Tennis reflection III

Played tennis yesterday but wasn't too happy with the quality of my tennis. Here are some of my thoughts in retrospect.

Serve: I actually got to the court a lot early and practiced the serve some. I thought the practice serves were decent, I tried to hit them consistently with some spin and some power. But when I got to the games, they became weaker and erratic. I think perhaps I need to just calm down and hit them like in practice.

Forehand: Somehow I feel that I am rushed for time during games, when during practice rallies I could hit them with more power, spin and accuracy. I think the key is to hit them with a smooth stroke and better timing, so the racquet head speed would be much quicker and less preparation time would be needed.

Backhand: It's getting better, but I must remember to hit with the correct stroke and arc on lower balls, just like Gasquet in the picture.

Verträumt, träumerisch

As usual so much stuff to write, but those thoughts once past don't come back to let one write them down, they just fade in and out of one's mind.

Ich bin ein Tagträumer, so kann man sagen auf Deutsch. I like to write things down, all manner of things, as I might have mentioned before, I keep a neat little notebook of all the important things. Then I write random private thoughts in my diary. And when I want to own up to no one in particular, no one I know, I write here. So I am a daydreamer. I write stuff. My thoughts.

Can I say perhaps, that my life is going well, the real life and not the life that floats around like clouds in my daydreams? I hold on to my writings and my notebooks and my little things like they are markers of my existence, in the real life and in the life of daydreams. All that stuff that I wrote down is already there, but I am afraid to lost the writings and with that the stuff and perhaps one of my lives. I flip them open often and maybe I do so obsessively, just to see the stuff and the writings, and to assure myself that they're still there. So the real life goes on well perhaps, but the life of daydreams goes on floating forever.

My life of daydreams lets me know that I am forever a wannabe. I wanna be all the stuff that I write down, but I may never get there. I wonder about Dan and the paper guys and girls I see on this flatness and I dream up full-bodied lives for them, based on what I wanna be and not so much what they really are, for I don't know that, don't know that at all. I wanna be in Buffalo, in some place, in all places except in no place. I click through link after link on Dan, his friends, dreaming up romantic lives and runaway stories. And I wonder and wonder, blurring reality and dreams. And I wanna be loving my friends too, like all that I imagine.

Today is Sunday, if I'm not at tennis, I spend it with my thoughts - in this way as a friend of mine would say I am a self-centred person. I went through some old books today and I came across a map of Malaysia. I realize whenever I see such a map, I recall the little days wending up the old highways, those days when I was but little.

I read an issue of The Economist recently, they write well and they had a obituary for Christopher Nolan, will see if I can transcribe it here sometime. Also the New York Times Magazine writers do brilliantly too.

She'll be coming round the mountain

The original thought for this post happened on 12/29/08.

Two months before, I had bought a beautiful Hallstatt jigsaw of a picture. Maybe it's the mountain in Hallstatt she's coming around.

When I was in Frederick, there was a time I'd sent my Wrangler to the garage -- that was at the start of last year's winter when the jeep was locked out. So I was walking in frederick town at night to the bus, how pretty it seemed then, after my swim at the Y, the lights by the windows.

I don't know why I had thought of this: everybody's a hypocrite -- in Chinese, this would be ren ren dou shi wei jun zi.

I had this random thought too: where do magicians hide their pigeons?