Only Real Men Play “Table Tennis”

Friday April 18, 2008

We had to wake up early this morning to get newspapers for one of our finals on Monday. We have to find an article from a Friday newspaper and analyze it for a section of our culture final, so I was up and going early today. It rained for a bit in the morning, got clear, rained some more. I think that Mother Nature was having fun watching us struggle. I had problems with the internet all day, went to four different cafes, and still ended up not being able to accomplish what I wanted to get done, so it was kind of a frustrating day in general. I got home and had missed dinner because of all of my unhelpful adventures, so I ate alone. It was just kind of a blah day. I just want to get all of this stuff out of the way and be done with it already.

 On a brighter note (no pun intended), the rays of sunshine in my day came in the form of four middle-aged serious “table tennis” (a.k.a. ping-pong) players. They had their battle ground set up outside of the gym that I was sitting by this morning. They were adorned in short shorts, spandex and sweatbands. Clad in nothing but complete amazingness…I now can die a happy woman. They were completely competitive and I’ve never seen a ping-pong match get so vicious. It has pure raw humor at its finest. One of those moments that you see exaggerated in movies had come to life for me and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Player number one, we’ll cal him Pablo, serves to player number two, known as Ricardo, and Ricardo swats the ball back. It jumps over the net and curves to the left side of Pablo’s battlefield. Pablo dives…he hits the ball just as it is about to hit the ground, it pops back up into the air and amazingly goes back over the net. Ricardo returns the hit, but this time Pablo is not so lucky…his bright green ping-pong paddle has failed him and he ends up on his knees pleading asking the sky (God) why? Why? Ricardo 1-Pablo 0. I may have gotten a little distracted from my homework, but with a great game of table tennis like that…how could you not?