Ultimate Frisbee, Anyone?

Here’s a fun story from high school gym class. I'm hoping it will make the people who read my post for Feb. 13th forgive me for being much less readable when I'm feeling philisopical and logical at the same time.

Please note that the state of Illinois requires (required?) high school students to have four full years of gym class for graduation. That is only relevant in explaining why gym classes in a large high school such as mine were the one place where students from all skill sets and backgrounds found themselves mixing. Otherwise, my high school experience was highly stratified in terms of scholastic ability.

Naturally, this is a story of me being amused by irrational conflict.

In my gym class during my senior year, I got really lucky with my classmates. The vast majority of the time, I had put my gym class in odd places in my schedule to open up other opportunities. By senior year, my obvious gym schedule options were shared by the people who were taking the same specialized classes I was. Put directly, I had a gym class with a bunch of friends.

But it was 20% friends at best. The rest of the class was random people, most of whom I had never met before. The antagonist of this story was just such a person.

She was a friend of a friend. Both she and the friend we shared were on the girl’s cross country team. For reasons I never understood, she decided that I was her enemy.

When I say I don’t understand her reasons, I am being dead serious. I had never spoken to or even noticed the girl until I was told that she hated me. Her hatred was not very well researched, because it eventually became clear that she was under the impression that I was stupid and in immediate danger of failing out of half my classes. She seemed to think I was some sort of Neanderthal whose value system was based entirely on sports. Being in gym class with me should have gone a LONG way towards killing that notion, but it didn’t seem to register to her. It’s not that she wasn’t clever, because she was, but not about this. She was also pretty cute and reasonably popular, so the typical bitterness factors shouldn’t have explained it either. It’s just that somehow, she got a fictional impression of me lodged in her head, and it refused to leave.

Most of her aggression was vented by her telling our shared friend how stupid she thought everything I did or did not do obviously was. This absolutely delighted my friend, whose competitiveness (especially with me) can best be described as “prone to cage-matches.” Emboldened by this illusion of support, my self-proclaimed enemy began going public with her mockery by actively mimicking actions I was taking, exaggerating them to look caveman-esqe.

I thought this was the best thing ever. It is worth noting that I defied description in high school. I’m still impressed with one quirk that I still have, but have learned to hide better. From grade school through to about the 12th grade, I openly found people making fun of me hysterical, so long as it was either clever or ironic. This was highly disconcerting for people trying to pick a fight, because on many separate occasions, people trying to make a fool of me in public had to deal with me laughing hysterically and gasping out that I loved their word choices. Apparently, I was supposed to confirm or deny what was being discussed instead, but I don’t argue with comedians. To me, it’s a waste of happiness.

Anyway, you have to imagine a skinny, cross country girl with a cute ponytail, competitive personality, and utter contempt for my existence mimicking my every move and portraying me to a large crowd of people as a modern caveman. She managed to make me look forward to gym class I was having so much fun laughing at myself/us. This reaction, I believe, made her decide that I was clinically retarded.

Naturally, things escalated over time. Eventually it got to the point where she would actively make caveman “roars” to accompany my athletic actions, especially during team sports. After I noticed the amusing pattern, I started to roar back, which she seemed to find beyond amusing, presumably for different reasons.

Eventually, the curriculum came to a slow-paced sport. During a chunk of bitter cold winter, gym class was confined indoors in the field house. We played ultimate Frisbee. Unlike what we had done so far, indoor ultimate Frisbee was a sport allowing for plenty of banter, and the teams get to freely mix on the court, unlike in, say, volleyball. We had reached the tipping point.

On day three, I intercepted a Frisbee pass from her team, and landed from a jump with a smile on my face and an audible thump as my sneakers hit rubber. She was the person who had thrown the pass, from about 20 feet away. She was not pleased. Since I planned to throw the Frisbee the other way, in her direction, she had plenty of time to close the distance. In a matter of seconds, as I scanned for a pass, she was about five feet in front of me.

She balled her hands into fists, locked her arms straight out at her sides, put both feet firmly down in an open stance, and roared at me.

I roared back, with a huge grin on my face.

She roared right back, louder than before so that half the gym stopped and looked at her.

Suddenly noticing how many people were now staring, I very casually stood up straight, shifted my weight conversationally onto one leg, raised an eyebrow, smiled knowingly, and loudly asked, “Orgasm?”

Five seconds passed in complete, frozen silence.

Then, suddenly, she tilted her head back, clenched both fists so tightly that her knuckles turned white, and shouted at the ceiling, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW!”

I passed to a teammate behind her, and my team moved easily down the court to score.

We turned around, point made, to see her entire team (minus her) literally rolling around on the cold rubber floor in tears, laughing. From across the room, we clearly heard her shout down at them, “THAT’S NOT FUNNY!”

The gym teacher eventually came over to see if the pile of bodies rolling on the floor had something to do with widespread injuries.

From that day forward, the girl never spoke to or about me again. I considered it my loss.