Here is my story:
It was my 33rd birthday. Not a landmark birthday by any means--no real reason to celebrate. Actually, I hate celebrating my birthday. I don't even like asking my friends for favors. Asking a friend to celebrate my birthday is like asking for a particularly burdensome, lame favor.
"Hey, could you please do me a favor? Could you set aside a night to come out and celebrate me for an entire night? Just keep buying me drinks, singing songs to me out loud..."
It just feels wrong. But for whatever reason, that year a lot of my friends were asking me, "What are you doing for your birthday? Where should we go? You haven't celebrated your birthday in a few years." I almost felt guilty for not wanting to celebrate my birthday. I felt like I needed to celebrate my birthday, not for myself, but for my friends. To do them a favor.
But I couldn't think of anything. So I did what I normally do when I have a really hard problem I can't solve. I watched TV...played games...surfed the internet...took my mind off of my problem until I had procrastinated so much that I had no choice but to deal with it. One day when I was surfing online, I saw this link labeled "3D Dodgeball." It turned out to be an advertisement for Trampoline Dodgeball.
Trampoline Dodgeball is just like it sounds. Fill a room with trampolines, replace the walls with angled trampolines, and you've got a bouncy dodgeball court. In the video, I saw one guy catch a ball thrown at him, fall back into an angled wall, and ricochet up and forward so that he could throw the ball at his opponents in mid-air! I have never seen anything like it, yet I feel like I've been waiting all my life to go.
So it was decided. On my 33rd birthday I went to Jump SkyHigh with 27 of my friends. I was so pumped. We walk in and I see a huge arena filled with trampolines. To my left was a gigantic pit filled with foam, with trampolines set next to it so people could sail through the air in any orientation they want, and land in a pit of soft foam blocks. And, of course, there was the trampoline dodgeball court. Everything was just like I'd imagined it. Except for one thing.
It was filled with kids...like, 8-year olds...maybe 10.
Certainly not 33.
But we weren't going to leave. We just paid admission, darn-it! So we slowly step forward to the line for the dodgeball court. Every game, they let the first 20 people in line play. When we get in line, I hear this kid in front of me ask his friend, "Why are there so many grown-ups?!"
But we play, and it was fun...just awkward with all the kids. It's like, when you're playing football, or basketball, or soccer, unless you're a parent you don't want half of your team to be kids and half adults! It was made even more awkward because we were on trampolines. I had to make sure I didn't jump on a trampoline while a kid was on it, because when my 200-pound body hits a trampoline at one velocity, a child's 70-pound body leaves the trampoline at a much higher velocity.
So we play for a bit, and take a break and talk about how we're having fun, but it's not as fun as it could be...and we all come to a similar conclusion. First, we need to aim for the kids. Don't aim for each other, take out the kids. Once the kids are out of the way, we can shout, "clear!" and can have our real game...adults vs. adults. I'm a bit ashamed to say, that was the MOST fun. So fun. Actually, I had much more fun aiming for and taking out 8 year old children than I did later, when all the kids stopped playing on the dodgeball court and we played against each other until we were too tired to play anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment