School and life have gotten in the way of recreation. And healthy eating.

Recap: I need to arrive at the facility earlier. Getting there at 12:00 or later doesn’t offer a chance to sufficiently warm up which means more soreness later and a higher chance of injury. 14 guys in attendance, which is two full teams with one sub each. I was on the slightly worse team that tended to play (exhausting) long ball rather than passing.

Health Report: Okay. I got kicked in the ball of my left foot which feels okay now but will likely be sore tomorrow.

Performance: Bad. I could not hit a barn door with my passing, consistently underhitting passes—if they happened to even be aimed in the right direction. Passing is without a doubt the strongest part of my game, so when that goes there ain’t much to write home about. Shooting was okay as I did manage to score a half-dozen unspectacular goals because the opposition played with their keeper way out of position. No problems trapping.

Rating: — The worst outing so far and the downward trend is ominous—from a 3, to 2.5, now to 2. No breakfast today, a booze-saturated weekend, and hardly a warm-up surely didn’t help matters. I was closer to giving myself a 1.5 than a 2.5. No footie on Friday due to a rescheduled Spanish tutoring session and none on Monday either due to a school obligation, which means I have a week to ponder this outing. And weep.

Yay! I made Football365.com’s Mediawatch with the below fat joke:

I’m so proud.

Current Mood: Happy |

Did anyone else hear his post-game commentary where he said that he would favor the Packers over the Cowboys to appear in the Super Bowl if they just had a reliable running back?

Question: would he still be saying this had the Broncos managed to score a touchdown in the dying seconds instead of a field goal? Erm. No.

I love my Packers silly but let’s get one thing straight—they’re lucky as hell to be 6-1. I am not, and never have been, a Mike McCarthy fan. His crappy play calling should have cost the Packers more games than just the dreadful second half display against the Bears. Again tonight, he successfully killed second-half momentum by abandoning everything that was working and instead running the ball into the ground. What drives me nuts is his smug post-game interviews, where relying on the fickle wind of Fate was apparently always in the game plan.

The Pack look acres better than they did last year but they still ain’t the real article. Unlike most Bears fans I know, I can love my team and still admit this…

I finished Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat last week—it was okay.

I’m reading PKD’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said this week—it’s only okay. I cringe at some of the writing and the women are bitches, sluts, deceitful, stupid, or all of the above. So far the book has some cool ideas surrounded by some not-so-great stuff.

I hope to finish the audio version of Blood Meridian this week—it’s much better than okay. The worst part about audio is that I naturally tend to space out for a few minutes from time to time but usually can still keep track of the plot. Unfortunately, I miss some of the niftier turns of phrase. This isn’t exclusive to McCarthy, but I have lost my place a few times in BM (no crass jokes please) and in trying to find the thread of the story, stumbled upon some terrific descriptive passages that I’d missed earlier.

A quick count reveals I’ve consumed 52 books in 2007, both audio and the paper kind. Why does it feel like it should be so much more?

Current Mood: Ready for Bed |

I’ve been in Chicago since Friday spending time with Brother Todd and his wife P.W. before they move across the pond to Swizzerland. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster for us because we’re at once very excited for this new opportunity for them (and to have a home base for European excursions) but also quite sad. One of the best features of moving back to Madison from Seattle was being only a few short hours away from my brothers. Now one is about five hours away in Minneapolis and the other is moving to Europe. We can’t complain since it’s only a matter of time before something (most likely my first teaching job) will move us from southern Wisconsin. But still. As a general rule, it’s better to have your loved ones close as opposed to far.

The Internet has done some amazing work to shrink the globe though through things like Skype, email blogs, and web cams. And we’ll be seeing them in Spain in May and back in the U.S. in July, so it’s not forever. But still. Sobering.

I’ve been working out regularly since August but that’s come to a screeching halt over the past few weeks, with excercise being supplanted by lots of fried food and booze. Amy wants to go on a detox diet for a month and that’s probably not a bad idea. I think it’s a bad sign when my sweat smells like Spaten lager.

Martin Jol sacked in favor of Juande Ramos the same weekend the Arse goes top of the table. Dark days indeed.

I’m not sure how I feel about the Ramos appointment. If the Spurs board continues to make personnel decisions, I don’t see how swapping managers will change much. Martin Jol has done a good job with the squad but he was a dead man walking from the start of the season. Is Ramos going to get things done? I guess it depends on the players the man can attract to the club. If he can bring in Spanish internationals like Benetiz has, that’s good—but I’m not convinced he can.

I did not watch any footie this weekend and missed some remarkable results. Chelski putting five past the Sky Blues? And I was gobsmacked that the ESPN Play of the Day during a crazy college football weekend turned out to be Rooney’s back heel in Man Ure’s destruction of Boro. The league is an interesting beast this time ’round, and the run-up to the holiday fixture fest will be enthralling.

Hey! The Chicago Fire not only made the play-offs by playing the shorts off the Galaxy in the final league game of the season, they nabbed a 1-0 win over DC in the first leg of the post-season. That probably won’t be good enough to get out of RFK next Thursday but it’s far better than going in level or down.

And the other games didn’t go according to plan either. Dallas over Houston? KC over Chivas? That’s the lower seed knocking off the upper in three of the four games. Fascinating stuff. I’ll have to tune in next week to check out some of these games as well.

Current Mood: Unsettled |
Currently Listening To - Wilco - “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”

More often than not, when I submit to genre mags I get positive rejections, i.e. a note that’s specific to my story (most commonly “nicely written but not what we’re looking for”) or parts that the editor felt weren’t up to snuff. I’m from the school of thought that personal rejections are nice, but they’re still rejections. And it shows that I’m usually not getting bounced by the slusher dealing out form rejections.

Yet my experience with literary magazines has been just that. Overwhelmingly, I’m getting form rejections with nothing on them and it’s been a bit discouraging. I know that what I’m submitting isn’t amateurishly bad and I guess I wouldn’t mind a little note from time to time letting me know that they could distinguish my submission from the convicts writing in crayon. Granted, the stories that I’m sending them are kind of weird. Not genre enough to really be genre, but with enough general weirdness to not be mainstream either. So maybe as they read they’re just like “WTF?” No way of telling, really, and in the end it doesn’t really matter.

But all that’s changing! Two, count ‘em, two notes written on my most rejection rejections. One read “Thanks, try us again.” The other read “Sorry” with a signature.

Clearly, the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for.

Current Mood: Underwhelmed |

Two sessions down, 23 more to go before I break even with my $150 down payment.

Recap: I showed up 15 minutes late but found 14 players already at it, 13 men and 1 woman. This meant two full teams with one sub each, which lasted about a 45 minutes before people began to bail. The overall quality of play of the group was okay to sub-par. No ringers present.

Health Report: More soreness than I expected. I nearly injured myself in the locker room trying to do a quick change into my shorts. But otherwise no knocks to report. Legs are sore and stiffening but fine.

Performance: Not good. Legs went dead quickly and it took me a good 30 minutes to find my touch, which is not impressive when you only play an hour-long game. Towards the end I scored on a curling shot off the inside of the post and hit a string of quality one-touch passes, but that didn’t make up for the shots into the rafters and the number of times I passed to the opposition.

Rating: — More ugly than not. Even the spike in decent play during the waning moments couldn’t save a sub-par (but not quite embarrassing) performance.

Recap: The opening day of the lunchtime, indoor pickup season. As expected, low turnout. The number fluctuated between 8 and 11 guys, meaning we at times played on a downsized field and modified goals. A usual number of players mid-season is 20-25 but can be as high as 50. Generally speaking, a good full-field game with keepers requires at least 16 guys–five outfield, a keeper, and two subs per team.

Health Report: No change. I expect soreness tomorrow, but ankles and feet held up well. I did step on someone’s toe poking a ball away. I consider myself +1 on the season.

Performance: About what one would expect for the first time out. Legs deadened quicker than I had hoped. Generally average play all around with good passes and bad passes mixed in.

Rating: — An unremarkable outing but two dead-on one-touch passes made me particularly happy, and for that I award myself an extra half star.

Right, so I’m trying to document my upcoming season of pick-up soccer. Sessions are most Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from now until mid-April. One either pays $6 per session or $150 for the season. I plan to do the latter and hopefully blogging this will help me track that magical break even point of 25 sessions. Ideally, I’ll hit that point before the first of the year but that means I would need to have both the time and endurance to manage three sessions per week.

I’m also planning on judging my own performance using the following scale awarding stars and half-stars:

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— Titus Bramblesque performance; couldn’t put a foot right
— Awful; unable to trap, dribble, pass and shoot
— Bad day; general play best described as “crap”
— Average; good and bad touches, occasional glimpses of talent
— Quite good; Scoring goals, clever passing, good on the ball
— Ronaldinoesque; Threading passes through alternate dimensions, scoring from the half-way line, general box-to-box domination

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In case you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to getting back into a regular playing schedule. It may take a few weeks for the regulars to start showing up, though.

I would describe my current health as fair. I am in better cardiovascular shape as I have been using the elliptical trainer for the last couple months, which also helps strengthen the legs so hopefully they don’t go dead as quickly. My feet are blister free. I have mild aches and pains and occasional stiffness in my ankles, feet, and toes. I sprained each of my ankles last year; I would put them at about 85-90% healed. I am 3 months away from being 34.

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Interestingly, I am now not only a writer of poetry but I am also a rejector of poetry. I am reading a bundle of poetry slush for the department’s literary magazine with the simple instructions to forward on anything that’s fresh, interesting, and unexpected. We’ll see how that goes.

As far as my own poetry writing goes, I’m discovering that I’m actually not too bad. The professor has complimented me quite a few times on what I’ve produced so far. What I’ve noticed is that I have a hard time varying my style. I have no problem trying on different styles and voices with fiction, but poetry I find a bit tougher. It’s been a very good learning experience thus far, though.

I handed in my paper on Dubliners this past Tuesday and have already selected a paper topic for the final paper due in December: James Joyce and vampires. It might sound nuts, but there’s a lot in Ulysses about feeding on the dead. And Bram Stoker was Irish. My reasoning is that I might find Ulysses more manageable if I had something specific to be looking for. I find the book fairly impenetrable when I’m reading it by myself but the class discussion helps it open up a little bit. The Joycean criticism, however, still drives me mad.

My Halloweenie reading of “Working Out Our Salvation” went well. I was unexpectedly called to read second instead of fourth, and that didn’t provide me enough time to be nervous. I was a little nervous at first (this being my first public reading) but the many familiar faces in the crowd of 50 or so helped me relax and after an initial bobbling in the open couple of sentences, I found a groove. Practicing at home four times also helped.

A few different people have told me they really liked the story. It’s funny reading a zombie story aloud to a literary crowd, and the story is a bit weird. I suspect that some people didn’t quite know how to react—somebody initially laughed at the part where the father-zombie’s mangled body is described after he’s suffered a dozen different deaths in the coal mines; then the laughter turned a bit self-conscious, as perhaps the person though, “This is really kind of disgusting. Am I supposed to be laughing?” To which my answer is, Why not? ‘Twas intended to be a bit unsettling.

Anyway, another excellent experience.

Noontime indoor soccer starts tomorrow. I’m planning to track my general state of health as the season progresses. For October, November, December, and most of January I will be able to play Monday, Wednesday, and Friday should I have the time. The question is how the body will hold up. The sport is very hard on the body from the knees down.

Current Mood: Bushed |

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I’m trying to plow through two books this week for my utopian Californian project, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats and Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. The comparison between the two struck me as I started reading the Steinbeck: here we have the utopian version of California where Danny and his friends bum around, drink wine, share a house, and not only survive but prosper in a state of anti-progress. In comparison, the junkies of Scanner bum around, get stoned on Substance D, share a house, and generally count down the days until their own personal destruction.

California as utopia, California as dystopia. I love it when a plan comes together.

Euro 2008 without a single British team? A week ago that seemed highly unlikely, but ugly losses on the road for Scotland and England mean they went from the driver’s seat to hanging on to the bumper by their fingernails.

Pity Scotland. They’ve overachieved by pushing Italy and France, the two World Cup finalists, every inch of the way. Even should the Scots fail, it’s a great launching pad for the future. Not so for England. They’re threatening to wind up third in their group behind Russia (not at the World Cup) and Croatia (who left the party in Germany early). England are reaping the reward of demanding an English manager when there was none qualified to take the job. Steve McClaren was never qualified, and as a result it now it looks like England won’t qualify either.

For me, they won’t be greatly missed.

Current Mood: Fine |