Ping Pong

So here's how I feel about ping pong: It's awesome.

I started playing ping pong as a youth in my friend's basement, where his father and he would take turns kicking my ass. At the time I thought his dad was a jerk because he didn't play down to me at all. I later realized that he was a jerk for cheating on his wife with, get this, his secretary or grad student or some other conveniently available cliche. What a jerk.

However, his beating the tar out of me totally motivated me not to play like a child anymore. You may be aware from your own experience that most kids suck at most things. That's where the common phrase, "hey kid, gimme your lunch money" comes from. Kids suck at fighting for their lunch money.

My friend's jerkwad dad taught me that you should be able to smash the ball from below the level of the table and that you could put side-spin on the ball to mess with opponents.

For years this valuable knowledge lay irresponsibly unused. Then, one magical day, my friend Dirk and I got frustrated with work and decided to play ping pong in the gym at work instead. I assume we were frustrated by someone asking us to do an interesting task and then insisting we do it all fucked up. The odds are on my side if I remember correctly why we were usually pissed off.

We started playing ping pong regularly thereafter and a bunch of our friends joined in for three simple reasons:

1. It's awesome
   
2. It's super manly
   
3. Fuck you, it totally is.

The more complicated reason, and the one I'm a bit embarrassed to acknowledge is that ping pong is the onliest sport I ever get that "flow state" high in, the one where you know what's going to happen in two seconds and everything suddenly becomes really simple and natural. I'm convinced it has to do with learning what stimuli matter and what don't and focusing only on the important ones. But I don't (yet) have a PhD in psychology, so what do I know.

Well, Dirk and I were joined by Eug (who hits the ball harder than a human should), Courtney and Mark (two dudes from Jamaica who, no joke, played on their high school ping pong teams and are goddamn amazing and in Mark's case, sneaky and "teefin'"), Meredith and Cara (both of whom managed to maintain their graceful femininity despite playing what's widely regarded as the world's most testosteronatastic sport), Dennis (who thank God doesn't know that he's totally susceptible to any shot to his backhand with a little sidespin on it - Hi Dennis!), and a roster of other folk who came and went according to their interest and terms of employment.

At one point we had to know who was best, so we held the first ever Consumer Reports table-tennis league (I shit you not). The Jamaicans insist it's "table tennis", not "ping pong", but I maintain that in a very real sense you're hitting a tiny plastic ball over an adorably diminutive net so there's not much way to salvage that passtime by changing its name. Plus, who won the league play? Who? Me, the best "diminutive paddlewang" player at CR that year, that's who. I figure if you win you get to name it.

Anyway, the point of this dreadful ramble is that on Monday I'm going to a bar and playing ping pong. Sadly, I haven't yet decided if I'll be taking my own paddle. You read that right. I have my own paddle. In fact, I'll have to decide which of my paddle I'll take, if I take one. Playing with "hard bats" sucks.

I think we can all agree that the point of this post is that I'm pretty sweet.

Anyway, let me know in the comments if taking my own paddle is just sensible because it'll improve the quality of the play, or tremendously sad because ... well, you know.