For the love of the game?

I was reading this article on Huffington post in which Joseph Spinelli advocates a zero tolerance policy for steroid use in baseball. I know this always comes down to me not having kids. My own dreams of playing major league baseball were dashed at age seven when I learned that women don't play professional baseball, so I have no need for illusions about the purity of the sport, I have no one to protect, but lets make the argument anyway because we can.

The idea of a zero tolerance policy doesn't really track with, well, humanity. As human beings we have certain weaknesses and are prone to making mistakes and to not allow people a second chance is ludicrous. It's not that I'm necessarily opposed to harsher punishment...in cycling for example the punishment for positive doping tests is a two year suspension, granted they don't do 162 races in a season so they could go with a 50 race suspension and it might amount to the same thing, but that's a whole apples to oranges issue and the point is that two years is a long suspension (a harsher punishment than they have in baseball) that in some cases can mean the end of a career but not all cases. Two year suspensions still allow for second chances (look at Daivd Millar).

My other big issue with the article is that he holds up Manny Ramirez as the poster boy of doping in baseball. His zero tolerance policy is specifically directed at Manny. Granted Ramirez is the latest to fall and so he is the current poster boy of doping in baseball, but the irony is that he got caught, or so it seems, because he stopped taking steroids and started taking something else to heal the damage steroid use caused. So he realized the error of his ways, or I prefer to think the Dodgers are a team that won't put up with doping so he had to stop, and now he's trying to play the game clean and now is when we're going to hold him up as an example of someone who should be banned for life. Now he seems to be trying to do the right thing, whatever his reasons, now is when we should give him a second chance.

If you love something, like baseball, you have to accept that it has flaws and love it anyway.

Goodbye

I went to a memorial service today for a friend who passed away last week. I found out that she'd passed from status messages on facebook and I wanted to be angry about that but I could really only be mad at myself because she'd been sick and I hadn't been to see her. At first I didn't go to see her because I had a sinus infection and her immune system was compromised by chemo therapy. When she decided to stop the treatment I still didn't go to see her though. The truth is that I was afraid to see her sick.

I know it's a cliche, that everyone says things like this when someone dies, but this woman was truly exceptional. She had a wicked (often dirty) sense of humor and the most amazing and infectious laugh. She was just so full of life that I couldn't imagine that life leaving her and I didn't want to see it.

Of course now I'm forced to face the fact that I didn't get to say goodbye to her because of my own stupid fear.

Chuck vs. The Upfronts

I know it's baseball season and I should be writing about the changes in the Mariner's outfield, but in a couple of weeks the television upfronts will take place and at the moment I'm preoccupied with that. Lucky for me I don't have an editor telling me what I can and can't write about. While I had been holding out hope for all the major networks to abandon the "season" all together and alternate new programming throughout the year it seems unlikely (though the cable networks seem to be starting down that path). At the moment my concern about the season is secondary to my concern that my favorite show might get canceled.

This has become an annual ritual for me going back to 2001 when my all time favorite show (Sports Night) did get canceled. At the time I didn't know about the upfronts, but I learned about them quickly from reading every article I could find on the fate of my favorite show. That was just the first of many shows I've loved and lost. Firefly. Veronica Mars. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The Loop. Every other year or so I find myself on upfront vigil, waiting to see if one of my favorite shows is going to be canceled.

This year I'm lighting candles for Chuck. I feel like I should make a case for keeping the show but I'll keep it short. It's smart and funny and combines drama, comedy, romance and action seamlessly. It has an entire ensemble cast of likable (and three dimensional) characters. The thing is that all the great things I can say about it don't really do it justice. There's an intangible factor that you have to watch the show to really understand. Since it had its season finale on Monday and may get canceled before next season I can only recommend, for now, that you rent (or buy) the DVDs and then pray along with me that it doesn't get canceled. This blog is all about faith after all and I have faith that this one time the universe won't let my favorite show get canceled.

Happiness is...?

Only a lucky few are talented at something that they love doing and that makes them a decent living. I haven't found anything like that. When I was younger the one thing I was really good at seemed like such a long shot at making me a decent living that I quit and only now do I realize that I might not have really liked it either. It was just easier that anything else. In recent years I've tried to focus on finding things that I am good at and in the process have found that my two greatest skills, empathy and logic, don't really overlap in very many career paths.

Everyone who knew me in High School assumed I would pursue acting and at the time I thought they were right. I was certain I'd go to college and major in theater. Empathy being the primary skill of actors that might have made sense. I chose my (first) college based on the fact that it had a good theater department (well that and the fact that it was relatively small and didn't have a Greek system). I realized pretty quickly that acting, for me, was an escape and that I needed to face whatever it was I was trying to escape from. So I switched, first to psychology, then philosophy, then I thought I'd try business but the school I was at didn't offer a business degree at the time (they do now though, in fact a friend of mine is a Marketing professor there now). I decided to transfer to a bigger school.

I told everyone I was transferring and most people were happy for me. There was a guy I knew from high school, I'd been a little bit in love with him in high school but the timing was always off. When I told him that I was transferring and that I planned to get my degree in business administration he got really mad at me. He said that business wasn't me. Of course, I got mad too because at that point we'd barely seen each other in over a year despite being at the same school. We got into a screaming fight in the middle of campus about it, him yelling at me that I wasn't being true to myself and me yelling at him that he didn't know me well enough to say that. It turned out he was right. I applied for transfer and was accepted but instead I didn't go back to school for about seven more years and when I did I majored in English. I couldn't hear it from him at the time. I didn't want to believe that he knew me better than I knew myself.

Flash forward ten years. I recently decided to go to law school. As is the case with many of my decisions it may or may not take, but right now it's my plan. Everyone I know seems to think it's a great idea. People have been telling me since I was about five years old that I ought to go to law school. It's the logic, my argumentative nature, people see law as a natural outlet for that and they might right.

There's another guy now. I haven't known him very long but in the short time I have known him he's become the yard stick against which every other guy I meet and/or date is measured and usually falls short. A lot of that is because he's great...smart, funny, great taste in music, a talent for writing worthy of envy and adoration, and the type of brooding good looks that women since the time of Bronte (if not before) have been unable to resist...but part of it is because I like to believe I have some sort of intangible connection with him and the reason I like to believe that is because he seems to know me better than he should given the extent of our conversations. That is how he really ruined me for all other men. I told him I'd decided to go to law school and he asked if that was really my final decision and I said yes and he asked me if I was happy with that. I was doing something that seemed out of character and rather than tell me it was the wrong choice, or try to talk me out of, he asked me if I was happy with it.

The truth is I'm mostly happy with it, but I'm always mostly happy. I picked law school because I had to pick some kind of school or I was only ever going to be partially functional. I've thrown myself into house hunting instead of studying for the LSAT because the answer to the question, am I happy with it, wasn't simply yes. The truth is, I don't know what's going to make me happy. What makes me happy is knowing that the people I love are happy but I'm not sure how that translates into a career or life goal.

Tuesdays with Michael Jackson

For the past several months I've been mostly listening to NPR talk radio in the car on my way to and from work. My commute to work now takes place at 10:30 though and on Tuesdays at 10:30 my NPR station has gardening chat on. So, one Tuesday I switched over to music. The first song I heard was the Alien Ant Farm cover of Smooth Criminal. I was sitting there, at a red light, car dancing, and several things came to mind.

First, of course, I was thinking about what a great cover that is, it might even be better than the original. Then I thought about a good friend of mine who is always saying that every guy she meets is either too young or too old for her. I've come to suspect that she sees an acceptable age difference to be plus or minus one year. I know if she met someone much older or younger than herself that she found she actually had feelings for she'd abandon all concept of what is an acceptable age difference, but I still wonder about what criteria go into determining what is or isn't an acceptable age difference.

Cultural reference points must factor highly. For my parents generation there was the Kennedy assassination factor, i.e. if someone was either not born yet or too young to remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated they were too young. The moon landing was another. Is music one of those cultural reference points?

My first impulse would be to say yes, definitely. Music is important to me. You don't always have to agree with me about music but I have be able to talk about it using the same reference points. Smooth Criminal for example. Michael Jackson was at the height of his popularity when I was kid. Smooth Criminal was on the Bad album which came out in 1987 (when I was 9 years old). But would I assume that someone of a different generation, 10 years either older or younger than me, would not be able to engage in the argument with me about whether or not the Alien Ant Farm version was better, worse, or equal to the original Michael Jackson version? Bob Dylan's original version of Don't Think Twice, It's All Right came out in 1963 and the Johnny Cash cover was 1965, both long before I was born but I still have an opinion about them.

Then again, I have an opinion about everything.

Curiosity

When I was in 10th grade I had a class that I loved called World Studies. Actually it was two classes, English and History, but they were linked. When we studied the ancients in history we read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, then we studied English colonization and read Heart of Darkness, then we transitioned to Asia by watching Apocalypse Now, on to Siddhartha and Survival in Auschwitz (and the attendant historical eras). It was a class that fed my natural curiosity and my appreciation of both fact and fiction.

It also had the added bonus of making me feel smart later on in life. I mean, I've always felt pretty confident about my intelligence in most venues with most people, but being a college dropout gave me a bit of an inferiority complex when I finally went back. Especially on the first day of the quiz section for a the core class I had to take when I finally declared my English major. That day happened to be the 10 year anniversary of the day I first started college so I was feeling especially insecure, but the first question the prof asked was about Clytemnestra.

Lately I've been wondering what happened to all that intellectual curiosity I had when I was 15. I must still have it, but not being in school seems to have made it dormant.

Moving forward

I've often thought that the main reason people have children is to one up their parents. As children we notice every tiny mistake our parents make and we promise ourselves that we will do better. Maybe I just think that because that's the reason I wanted to have children.

My mother worked my whole life. When I was in first grade she went back to school, law school, and she was around even less after that. For a long time I was angry and I resented her not being there. Children need their mothers, girls especially, is what I thought, and my mother would have been Donna freaking Reed if she'd been a stay at home mom. Cooking, cleaning, sewing costumes for dance recitals and Halloween...she excels at stuff like that. I guess she excels at most anything she does actually, but that didn't occur to me at the time.

Now that I look back on it I can hardly believe what an amazing mom she was. It was my dad who put me on the bus for my first day of school, and who drove me to dance classes and doctor appointments, and who picked me up from school when I got sick and my mom who came home late every night, but she did still manage to make it to every one of my dance recitals. In fact, as I said, she sewed my costumes for all of my dance recitals.

Still, I thought that when I had kids I would be there, day and night. I wanted nothing more than to be a housewife and mother so that I could show my mother how it's supposed to be done. But I've come to the realization that even if did fulfill the fantasy of spending my days doing laundry and baking cookies for my husband and kids I'd still make mistakes, they might not be the ones my mom made, but even if they were, the mistakes my mom made weren't that bad. I turned out okay and now, even though I resented her 20 years ago, I love my mom now (she's my best friend)

From the time I was five years old everyone said that I should go to law school like my mom. At first it was just something people said because people like the idea of daughters following in their mother's footsteps. I swore though, that it was the one thing I would never do. As time went on the suggestion persisted and it became more and more about me. I mean, people started to say that I should be a lawyer because of my argumentative nature not just because of the symmetry of me following in my mother's footsteps. People started to tell me I was born to be a lawyer and I still insisted that it was something I'd never do. I said, I work to live not the other way around and I didn't want to put in the hours that law school, and the practice of law, require because it would take away from what's really important in life (i.e. the people you love).

Lately though, for months now, I've heard myself saying that I need to find a job that takes up all my time. To quote from Sports Night, because what would a post from me be without a quote from Sports Night, I want "a job that involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time". It took hearing myself say that repeatedly, maybe thirty times, before I started to really think about what kind of job that might be. And then I registered for the LSAT.

In all honesty I'm no longer someone who thinks the worst thing in life would be to become my mother. I can't think of many better things that turning out just like my mom. Maybe I'll find the fantasy someday...husband, kids, laundry, cookies, PTA meetings, t-ball games...but if I never find those things at least I'll be able to say that I did something with my life that "involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time".