just a case of mononucleosis

tennis is about chaos and order. to be a fan is to subject oneself to the tortures of chaos and the bliss of order. the life of a tennis fan is centered on a tennis hero. my hero's roger federer. i have sort of proto-heroes before roger: guga (can't win a non-clay slam), patrick rafter (too good, and the shirt size), marat safin (genius, but). then wimbledon, 2001. a swiss kid beat the mighty pete sampras in the fourth round. that win is not only material, it is also very symbolic. during the next years that kid started breaking records. tennis fans were quick to revise their assumption that sampras is the best player ever. welcome to the age of roger federer.

today, of course, we're living in that phase they call the changing of the guards. roger's 26, which would make him kind of past his prime. he has won 12 majors already. the thirteenth should have been an australian open crown this year. he lost in the semis. a new kid from serbia beat him. call me sore but i believe the mono story, haha. roger was sick. no one beats him like that.

roger started losing matches after that, which would validate the ailment non-excuse. these observations of chaos are not entirely centered on fed. there was a time when tournaments were won only by either roger federer or rafael nadal. this year these two kept losing to, well, lesser players. then last week, roger won a claycourt title, his first for the season. his opponent retired. could this mark the restoration of order in the tennis world? and just last night, federer and nadal booked their places in a tourney final.

their matches could not have been more, erm, portent-ious. nadal beat nikolay davydenko, who beat him in last month's masters (was it in miami?). federer was trashing novak djokovic when, quite expectedly, the serb retired. breathing problems. we've heard that story before. if you don't know how to handle losses, quit the sport kid. as we're on the subject of portents, nadal wins the final. i'm back to being a federer groupie, but i'm also more realistic now (realistic and superstitious). no one beats nadal on clay. federer did last year, but that was hamburg. at least there's the comfort of order restored.

several hours after. you don't learn! i have actual superpowers! i accurately predicted the outcome of the monte carlo final between roger federer and rafael nadal. nah, it was easy. we all know no amount of coaching would change roger. he'll always be that graceful, beautiful, intelligent player. he must win a few more wimby titles, to compensate for all the french losses (past and future). hay, roger federer. one last appeal. please. don't be a saint, kill your opponents out there! we all know you value aesthetics. but try and play ugly sometimes. we need roland garros.

a myopia slash astigmatism story

or maybe it was the astigmatism that did it, don't know the difference really. but my story involves mtv and those televisions in public where you see the images but do not hear the sounds.

a little bit of history. always had glasses (not comfortable using the word spectacles, so glasses). glasses were to me as braces were to my sister. they made us freaks really when we were kids. freak is a harsh word, exaggerated in this context, but the only other word that i think could replace freak here would be queer; freak it is. kaye would warn me of the pains of having braces and i'd do the same with the glasses.

when the enemy is genetics one is bound to lose. kaye did have the headaches and needed to wear glasses. i began looking like a vampire and had to get braces (genetics is my excuse). the point was the eye problem. serious eye problem, i would technically be blind without the glasses. the last time i saw an eye doctor was more than a year ago - that ends the history part and also explains why we have this story here.

civilization and all its discontents

now i don't think the world is absurd at all. changed my mind. it has timing - this world, this universe. when patterns are obvious, there's no absurdity there. some intelligence is involved. god is not silent after all. the greeks may be right. the difference is in the nature of tragedy: ordinary people can be tragic figures.

help me god, err, world, whoever/whatever's out there somewhere. make this that thing rational people call a mid-life crisis. to escape existence at forty would be, that would be heaven.

half smiles of the downloaded

after seven decades there was, finally, a check beside the taxi driver soundtrack torrent. the score by bernard herrmann was the earliest thing about taxi driver i liked. earliest: didn't get the movie the first time i saw it. high school, surrounded by people, you know, typical happy life. always liked violent movies - kaye and i had this fascination with the silence of the lambs. we would do scenes in what i would now call camp, erm, a campy manner. (the lambsh, they were shhcreaming/quid pro quo docter/good eeveneeng clareeeese). taxi driver has a different kind of violence, though. that kind that goes beyond the physical. of course the only way to show that violence is through physical images and symbols, but this movie transcends even that. there's john hinckley and jodie foster and the reagan assassination attempt.

the twelfth track has the travis bickle diary entries monologues. he talks about the rain washing the streets clean of dirt and blood and that same rain cleaning the earth of all its scum. the first meeting with the angelic woman seems to be a feature in scorsese films; cate blanchett glows when she and howard hughes are first introduced (now i'm mixing names, and the aviator is really a non-scorsese film directed by martin scorsese). betsy has that same radiance when travis first sees her.

there's a similar obsession to john hinckley's and it's the best (not the superlative of good) story in tennis i've known. steffi graf won the golden slam in 1988 (all the majors plus the olympic gold) and was queen of the world. a few years later some teenage girl started beating her. monica seles became world number one. then günter parche, obsessed fan, stabbed seles and steffi was number one again. seles would win only one major after that. whatever, i still love steffi.

this is a piece of crappy writing one does to keep one's thoughts away from the real crappy things that're happening. by one of course i mean me (or is it i, i mean i?).

undo the collapse

will never be albert camus, or beckett/adamov/genet/ionesco. still, here's an attempt at articulating the absurd. you know you have an existential problem, crisis, when:

1. some cat looks at you in a weird way; you feel judged. you have a feeling that even cats know better than you do.

2. you want to jog around the neighborhood at 11pm.

3. you do jog at 11pm. alone. and only for five minutes, or the length of two and a half songs on your ipod. you suddenly realize the absurdity of what you're doing. you go home.

4. the world has six billion people. you feel alone.