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So Friday morning was the Wimbledon semifinal between Djokovic and Federer, which I expected Novak to win, if not easily, then at least successfully.

And he didn't.

Losing in the semis was bad enough, but losing to Federer? Just added insult to injury.

I was more puzzled than anything else, because honestly? Djokovic was not playing anything like what I've become accustomed to seeing at all. I wanted to reach through the computer monitor and shake him and demand, "What is WRONG with you?"

One of the things that has always most impressed me about Djokovic is his movement on the tennis court. He's speedy and sneaky and it surprises me every time, probably because he doesn't look like he should be able to move that quickly. Those long limbs of his aren't graceful, just lanky, and it gives the impression of sloth as well as awkwardness. He's skinny, yes, but every inch of his body is roped with solid muscle, and he is astonishingly flexible even so. He can slide into a point that makes my knees twinge in sympathetic pain just to watch, and make the most impossible shots by doing so, yet on Friday, it looked like his feet were nailed to the grass.

One of the fundamental rules of tennis is, "Go for every shot." Now, granted, at the professional level, that's just not practical. There just really isn't going to be enough energy available to chase down every ball, especially a clear winner. "Know your limits" might be a better interpretation. Still, on Friday Djokovic was watching balls sail by him that he would've gone for on many other occasions that I'd seen him play.

I don't think Federer's ace count would've been as high if Djokovic hadn't been so clearly off his game.

Which brings me back to the question: WHY?!?!?

I kind of feel like I'm the only one asking it.

The sportswriters seem to have universally decided that Djokovic was nothing more that a flash-in-the-pan anyway, and this is his natural fall back into the bottom of the pack.

The commentators are pretty much united in the belief that Djokovic hasn't been able to handle the pressure, both internal and external, of being Number One in the world, of trying to capture and hold all these titles and break or set records, of upholding the faith not only of his family and loved ones but of an entire country.

I'm sure that's part of it.

But pressure is generally the kind of thing that gets you underestimating your opponents, that gets you losing Miami in a surprise attack from John Isner and bouncing back to win Indian Wells, not necessarily the kind of thing that upends your entire mindset and throws your entire game out of whack for months on end.

I'm wondering if the problem, while still mental, might be something a bit more prosaic.

Djokovic's beloved grandfather died while Novak was playing the Monte Carlo tournament.

He hasn't played the same since.

When my maternal grandfather died suddenly, I was a freshman in high school and we were on vacation in North Carolina. I remember that my mom was absolutely DEVASTATED. For months after, maybe as much as a year, she was just barely functioning. I used to come home from school sometimes and find her in bed, and let me tell you, that was not something my mother EVER did.

It was decades before she told me that the reason for her excessive distress was guilt: the night before we were to leave for the trip, she had taken me and my brother up to visit her parents and say goodbye, like we always did. We'd been late, of course, as always, and apparently Grandpop had been annoyed and left for his Knights of Columbus meeting without waiting for us. Mom had been mad at him for not waiting, so we'd visited with Grandmom and then gone home. The next day, we'd left for North Carolina.

A week later, her father was dead, and not only had she had never said goodbye, but she'd parted ways in anger.

Of course, it didn't have to be anything quite that drastic for Djokovic. Losing a close family member as an adult is different that having it happen as a child. And everything for his family is colored by the war, and what they went through during the bombing of Belgrade. I can't even imagine what a difference that makes: it must draw an already close-knit family even closer, and make it that much worse to lose a member of that family.

For Djokovic to be away from his family when he got the news, and even worse, to miss the funeral, must be a very difficult thing indeed. I wonder if he's even really had the time to grieve properly.

And that, I think, is the kind of thing that weighs on the mind, that can cause the kind of erratic play I've been seeing.

It's a terrible shame, really. This is high season for tennis, and there's really no break, no time for him to take without withdrawing from important tournaments. And doing so could mean not just a financial loss, but also one of clout. He's already lost the No. 1 ranking because of this loss to Federer, and in the politics of the tennis world, that also will have lost him a significant percentage of power. And it's not just his own bank account that suffers, but also the livelihoods of the people who work and travel with him.

It's an awful decision to have to weigh, and I don't envy him.

Of course, this is all speculation. I could be totally off-base, here.

But I get the funny feeling that maybe I'm right.
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Today is my brother's birthday.

He's 41, just a little more than a year younger than I am, and yet there's a lot of people in my life now who don't even know that I have a brother.

We haven't spoken in more than fifteen years. )
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. . . you only have yourself to blame for fucking up something?

Me too.

Okay, if you're curious, here's the story:

Like, a year ago, I joined match.com, like squillions of other people. I'm not rabid about checking up on my profiles on personals sites-- I kind of figure that I'll get the emails if people are interested. NBD. So there's this guy who winks at me, and I wink back, and then, as far as I know, that's it.

It must have been a good three or four weeks later that I happened to login to the match.com site, and I noticed the guy had sent me an email. I had to wait for payday before I could purchase a membership, and during that time, the 30-day window for reading emails ( yeah, that I didn't realize existed ) EXPIRED.

FUCK!!!!!!! says I, since I'd really actually been interested. Subsequently, dude's profile disappears, and I figured that he found someone else. Well, or that he got pissed off and blocked me, but, whatever.

Last week, I idly logged in and noticed they'd revamped the account home page, and it included little notes about updates to the profiles of people I'd viewed in the past. This guy's profile was listed as "updated". I was actually kind of excited, because I re-read it and yup, still interesting.

So I realized that, you know, I really kind of owe this guy an apology for what probably looked like me blowing him off, at the time. Man, it is NOT EASY to write an email to a guy when you have to start off with an apology.

It's also not easy to get an automated message in return that states, { username } is not interested.

Ow, man. I got BURNED.

And boy, am I KICKING myself for missing the chance in the first place.

In all fairness, though? If positions were reversed, and I was on the receiving end of such behavior? I'm not sure that I would've done anything differently than what he just did. And jeez, it had been a whole year. *cough* Possibly more. *cough*

I like to think that I would at least have read the email and responded via email as well, instead of using an automated shutdown, because that's pretty cold, but then again, maybe he's not a paying subscriber right now, and maybe he didn't want to buy in just to tell me to fuck off. That happened to me with a different guy, back before Christmas, and NO WAY was I wasting thirty-five dollars just to verbally eviscerate this dude-- no matter how richly he deserved it.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is . . . I have no one to blame but myself, and THAT REALLY SUCKS.

*goes off pouting*
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So I was harangued into opening a Facebook account.

I can't believe how many people from my old high school are friending me . . . some of them are people I don't even remember, others are people I never liked, and still others are just the kinds of people I never interacted with, so why on *earth* do they want to know what I'm doing with my life?

It's been more than twenty years since we graduated. It's kind of cool to look at people's profile pictures and see how they've changed. There's a lot of people I wouldn't recognize now from Adam-- they look so different! Personally, I don't think I've changed much-- well, except sideways-- but things always look the same when you're staring at your own reflection.

I saw the FB picture of the guy I had a crush on from . . . let's see. He arrived in fifth grade, and that was pretty much it for me until he moved away in-- ninth grade? Yeah, I think it was the summer between ninth and tenth grades. His folks divorced and he went with his dad. His asshole younger brother stayed with their mom and graduated a year or two behind me.

Anyway, huge and honking crush. I remember running into him a few times in the years following and he was always surprisingly nice to me. Once he saw me walking and pulled over to offer me a ride when he could just as easily driven right by me . . . I had my nose in a book as I walked ( as usual ) and certainly wouldn't have noticed the difference.

Freshman year of college, I went to a Halloween party with Kristin. The guy who threw the party graduated two years ahead of us, so it wasn't too surprising to see some familiar faces from high school, whether in or out of costume. I remember a guy in a werewolf mask and hands coming up and talking to me and asking me repeatedly whether I knew who he was. Duh, you're wearing a full mask! How am I supposed to know?

Eventually, he removed the mask and-- lo and behold! Guess who?

Yeah, you saw that one coming, didn't you?

I remember talking to him some, but mostly I was trying to keep an eye on Kristin, who was staggeringly drunk and kept trying to leave to go to some frat party or other. I remember several of the other party attendees were getting ready to leave and go to see Rocky Horror, and he asked me to go with them. Several times, IIRC. But Kristin was a wreck, she would've gotten hit by, like, ten cars on her drunken way across town, and I couldn't leave her alone when I'd promised to mind her.

Turned out to be a real bummer of an evening, and I wished I'd gone to the movie instead. Especially once I realized that, hey! Yeah, dude was hitting on me.

Aaargh. Yep, pretty much regretted that particular bit of stupid ever since. I was so hopelessly naive when I was eighteen, wasn't I? In my defense, at that time I'd had no experience whatsoever with guys, since I wasn't allowed to date in high school. And to this day I haven't ever been too good at picking up signals . . . mostly, a guy has to hit me over the head with a brick before I get the idea.

I confess, there's always been a big, insecure part of me that never quite believes that a guy I like might return the interest, so I ( consciously or not ) dismiss the more subtle signs as my own wishful thinking. Once when I thought I'd read everything right, I actually screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked the guy out, only to watch him literally recoil in horror, so that pretty much fucked what trust I had in my own senses-- at least when applied to myself.

So how does all this relate to Facebook?

Well, Huge-Honking-Crush guy has a profile.

Someone else from high school who friended me also friended him, and when I spotted the name, I got curious.

Talk about people who've CHANGED DRASTICALLY since high school! There's very little there of the boy I remember-- tall and lanky, white-blond hair and light eyes, wicked grin and sharp cheekbones, sarcastic tilt to his brows. This man is heavyset and balding, face puffy with the extra weight he's carrying, scruffy with days' worth of beard. Granted, a webcam photo is no one's friend, but this one is especially bad. The only thing at all familiar is the eyes.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a baby's high chair visible in the background; I'm the oddball for not being married, not having or even wanting children. It's just another measure of how much all our lives have changed in the last twenty-odd years . . . people who graduated with me are talking about their children's proms and graduations in their turn.

Oh, and you want to hear weird in terms of Facebook friending? This guy I'm talking about, the one I had a crush on? Man, he used to fight with this one boy all the time. I mean, it was legendary.

Now they're friends on Facebook.

Fucking bizarre, I'm telling you.

I wouldn't go back to high school for all the money in the world, but if I could? I'd go back to that Halloween party and handle things quite a bit differently.

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