sports

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‘i wanna go, i wanna go for a ride’

Posted by 8 Jul 2010

by this time tomorrow, i will be writing hump-free.  i have idly wondered what will happen, if in the manner of sampson and his hair, all my powers lie in my hump and i am left a mere shell after its removal.  will my grasp of language disappear?  my need to overshare run dry?  what if my boobs get smaller?!

in the meantime, i am occupying myself drinking copious amounts of fluid because the pre-surgery directive of no food or drink after midnight, coupled with the infernal weather, has sent me into a tailspin of new neurosis – in short, that i will be obscenely thirsty for most of the day tomorrow.

in the meaner meantime, i am channeling nervous energy into, of all things, the MLB all-star game and campaigning for my beardsy imaginary boyfriend, kevin youklis, to make the last spot on the american league team.  i’ll avoid the hypothetical if-something-goes-wrong-tomorrow pleas that could make this a theoretical last request, but i will ask you, nicely, to vote for him.

catch you on the flip side, kiddos.

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Triathlon: Run for your life

Posted by 17 May 2010

I just got done registering for an upcoming 5k as part of my training for the upcoming (read: impending) triathlon. Sure, it’ll be good prep and as a plus it is in support of cancer awareness and will be run on Cancer Awareness Day. (Somehow I’m sure that isn’t a coincidence.)

But I had a little trouble filling out the registration.

Not age or address or anything like that. No. Given the race’s association with a hospital and a cause, they want to do special recognition of cancer survivors running in the race. So here was this seemingly simple little question: “Are you a cancer survivor?”

Nearly five years in and I’m still clueless how to answer this question.

In fact, I’ll be five years clear in August. My dermatologist and especially my oncologist are super happy with what they’re seeing and have increased the lengths of time between visits. Every five months for the dermatologist, and my cancer doc smiled and moved me out to annual visits during our last appointment.

But am I a cancer survivor?

I feel like mine, though malignant, was caught so early, that the operation seems to have caught all of it. I didn’t do chemo. Or radiation. I never spent a night in the hospital. I take a chest x-ray every so often and have somebody poke me here and there during a whole body exam.

And with the exception of gimping around on a cut up leg, I never suffered.

So, I had it. It’s gone. But I don’t really feel like a survivor. I dodged a bullet and just need to keep on walking and not look back.

Or in my case, run.

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Life: The Athlete’s Lament

Posted by 10 Dec 2009

It seems
I am truly wasted
for having moved through time
without moving through space,
and I am only merely spent
for having moved through space
within only a modicum of time.

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um…this isn’t an onion article. surprisingly.

Posted by 19 Aug 2009

The headline is:
IAAF isn’t sure South African runner is female

IAAF spokesman Nick Davies said the “extremely complex, difficult” test has been started but that the results were not expected for weeks.

via Olympic Sports- nbcsports.msnbc.com.

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Dear ESPN: Stop Sucking

Posted by 7 Oct 2008

Dear ESPN,

I, like many of your viewers, am a guy. A guy without a ton of time and the presence of an actual life which precludes me from spending all weekend every weekend watching the games. 

Listen up, because this is where you come in.

What used to be great about ESPN is that a person could watch it and actually get all the sports boiled down into an easily consumable hour (minus your complete and utter disregard for all non-ball sports, but I digress)(…)(…but just to regress for a moment: don’t just cover cycling when somebody gets busted for doping, okay?). That was the deal we had. You showed all the important plays, sometimes even in slow-mo and from different angles, and I didn’t have to sit through the tedium of actually watching what lately have been amounting to fairly shitty games all around.

Ah, but recently, recently you went and broke that contract. You sullied the bro code.

You went all 24-hour news cycle on us and started just using long shots of pretty talking heads blabbering about what they think and feel about some shit issue. I don’t want to watch some pretty face talk about the ramifications of Plaxico Burress’ decisions. Used to be, if somebody was going to droll on about an issue like that, you showed actual clips of the player in question playing, not Mr. or Ms. Pretty standing outside the stadium talking into the camera.

Because, honestly, that shit is bor-ing.

In summation: Less pretty; more sports. If I wanted pretty news, I’d watch all the hotties on CNBC tell me how my stock isn’t worth a pair of socks from Walmart, ‘kay?

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‘as the memories go by’

Posted by 24 Aug 2008

five mostly unrelated thoughts:

1.  david beckham is just too ridiculously good looking.  i mean really.  i flush just looking at himsometimes.

2.  i tried to cook plantains this evening with dinner and it was a total failure.  i created tasteless, crispy chips with none of the sweet and salty goodness i associate with the tostones i’ve eaten at myriad south american restaurants. what went wrong?  maybe they weren’t ripe enough.  i was saddened, having high hopes that they would be a fruit/veggie that Z and T might actually willingly consume.  

3.  one more teacher workday and the academic year begins.  in my new role as program coordinator at my new school, i am in charge of one full-time and one part-time assistant.  that’s a weird new change for me and has underlined my extreme discomfort in delegation.  i really prefer to do things myself, and i need to get over that.  i’m afraid it’s not because of some virtue in which i want to serve others, but because i am a control freak and want to reap heaps of praise when things go well.

4.  i have mixed emotions about john mayer.  there’s little to argue with in terms of his guitar-playing ability – it’s pretty fucking amazing, although sadly not showcased in the majority of his pop-heavy tunes. he’s pretty funny and well-spoken and well-written and self-depreciating, all of which i dig on.  but the bland tapioca of his music sends me a-snoozing, and i took affront somehow in a faculty meeting friday when my extremely well-intentioned new principal used his song ‘no such thing‘ as a springboard into an inservice on school discipline.  in reflection, now, i’m not actually sure what the parallel there was.  i was perhaps too busy having my hackles up being forced to listen to the song looped before the meeting began, then instructed to listen to it again with a copy of the lyrics in my hand.  it’s not horrible, but it’s not exactly the type of music i’d draw upon for inspiration and deep though, you know?  maybe i’m just still a judgmental music snot, circa my days at wcwm.  but how can that be?  i have new kids on the block on my iPod.

5.  scrunchies are still very popular in gymnastics, i observe.  why?

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‘big papi and manny and pap, oh my!’

Posted by 29 May 2008

tomorrow night is my valentine’s date with todd – the sox game up in baltimore. funny how i don’t think of it as the orioles game. i’m way psyched and there has been so much stressy shit going on in the past weeks that i am going to throw myself into forgetting everything else except baseball. at least for 3 hours.

i have the cutest outfit to wear, too, courtesy of michelle – a pink ribbon sox shirt and pink ribbon sox cap – how perfect is that.

yoooooooooooooooooooooooooook!

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