In which FHC shares a few tricks on how to avoid losing

Despite LL’s kind, yet awkward and slightly demeaning, efforts to make me win to build my self-esteem, I have been constantly losing at Tennis in the last few days.

I have always hated competitions mostly, I believe, because I am obsessed with victory and love to win as a way to confirm my worth. Sadly I tend to be a huge loser. I vaguely remember that my mother taught me when I was just a charming, albeit meek and extremely small, child that for men of my condition it always is better to die than to lose. As a somewhat logical consequence, I happened to lose the little talent I had whenever I was expected to perform at my best: I was a mediocre golfer, judoka, footballer, musician, swimmer, and sailor and later on in life lover. I am also a very poorly performing human being but that’s another story. I also have fond memories of being left out at school with the less popular children whenever we would pick teams and ended up giving away my mother’s silverware to avoid this embarrassing and traumatic situation. The only thing my mother would not let me be mediocre at was riding, because that little brat, Bonnie if I recall well, who dies in “gone with the wind” (an all time favorite of French women). I just find it so hypocritical that people call all forms of high school sports competition “a game” when it actually is the most tragic part of most childhoods and most coaches are just neo-Nazis.

After a while, I got pretty fed up of losing and then decided to spend the rest of my life avoiding contests of all kind at all cost on the basis of the very famous rule that “if you don’t play, you can’t lose” and looking for all the shortcuts. I even became gay (one hell of a shortcut if you want my opinion). If someone asks me to join some team instead of saying “I am not a competitive person”, I can just indicate that “I am a fagot”: which usually does the trick. The idea of buying trophies from e-bay to place above my chimney only occurred to me much later in life. On the professional level, I usually pop a beta-blocker or use some backstabbing technique whenever I am expected to compete but mostly I try to lower expectations as much as I can. I am always amazed that one is asked to live with oneself for such a long period of time in life.

Comments

[LL]

I can't tell if the entry reflects a mostly gay attitude or a mostly french one.

[fan]

calimero

[Russ W]

I have said it many times over this past week... KICKBALL. Now this is a sport where winning is nothing and ensuring dignity is everything! The key to this is to make the post game drinks last long enough so that the game is but a vague memory the following morning. Now forget those "fagot" sports such as tennis and sailing, and be part of a real team.