Monday, November 10, 2003

A Day To Remember, A Day To Forget Disclaimer:  This will be one hell of a long post.    Perhaps even my longest ever.  I have a lot to get off my chest, though. As a rule, Mondays suck right?  Isn't that pretty much a universal truth?  Certain things in life are just guaranteed, like death, taxes, and Mondays sucking.  Sure you might have the odd good Monday thrown in there, like a government holiday or whatnot, but by and large, people don't like a Monday. Well, I hate them even more after today. For most of the day, it was the typical start to the week.  My students didn't want to participate in the play we were reading, but I could have predicted that before even walking through the school door.  But I can handle apathy.  In fact, I'd have been pleased if the worst thing to happen today was apathy from my ninth graders.  Apathy and Mondays are like peanut butter and jelly, movies and popcorn, or Siegfried and Roy.  Or...ok, bad example. But then once my school day was done, I decided to slip on over to the mailroom on post and see if anyone had sent me anything other than more bills.  On my way back out of the mailroom, a lady came up to me and asked, "Is that your car over there?," pointing at what sure enough was my car, but now with a big ol' dent in the driver's door.  I know the picture doesn't do it justice.  Just take my word for it being about two feet across and a foot and a half high. Turns out that this woman had not seen my car parked behind hers and off to the right when she decided to pull her huge SUV out of her parking space to head home.  Well, at least I assume she's telling the truth when she says she didn't see me.  Hate to think she did it for ha-ha's.  Her monster SUV sustained zero damage, for those keeping score at home. Took an hour and a half to have the MPs do all the proper paperwork and send us on our way.  Luckily she took full responsibilty and I hope it won't be too difficult getting her insurance company to pay up.  Until then, I can't roll down my window.  No big deal if you're back in the states and avoid fast food drive-thru's.  Here, though, you have to present your ID everytime you go onto a base or post.  Guess I'll be swinging my door open every morning to do that. So you might be thinking, that's a sucky thing to happen on a normally sucky Monday.  Even suckier than usual, you might venture to add. Oh, but it got much more sucky.  Believe you me. So Monday's are my tennis night, right?  We (meaning Bob, Rod, Jim, myself and Radley -- more about my pal Radley Ramirez, later) head out to the indoor tennis place at Baumholder and set-up shop on court #3, which we've rented through June.  We get to play for a couple of hours each Monday night, which helps to ease the pain that the students may have inflicted on us earlier. We interupt this suckiness report to bring you something that was somewhat less than sucky:  Halfway through our match, we were alerted to the fact that a festival parade was happening right outside.  The other guys weren't too keen on seeing it, but I'd never seen anything like this before, so I ran outside to see what the hubbub was about.  Turns out they'd erected a bonfire, and a couple of hundred people were out there with candles, lanterns, and torches singing songs and having a good time.  There was even a guy dressed as a Roman solider on horseback.  I'm really not sure what the whole deal was -- someone tried to explain it to me, but I wasn't getting it -- but it was still cool to watch. Ok, back to my crappy Monday.  We continued where we'd left off, and actually my side made up of Bob and myself were doing rather well.  I was up to my usual antics at the net, trying not to let anything get past me.  Then Radley (told you there'd be more about him later) decided to put a little UMMPH into a ball that he whacked right at me. My mistake was to try and jump out of the way.  If I'd just stayed in my shoes, the ball would have hit my stomach and not done much damage.  But no, my reflexes made me jump just enough so that ball was able to smack right into my...my...nether region. I went down like I'd been shot.  In fact, getting shot probably would have hurt less.  Instead, this was like an orgasm gone horribly wrong.  Instead of wonderful feelings down there, it was excruiating shots of pain coming from just left of Mr. Happy.  Not only did my life flash before my eyes, but also the lives of any future generations that I'd hoped would spring from my loins.  Now at best, they might stumble out eventually.  Nothing will be springing from down there anytime soon.  Hell, it took me a good five minutes just to decide I wasn't going to throw up.  Ten minutes untill I was able to hobble off, though I honestly couldn't feel my hands or face. I'm surprised Radley didn't grab my camera and capture the moment.  If he'd just painted it, I'd have looked something like this. But just when you think it couldn't get worse -- it did.  I decided that what I needed was something cold to drink, like a Sprite or some water.  There's a pub at the tennis place, so I crawled into there and tried my best to explain to the woman behind the bar that I wanted a Sprite or something cold in a bottle, but not beer.  She didn't speak English and had no clue what I was asking for, and I was in no shape to play charades.  I eventually got her to understand that I would be happy with water, but PLEASE, no carbonation or gas.  I repeated that over and over, "No gas.  No bubbles."  I hate with a passion this carbonated mineral water they love around here. So what did I get?  All together now!  Carbonated mineral water!  Tasted just like Alka-Seltzer.  But I was desperate at this point, and I know the patrons of that bar wanted the American with sweat pouring off his agonized face to just hobble on out.  So that was it.  We eventually called it a night because the other fellas didn't want to keep playing with me in obvious agony on the bench.  After some chit-chat, I was able to somehow get into my banged up car and head for home. The end.  I'm now going upstairs to scream into my pillow. 10:04:20 PM     |

© Copyright 2005 Alex L. Mauldin.