The World at your Feet

Last Saturday, I took the afternoon off and headed down to this big unairconditioned gymnasium at MIT called the Rockwell Cage. L was hanging out there while one of her new dating conquests judged a badminton tournament.

Now you'd think MIT, what with all its wads-o-cash, would have a pretty decent facility, and their pool, attached to the RC, is beautiful. And the RC is beautiful as well. But it is not air conditioned and there was not a fan in site, not on the ceiling, not on the floor, not in the building's many, many windows. It was hot in there. I sweated sitting still. But that's not what this story is about. This story is about the whole wide world, under one roof, playing a game I thought was normally meant for backyard bbqs.

Apparently badminton is a popular sport in all sorts of other countries: There were folks there from England, Pakistan, India, the Ukraine, China. And they were playing hard -- whipping the shuttlecock (which they just call a shuttle) back and forth, running, jumping. Well, except for the players who were really good. You could tell when a team wasn't well-matched because a pair on one side would be racing back and forth, moving up a down and sweating, while the pair on the other side essentially stood there yawning and reaching an arm out to whack the shuttlecock back to the crazies on the other side.

It was great! All that hot, sweaty humanity from all over the world, on a steamy city summer afternoon. I really loved Boston that day. I even saw a terrorist playing badminton! Well, sort of. One of the Brits was telling me what country everyone playing was from when he came to a Middle Eastern man with a thick beard. "Nobody likes him," he told me. Apparently this guy is a misogynist and a jerk and nobody understands why he plays. So they call him a terrorist. Honestly, I felt for him (although obviously not enough to not be snarky about him on my blog), just as I feel for any bearded Middle-Eastern man, especially ones I see carrying backpacks on the train. You can't change how you look -- OK, I suppose you could shave your beard, but I don't think that's fair -- and these days that look is very unpopular.

Ah, me. Anyhoo, I met L's Brit; he was super-cute. Then she and I grabbed an iced coffee and walked on the Esplanade and she told me that yellow fever is when a white person likes a Chinese person and I told her that my brother's fiancee therefore must be suffering from kielbasa fever because she's marrying a Polack.