by Jackie Roe, TW Social Director
Hi there, TWibe. Apologies for not posting last week—I figured you were all too occupied with the Fedal madness to notice anyhow. (Can you believe it’s only been a week since that match? Feels like ages ago. Being a tennis fan is like having an amnestic disorder. Wonder if it works that way for players, too.) The break also gave me the chance to flesh out some new ideas for the Deuce Club. I’d really like to move toward using this space to spotlight you, the TWibe. Sure, we already do that every week, to an extent. We congregate here and chat about various aspects of our lives, frequently as they relate to tennis, and we feel as though we’re getting to know each other. But how much do we really know? If you think about it, the most we ever learn about posters as people—i.e. aside from their tennis player/style preferences—is maybe what country they reside in or what they do for a living.
Nothing wrong with that, especially in a public forum like this one, and it’s true that there are times when distance is important, when we ought to be kept at an arm’s length from one another, to protect our privacy or to maintain a light, casual atmosphere. But when it comes to fostering relationships and feeling closer to one another—which is ostensibly the goal of the DC—we end up hitting a wall. After all, there’s so much more to a person than just his/her favorite tennis player or debating style. We make deductions about a person’s character based on these things, as well as language, tone, even emoticon usage, but wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if we just, you know, asked that person to tell us about him/herself? More accurate, too.
So, why don’t we? I dug through my old, old e-mails and found a quiz that my friends and I passed around back in high school, one of those “all about me” questionnaires that were all the rage. It’s no Myers-Briggs test (hmmm, a future DC topic?), but it does give us a window into a person’s personality, ethos, preferences, and life experiences—all things we wouldn’t ordinarily unearth in our usual blog interactions with that person. Thus it perfectly facilitates this “getting to know you” DC initiative.
My plan is to profile one TWiber every week or every other week here, provided I find enough of y’all who are comfortable with relinquishing some anonymity and allowing us to take a look at the “real” you.
Let’s start off with one of the “original” TWibers, someone who was reading and posting (perhaps under a different moniker wink) from the very beginning, long before my time here. She’s a DC regular and sometimes-contributor and also one of my very best friends. Here’s . . . tan!
(I try to avoid giving too much direction here, since this is your space, where you can feel free to chat about whatever you please. But this exercise will work best if you stick to commenting on tan’s responses instead of sharing your own. Your time will come! Just send me a note here and let me know that you’re interested in taking this quiz (or one like it) and you’ll get to shine in your own DC.)
Wasn’t that fun? Thanks for being my guinea pig, tan! Hope others follow suit.
Have a great weekend, everyone.