I changed my mind
This newsletter is about tennis now. Is that okay with everyone?
Tail between legs, blushing, I crawl sheepishly back into your inbox with a different proposition. Will you accept this rose? The rose smells different now; let me explain.
(Actually—allow me a quick dalliance about smells? I once lined up a game with a stranger from the NYC Tennis Players Facebook group. His tiny profile picture was unclickable, so all I could glean about this man was his staunch commitment to online privacy. In person, he materialized as a college graduate (earnest) who brought fresh balls (exemplary etiquette). He cracked open the can and offered it to my nose with such excitement I had no choice but to comply. And that’s how I wound up deeply inhaling the *new can smell* with a perfect stranger; ahhhing; feigning transcendence. It was a kind of intimacy I had never known before and have not known since. It would’ve been the ideal consummation of our new relationship had I ever hit with him again.)
Back to the task at hand: what it is we’re doing back here. Consider this a resurrection of the newsletter I started two years ago, dispatched three editions of, and callously cast aside when other elements of my life became too rambunctious. I’ll spare you the particulars, but I came back to relearn how to think and *therefore* write critically about things that can’t be added to cart. My day job—developing the tone-of-voice for various direct-to-consumer brands—tips the scales heavily in favor of twee one-liners, rather than unraveling the curiosities of my big, beautiful brain. I stand before you to repent.
And if any of my clients read this? What we have is real; I just need to explore other things.
If you recall, I started this newsletter with a focus on ‘games’—mind games, puzzles, sports, gameshows, games at large. I’ve since come to realize that I have a lot to say about one game—tennis—so I’m clearing all the peripheral rubble. I figure that over the course of a week, I spend more days playing this sport than I don’t. To say I have a hobby would be accurate—but also not—since grown people who talk about having hobbies also say things like ‘adulting’ and have bucket lists. Those people would take up pickleball, not tennis. Sue me for this elitist, unoriginal opinion (or let me walk free because pickleball is annoying).
I had a twisted childhood—which of course makes me just like everyone else—and my parents parented in their own clumsy ways. But they also threw me on a tennis court 30 years ago, paid for regular lessons and drove me to tournaments across the state. We stayed in motels with deranged wallpaper, or doubled back home that evening after all-you-can-eat Sizzler dinners, my mother encouraging me to stuff food into napkins for later. Regional things. My impatience and temper thwarted my tennis potential as a young competitor, and as an adult, I enjoy pantomime-like bursts of scream therapy when I mess up. Even so, tennis remains the most disciplined thing about me. The thing I’ll leave home before 7am for, and the thing that keeps me out of flavorless gyms for the better part of the year.
To give myself a head start—and you something to believe in—but mostly me some extra grace and procrastination, the next two dispatches will be personal essays about tennis that already exist on the internet. They focus on my pitfalls not so you can point and laugh, but so we can all maybe improve (gang gang).
Onwards from there who knows what could happen? Maybe answers to questions like:
Simply why do so many women have great backhands and temperamental forehands?
Why do I play tennis? Why do other people I know who play tennis play tennis? What’s the point?
Once and for all, where are the hot, single people playing tennis in New York?
If you’d like me to unpack anything tennis-related, please ask! This is a game of back-and-forths, after all.
Oh—the new title is Hard Hitting. Hard is the way a person needs to play for tennis to double as therapy and also, good things don’t come easy. Moon ballers and pushers are permitted entry if they’re ready to change. I won’t be breaking hard-hitting tennis news because I can’t put that sort of pressure on myself. For similar reasons, I should remain unwedded to any kind of schedule or cadence. Please know that the pungent logo color can be credited to the search query ‘tennis ball hex color’ and not brat summer.
Lastly, I promise this title isn’t an omen for forthcoming tennis puns and wordplay—especially ones about love.