MayDay

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 I am sure that somewhere in my blog posts I have mentioned that I am not really sporty--I have nearly-missed hitting my father-in-law's head with a golf ball; I was so terrible at my attempts to play racquetball with Mark that he has not even bothered trying to play tennis with me; and my teacher in a college badminton class actually laughed at my efforts.

Well, that hasn't changed.

a representative photo for visualization purposes
About a month ago, Mark joined a local softball team [it's such an easy game to social-distance in], and has twice called upon me to toss balls to him so that he can practice his batting. I warned him beforehand that I am fairly incompetent at sports, but he didn't have a whole lot of available options in this pandemic life, so me it was that threw ball after ball after ball in his general direction. And when I say ball, I mean it in both senses: I was underhand-tossing a physical ball, AND I swear 99% of them were balls--not a strike, not a foul, just a ball a.k.a. unhittable.

At one point I threw the ball directly against the post of the protective screen that was 2 feet in front of
me, and to my embarrassment, as the ball bounced back at me, a passing observer commented that such a pitch would make it onto America's Funniest Home Videos.

Mark apparently got some sort of practice from it, though, because he asked me a second time to help him practice. Some of my pitches were passable, but a lot of them were balls. I want to emphasize, again, that I'm not terribly sporty, so if I can recognize that the pitches are balls, those pitches are
unquestionably very terrible throws. I mean, when the ball goes on the opposite side of the batter--the side where there is no bat--it is not that hard to draw conclusions on the competency of the pitcher. 

The same throwing skill also shows up when I play disc golf. On an 18-hole course last week, I hit a tree--at least one of which was extremely avoidable--at least 6 times. Neither Mark nor I even bothered counting how many throws-per-hole I had (but it was probably over-par 75% of the time at minimum). One of my throws definitely went in a small out-of-the-way-and-not-even-in-line-with-the-hole creek (and actually, as far as my history with disc golf goes, that's par for the course). And even though we had other players on the holes both directly ahead of and directly behind of us, and despite it being poor form to throw your frisbee while other players are still on the hole, both Mark and I agreed that as my disc was not likely to go anywhere near the people ahead of us, I could get a headstart on the hole once those individuals had thrown their initial drives.

I think I will be an embarrassment to my future children.

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