The College Life: Living With Engineers

         We’ve all heard the generalization that some people are math/science lovers and some are history/language lovers when it comes to school. While I think that that way of thinking is a stereotype that is more often wrong than right, it really fits me. I am NOT a science person. While I’ve always performed well in my science classes, I don’t take joy in performing chemistry experiments, peering through a microscope at tiny organisms, or learning about the scientific process. This is a confession, but my current “Physical Science” (that’s one of the GE science classes required for all you non-BYU folk) section of my notebook has about an equal number of basketball plays and pictures as notes. (Though in my defense, some of those are decorated chapter titles, which need to get on the page anyways, right?)

            Interestingly enough, I live with a bunch of engineer majors, and one computer science genius. (I figure I can lump him in since the major has "science" in the name). I for one cannot see why on earth they would voluntarily take classes about atoms, although I respect them for doing so. It hardly came as any surprise then, when our blender broke and we decided last night to take it apart and then fix it.

Well, at least that was the original plan. By the time the evening had finished, we had a fairly good-sized crowd of neighbors in our kitchen watching us blow up an old strand of Christmas lights one by one, using the blender’s electrical circuits. It was actually pretty epic. And you know what? I actually learned a lot about electricity and the mechanics of a blender, and I even enjoyed it!       

The Fed

(Disclaimer: For those members of my readership who do not play or watch tennis, I will be straight up and say that this post is entirely on the subject of tennis. That being said, I will attempt to the best of my ability to explain all of the tennis concepts so that you can understand them too.)

World, meet Roger Federer. Roger is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, tennis players of all time. In his career, he has broken most of the meaningful records in tennis: (Grand slams won, time spent at #1 in the world, and number of consecutive finals reached in major tournaments, just to name a few).

I love him.

By now, you know what’s coming: this is unusual. That sentence above just made many people respect my opinions less, made a few visibly wince, and might have caused some genuine anger in any die-hard tennis fans in my audience. (By the way, if you are out there, feel free to leave a comment. At this point, I’ll accept hate comments, as long as it’s a comment.)  Here is my concession to these people: I completely understand why one would not like Roger Federer. Society teaches us to love the underdogs, and hate those who win consistently, which group will be hereafter referred to as “over-dogs” for lack of a better word. I condone this is in every case except when one has a personal tie to the team. So Alabama grads can be respected if they support Alabama, but it is perfectly acceptable for everyone else to hope that Nick Saban loses every football game he coaches for the rest of his life. That’s just how it works.

                Roger Federer, up until recently, has been the top dog of tennis for an incredible amount of time. It’s unreal how long he was the dominant force in men’s tennis—it is extremely safe to say that he is the prime case of an over-dog. Yet I make an exception for him from my general rule of “rooting against the favorites”.  Why?

                The reason that I cannot bring myself to do anything but admire and cheer for “The Fed” is that he has done something that no other over-dog that I know of has managed to do: he transformed an athletic competition into something completely different. Federer is more than just a tennis player. When Federer steps onto a tennis court, he doesn’t merely play tennis; he transcends the game, turning an athletic competition into something beautiful. Federer doesn’t compete with his opponent to see who is superior at the sport. His tennis is more art than sport, a showcase instead of a battle. It is for the pure beauty of Roger Federer’s tennis that makes him different than any other over-dog.

                Yet this “artistry over competitor” idea by itself is just a cop-out. It’s an ambiguous idea, and thus is really up to the observer. An explanation is necessary: what is it that makes Federer an artist? The answer is one simple word, which in terms of tennis, Federer has re-defined: control.

Sports in general are by definition, chaos. Throwing athletes into an arena with a ball and some rules, then tell them to figure out who is better is never going to end up with a result that is calm. Yet Federer has brought a peculiar order to the tennis court, due to his complete control of nearly everything on the tennis court. He controls the ball. He controls his own emotions. He controls the flow of the match. Sometimes, from the way events go his way it seems as if he even has control of opponents’ minds.

So you say, “You’re still talking in the abstract Aaron. Show me this in real terms.” I’d be happy to. In the last Australian Open, Federer played the up-and-coming Australian hometown favorite, Bernard Tomic, in the fourth round. Before the match, tennis analysts and experts were saying that it could be a match that marked the changing of an era, as Roger faded from the scene, and Tomic began his rise. The following pictures were taken from a point in that match.

(A little aside: The video for this can be found here, if you can stand the strange Spanish commentary.)

A little background: Up to this point, the two have hit a couple of shots to each other, and Federer has hit a drop shot and advanced up to the net. Even with my idolization of Federer, I can recognize that this was not a good shot at all. (Federer is in the red shirt, Tomic in white)

 

       

Tomic easily reaches it and now has a great opportunity. There is a reason why you don’t often see tennis players standing in the middle of the court where Federer is now: it’s because it gives your opponent a chance to hit a shot that will bounce at your feet. It’s really hard to get control a ball that is hit at your feet. This situation is especially bad for Federer since both players are relatively close to the net, and he will not get a lot of reaction time to whatever Tomic hits his way. Regardless of these mistakes, Federer plays it smart and stays in the middle of the court, closing off the center but surrendering both sidelines for Tomic to take. At this moment, it looks as if Federer is going to try to make Tomic hit close to either sideline, and hope that Tomic overplays the ball and hits it wide.

Tomic plays the ball very well. His shot lands at Roger’s feet, and he has not tried to do too much with the ball, yet he still places it right up next to the left sideline. Traditional tennis doctrine, or at least what I was taught, is to come in behind the ball’s path when one hits an approach shot, as Tomic has just done. In this case however, Tomic correctly realizes that at times, traditional tennis doctrine is a bunch of bologna. The net is lowest in the center, and thus takes the least amount of control to hit over. Given the sticky situation he’s just put Federer in, Tomic moves towards the center of the court to cut off the easiest option of Federer’s. If the ball somehow manages to get back, he’ll be in the prime position to slam it over to the right sideline, way out of Federer’s reach. The only way to improve Tomic’s execution here would be to have hit the ball a couple of inches closer to the left sideline to make the shot absolutely perfect, but otherwise he has just made a flawless play. After all, not every shot in a tennis match hits the perfect corners, and so for all intents and purposes, Tomic has just hit the best shot he could have.

                Now to Federer’s side of the court. It is a testament to his quickness that he even has a shot of hitting this ball at all. I, I’m pretty sure most of the tennis players I’ve seen, wouldn’t have been able to do anything other than hit a big whiff of air in this situation. Of course, Federer is a professional, and I’m not, and so maybe it isn’t that unusual that he gets to this ball. This shot is on Federer’s backhand side, which for most tennis players is the harder side to hit off of, for the simple reason that swinging your arm and rotating your wrist forward is more natural than arm-swinging and wrist-rotating backwards. (Try it right now—see what I mean?). The fact that this ball is right at Federer’s feet, (depth-wise) combined with the fact that it is at the extreme limits of his reach, and to his backhand side, all combine to make this one incredibly difficult shot to hit. Like I said, most tennis players wouldn’t even get to it. A fair number of professional players could get a racket on the ball, but only to hit the ball into the net. Few are the people in this world who could get this ball back into play. Those people would simply pray for Tomic to make a mistake because they would have to hit the ball back to the middle of the court, right where he is patiently waiting for the opportunity to cream the ball back. Federer doesn’t fall into any of these groups.  

Look at this beauty. Federer gets to the ball, hits it, and puts in back in play, not up the middle where the net is lower and the shot is easier, but he lofts it high enough to clear the net by the left sideline. Whether it can still land inbounds after being hit so high is yet to be seen. Tomic scrambles to get to the ball…

                …Only to watch in amazement as Federer’s shot literally lands on the intersection between the baseline and the sideline. The perfect shot. Tomic didn’t even get a chance to swing his racket.

                Let’s take a review of this point for a second: Federer makes a pretty costly mistake. Tomic capitalizes nearly perfectly on that mistake, and it does not make one little bit of difference in the end result. Federer does the near-impossible and hits the perfect winner from a terrible situation. In contrast to the other athletes of this day, who can’t tie their shoes correctly without showing off, Federer doesn’t go crazy after this shot.

I kid you not, this was his reaction. He put his head down! He almost looks depressed in this shot, what with his lowered gaze and slumped shoulders. He just hit an incredible shot that 99% of all tennis players could spend their lives practicing and would never quite replicate. This picture is utter control of emotion. Not even a fist pump escapes Federer’s emotionless on-court persona. He’s long since realized emotion only clouds his game, and so he takes emotion entirely off the court, even after such a dramatic winner.

To me, that is total control. During this point, he has taken a terrible situation and turned it to his advantage by his control of his racket, the ball, and his emotions. This play speaks for itself—it’s simply beautiful. Masterful, even.

That’s artistry. That’s Roger Federer.

Lose Yourself In the Music, the Moment... The Roads?

The other day in our Elder’s Quorum (for the non-Mormons in my audience, that’s the hour of church that we meet as just boys), we had a lesson on marriage. Surprise, surprise: this is BYU. This is completely off-topic from what I’m going to say, but I would like to take some time to point out that with two exceptions, the Church would disapprove if anyone in that room got engaged. I can’t help but feel that the time would have been better spent in instructing us how to be good missionaries, not good husbands… Alas, such are the tribulations of a student at BYU.

            Anyways, back to the topic I was going for. At one point in the lesson, our instructor was trying to demonstrate to us how men and women are good for each other. He used the example of getting lost, asking how many of us would stop to ask for directions. Two or three of my peers raised their hands, at which point he chuckled and told them they were girls. He then asked who would say they “weren’t really lost in the first place”. The rest of the class raised their hands. The lesson continued on.

            I kept my hand down. Neither of those descriptions fit me. When I’m driving and realize that I don’t know where I am, I’ll admit that I’m lost, and then I’ll smile as wide as I can. I love getting lost.

            In fact, I love getting lost that I specifically set up opportunities to do so. As I mentioned in an earlier post, most of my favorite memories with my beloved car involved me driving around, lost and directionless.

            I realize that this is a bit of anomaly. (Then again, is anyone reading this surprised? I’m Aaron Wilson. EVERYTHING I do is an anomaly. Sometimes I wonder if this is too much of a problem.) So once again, I’d like to try to open my mind to the general public about this issue and see if I can truly explain myself. Without further ado, why it is perfectly acceptable to like getting lost while driving:

            First off, you have to take the whole “time crunch” issue out of the equation. I hate being late to something important, and getting lost while you desperately have to be somewhere is a terrible feeling. However, if a job/grade/eternal salvation isn’t at stake in some form, few things beat being lost. I think that one of the primary reasons I feel this way is that I’m a big fan of mazes. I’m pretty sure my subconscious would be partying like it's the end of the world if someone invaded my dreams, Inception-style. Basically, I see a city as being a massive maze, except a little bit easier. I mean, there are signs! The thrill of the hunt, plus that little bit of stress because you know you can’t just walk away, makes a car-sized maze an adventure.  

            Secondly, I love the feeling that comes from being un-lost (and this is my blog so I feel pretty justified in making up my own words). It’s a nice combo of relief and satisfaction of solving the puzzle. Think of the good feeling of solving a difficult math problem, minus the unpleasantness of actually doing math. Not bad, huh?

            Third, it’s a break from routine. One of my friends wrote an excellent paper about the nature of humans to have habits. One of her conclusions—to the best that I can understand it—was that as humans we want the comfort of habit, of continuity, but at the same time we yearn for the unknown, for a new experience. I agree with this, and I think this is especially true as far as places we visit. In my weekly routine I visit certain places, and day in, day out, I go back to those same places. Why? Because I know them. They are comforting to me. Being lost completely breaks that mold. You get to see new sights, experience new things. If you know exactly where you are going—even if it’s somewhere you’ve never been before—that doesn’t necessarily happen. When you’re lost, you are outside of your world, the places you inhabit, and for a second, you are in somebody else’s. When I'm lost, I look at things differently. Someone probably drives on that road every day, and for a minute, I'm in that person's world. That feeling, of breaking out of one’s world and experiencing another's is by far the greatest part of being lost in my book. It don’t think that it’s a coincidence that people enjoying traveling to new places, and yet traveling is the time that one is most likely to get lost. It's new, it's different, it's an adventure, and thus, it's awesome.

            Fourth, well, having a little extra time to belt out the strains of whatever CD is in the player isn’t so bad, is it?