i had the most amazing time playing tennis! it was so refreshing. i slipped right back into it again. my serve was beautiful. the guy i was playing with, kevin, was cute and a gentleman the whole way through. he was slightly better than me but kept conceeding me points and pretending that my shots were in when they weren’t, and he took the side where the sun was shining in his eyes, and made an excuse so he could stay there the whole game, and offered to drive me home, and we’re going to play twice a week from now on. it was great.
i was reminded of what the late and great david foster wallace said of tennis:
“that’s not the way a real player plays. With respect and due effort and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede nothing. Even against loxes. You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking. You enter a trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything. The court becomes a… an extremely unique place to be. It will do everything for you. It will let nothing escape your body. Objects move as they’re made to, at the lightest easiest touch. You slip into the clear current of back and forth, making delicate X’s and L’s across the harsh rough bright green asphalt surface, your sweat the same temperature as your skin, playing with such ease and total mindless effortless effort and and and entranced concentration you don’t even stop to consider whether to run down every ball. You’re barely aware you’re doing it. Your body’s doing it for you and the court and Game’s doing it for your body. You’re barely involved. It’s magic, boy, Nothing touches it, when it’s right. I predict it. Facts and figures and curved glass and those elbow-straining books of yours’ lightless pages are going to seem flat by comparison. Static. Dead and white and flat. They don’t begin to… . It’s like a dance, Jim.”
![wolfthatdoesntbite:
anticonfluentialist:
SEVERAL weeks ago, a plastic surgeon in Virginia started a media frenzy when he publicized a new procedure that he said could help people look younger when they appear on Skype and other video chat services. He named the surgery the FaceTime Face-Lift, after the popular iPhone feature.
“People don’t come in asking for a FaceTime Face-Lift per se,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert K. Sigal, of the Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Reston, Va., said in a YouTube video. “What they’ll say is that ‘I don’t like the way I look when I’m video chatting.’ ”
[…] Roughly a quarter of the 100 face-lift patients he has a year cited the way they look on webcams as a reason for going under the knife, he said, including his own wife. Dr. Malcolm Z. Roth, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said that other plastic surgeons had heard similar concerns.
David Foster Wallace is making his “I told you so” face. (Infinite Jest, p. 144-151)
Jesus DFW is my favorite.
DFW](http://24.media.tumblr.com/b7f59902deda93209efd1c4577188a63/tumblr_mgwwe66VXA1qj3xoeo1_500.jpg)
