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Losing Convincingly

A little while ago, we had some family stay with us. Among other people, one of my younger cousins stayed with us for a few days. I hadn't met her before, so I was actually a bit worried how everyone would react. I mean, I can handle adults, but I'm never quite sure how to deal with teenage boys and girls. They talk differently, they have far different interests, and they tend to regard anyone who is older than them as strange. All in all, it's a dicey proposition.

Still, I happen to be the youngest of the adults in the house, and I am also the youngest at heart (being a smart aleck tends to do that). So, on more than one occasion, I found myself trying to engage this cousin in conversation or otherwise keep her company. It wasn't horribly awkward or anything, but it took a little bit of time before that initial shyness passed. And, at one point, we were talking about school or something, when she mentioned handball.

Now, we just so happen to have these little balls with which the daycare kids play, so an idea came to mind. Sure, playing any kind of sport/game with a ball indoors can be somewhat questionable, but I figured I'd take a calculated risk. It's not like we were going to be tearing through the halls or anything, and those small balls couldn't do much damage. It would've taken someone straight up throwing the ball at something delicate in order to really make this a bad decision, and I wasn't about to do that. So, soon after, I found myself standing across from her, watching a ball bounce across the living room very carefully.

It did honestly take me a little bit of time to get used to the game, so she was legitimately beating me for a while. I got a feel for the game a bit more after a few points, so I was able to fight back and make it close. However, at this point, I remembered that I was older and it meant a little bit more to her to win than it did to me. So, I started thinking about how to keep the game close while still making it interesting. I'm not going to say I knew I had the game in the bag otherwise, but there was certainly no way I was going to win if I was throwing points here and there.

That wasn't the end of it, though; we had a bit of time before dinner, so we decided to play some more. At this point, it wasn't even a question: I knew I was going to lose. However, I couldn't just randomly whiff all the time, she would've quickly realized the ruse. So, I had to play just well enough to stay in the game, but also poorly enough to lose the game. It was right around this point that I remember thinking, "man, this is hard." Do you have any idea how much thought it takes to think ahead three points in order to figure out which points you need to win, all while trying to execute that flawlessly? It's hard enough trying to execute flawlessly, it's even harder trying to execute both winning and losing flawlessly. If I screwed up at any point, I had to make up for it with the next two points. Also, let's not forget that my cousin liked this game, so she was not unskilled in this game. Even when I was trying to win some points, I'd lose them.

The other fun part of all this was that I couldn't betray my feelings about any of this in the middle of the game. Again, my cousin was hardly dumb; if I betrayed disappointment at winning a point, she'd know that something was up. So, I had to stoically suffer through my mental travails. Luckily, I was able to discreetly ask what the score was several times, so that I could change my game plan in response to conditions at the time.

You want to know the best part? Since we had quite a bit of time, we ended up playing a best-of-five match (e.g., first to win three times wins the whole thing). I actually managed to win twice after she won twice, so it all came down to that last match. We didn't quite finish that last match, but it was pretty close when we had to call it quits. In my mind, that was a job well done. So, as I was saying, the best part of all of this was that I was really happy about a draw. After all of the scheming and handball-playing, I was rewarded for my efforts ... with a draw.

I lead a rough life.

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