This blog is about another proactive coping skill. It has a well known, but opposing truism in team sports that all serious fans have heard: "sometimes the best defense is an even better offense." This coping skill embodies the flip side of that concept, i.e., that "sometimes the best offense is an even better defense." It involves what would appear to be a paradox of sorts: proactively being reactive. This may sound like double-talk, but that's only because this coping mechanism is counter-intuitive. It requires practice to perfect, but I've found that even practicing this coping skill can be fun. If well executed, it can miraculously lead others to think you're a lot smarter and more socially adept, and sometimes with the ladies even more charming, than you really are.
I hate cocktail parties, especially those around the holidays that are populated by people I don't know and with whom I have next to nothing in common. Nor have I ever enjoyed attending my wife's business related cocktail parties. I can never separate the good guys from the bad and endure these events in fear that I will say something that might embarrass my wife. Until I discovered the coping skill described below, I usually spent the better part of business cocktail parties standing in a corner nursing a glass of cola, all the while wishing that I were invisible. [I knew that if I faced the corner, as was often required of me in grade school, others would find it odd.]
However, for me, the worst cocktail parties have always been those that do not mark a holiday or an event around which I can wrap some tired cliché or inane small talk. At these events, while I don't pretend to know what the women talk about, I do know the men engage in treacherous contests of one-ups-man-ship.
I'm not good with sports statistics [I couldn't care less.] and don't play golf or basketball. I bowled in a local league for two years when I was in high school, but my average score was so low that the team captain [my own uncle, believe it or not] asked me to resign from the team. I used to play city-league softball [second base and short stop], but have found that in the eyes of most men with a drink in their hand who are trying to establish dominance, softball is considered effeminate. [They've obviously never played the game.] I also enjoyed scuba diving [I was trained by a hardhat diver before certificates were required.] and intramural flag football [you know, tackle without the benefit of a helmet or any pads], but have yet to find anyone with these sports in common.
So what is the coping skill that I eventually mastered that has made cocktail parties, if not fun, at least bearable? It has no official name, so I named it "Verbal Curling" after the sport of curling.
Curling is a sport that involves two teams of four persons each and shares some common features with bowling and shuffleboard. One of the players launches across the ice a highly polished ellipsoid stone of regulation size, shape, weight, and with a gooseneck handle, aiming at a circular target area marked on the ice. As this stone glides along the ice, soft or wet spots, surface irregularities and contours of the ice affect the course of the stone.
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