Bowling, Beer, Basketball

Listening to:
Murs
Murs For President

I went bowling with about a dozen other teachers from school, whom I’m now convinced are the rowdiest people on the entire planet. I bowled an 81 while sober, which is straight up embarrassing, but went on to bowl a 133 once I had a little beer in me. It's not a great score, but pretty damn good by my standards. I think I might stick to it and go bowling once in a while on the weekends, more or less because it’s a sport that requires minimal running, something that really isn’t my strongest suit.

I’d been jogging to keep in shape, but I ended up putting that on hold because it just got too damn cold in December. The good thing is that all that jogging paid off last month, since I had worked myself into decent enough shape to play a really good stretch of basketball when we had the district tournament for teachers. I suppose that there’s only so much that you can gather from me saying that I played “really good,” but when that fadeaway jumper is falling, believe me, it’s on. I probably should have been laboring out there, but you don’t really feel those tired legs when your students are in the stands yelling and beating on taiko drums. I unfortunately can’t get up nearly high enough to dunk, a point of great disappointment for the boy’s basketball team, but I managed to send the gym into a minor frenzy by blocking a bunch of shots emphatically. Let’s just say that I don’t bother to keep the ball in play. You know how I do. ;-)

An interesting quirk of Japanese society is that people treat you considerably differently if you do well in sports. Especially in a rural town, “cool” is measured not by the car you drive or the shoes on your feet, but by your skills with a soccer ball or your time in the 100-meter dash. Materialistic old me found it a little odd at first, but it’s actually kind of a nice, quaint way to go about living your life.