Recap: Around 25-30 guys showed up today, meaning four full teams with few subs. One goalkeeper came and that’s always heartily appreciated. There was a lot of diversity today—some of the best players, some bad players, some young players, some old players. The teams were more or less even but not great, and rumor had it that the field I was playing on was a little faster paced, but that isn’t to say it was fast-paced.

Health Report: Okay, except for lingering throbbing from collisions on Monday and Wednesday.

Performance: Fair. I had two near-perfect volleys in the opening minutes but both ended up hitting the inside of the upper V and ricocheting out. Other than those moments of oh-so-close glory, it was a mixed bag: passes and goals both above and well below average.

Rating: — My performance largely depends on those around me, it was an up and down day for me, depending on who was on the field. Play was really spotty today due to the fact that each team had older guys who were good but couldn’t run, younger guys who could run but couldn’t pass or shoot, and players who were all around good. The same was true for the other team, so the scales tipped frequently. When our best line was against their old and slow line, we shredded them. Then as our guys subbed out, their best guys were subbing in and the tables turned. Sort of a frustrating day for all involved as it was hard to find a rhythm.

That’s about what I feel for the Cowb*ys. Really, as far as hatred goes for football teams, they rank right up top there with the Be*rs.

Let me know if you see a pattern in the teams’ last ten meetings:

So yes, there was an air of inevitability about last night’s game and probably for the rest of the season since the Packers will more than likely need to travel south once again in the play-offs. What a difference it could have made had the Packers had those jerks in below-freezing Lambeau last night.

Anybody want to finish the semester off for me? Please?

In good news, I got the classes I wanted for the spring semester: contemporary Native American novels, visual narratives (not entirely sure what this one’s about but the professor is an interesting guy who moved over from the art school to the English department), and a fiction workshop.

The bad news is that I go to class three days a week, which means two nights away from home and more driving than I want as the spring semester is always worse weather-wise. And one of the classes serves up the double-whammy of being twice a week (gack) and beginning at 12:30 pm (gack gack). And the only other course I was really excited to take, one on American pragmatism, runs concurrently with the fiction workshop which I more or less need to take in order to work with this professor before I run out of coursework. The department has a way of scheduling the best lit classes at the same time as the fiction workshops which is highly annoying.

I have my last Spanish lesson today. There’s a final exam that I probably won’t take until January, but after that I’m done. Which is sad. It’s so much harder to stay self-motivated. The strength of this program is that you needed to be ready for your weekly tutoring session, which meant you couldn’t slack off. Without that reinforcement it’s going to be tough, but thanks to Skype Brother Todd and I are planning to keep up our Spanish speaking sessions while he’s overseas.

Current Mood: Bleck |

Right, this is for all you out in the blogosphere planning on buying me Christmas and/or birthday presents.

Without further ado, I present my 2007/08 Holiday Wish List, complete with Table of Contents.

This is list is subject to expansion and contraction at any time. Thanks for your support.

On Tuesdays when I need to be on campus early for a meeting, I’ll generally sit in the student union and watch most of a Champions League match while grabbing a bite to eat and reading before class. You can’t help eavesdropping since the tables are relatively close and there’s not enough ambient noise to drown out other conversations and, since I’m alone, it’s hard to ignore.

Last time this happened I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard. A couple American guys were watching Liverpool thump Besiktas one table over, and an African student came over and introduced himself and they started talking footie. The African guy’s English wasn’t great but they managed to converse well enough about the groups, who played who, etc. Surprisingly, the American guys knew players, teams, tournament scenarios. Delightful, I thought. The world’s game bringing people together and maybe the US is finally starting to get into the conversation.

Flash forward to this Tuesday. Two guys and a woman sat one table away and the conversations was as random as can be (to the woman’s credit, she hardly said a word). The guys started with the justification for using profanity, their logic/attempts at humor being quite painful as their main arguments were lifted from a chain email everyone on the planet saw six years ago.

Then the conversation turned to the footie match on the big screen, and they launched into the typical argument that soccer is boring. “Basketball is popular because the score is always like 100 to 100,” one reasoned. “Hockey has the slap shot, basketball has the slam dunk, baseball has the home run,” the other one answered. “But what does soccer have?” Seconds later, they both admired a clearance from one of the defenders. “You gotta say though,” the second guy said, “they can kick the ball pretty far. I couldn’t kick a ball fifty yards.”

Thankfully the conversation turned once again, this time to gun control. “Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if there were no gun laws? I mean, would you try to steal a car or hijack a plane if you didn’t know who around you had a gun?” Irrefutable logic. Then they went on to agree that Clinton benefited from Reaganomics for eight years and that a president has no control over the economy while in office because it’s all due to the prior administration.

Finally the woman, who had not said a word to this point, got a text message that she was answering when one of the guys called her out. “I hate it when people answer their phones while we’re having a conversation,” he said. “It’s basically telling me that what I’m saying isn’t important, that you’re just waiting for something better to come along.”

And in case you were wondering, no, it wasn’t me texting her.

Current Mood: Feh |

Recap: There were between 12 and 18 guys today. The level of play was pretty good, but there were lots of guys who were 40+ in age which means a slower tempo game. I was on the marginally less-talented and decidedly older team.

Health Report: Could be better. I was on the wrong end of a perfectly legal but bone-rattling tackle. It was a bit heavy for that venue and I made a point to say so, and the guy duly apologized. I talked with him afterwards and he was a very cool guy, but my left shin is still throbbing. Later, I treated myself to a frosted cookie in the shape of a lion to help deal with the pain. It worked.

Performance: As average as can be. I scored a couple decent goals and laid off some nice, slow-rolling passes but there were plenty of mis-hits and give-aways mixed in too. The imbalance in the teams made it difficult to have an outstanding day anyway.

Rating: — Vintage three-star performance if there ever was one. Our team had difficulty finding a flow because we had a couple dribble-happy ball hogs on the team, and some older guys who couldn’t keep up with pace of the opposing team. This led to the younger guys (of which at 33, I am one) had to do a lot of sympathetic running to both lead the offensive charge and then get the hell back on D. Not a great day footballing wise, but good exercise nonetheless.

Sheesh, no news like good news. Check out the first six headlines in Fox Sports’ NFL Roundup newsreel.

* Taylor Dies at 24
* Torn pec ends Ricky’s year
* Vick trial date on state charges set
* Bridges guilty of assault
* Evans gets two-game suspension [for crimes]
* Pats place Colvin on IR

Hmm. One violent death, two injuries, and three criminals. Nice.

Recap: The numbers fluctuated between 15-18 people, meaning two teams with two to three subs—one woman, the rest were all guys. Overall quality of play was lousy. I was on the slightly worse team.

Health Report: I predict soreness. The facility was cold meaning the muscles took a long time to warm up and I got whacked pretty good two or three times. Nothing malicious, just clumsy: the ball is there one instant gone the next, replaced by a shin—WHACK!

Performance: Not great. My legs tired almost instantly and I’m not quite sure why, although we did finish gardening the front yard yesterday and maybe that took more out of me than I thought. My touch improved as the day wore on, but the teams were stocked with guys who simply weren’t that good. Couldn’t trap, couldn’t pass, and didn’t know how to make space or get open. Frustrating enough for me to come home and make a diagram (see below).

Rating: — Generally speaking, I’m only as good as the players around me. I’m not good enough to beat guy after guy in order to make space but, as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m a pretty sharp passer. Sharp passing only matters if guys are moving. The below is for the benefit of anyone who may find themselves talked into playing a game of pickup soccer.

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Right, so this situation happens about every three minutes in a game of pickup. The blue player is advancing with the ball with his teammates spread to the left and right with a couple of red defenders back. The principle here is quite simple—if there isn’t a direct line of sight between the passer and receiver, it’s a lot harder to move the ball. The solution here is not, as many like to think, for the attackers without the ball to shout “line” or “look left” or to stand with hands raised because no one is standing near them. The solution is to move to get open. Scenario 1 happened a lot today, and the result is one of the red defenders steals the ball, or the ball is passed to an open area with no one running onto it, or they intercept the pass, or block the shot, or converge quickly and double-team the guy with the ball.

Scenario 2 shows two attacking players who know what they’re doing. They are either moving back to the ball or cutting across the face of the goal, requiring the defenders to keep track of their movement as well as pay attention to the advancing ball. The guy with the ball has several options open. If the defenders follow the attackers, a shooting lane opens up. The guy with the ball can do a give-and-go with the attackers, continuing a run toward goal. Lots of options, all predicated on movement that either frees players or opens the defense. Standing still doesn’t work out so well.

Most of the offenders admit they don’t know how to play soccer. I don’t yell at them during the game but I will say this: I don’t go play pickup basketball to stay fit, and I’m hoping that some of these guys figure out that maybe this isn’t the venue for their huffing and puffing.

Most of them are in good athletic shape, which actually makes the problem worse—see the health report above. A decent player knows what balls they can get to and what they can’t, but inexperienced players tend to go after everything. If you yank the ball away, you suffer a tasty foul. Look, this is all well and good for competitive footie that’s played at high intensity, but this is sheer clumsiness. Bad fouls are followed immediately by sincere apologies, but tell that to my throbbing shins.

All right, enough elitist whining. Not a good day no matter what way you cut it. I just hope Mondays don’t become a day reserved for a dearth of talent.

Gack. I just scheduled out the next three weeks of school work and it doesn’t look pretty. Three papers, a presentation, a poetry portfolio, and a couple more books to read. Yikes.

I can hardly wait to see the backside of this semester. My independent study has been interesting but didn’t quite come together the way I had hoped. It has entirely clarified what an academic sabbatical is truly for; it’s extremely hard to do serious research for an academic paper alongside a number of other competing interests. The intensity of the independent study I had envisioned was probably more like research for a dissertation rather than a single, relatively short paper. At the end of this, I will have read a lot and thought a lot, but I can’t see this paper being as thought provoking or as comprehensive as I would have hoped.

My poetry workshop has turned out to be a bust, more or less. The poets in the class really like the independent format but for fiction writing folks like me who were hoping to hone some poetry skills, that never really happened. I don’t feel like I know anything more about poetry today than I did twelve weeks ago. The constructive criticism (or at least that’s what we’ll call it) has been far too diffuse to be of much help and I think I personally would have benefited far more from a traditional workshop format rather than the small group format we went with. I also understand that the workshop does not exist solely for my benefit, but still…

Which leaves my Joyce class. Most of my distaste for Joyce remains, although I have a better understanding and appreciation of the man’s work. I don’t care for slogging through impenetrable text week and after, but I really do like going to class and trying to hash out what it all means, if it means anything at all. Perhaps the best part about this class is now being somewhat knowledgeable about Joyce’s work. Joyce is one of those authors whose name is thrown around quite a bit. Having read most of his work (and I can’t see myself ever bothering to pick up Finnegan’s Wake unless it’s to toss it on a bonfire somewhere) and a fair bit of criticism, it’s my feeling that his name is often dropped to impart some sort of credibility (see my post on The Departed for this syndrome) but I question how many people have actually done the tough leg work of grappling with Dubliners, A Portrait, and especially Ulysses to pull out any relevant, personal meaning.

I register for spring classes tomorrow. I’m hoping to get a fiction workshop, a course on contemporary Native American novels, and another course on visual narratives. We’ll see if everything is still open when I register.

Current Mood: Daunted |
Currently Listening To - Oasis - “Be Here Now”

We watched The Departed last night. I thought it was pretty good as far as Hollywood goes, but there was too much “Coincidence: The Movie” about it. A quick check on Wikipedia revealed that it’s a remake of a Japanese movie Infernal Affairs (which strikes me as an awful translation for the title). The most far-fetched part is the love triangle, an aspect which appears to be absent in the original.

The James Joyce references were likewise head-scratching. Okay, first off it rubs me the wrong way when Jack Nicholson’s character is talking about the Catholic church to the boy and he says, “Non serviam” and the boy says it’s a quote from James Joyce. Close. Joyce was actually quoting Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost but hey, whatever.

And then Marky Mark’s detective is named Dignam; Dignam is the name of the dead friend of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. How does this blatant allusion work? You know, I can’t say. In the book, the guy’s name tends to come up when Bloom is thinking about mortality. How that fits with Marky Mark’s character, I have no idea.

Finally, there’s the title. Maybe it’s just me, but The Departed comes awfully close to Joyce’s best-known short story The Dead. Are there parallels? Not really. I mean, both the story and the movie have to do with the influences of powers unseen, but I would hate to make a case for that being the rationale for the movie’s title. The Wikipedia entry on the movie has a bit on the importance of father-son relationships, and that’s undoubtedly a main theme in Ulysses, but again, I don’t see any obvious similarities between the two. The father-son stuff in The Departed couldn’t be less like the issues in Ulysses if it tried. The same goes for the ideas about identity; the theme is present in both, but they really have nothing to do with each other.

So what does this all add up to? In my opinion, not much. It seems like maybe Scorcese was trying to make the Dantean Japanese movie into a Joycean, Bostonian one, but if that’s indeed the case, it didn’t work.

Current Mood: Fair |

I’m actually quite happy that England did not qualify for Euro 2008 by shamefully losing to Croatia at home in a game though only needed to draw. It’s not that I’m anti-England, it’s that I’m pro attractive football—and England has been boring, boring, boring for dogs years. I say, good riddance.

Furthermore, I’m disgusted that Soccern*t splashed out its gigantic header page, the one that they normally reserve for things like the opening day of the World Cup or the final of the European Championship. This was a qualifying game, and neither of the two teams will be winning Euro 2008. Would they have made such a big deal for any other game? Answer: no. And what makes it hilarious is that the only reason it was a big game at all was due to England’s incompetence during the entire qualifying campaign.

This is my plea: can Americans stop paying undue attention to England, please?

Happy Turkey Day

Current Mood: Fine |