I've always hated dodgeball, and my hatred for the sport is split 50/50
between two very serious reasons. The first is the pain one feels
when being whipped in the ass by a tight, hard, rubber [IS SHE GONNA
TAKE IT THERE? NO SHE ISN’T] ball. This pain is
only justified by a mere half-endorphin of “yes! I hit someone else!”
and brings to the surface the fact that the only real win in dodgeball
is when you’ve successfully destroyed a human body. Agility, speed,
vigilance…yeah right. It’s all about knocking someone
da fuk out. And I’m sorry, but I do not want to base my victory on
hurting others.
The second reason goes a bit deeper, and reaches
into the realm of cross-cultural pre-pubescent rejection. Lol ya hurd
this gon be weird. You know how you remember certain things from your
childhood, and you don’t know why you remember
those particular things, but you deduce that they must’ve had a serious
impact on you? The situation I dealt with in grade five obviously has.
We were playing dodgeball, and my immigrant-induced drive of self
preservation was still in full force, so I somehow
ended up being the last person standing on my team, going against two people on
the opposite team. I knocked one of the people out, leaving just one: a
boy named Javier. Having recently moved to Canada from Nicaragua,
Javier was also on the alert for common social
dangers the likes of misunderstanding the symbol for the girls' bathroom leading to an unwelcomed entrance, consequently
labelling him a pervert. Javier had dark skin, and pale green eyes. I
remember them very well, because at five minutes
to the end of gym class, he had backed me into a corner and stood just a
few feet away, piercing me with the impetus in their glare. In the left
was an eye booger.
I remember that moment very well because it
was the first time in my life that I felt my femininity threatened by
the power of his masculinity. It was a right of passage, in a way. I
remembered what my mom had told me about talking
to men. “Women can get by on the smoothness of their words,” she had
said. As he gripped the ball, I slowly curled my face into a smile. “Javier,” I whispered breathlessly à la Marilyn Monroe, “Don’t do
it.” He paused for a micro-second, then whipped
the ball at my stomach and walked off, victoriously. Thus began my
journey as a woman.
That said, I was recently invited to play on a
dodgeball team, and in keeping with my enthusiasm about team games, I
accepted. As I signed up, I briefly thought of Javier. I had flashbacks
of the eye booger. I could still smell the
combination of fresh gym equipment and sweat. The night of the first
game, I put on a t-shirt with french fries all over it. In hindsight, what
the f was I thinking.
Let me just say: if you think elementary school
dodgeball is scary, try it with FULL GROWN MEN. Men who do this for fun
every day. Men who wear knee pads just for the purpose of sliding up
close enough to land the perfect shot in your kidneys.
The first class was last week, and I’m still shaking. First of all,
everyone on my team is really, really good. They’re excellent throwers,
they can duck, they can even do that Michael Jackson thing where you
dodge a ball by lifting your pelvis off the ground.
I’m really good at cheering, I think. I’m usually pretty good at
repeating what just happened while clapping. “You did that! Woo!” “It
didn’t get you! Awesome!” "You are still inside the game!"
Although, I’ll have to come up with new
material soon, or people will think I’m just being patronizing.
One thing I’m absolutely horrific at is throwing. I
tried throwing in softball a couple of years ago, and people said I was good, so I
guess those people weren’t my real friends. Here, I was a disaster.
I’m not used to foam balls, and lets just
say I’m not used to throwing in order to hurt someone. I’m more of
like a basketball leisurely thrower than a whipper. They kept yelling
“Throw low!” and while I attempted to relay the message to my brain, it,
in turn whispered to my arm to create a paper
mache swan out of its joints, and well let’s just let it be, dear
it said. Seriously. Awful. While others whipped the ball at my legs
before I even had a chance to use them, the path of my throw was that of
a very precise concave downwards parabola,
the formula for which is expressed by a very simple
y = -x2 + 1,
resulting in a very slow trajectory, laden with predictability and
shame. I have drawn a diagram to represent this, where x and y should
equal distance and height, but really they represent
my opponent’s boredom and my personal embarrassment.
I throw slow and steady, launching my ball into a
very friendly, obtuse, positive climb, followed a monotonous and
reflective pause which gives everyone on the opposing team time to eat a
sandwich and re-group, followed by a lingering descent
calling for a bystander to merely extend their arms to cradle what’s
left of my ambitions in a careless afterthought. What a fail.
Somewhere in the middle of the game, I stopped
letting my negativity cloud my focus. I decided to be fearless, and
leapt towards a ball that had been discarded amidst the rubble of the
fallen. I decided this would be my chance at making
my mark, this would be for the time Javier rejected my Lolita-esque
attempts, this would be me, picking up the ball and whipping it at
someone’s legs, like I should. Instead, it was me, bending down to pick
up the ball with the agility of a newborn elephant,
and upon rising, getting slammed in the face by the opponents' sphere of evil. It hit me so
fast, I didn’t even realize what was happening, except I was holding a
blue ball, and what hit me was a yellow ball, so I mainly just saw
green. Who even gets hit in the face? Apparently that
has never happened to anyone on the team, so of course, it’s written in
the official rules of dodgeball that on my first attempt, it would
happen to me. It hit me in the nose, and for a few seconds, I couldn’t
breathe. Then I was all:
The absolute worst of that is when people flock to
you, asking if you’re okay. If you were okay before, having people
worry about you just makes you feel like this is something to be worried
about, so you tell them you’re okay and then
proceed to bawl your eyes out. But no, not I. I gathered myself and
in a very cool way, reclined at the wall. “I’m gonna take a breather,
dudes” I said. Or something equally cool and nonchalant. And then,
when no one was looking, I casually walked out
of the gym, walked into the girls bathroom (it was a public school…I
know- way to relive all of those fears again), dabbed a tissue on my
throbbing nose, and cried three tears. I counted them, because I wanted
to make sure I was accountable for each and every
one. You know what, though, it did really, really hurt. You know what
hurt worse though? The fact that on that particular night, for that
particular game, I had chosen to wear that damn t-shirt with french fries on
it, so I literally could not have looked any more
lame. Hey guyze I like frize! Asshole. Fries do not belong in serious
athletic environments.
Anyway, I then told myself to stop being a pansy,
and walked back onto the court. The rest of the game proceeded with
mediocrity (at best) on my part, interspersed with my inner monologue of
“I am never doing this again!” but luckily
ended on the note of my decision to keep going. I told myself I would
push myself this year, and here I am, pushing myself – out of my comfort
zone, and possibly out of what it means to be a woman. I don't need you, Javier.
.JPG)
