So you drive a car to work everyday. You get up, have breakfast, head to the garage and get in. Start the car, put it in gear and drive off. Day two. Same deal. Then comes Day X. Car won’s start. It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, the car will fail. In fact, all mechanical devices fail sometimes. Because that’s what they are, constructs whose success rate is ‘good enough’ for what we need them to do.

Ever noticed how the human body is equally prone to error? Less probable to fail perhaps, in a period of time, but just as likely to fail when the time comes. And I’m not talking about sickness, inborn defects or hereditary disposition. I mean plain everyday things. Like you’re in class and the teacher asks you a question and you open your mouth to speak, but… no voice comes out. So you clear your throat (the proverbial ‘reboot’) and it’s back. It’s such a weird thing, it probably doesn’t happen more than a couple of times a year (so just imagine how reliable your voice is!), but you never see it coming and it does happen. And it’s not triggered by any kind of special situation, sometimes it happens in high-stress cases, sometimes in trivial settings. It’s almost as if you want to test your voice before you’re about to address a person in a crucial moment, just to be sure.

If you’ve ever worked on a car you know the way your hands look afterwards. Or even a bigger job working on a bike will give that effect. It’s the kind of dirt that doesn’t come off with a wash, you have to scrub the skin and ideally use some special detergent to get it all. This doesn’t happen in one go, you have to scrub for at least 30 minutes, maybe more, to get your hands reasonably clean. There will still be dirt under your finger nails that won’t come out, but you throw in the towel and consider it a job done well enough. Now this is a scenario that mechanics have to deal with everyday, it’s part of the job.

But this is the same kind of scrubbing that surgeons do before surgery. Now, to draw a parallel here, I could understand that kind of meticulous scrubbing after a surgery. You’ve done the job, you have blood and tissue everywhere, that’ll need a good scrubbing. Of course, you’d like your hands reasonably sterile before you put them into a patient. But here’s the thing – surgeons wear gloves. Wouldn’t it be enough to just wash the gloves? No wait, the gloves are sterile, they come right out of the box, they’re used only once and then they go in the trash. So what’s the deal?

To make matters worse for the surgeons, mechanics is actually a more precise science than surgery. You can replace a piston with a piston, a screw with a screw. And the whole vehicle comes apart just as it was put together, with no damage caused by opening it up. Surgeons are more like those people who drill for oil, they can’t get in without drilling/blasting the outer surface and even then they’re not really sure where they are exactly. And when they find the problem, the best they can do is carve out a sizable slice and dispose of it. In the process, they will probably do some minor damage in the area, cause it’s a small space and it’s hard to move around in there.

Ah tennis… Middle aged men in elegant, white cotton swinging wooden rackets on a court of red clay. And recently, women in all the more skimpy and flashy colorful dress. And then there’s us, regular people with little clue about what we’re doing, swinging the racket in all kinds of awkward ways.

The opening act was brutal. Despite playing on Monday and last week, I still often feel like I’m just doing this for the first time. Physically a complete flop. Surprisingly, it picked up after about 40 minutes. Yes, that was 40 minutes of unquestionable, solid suck. Twice fumbling the ball not out of bounds but over the tall wire fence. Oh those were moments to forget. Then, somehow, unprecedentedly, a page was turned. The wrist was getting a brutal beating, but the balls started falling somewhat more favorably. I was doing something right. It was moving ahead, enthusiasm surfaced, energy uncorked. For the next hour there were some ups and downs, but for long stretches of time, I was feeling it. It. The vibe, that says “this is how it’s supposed to feel”. I’m starting to make it work, starting to master the movement, the stroke, the aim. After three weeks of playing, finally, for the first time, I felt like this is coming together, this is going somewhere. The balance had shifted too, my opponent’s bad knee was acting up, I was on the money, but holding back a bit. Otherwise I would have put the pedal to the metal to really find out where I stand. I haven’t done that yet. I’ve played it quiet, trying to drill the basic skills, to get my house in order, lining up my troops at the border. But this is the place I need to be in to go all out. I may not be back here on Monday, form is so elusive. But I will be back. And I will keep coming back, gradually more frequently. I just need to stick with it and remember this feeling.

And yet it started out so sucky, so incredibly sucky. Who knew how it would play out. It’s impossible to predict.

On a completely different note, I was validated today in traffic. My long standing conviction that traffic lights basically count for nothing was confirmed. I was coming up to a major intersection, there was a biker ahead of me waiting at the light. Seeing cars coming up to the lights on the left and stopping, I hit the brakes hard and stopped at the light. Then I look at it again, it’s green. Well, if it’s green… I start crossing, the traffic from the left has just started moving. I get some distressed drivers honking at me. I’m not supposed to be in their way. So why was the light green? What is the point of having traffic lights if they are misleading? To date the most dangerous situation in traffic I’ve been it. Pay attention to traffic, not traffic lights.

Compulsory liability disclaimer: This rule applies to bikers and pedestrians. Not to drivers. When I’m driving, I respect the lights. That’s a whole different ball game.