One quasi-holiday tradition is doing a puzzle together, usually over at mom's house. In years past I haven't really participated, but the pandemic has drawn me in to the pastime, and rather enjoyably so. This year Leslie had the very clever idea of buying a puzzle and sending it around to everybody.
Natalie, Mary and I have been working on it, and have made a lot of progress on it. To set the stage, back in the summer there had been a puzzle I had picked up at Staples early in the lockdown period which was a pretty difficult one. I ended up doing maybe 95% of it over a week or so of evenings, during which I made a lot of progress developing methodology.
So this time, I feel like I'm the mother-fucking Puzzling Man. When I see them making progress, part of me wells up from within and wants to get in on the action and show my puzzling mastery. Which is ridiculous, really nothing more than a typical male desire to dominate, for absolutely no reason, in a pretty much counterproductive way.
I was reminded of a time, probably back in '86, when after Hilary graduated a group of us went off to Shelter Island and stayed at Janet Goodman's house. As a sophomore I was an outlier amongst all these seniors, so just being invited of course made me feel super cool. At the house they had these old bikes and somewhere down the hill there were tennis courts. Hilary and I borrowed the bikes and went down to hit tennis balls, something we had never done together, I don't think. So there we are hitting, and she goes "you're so competitive!", in a way that didn't seem like a complement. I'm sure I was subconsciously trying to hit winners, or maybe the ball was just in a place that so invited a winner that I couldn't resist it. I probably tried to dial it back at that point in time, but... we get pretty hard-wired to push for victory. It's hard to fight it. It doesn't always end well.
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