Playtime

Lately I've been trying to get out of my comfort zone and rediscover high school Ordale. That guy was fun. He was in every club and organization. You used to see him walking down the halls talking to everybody and making people laugh. He was the president of the SGA so he used to speak to every single person, especially the ones who looked sad or lonely. You could call him a social butterfly, but he was more like a social dragon. Everybody knew Ordale, even people who didn't go to the school.

That's the guy I'm trying to get in touch with. Somewhere between high school and college, he got kidnapped and locked away in some subconscious cerebral prison. Popularity was fun, but it had its downside. After a stress filled senior year where popularity became more annoying than rewarding, I decided to stay to myself in college. It was never my intention to become antisocial. It just happened.

So fast forward seven years since college and I'm trying to break out of this artificial shell. I've done some Yelp Elite parties and I even integrated kayaking a week ago. This past weekend I went to something called an Adult Playdate. Teams of four compete in field day games that you'd find at an elementary school: tug of war, wheelbarrow, leapfrog, crabwalk and piggyback races, etc.

That shit sounds fun until you actually start doing it. There's a reason grown people don't have playground equipment behind their office buildings...we might die. It didn't help that someone thought it'd be more of a challenge to lump events together. Instead of having a wheelbarrow race be one event, we had to do that and a leapfrog race and a piggyback race and then finish up with a crabwalk up and down a field. And all of that was just one event. There were like fourteen events.

By the time I got to our last event--which only became the last event because it started raining--my legs, arms, and 35% of my internal organs had adopted "cramp" as their official religion. I was in so much pain that my blood hurt. When the uterus that I don't even have started to hurt, that's when I knew it was time for me to go home, so I limped away without hearing the final results. My team won overall and got a bunch of prizes as a result. Sadly, you had to be there to actually claim your prize, so I don't get shit...except an epsom salt bath and coupon good for 50 cents off my next bottle of Ben-Gay.

The moral of today's story is that you're only as old as you feel. I'm dead based on that fact.