I’ve been away lo these many months, but I do want to get back to blogging. I’ve still be writing, journaling, and more. The need to put something out there publicly, to drive something to be ‘published’ is strong. I’m trying to decide if I want to commit to writing something here every single day (come on, I must have at least one thought worth sharing every day.. or at least I hope I do) or a few times a week, but perhaps for longer or maybe both. hmm….
I recently read Decisive by the Heath Brothers, they recommend expanding ones options. Try not to get into this OR that. Could it be this AND that? So for this blog, does it matter which thing I commit to doing, as long as I commit to something? So yeah, my goal is three longer (and by longer I mean 500 words, not dissertations) blog posts per week, but at least a quip let’s say 5 times a week. It’s good to have goals. It’s good to stretch..
Weird
Is it weird that I don’t google people? I’d rather have them tell me about themselves?
Foreshadowing…
Tonight I sat in one of my favorite independent bookstores listening to a reading by one of my favorite authors. As I looked around the varied shelves, I thought look at all these books, all this knowledge, all these places and worlds to visit. Then I thought: remember all this, remember what it was like to be surrounded by all these wonderful, wonderful physical books.. remember it for when all this is gone. Remember it later so you can tell the young people some day of this wondrous place called a bookstore, where people went to converse, learn, listen and gather with others as in love with the written word. And I was sad for all that we’re going to lose, and lose it we will someday. Ouch… my heart hurts tonight.
The Madness
Syracuse is going to the Final Four. Repeat that a few times to savor it (if you’re a Cuse fan that is). This, my friends, is what the tournament is all about. Who would have thought the team that allowed Georgetown to crush them, holding them to 39 points, just a few weeks ago and who bounced back from that in the Big East tournament only to implode in the second half of the championship game against Louisville could come so far. The Louisville loss especially said to me that this team isn’t mentally tough, that they let things rattle them, things they then can’t recover from. Well, one way to avoid having to deal with the mentally tough issue is to not get into situations where mental toughness breaks down.
Some stats may illuminate:
61 field goals allowed
67 forced turnovers
Holding Marquette to the lowest point total in a regional final and a shooting percentage of 22.6%.
Holding all opponents to just 37.2% shooting.
Defense baby. Though it could also be that I attended my very first March Madness game, getting to see the Orange play in the 1st round in San Jose (the ho hum victory over Montana. Hey Montana: passing the ball outside because you can’t figure out how to penetrate the zone for about 33 seconds a possession then throwing up a brick isn’t really a game plan), so perhaps my fandom inspired our Cuse.
In any case, there is now a possibility if Syracuse gets passed Michigan and Louisville passed the Shockers (and wouldn’t it be shocking if they didn’t) for a Syracuse – Louisville championship game. The undercurrents are plentiful: A rematch of the Big East tournament game, a rematch between two coaches who also coached against each other in the 1987 Final Four, a match between coaches where one was once the assistant coach of the other and perhaps most importantly a fond send off for one of hoops greatest basketball leagues. This must happen, don’t you think?
What does pure joy look like?
See you next weekend.
Minimal Standards
If you ask a co-worker what happened in a meeting held last week that you couldn’t attend, shouldn’t they be able to answer? Is that too much to ask? Instead this is the response I received:Co-worker: um, what meeting? It was about X, you say? I don’t think I was invited.
I then pointed out the invitation which clearly displayed the person’s name.
Co-worker: Oh, weird. Let me check my calendar.
The person then walked away, checked on their computer and returned.
Co-worker: It looks like I did attend, but I’m not really sure what happened.
Me: {open-mouthed}
Co-worker: I’m often in meetings where I’m not really sure what is going on or who is running them, really.
I later followed up with someone else at the meeting and asked if co-worker had attended. She replied: well, co-worker was there, but you know, not really there.
Holy crap. Is it so much to expect that someone, who is not junior and is not new to the company, understand what is happening in meetings they attend or even just remember whether they attended?
Just wrote..
the line: so some asshole took his assholery to a new level. And that made me happy, childish and immature, but happy.
Argo Fuck Yourself…
and all that jazz..
Congratulations to Ben Affleck for Argo. After being snubbed as a Director for both The Town and Argo, well deserved.
The Sour and the Sweet
They say appreciating the sweet is so much richer if you’ve also experienced the sour (as a fan of the Boston Red Sox, I can tell you this is true), however you must allow yourself to experience the sweet and not get bogged down in fixating on the sour. If we could only celebrate the things we do have and not spend so much time mourning what we don’t, I think we’d all be better off
Convergence
You’re supposed to pay attention to things you never noticed before and then are suddenly everywhere in your life, right?
Let me be clear, let me introduce myself.. hello, I’m AB and I’m a reading-0-holic. I love it all, books, all kinds, fiction: literary, trashy, serious (hello, Jonathan Franzen), non-fiction: please don’t me die before I’ve read everything David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro and Michael Lewis have ever written, magazines: how do people keep up with the New Yorker? It’s so god-damned good and yet I just can’t get to it every week, blogs, and then you know the whole rest of the internet. I enjoyed digital, you’ll rip my Nook out of my cold dead hands (please buy things from Barnes & Noble and support the non-proprietary, non-Kindle only format of the Nook. You know deep down you want physical book stores, you do), but if you’ve ever opened a new book and stuck your nose deep into the pages to inhale the new book smell goodness, you are my kind of people. That is one David Foster Wallace like paragraph of all over the place-ness.
Wrangle it back in, AB. I realized one day that I’ll never read everything or even the most important things on my reading list if I didn’t stop changing course with each new shiny book that was recommended or read or referred to that I needed to drop everything to get to. So I made a list, I got my Amazon wish list as an Excel file (ask me how!), I added to all the books I own that I haven’t’ read. Mark my words, this was a terrifying exercise. All those books! Guess how many I owned that I’d never read. Guess! It’s too embarrassing to say (email and I will tell you). This can’t go on. Someday I’ll read that book didn’t cut it. I needed to prioritize.
I stared at my bookshelf. What stared back at me? Moby Dick. I may be the only person in the United States who did not read this in high school. But I did purchase it, apparently in a used book store in New York City (per the bookmark in the book) at some point. I refuse to check if the bookstore still exists. I will chose to believe it does. Next to a photo of the cover of that book I could have written: someday I will read that book. One day I decide that someday was today. So I ambitiously started the great novel.
Well, it’s hard. The language is so beautiful you want to linger over every sentence, it’s so hard to leave them behind. Then one day I realized I was 200 pages in and we hadn’t left shore yet. This made me feel as if this was going to be the longest book of all time. Oh Ahab, get on with it. Move the plot ahead faster. I’m used to much smaller chunks of information these days, I’m sad to say (not even sad, just horrified, embarrassed and depressed). The great book started holding me back from reading other things. The time I spent with it was so long. What about all the other books? So I put it aside for a little bit, just a little bit. But then I started noticing things in my life: one of my favorite publishers and blogs is Melville House, Melville and Moby Dick are mentioned in an amazing number of blogs and articles I read, there is even a Led Zeppelin song called Moby Dick. Then even the novel I turned to for relief in hope it would be easier, The Art of Fielding, a book to that point had been about a college aged baseball player, integrates a love of Melville into a character’s life. At some point you have to admit life is telling you something right? I am meant to finish Moby Dick and maybe now is the time. Call me Ishmael.
Rivalry
Sometimes a contest makes you rise to the challenge, sometimes a rival makes you better than you thought you could be, sometimes we get to go along for the ride and have the privilege of watching the content, the thrill of seeing other rise to the challenge give us hope for ourselves. Tomorrow afternoon something that has given me an enormous amount of happiness for a number of years, and I’m incredibly sad, missing it pre-emptively. Yes, tomorrow afternoon a thirty three year old rivalry, Syracuse – Georgetown, for me the second best rivalry in all of sports (nothing will ever really come close to Red Sox/Yankees) comes to a close. The teams move on to other leagues, all for the money, nothing about the sport and we are all worse off for the loss. But we have one more game to savor, a sell out, record largest crowd of 35,012 will be there and a national television audience.
Beat Georgetown.
Sat: 2/23, 4pm est, CBS
Living Reflections 