took because I thought I was supposed to – good grades,
then degree, then job, then you win.
That shit did not work.
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