Spring Awakening – The New York Times

One afternoon last week, I persuaded a friend to accompany me to a restaurant in Brooklyn to find out how to play Mahjong similar to Hong Kong. You are always fascinated by the colored bacilli tiles of Maahjong, the sound of the pathological beating they make while mixing them. My mother plays the American version twice a week with the same groups of friends, which is a club ritual that makes me feel a little jealousy: Why don’t I have a regular game of something?

We were a group of 15 students or so, all of which are new in the game. To start, we played a fake tour with all the tiles that were delivered so that everyone can see their values ​​and the teacher can walk in every step of play: Here is how to prepare the table and build a wall of the tiles. Roll the dice to see any player getting the wall break. These are the lawsuit tiles, these are the tiles of honor, dragon, wind.

Mahjong is not sudden to learn. Our teacher was excellent, as he repeated every step several times, and asked us to repeat it to him. There was a whiff of paper games that I knew, but I found the complications confusing: Wait, do you need three identical tiles to form Pung? How did this man win the game when I was still working on how to make flower tiles?

Then: Why do I learn to play this game when I really know many other games and never play it? This was the idea that stumbled on me, which made me want to demand politely in a state of emergency and exit from the middle: Why do I do this? Outwardly, I am a curious person, a person attracted to new experiences, wanting to expand their horizons, to strike opportunities for fun. Mahmoud offers all these things! But learn a new game something I have not done since the ages. It is something that children (and their parents) do easily, but in the end, most of us stop. The mechanism to learn new things becomes noisy. It is not easy or comfortable raising this old microscope and operating it again. A lot of things in life is not really easy or comfortable! Why do you choose another one? Do I have a space in my mind, in my calendar, for another? The thing I do?

The friend who brought him with me to Muhong surprised me after a few days, when we assumed that we decided that our lesson would turn enough, but none of us had energy, appetite or a brain to play again. “The Mahjong Group has got to us, announced. “Now we only need two other people and we can play.” I thought about our lesson, how I wanted to leave because I didn’t mastered Magong enough quickly. To be bad in something bad. To be new to be unpleasant and embarrassing. Of course we are hypothetical in doing good things in. We love to be confident and comfortable and look cold.

But here was an invitation to society. An invitation to be bad in something with other people, with the aim of reaching the other side: a new hobby, new rituals, perhaps, in the end, this club that I envy in my mom’s games.

I wrote two weeks ago about how I think about this time of the year as one of cancellationFrom giving up this coils, blocking the winter self and opening up to the spring, which officially arrived last Thursday in the northern hemisphere. The cancellation, which I think now, may sometimes be a challenge. I intentionally move from a familiar place to an unfamiliar place that is not without harassment. I was recently reading how, when the chick is ready for poverty, develops egg teeth, and a small sharp structure on its beak used to get out of the eggs. How do you not believe! How do we grow our egg teeth, create our own tools to break our shells, escape from our containers full of annoying and appear in the light?

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• Drake against Texas Tech: No. 11 Drake plays in the slower pace in the country and generates many transformations. But if they hope to continue to run Cinderella, it is possible that their crime will play better than it was in the first round.

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