bad decision day

I stayed home sick today. That was a bad decision, mostly because I would probably have more fun at work than here. How sad is that? Then I decided to just keep sleeping. Too much sleep makes me groggy. It hasn't happened in a while, but there have been a few times when I have woken up from a nap and not known ANYTHING! Not who, not what, not where, not when, and I never know why. I am not that bad off today, but a little groggy nonetheless. Will this help my decision making abilities? Let's wait and see! Next I decided to make eggs. Good decision or bad decision? Trick question! The only other edible thing in the house is frozen butter. However, this brings on the Age-Old Question: two or three eggs. The answer for me should always be two eggs (refer to this post's title for actual answer). Next, the decision what to put on my seven eggs. I know I said we only had frozen butter, but it was just hyperbole. My stomach is a little off, so naturally I went with green salsa. Then I was innocently minding my own business when WHAM! the Mother of All Decisions: The salsa looked a little funny. Not fuzzy funny. Stringy funny. I think I finally aced one. Instead of putting it on my eggs, I decided that cooking them in the eggs would remove any funny. Then I decided to blog about it.

by request

A comment on my last posting:

I don't know Gunnar, but anyone who could take Sparklestone in straight sets must have gone on to greatness. Please share, was this Aggasi or Roddick who took you to the wood shed at old East High? Please don't say it was Tracy Austin.9

So here is Sparklestone vs. Gunnar:

High School tennis matches consisted of seven separate matches: four singles and three doubles. Each match was worth one point and whichever team took four or more points won the overall match. In general, the best players were in the 1st singles position and the worst in the 3rd doubles. I played mostly 1st and 2nd doubles. I played singles once.

Half Hollow Hills East was the best team in the conference. They had a strange situation. Their best player didn't play away matches...I am not sure why. We played each team twice a season. The first time we played HHH East, it was on our home courts, so their best player didn't come. In the 1st singles match, our best player, Mike, lost to their 2nd best player, Gunnar, 6-0, 6-0. I don't know what happened in the rest of the matches, but we got beat bad. For the match a few weeks later at their home courts, Coach O'Hara made some position changes. Mike was going to lose to their best player; that was a given. Our 2nd best player would lose to their 2nd best player (Gunnar) who had already destroyed Mike. So Coach moved our 2nd singles player into the 1st doubles team and moved one of that teams' members to 2nd singles as a sacrifice. That was me.

Just so everyone understands...I took the place of a player who could demolish me against a player who could demolish him.

In the very first game, I hit a heavy topspin cross-court forehand passed the charging Gunnar to take a 1-0 lead in the match. The 1st singles match was on the court next to us and switching sides during this point. After my shot, I heard their player say, "Man, Gunnar got burned!"

I lost the next 6 games, took the first game in the 2nd set and then lost 6 more games. On my way off the court, one of their players asked me what the score was and I told him it had been 6-1, 6-1. He said it was the best anyone did against Gunnar all year.

Coach O'Hara's plan came very close to working. The stacked 1st doubles team won and so did two other teams. With one match still on, the overall was 3-3. That was our 4th singles player and he ended up losing a very close match. He cried and apologized the whole busride home. And maybe some of the team felt bad losing 3-4 to those rich pricks at East, but not me. I played my best that day.

Gunnar went on to have a pretty good NCAA career at Indiana University.

memories from a guy living in a house with a lady from texas and a dog from louisiana

My dad took my sisters and I to Half Hollow Hills East High School for sledding one snowy day when I was around seven. There was a short, steep hill next to the lower tennis courts. Ten years later, I would lose 6-1, 6-1 on one of those courts to a kid named Gunnar in what was probably the high point of my varsity tennis career.

On my first trip, I started heading a little to the right and about half way down the hill I spotted a kid on my right coming towards me. I steered left and looked over my shoulder to check to see if I was out of danger and I was. When I looked back, I was almost at the bottom of the hill heading straight for a man walking perpendicular to the slope. This guy hadn't been riding a sled down the hill, he was riding on a door. It had the hole in it where a doorknob should be. He didn't see me until the last minute, and when he did, his reaction was to ward of the blow by lifting the door he was carrying under his left arm. I received a high-speed, uppercut to the nose with the door.

I remember the snow being covered in blood and a lady running down the hill yelling, "Tissues! I have tissues!" My dad says my nose was flattened across my face from ear to ear.

Yesterday, I was browsing around eBay and I saw this very cool snow bike. It was a very well-made bike with a frame designed to accommodate these enormous rims which had snow tires on them. I showed it to my wife who glanced at it and said, "Who would want to ride a bike in the snow and why?"

Me. And because I am still intrigued by all that crimson snow.

charm bracelets vs. cuffs

This morning I read a "What's In/What's Out" article in a magazine we'd bought over a year ago for the restaurant reviews. I yelled out, "O my god! Ugg boots are In and Pumas are Out!!" And from the other side of the table came, "No. Ugg boots were In in 2004. Now they are Out. Pumas are WAY Out. You, evidently, are WAAAYY Out."

So it shouldn't be a big surprise that we haven't been to the movies in ages. If not for Netflix and TBS's "Nothing But All Of The Back To The Future Movies All-Weekend Extravaganza," I wouldn't see anything.

We saw The Life Aquatic. This evening I called J-Bone and told him I'd seen it and he mentioned that he'd read a review that said that Wes Anderson had done this already. God! I was going to write about how pissed off I was. But now that I have written it down, I am REALLY pissed off! How pissed off? A LOT! The film is a stunning work of art. I feel genuine anger toward the notion that it can be dismissed as 'already been done.' But, then again, I didn't know that Red Bull was out and Pabst Blue Ribbon was in.

hafsakah

Look! Down on the ground!

A few days ago I got in an argument with a co-worker about Faith. There is some artillery in my arsenal...I have a Master's in Religion and know a decent amount about a lot of different sciency things like physics and whatnot. But the heart of my treatise on the subject is that People of Faith give me the ka-jizzies.

I know at best it's an agree-to-disagree kind of situation. Somewhere in there is the fact that I know that my own faith in the notion that people with faith are full of shit just bit me in the ass in the middle of this sentence. And worst case is that I am one micro-second from glassy eyedness.

But if you are out there, Mr. Micro-Second, I gotta tell you...I am no easy mark. No need to tell you though. You were there when I slipped through your fingers all those years ago. All wet and cleansed in the Pacific and already doubting.

Sometimes I think that experience made me some sort of SuperHero. DoubtMan! Too negative. LogicMan! Too one-dimensional. My super power is the ability to see through shit.

Watch, as SeethroughallyourshitMan travels the globe, fighting fundamentalism:

"Gee thanks, SeethroughallyourshitMan! At school they said the earth might be just a few thousand years old. Golly, you're smart."

"You can be too, Billy. So long now...and stay vigilant."

See, SeethroughallyourshitMan ward off crap strewn from all directions:

"Thou shall not lie with a man after the manner of a woman: it is an abomination Leviticus 18:22."

"Oh yeah! Well, you shall not wear combined fibers, wool and linen together. Deuteronomy 22:11. And you're breakin' that one right now, buster!"

I know it's more like FullofshitMan. I know! I know! But a man with the ka-jizzies can dream, can't he?

interruption

I was just about to write about that famous simile, life is like riding a bicycle with no brakes, and give my insider's opinion of it, being that I had just ridden a bicycle with no brakes, when I was interrupted by the teenage boy a few houses down who came to my door saying, "your nice and strong, right?" which is a fine way to start when you're about to try to get your skateboard out of a sewer which you won't be able to climb back out of.

by popular demand...

...I have created another blog. The new one will be semi-directed while this one will remain completely aimless.

whether to look or turn away

I am named for a man I never met. I have seen pictures and I look nothing like him. His background was Austrian upperclass but the rest of my heritage is pure shtetl. He was blue-eyed and fair and I am Tevye.

I have his cufflinks and I have his cholesterol.

My six year old nephew was just found to have high cholesterol. He's not one of those fat kids you see on Rikki Lake, either.

They didn't test back then, but my guess is that I would have tested high at six too.

I can ride my bike and take my little pill every evening but I can't change what my blood is made of.

I used to walk with my grandmother between services during the high holidays. To this day, if the leaves aren't changing and it isn't windbreakerish sort of weather, I want no part of the holidays. I remember walking in our neighborhood on a street called Dunford. There was a street that looped off of Dunford in a crescent and met back up with it about a quarter of a mile later.

That street was Milford. My grandmother wouldn't walk on Milford because in 1965, my grandfather collapsed on a street called Milford and died.

I will do what I can to avoid that. But I can't change my blood. Milford just keeps looping back to Dunford no matter what you do.

But I know a family whose struggle isn't with blood. Their struggle isn't silent and the losing isn't a quick heap on the street but a slow turn on a spit. I know this family through its only victor.

Her trophy is that she gets to watch from a distance as the others skate around the brink.

just in case you don't know, i am most certainly not a perfectionist

Since I started this whole blog thing I have looked back at some of my writing from a few years back and a lot of it really surprises me. I don't remember writing some of it and the style also sometimes seem foreign. But I remember me when I read them. I was in a great deal of pain when I wrote the poem in the previous posting. It still pains me to think of those stars and brackets, but I am happy and amazed that I was able to leave myself such a vivid memento of that day. I feel I am a long way off from being able to do that now.

And then I took this personality test. We actually missed the ball drop aspect of the New Year because we were all engrossed in choosing which defines us the most and the least out of options such as Reserved, Obliging, Strong-willed, Cheerful. After about 15 of those, I sensed trouble, because on 90% of the questions I had no idea which words to pick at all. This was confirmed by the final verdict: Perfectionist.

So here I am in 2005 and seemingly not entirely in touch myself. But I feel the ball is in motion. And the person I have by my side is probably the person I would choose for anyone who wanted to get to know themself better. Just so happens to be my wife. Also, there's a group of people out there reading this....well, you know who you are and you get the idea.
Happy New Year.