Friday, March 24, 2006

in the sun

i guess in a way i made it through another week. i'm not sure how sometimes. grading is burdensome. my favorite basketball team lost in the sweet 16. i feel behind on everything.

i'm not entirely used to this feeling - i've lived with major frustrations before, but only rarely have i ever felt that i couldn't keep up with what i needed to do, when i devote a lot of time and effort. that's not good enough right now. and of course, i have no power over whether gonzaga beats ucla so i should just not worry about that.

why this clear and sudden caring for college basketball? that stretches back a long way, to when i was five years old when my parents started taking me to all the college basketball games at sdsu. my mom taught me how to keep score, and i kept score of every game until when i was at least twelve, every home game there in person, and listening to almost every away game on the radio (though i didn't really like keeping track of scores over the radio). i grew up loving basketball very much. i loved watching and listening and cheering and yelling when officials did a less than optimal job (though i never did, and still never do, yell just to get calls, only when i feel something could truthfully be better).

i also loved playing basketball and would play in our house (with garbage cans or door frames, in our garage in the winter, outside on our hoop or a neighbors in the summer, at 7am every morning during the summer (because i didn't sleep in until sometime late in 7th grade). i loved basketball, but unfortunately, i never got any taller after 7th grade, likely due to genetics, along with me drinking carbonated drinks and caffeine, playing lots of soccer and basketball and running in bare feet, and becoming an insomniac late in middle school--the first was probably the biggest influence, but sometimes i wonder if the others had any effect. so in terms of my height, that dashed any hopes my mom or i still had of me being a top basketball player... hence soccer, where height isn't an issue (at least in high school, and much less of an issue anywhere). to be fair, i'm sure that if i had devoted all my spare moments to playing basketball, i probably could have done all right at 5'7, but it just didn't seem likely. so since 7th grade, i've barely played at all, though like with all sports and activities, i still enjoy them.

and all this maybe goes some distance in explaining why i still like watching and supporting certain basketball teams that i like. this year especially, it was gonzaga. they lost yesterday, which was annoying. after yesterday, the only other team i really have much desire to see was washington and george mason, both of whom played today. the former lost to uconn, and that was again a big uconn comeback (much like ucla's on gonzaga). and gmu won again because of their amazing zone defense. so they remain, but i'm much less invested in the tournament now.

with all of the busy-ness and stress in my life recently, due in large part to grading, but not solely so--with all that, i've started to get back to playing guitar a little bit. i've been playing some of the music i wrote a while ago (i haven't played enough recently to write anything for five years on guitar), and i've been playing pictures of success by rilo kiley, stay by u2, fake plastic trees by radiohead, and ashes of american flags by wilco. they seem like decent songs to me. i like them anyway. and i've been listening to a wonderful song by grandaddy, somewhat simple, perhaps too much so, but still amazing - it has the same kind of great quality that i sometimes associate with the polyphonic spree. and it describes what i would like to do right now, the sum total of all i want to do right now. walk up the side of the mountain, down the other side, swim in the river, lie in the sun. that sounds perfect. believe me. it does.

the nature anthem by grandaddy

i wanna walk up the side of the mountain
i wanna walk down the other side of the mountain
i wanna swim in the river and lie in the sun
i wanna try to be nice to everyone

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

welcome back! We had spring break last week and I spent the entire thing getting work done. Not exactly the most exciting.

Too bad about Gonzaga, they were my top choice, Morrison's mustache is very very nice. GM is still going which is exciting. The UConn GM game was pretty great.

I didn't know you were rocking the facial hair. Nice move. My beard is getting impressive.

A lot of the time that I'm in classes here I'm thinking that I'd like to be on some mountain somewhere reading, walking, throwing frisbees, or lying in the sun. Last weekend we wandered around at Joshua Tree National Park. Pretty amazing!

Can't wait for you to come out here. Best of luck with the rest of this semester. We should chat soon. Later my friend.

1:48 AM  

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