The Deuce Club, 4.9

Category: Tennis

Publish Date: 04-09-2011 03:49 AM -0400

by Jackie Roe, TW Social Director

Hi there, TWibe. Apologies for not posting last week—I figured you were all too occupied with the Fedal madness to notice anyhow. (Can you believe it’s only been a week since that match? Feels like ages ago. Being a tennis fan is like having an amnestic disorder. Wonder if it works that way for players, too.) The break also gave me the chance to flesh out some new ideas for the Deuce Club. I’d really like to move toward using this space to spotlight you, the TWibe. Sure, we already do that every week, to an extent. We congregate here and chat about various aspects of our lives, frequently as they relate to tennis, and we feel as though we’re getting to know each other. But how much do we really know? If you think about it, the most we ever learn about posters as people—i.e. aside from their tennis player/style preferences—is maybe what country they reside in or what they do for a living.

Nothing wrong with that, especially in a public forum like this one, and it’s true that there are times when distance is important, when we ought to be kept at an arm’s length from one another, to protect our privacy or to maintain a light, casual atmosphere. But when it comes to fostering relationships and feeling closer to one another—which is ostensibly the goal of the DC—we end up hitting a wall. After all, there’s so much more to a person than just his/her favorite tennis player or debating style. We make deductions about a person’s character based on these things, as well as language, tone, even emoticon usage, but wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if we just, you know, asked that person to tell us about him/herself? More accurate, too.

So, why don’t we? I dug through my old, old e-mails and found a quiz that my friends and I passed around back in high school, one of those “all about me” questionnaires that were all the rage. It’s no Myers-Briggs test (hmmm, a future DC topic?), but it does give us a window into a person’s personality, ethos, preferences, and life experiences—all things we wouldn’t ordinarily unearth in our usual blog interactions with that person. Thus it perfectly facilitates this “getting to know you” DC initiative.

My plan is to profile one TWiber every week or every other week here, provided I find enough of y’all who are comfortable with relinquishing some anonymity and allowing us to take a look at the “real” you.

Let’s start off with one of the “original” TWibers, someone who was reading and posting (perhaps under a different moniker *wink*) from the very beginning, long before my time here. She’s a DC regular and sometimes-contributor and also one of my very best friends. Here’s . . . tan!

(I try to avoid giving too much direction here, since this is your space, where you can feel free to chat about whatever you please. But this exercise will work best if you stick to commenting on tan’s responses instead of sharing your own. Your time will come! Just send me a note here and let me know that you’re interested in taking this quiz (or one like it) and you’ll get to shine in your own DC.)

1. TW moniker: tan
2. Hair color: dark brown
3. Eye color: chestnut
4. Shoe size:�larger than size 9
5. Last album you listened to: Ways of Meaning by Kyle Bobby Dunn
6. Last movie you saw: Entr'acte directed by Rene Claire, 1924. I never tire of this film.
7. Crushes:�Amuro Ray (Mobile Suit Gundam protagonist, never a more noble soul to appear in images); Charlie Chaplin; Joel McCrea; Louis Garrel; Shaquille O'Neal; Sasa Stanisic [JR: No one will top this.]
8. Favorite musicians: John Coltrane, Shostakovich, Can, Animal Collective, Maria Callas, Nick Drake, Erik Satie, The Beatles, The Breeders, Bach, Thomas Tallis, The Cure, Ella Fitzgerald, My Bloody Valentine, Kurt Weill, Johnny Cash, James Brown, Docteur Nico, Thomas Brinkmann
9. Favorite actress: Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Irene Jacob, Diane Keaton
10. Favorite actor: Charlie Chaplin, Louis Garrel, Elliot Gould, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Cary Grant
11. Favorite movie: These are just off the top of my head . . . The Little Fugitive by Morris Engel,�Treatise of Venom and Eternity�by Isadore Isou,�Holiday�by Howard Hawks,�Jean-Luc Godard,�Twice a Man by Gregory Markopoulos,�The Devil Probably�by Robert Bresson,�The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum�by Kenji Mizoguchi, Charlie Chaplin,�Entr'acte by Rene Claire,�The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad (an exquisitely beautiful Iranian film), Preston Sturges.
12. Favorite books: Again, off the top of my head . . .�How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone�by Sasa Stanisic,�Brothers Karamazov�by Dostoyevsky,�Camera Lucida�by Roland Barthes,�I Love Dick�by Chris Kraus. Anything written by Baudelaire, Plato, Wallace Stevens. Don Quixote,�The Hills were Joyful Together�by Roger Mais, most things by Jorge Borges,�The Homeric Hymns�by Homer.
13. Favorite color:�tree green and sea blue�
14. Favorite food:�Japanese, Mexican as it used to be served up on the train that used to run between Nuevo Laredo and Mexico City, Italian
15. Favorite sport: tennis [JR: Should be a given for all of us. ;)]
16. Favorite vacation spot: Iceland
17. Worst fear:�pain without end
18. Best feeling in the world: being in love and playing music and finishing something that i put lots of effort into and staring at the wide open sea regardless of weather
19. Worst feeling in the world:�abandonment, violence, pain
20. Death:�It comes when it comes. I'm not for cryogenics. I think we all have a different number of chances to die. More than nine for some for sure.
21. Long distance relationships: Yes, and it was lovely but it petered out. Still my best friend.
22. Where will you live: Disko Bay, Greenland
23. Do you believe in heaven and hell?:�noooooooo
24. Do you believe in aliens?:�I’m not so deluded to believe earth is the only place with life.
25. Favorite hangout: Tempurpedic bed
26. If you could have any kind of pet, what would it be?: cat, dog, pig, sheep, goat�
27. Your most prized possession: my health
28. The most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done: Uhhh you think there is only just one most?
29. Favorite love song: “Toxic” by Britney Spears (long story), “The Purple Bottle” by Animal Collective
30. Favorite break-up song: “Leaf House” by Animal Collective, “You're Not Rid of Me” by PJ Harvey [JR: Thought you’d have Portishead’s “Hunter” in there, T. No worries, now I can take it!]
31. What are you thinking at this very moment?:�this quiz�
32. Favorite kinds of clothes:�Chic. It's my failing in life. I love clothes.
33. Have you ever cried in public? Yes
34. Who would you want to meet?: the Swiss maestros Roger Federer and Jean-Luc Godard
35. Personal quote: Life is too short to not worry about it.
36. If you could change one thing that happened in your life, what would it be?: I wouldn’t have gone there that day with that person at that time under those conditions and I would never have listened to that advice and gone on my merry way.
37. Favorite TW moment: I started reading TW in 2005. There was this poster named B. I imagined B. was Billie Jean King. I have no idea if B. was a man or a woman. The responses were so thorough, eloquent, and thoughtful. I couldn't ever wait for the next one. B. got me addicted to this site! And I always thanked B. for posting. B. would basically talk about the women's game. Wherever you are, B., this post is for you! I wish I could remember the content of a particular B.�post and I’m not sure that any of them are in the TW archives. Alas B.'s memory is only in my jumbled head. Can anyone help me?

Wasn’t that fun? Thanks for being my guinea pig, tan! Hope others follow suit.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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