Things We Learned in Florida

I know all of you were going into withdrawals last week due to my absence from the blog and were developing early stage dementia due to the lack of sarcasm in your life. Well you can stop frothing at the mouth and sticking your remote in the freezer because your annual dose of medication is here.

Two weeks ago I talked about some bucket list items that still need completion before I play that final match in the sky. One of the main items on that list was visiting every 50 states and the spring break trip helped the cause by taking one more state off the list. Yes, Florida is now highlighted on the big board!

Only 28 more to go!

Whenever you go to a new place there’s always a chance to learn about yourself. For example, going to Los Angeles taught me that I dislike Los Angeles and going to Alabama proved my intuition correct that I never want to live there. I learned quite a few things in Florida which I will be more than happy to enlighten you with.

I Like Losing Things on Spring Break

This one will come as no surprise to my mother, but I have an absolute affinity for losing things on spring break trips. This year I lost my hat, not once, but twice; at the same tennis center no less. The first time Mike Janssen’s mother picked it up thinking it was one of the players. Sadly the hat belonged to one of the “adults” in charge: me (as scary as that sounds). Upon receiving my hat I promptly left it at the same tennis center the very next day. I remembered the hat only after I left the complex, so I did the responsible thing and asked freshmen Zack Decker (aka Butters) to grab it for me.

It was actually a good spring break in that I didn’t lose anything permanently which is not usually the case. Two years ago on a spring break tennis trip to California I was the proud owner of a black fitted team hat and Nike team pullover. I was so proud of these items that I decided to unknowingly donate them to some nice person working for Avis at LAX. You can imagine my surprise when I got home after the trip and realized that I had left some of my most prized possessions in the rental car. This, however, is not as bad as what I did my freshmen year of college on a trip to St. Louis. We spent one night in a hotel on the way to St. Louis and checked out the following morning to continue our journey. When we arrived to play Washington University I was perplexed by my inability to find my court shoes in my bag. It was at this time that I had a revelation: I left my shoes in the hotel room!! It’s no wonder that I lost my matches to Wash U and that other team we played during the trip. Who was that? Oh yeah, some school from Iowa called Coe College. Now you all know why I lost that doubles match to Tom Jennings. And to top it all off, my shoes were full of my winnings from our previous day’s poker game. I lost my shoes and the ability to buy more.

You're doing this all wrong Fernando, trust me

My Phone Hates Florida

I enjoyed my time in Florida like an old person at a 4pm dinner. My phone, on the other hand, did not like it one bit. The thing really has a mind of its own. Normally I have good battery life, but the second we landed in Florida my phone went on a power binge that sucked everything out of it in 4 hours. It’s like upon realizing we were in a different time zone my phone became a power hungry, self-destructive force that would make Kim Jong Un proud.

So my phone is Dennis Rodman?

On those rare occasions when my phone wasn't being a drain on the local electrical grid it decided since there was so much sunshine in Florida I didn’t really need a backlight to see the screen. That’s more of a luxury, really. When I received text messages I had to use the voice function on my phone, so it would read them to me. There is never a more awkward situation than having your incoming text messages pronounced out loud by an electronic voice in a hotel lobby. It is simultaneously frustrating and thrilling to respond to a text message from a random number in your contacts list. I just assumed all incoming messages were from my mother, so I ended every reply with an “I love you” just to be on the safe side.

I Have Corrupted the Team

I’m like a bad computer system and come prepackaged with a variety of sayings to pull out at inappropriate times. Most of these are from my own playing days and include a cheer for every situation on the tennis court. If you break your opponent, that is the opportune time to inform EVERYONE within a mile vicinity of this accomplishment by yell, “That’s a break Kohawks!!” If you happen to win the set then the amplitude is obviously doubled with the yelling of, “That’s a set Kohawks!!!!” (double the exclamation marks means double the sound). This works in a variety of different situations. After screaming about a break and subsequently holding you can scream “double flip” as you run to flip the score card to indicate the updated score. Of course there are other things to yell even if a break or set hasn’t been won. It’s always a good idea to randomly inform the other team that “the pain train is coming”; “you’re gonna get it”; and if you’re feeling especially sprite, “They Don’t Want It!!”

You can imagine my happiness/dismay when during one particular match I heard court 1 yelling about a break, court 2 yelling double flip, and court 3 informing us all of how much the other team did not want it. I realized then that I have created a monster.

My God, what have I done!?

And it extends past on court exclamations. According to Kris, Coach Rodgers now talks with a little more twang during team huddles, and he’s not even aware of it (I’m a little proud of that one). My most pervasive influence on the team is with saying the words “my bad.” I unknowingly instituted this sometime this semester and we say it with a special twist: instead of properly pronouncing the “a” we drag out the vowel to almost an “e” and nearly give this 3 letter word 2 syllables. It’s like melding the word “bad” and “bed” into a new word, “baaeeed.” What’s sad is this pronunciation is so ingrained we don’t realize we’re doing it anymore. I came to this conclusion after a text message from my aforementioned phone-of-satan at 2:00am. When my phone went off the other coaches looked up at me and I, while still half asleep, calmly said, “my baaeeed” and reached for my phone.