Yearly Archives: 2004

Shoot for the corners…please?

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Tuesday was the first practice of the year for a certain CYO under-12 Boy's Soccer team–a team I inherited this year.

It's my youngest son's 5th grade team, and I know most of the kids fairly well because I coached them all in clinic league back when they were in Kindergarten and 1st grade. But the demands of work, travel, and the crazy competitiveness of others who wanted to coach kept me from picking up the clipboard for a few years.

And today, I felt it. Despite some stretching and warming up,my tendons were not very happy with me. I turn 40 in a few weeks, and my body seemed intent on reminding me of that. But it's a good kind of hurt.

It's already easy to pick out who's got natural ability and who's got enough enthusiasm to make up for a lack of it. But I've only got a roster of 14 so far, which is a good thing–it means I won't have to make excuses to anyone for playing everyone in every game equally.

I ran them through some basic ball-handling, passing and tackling (that's ball-stealing for soccer-illiterates) drills to dust off the cobwebs, using my 13-year old son as an assistant demonstrator and easy mark. He's nearly as tall as me, and maybe a bit more athletic, but I can still rob him blind on the soccer field (in short bursts). Then I threw together two squads of five for a modified game of Futsal, and let them run loose for an hour. A 2-2 draw was settled with a shootout on a regulation goal–with me as the goalie.

Only one kid scored.

“Come on!” I cried. “I'm old and creaky, and I'm sure not diving for the ball! Put it down in the corners and it's a sure thing!”

But no, they all kicked for the middle, except my youngest son who decided to try to take it around to the side and kicked it into my shins when I came out to challenge. The lone goal still stood.

We'll fix that. I'm betting I'll be tasting some dirt before too long.

The Blue State Blues

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If you live in a state that's already been conceded in the upcoming Presidential election, and you happen to work in local politics, don't expect any help from the big boys–especially if you're a Democrat, it appears.

My folks live in a Republicanish corner of the far upstate of New York; my dad is the Democratic Party chairman for his county, and a county legislator. A few weeks back, my parents were trying to get materials together for the county fair, and contacted the Kerry campaign for materials.

They sent my parents a price list. I believe there was a conversation about just using the leftover materials from Howard Dean's campaign.

When my parents finally managed to talk to the regional coordinator for the Kerry campaign–a person who lived a mere 15 miles away–the person was totally unaware of the county fair, or any local issues, and needed detailed directions to the fairgrounds.

So my mom fired off a complaint to the national Kerry campaign, complaining that while the lack of emphasis on New York was understandable, the total lack of campaigning could make Democratic voters apathetic, and impact local elections in a negative way.

She got an auto-reply.

Anything to add, Mom?

Kerry, Bush, and Showing Up

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The whole “Swift Boat” bullshit right now surrounding John Kerry overlooks the fundamentals of the situation. Kerry was a young guy when he was put in charge of a couple of river patrol boats, and his fitness to command in combat at that point in his life is hardly relavent today. But there is one important point: at least he showed up. He volunteered for combat duty. George W. Bush didn't, and in fact evaded potential combat duty with the help of his dad's friends. And that's all that really matters.

Crybaby cultural criticism.

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In response to my rant on Six Feet Under, some anonymous Mike wrote:

i felt my time sucked by this blog entry. what a pompous pseudo intellecutal over-generalization about TV. there are good and bad tv shows like there are good and bad newspapers, books, songs, etc. the whole darn medium in not useless and the fact that you personally don't like and tv shows tv is about you not that medium. do you think it makes you sound hip or intelligent to knock tv? that's such a 80s yuppie thing to do.
perhaps you don't like tv for other reasons maybe you don't like passive media and prefer active media, if so then this is a preference so consider this before knocking and judging an entire medium.

mike 07/25/04 10:15am MT

Well, Mike–waaah. Waaah fsking waaah.

1) This was a personal statement, not some intellectualized bullshit. The point is, I have a very limited amount of time to spend on entertainment right now, since I work so fucking much and have children to tend to. There is TV I like; I *did* enjoy, for example, previous seasons of Six Feet Under, The Shield, and a number of other shows. I just don't miss them when I don't watch them. I don't feel so engaged with any show on TV right now that I get upset about missing an episode.

The fact that I am a disaffected Gen-Xer choking on what purports to be high culture TV is the whole frigging point of the post–I don't claim some intellectual superiority to morons who live for their TiVo.

2) I'm not one of those “TV is in decline” sorts of people. I personally think those people have some romanitcized image of prior TV culture, or some culture-war agenda. TV is a reflection of our culture's current state–splintered, stovepiped and with a lot of interesting undercurrents.

3) It is about me. I've said in the past, I get physically uncomfortable watching many situation comedies because I recognize where the script is going because of a childhood spent watching situation comedies in syndication before going to school in the morning. Lucy, Mr. Ed, and Gilligan were my day care providers. I recognize the plotlines from those shows in everything I watch, which leads to deep-seated feelings about my childhood, and it gets all Freudian. Can't deal with it. Since the family mostly gathered around James Burke's “Connections” series on PBS, the History and Discovery Channels are like TV comfort food for me.

4) It was your personal choice to spend your time responding to that post, so saying you felt your time sucked by reading it indicates you made a poor web-surfing decision based on your personal tastes. And next time, at least leave an address so I can respond in a less time-sucking, more reasoned manner. Idjit.

But do come again.

Six Feet Under My Tolerance Level

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Tonight's Six Feet Under sucked.

I haven't been watching much of it this season, as I usually have other things to do on Sundays at 9 (like peel my three-year-old off the wall and get her into bed), but Paula has insisted on watching it every week. At first, she taped episodes in the hope that I would actually get a chance to watch them. But that was pointless. I've pretty much come to the point where NO television show is important enough for me to watch it time-shifted. Or, at all.

But Paula insisted that I sit down to watch this episode with her. I did, for a while, and then felt time being stolen from me by something that sucked. “I can't believe you made me watch this,” I said. “I can't believe I sat through it,” she replied.

The whole David – picks – up – psycho – hitchhiker – who – steals – his – money -and – forces – him – to – do – crack – with – him – before – dumping – gasoline – on – him subplot just totally drove me nuts, to the point where I couldn't bring myself to watch any more of the stupid show. David has just gotten more nerve-grating over time; maybe they should have set him on fire–it might have brightened up the rest of the season.

I'm kidding. Really. Maybe.

Twenty-eight pounds of whupp-ass

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My daughter whupped me good today. I'm going to need a spatula to get out of bed tomorrow morning, and it's all her fault.

Zoë was up at 8 this morning, and ready to take on the world…while I, on the other hand, had been up until past 1 am working on feeding the beast its weekend rations.

Anyway.

So, we creaked into the day, and after a late breakfast it was determined that, in order to give Paula a bit of time to get ahead of her classwork, I was going to take Zoë to the pool for a couple of hours.

This, we did; of course, when I take Zoë to the pool, she doesn't need any pool toys, because I am the primary source of entertainment. It's “do that thing you did last time” time…sweeping her through the water backwards, her legs and body making a wake. It's “toss me in the air, Daddy” time. It's let-Zoë-ride-on-my-belly-while-I-crabwalk time. It's lift-Zoë-out-of-the-water-on-my-feet-while-sitting-on-the-bottom-of-the-kiddie-pool time.

Eventually, Zoë wanted a snack, and then she wanted to wash the entire side of the kiddie pool with a duck-shaped sponge she found. But soon it was time to go home, since we were going to go to Artscape.

So, it was back to the house to grind out a few household chores that had been left undone, and then change and head over to pick up Zoë's godmother Jesse, then to the light rail stop to wait for the train downtown. And wait. And wait. Apparently, MTA, despite plenty of advance warning, hadn't really prepared itself for the additional traffic for Artscape (which is located right on the light rail line, and has no arrangements for parking to speak of).

Finally, after almost an hour of waiting, the train arrived, filled to capacity. We squeezed on. And soon, we were there, and Z was on my shoulders. As The Mayor and his exercise in musical megalomania were playing, she demanded that we dance. And then back on the shoulders. And down. And up. And so on.

We decided to forego the forced march back to the other [designated white-boy] stage where the Violent Femmes were playing (and let's not even get into the irony of the Mayor's band opening for the Violent Femmes). Besides, all the real energy seemed to be down where Wyclef Jean was playing. We looked at book stands, sat for a little while, and then grabbed Princess Z the pretzel she desired. Then, as the sun set, we headed for the light rail stop.

All that Zoë-lifting and Zoë=spinning and Zoë-dancing has seriously whupped my ass. And she kept going hard, until we dropped Jesse off; on the ride home, she fell asleep in the car. Which, of course, meant I got to carry her again.