1. I only play for cash stakes.
2. I failed the pee test.
3. I’m too old to mix it up with you kids.

I may have left readers of a previous post with the impression that I’ve arrived at this place of “total, psychological, and emotional self-control.” Sorry about that. Part of me figured I had. However, as much as I’ve reckoned with my own high schooling and its effect on my classroom posture, I realized on Wednesday that I have never reconciled the stigma of growing up real tall in high school while lettering in varsity tennis.

That was weird.

I’m gonna get over it, though, and play in the student-faculty basketball game next year, if only because all those teachers crashing around out there against most of the senior class, chasing loose balls like greased pigs after headless chickens (or something), looked like too much fun to let decade-old insecurities interfere.

Postscript: Also underscoring the difference between the teacher I want to be and the teacher I am is one of my earlier posts, a post from back when my readership was well contained by the walls of my childhood home. I wish I had waited to post it now, because it was and still is, as the post’s please-kick-me title states, The Truest Stuff I’ve Ever Watched or Written.