Monthly Archives: March 2008

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my lazy eye and unanticipated joy

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[started last tuesday, 3/18.. happy to say i’m not at work tonight, working until 1am or so. instead, i’m at home.. writing until 2:30am 😉 i’ll blame it on soccer games that start at 11:15pm]

not my eyesit’s tuesday.. and already my eye is twitching. is that bad?

seriously, though, my left eye has been twitching since around 3pm or so and it’s flipped my day on its head. it’s nothing more than a simple twitch, probably a deficiency of potassium or some other mineral cnn warned me about years ago. but the mind is a funny thing.. a simple twitch can conflate a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of fear and anxiety and suddenly i have a cerebral avm that’s minutes away from a complete bleed out.. or several massive gbm that are pushing against my ocular nerves. and, no matter the diagnosis, i probably won’t be waking tomorrow morning without at least a little blood trickling from my ear. [i’ve been reading a new book, another day in the frontal lobe, one that i’d recommend despite the uninspiring title.. so, sorry for the random references]

given the prognosis, i quickly resigned myself to my fate and contemplated my life as lived in that day, tuesday. now, i recognize there’s already shadow hanging over my thoughts. after all, it’s tuesday. does anyone in this country enjoy tuesdays?

no ropes :-Danyway, it got me to thinking about why i’ve been working so hard and if it’s what i want to be doing. the first question isn’t so bad: i’ve been working so hard because there’s a lot of work to be done. the second question is much more difficult to answer.. and perhaps it’s not even the right question. i’ll leave it at that for now. well, actually i’ll leave it at “i desperately want to leave it all and travel the world” or “i’d love to disappear for months and deep water solo in mallorca then live and climb in australia for a year” or “i want to ditch it all and work in a cafe”.. yeah, i’ll leave it at that.

where’s bob barker when you need to know what’s behind door 3?an interesting parallel: since i’ve been working so late, i’ve been cruising ted.com. now, i’m a sucker for a good story or speech, which is why i love npr’s this i believe, but this take it to a whole new level. two that i’m particularly hooked on concern choice and choices. mainly, they come to the following conclusions: too much choice can be detrimental; chances are, you’ll be happy regardless of your choice (assuming the proper qualifiers are considered); most pain isn’t as painful as we imagine it is/might be and that recovery is usually quick. it’s the second part, that your choice has little impact on your happiness, that’s especially heartening. think about it, think about the weight that can relieve.

the point of this post was, i guess, just to consider the little things that can turn a day on its head. a simple twitch had me contemplating the meaning of my life and looking for tickets..

watch the ted.com talks i’m talking about

happenings

really, though?

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tonight was easily the roughest soccer game i’ve been a part of. it’s ridiculous to me that any team, especially a social league team, would be playing so recklessly. what’s the point? it’s social league.. actually, forget that. even if it were the competitive league in lexington, so what?! it’s game.. do you really need to check people into the boards every two minute? honestly, blue cards were flying almost on the minute every two minutes. not to mention the yellow card, the first i’ve seen indoors, that was issued in the first half. later, people playing on the other field would comment that it sounded like a hockey game with all the people being thrown into the boards.

it’s one thing to play intensely. it’s another to play recklessly. and playing so vehemently after continued penalties is just ignorant.

thankfully, the second game was the polar opposite. if someone made a rough move or fouled, they’d call themselves on it, admit their foul and apologize to the other player, making sure they were fine. it was honestly a pleasure to play them, even though the game didn’t start until 11:15pm.

ouchthe best part of the night was, though, between games. the first game i played, we were light blue and the other violent team wore red. how appropriate. when the first game finished, i threw on my dark blue shirt for the next team. one of red team players from the first game was still on his bench and he looked at me, seeing that i was playing the match, said, “hey, just warning: if you have the same ref we did, he’s awful and calls everything. if you so much as touch the other guy, he’s going to blue card you.”

i smiled slowly, realizing he didn’t recognize me, and simply pointed to the light blue shirt in my hand. i watched as the gears ground against each other, smoke billowing from the extra load of trying to put the clues together. bingo! it hit him.. “oh.. you were on the other team.” a pause and mental search for a way out.. “well, man, did you see the play down in the corner over here? they were just going for the ball! the other guy just ran into the wall.. no foul, no contact.. he just ran into the wall and the ref called it. don’t you think?’

i couldn’t really believe it. i stared at him another second while he blinked hard. was he getting this at all? again, i let a smirk creep across my face. “that guy in the corner was me,” i said. “it was a good call. believe me, i didn’t ‘just run into the wall’. i was checked. i would’ve stopped if i were on my feet but since your man rammed me, i was thrown into the boards. it was a foul.”

“but you guys were just going for the ball.” it wasn’t getting through. i thought i should probably cut my losses and continue on.. but i added just a little more. to his credit, he wasn’t getting passionate about it so it wasn’t an argument, not at this point.

consider your perspective “it’s one thing to go for the ball. it’s another to check a guy into the wall while going for the ball. and it’s social league.. if this were competitive league, i could understand the intensity. it’d still be a foul but the intensity would be expected. this, though.. there was no reason for any of this,” i said. “and honestly, i’d consider myself pretty fair about most calls like that. if it’s not a foul, i’ll mention it to the other player, tell him ‘tough break’, and shake it off. that move, though..” i shook my head and walked back to the bench to get ready for the next game.

i hope he stuck around to watch the second game. the entire time i wanted to grab his team and say, “see! same ref and no blue cards for flagrant fouls! why? because these teams are playing clean and honest.” that’s how soccer should be played.. with respect and honesty and a sense of humility. (never mind that those three aspects should be applied even more judiciously outside the boards. that’s for another post)

really, though.. is that too much to ask?

happenings, random memories

frisbies and brown people

glowstick war!i forget the occasion, and there may not have even really been one.. but one of my favorite memories is of playing volleyball at red river outdoors in the red river gorge.

actually, it only started with volleyball.. bourbon volleyball, that is. see, our friend, fluffy, really loves bourbon and takes advantage of any chance he can get to get as much bourbon as possible in his friends. accordingly, he invented bourbon volleyball: a game where every mistake (read: point) is penalized with the player(s) in error taking a shot of bourbon. on aces, the whole team took a shot.

now, i was down there with y and she doesn’t drink very much.. ok.. at all. and while she wanted to play ball, she didn’t want to pay the price. as a compromise, we decided that she could play and that i would take her shots. after the second game, rhino stepped in and helped out.. but only because my liver screamed out to him.

needless to say, the lot of us were quite intoxicated by night’s end. we turned off the cars and their headlights.. and that’s when the first signs of trouble showed themselves. the warning came innocently enough: a green disc gliding silently, gently through the inky night sky. it stopped, made a fast, blurry loop, and was back on its way from where it came. then a pink disc joined it.. chuck had brought his glow-in-the-dark frisbees (leave it to the hippies to think of such things). so far, it was just innocent tosses.. the occasional errant throw came a little close a head now and again but it never seemed provoked. the night drifted on warm and soft.

suddenly, bright blurry green sticks crashed down next to a some of us. and like that, a neon war was declared in the night air. the enemy – the dark shadow “over there”. the objective – pelt them into submission with any glowing orb, stick, or disc you could find.. and the occasional stealthy, non-glowing volleyball. that was the best actually: i’d sneak off towards the edge of the woods, walk slowly and quietly becoming a mere shadow myself, and then, when this shadow an arm’s length away, i’d pelt nail you in the small of the back with the “missing” volleyball and scurry away before you could retaliate. i always wanted to be a secret agent man.

he proposesat one point, a grand plan occurred to me.. it was time to capture an indian princess. i sighted the target in the distance with her flowing white dress on, now spotted with grass stains from the evening. making like i was going for a glowstick, i ran across the imaginary line in the sand.. and then made for the mark. i picked her up, threw her over my shoulder, weaved, stumbled, and laughed the whole way back to the vw bus where i threw her in and shut the door. we had her! and since she was bent over double in laughter, she didn’t even fight it. still, a small border war ensued. despite the best efforts of the coalition, her now fiancé and the rest of the glow stick launchers freed her from the bus and the brown terror was loose again. (by the way, i say brown only because she would say the same herself and proudly. she truly is one of the most beautiful people i know, inside and out.)

make it stopafter her escape. the night moved on filled with streaks of neon gel and we all grew tired eventually. we collapsed in the grass around 2am, exhausted and drunk, watching the stars spin in the inky sky faster than the universe even envisioned. y and i stayed up and talked with don for an hour or so, amusing ourselves by how much alcohol and general abuse that poor man’s body could handle and still function (that’s a relative term). by 3am, dreams of mattresses danced in our heads and y and i made the trek back to lexington. thankfully, she stayed up with me, chatting it up the entire time. needless to say, the next day we didn’t get an alpine start. 😉

i’m still amazed that no one lost an eye.

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ok, i believe you

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alright.. for whatever reason beetlejuice has been on a lot lately. now, i can’t really watch it because.. well.. yeah, it scares me. always has. the sandworms, the elongated faces, the creeping, crawling sculptures.. it was too much. tim burton is way too crazy for a young mind to handle. or most any mind for that matter. he does have, though, excellent taste in his musical choices. so i find myself, usually quite late a night, jumping in to check out where the movie is in its progress. usually it ends up with me turning it on for a couple seconds, just long enough to see if it’s my favorite part.. then change it to anything else if it’s not. but should i hear some belafonte and seem some rumps shaking.. then it’s all smiles 😉

you just have to love a little belafonte lighting up an otherwise morose scene. that and i have to say there was nothing wrong with, as a teenager myself, having a crush on a suicidal winona ryder.. right?
and so i’ll let this post go – very little substance but hopefully bringing plenty of smiles 😉

shake shake shake senora

day-o
as a side-note: my mom used to embarrass me relentlessly by singing and dancing to this song.. it was more than once that she actually got up at the dinner table and started acting this scene out (minus the shrimp hands thing).. and you think i’m kooky..