Last week I signed up for the National Capital Region Table Tennis League. Teams are two to four mem­bers each, and play in a round robin over four months. Three match­es are played every week, and each match con­sists of two to four sin­gles sets and one dou­bles set. A prob­lem I have is that I start to hold back and doubt myself when I’m up against some­one I’ve nev­er played before, caus­ing me to lose my offen­sive con­trol game, the only thing I’m good at. I fig­ured that join­ing the league would be a good way to expose myself to dif­fer­ent play­ing styles, and get myself com­fort­able with play­ing new peo­ple.

We only played two match­es today, win­ning the first and los­ing the sec­ond. There’s quite a mix of skill lev­el there; from for­mer nation­al team play­ers turned nation­al team coach­es, to provin­cial junior team play­ers, to recre­ation­al ama­teurs, to begin­ners, to para­plegics. I’d say that peo­ple there are between 14 and 60 years of age.

Since I’m actu­al­ly either sweat­ing or sit­ting in my sweat for more than four hours there, I’m tempt­ed to start using anti-per­spi­rant again. I haven’t used any in over four years, since I don’t actu­al­ly smell very much when I sweat. I’ll take the fact that I still have friends (and have actu­al­ly been dat­ing) as con­fir­ma­tion of this belief.