GoldbergBlog

Blog Shift

For a long time, I’ve tried to make sure that this blog isn’t personal.  I did this for several reasons:

1) I thought my life was boring.  This is still mostly true but my internal life is fascinating.

2) I thought people wanted useful information or a distraction, not to read about my navel-gazing (for those wondering, my navel is great).

3) It’s fun for me to write about me.

Yes, I am my most favorite topic. I blame this narcissism as an inherited trait from my Grandma Edye (Happy Birthday, Grandma Edye!  Seriously, today is her birthday and I’m calling her a narcissist, but she doesn’t have the Internet so it’s okay!) and as such, cannot be held responsible for this self-indulgence.

“But Matt!” I hear you exclaim (deep in your soul; that’s right: I hear souls) “Won’t writing about your personal life endanger both your job prospects and/or personal relationships?”

First, any job that would care about my personal blog would not hire me in the first place.  I’m not qualified enough or tight-ass enough to get past the application.  Second, this blog isn’t about other people.  It’s about me.  Don’t look for any interpersonal drama because I don’t tend to hang out with other people on a regular basis and when I do, it’s mainly drama-free.  Some people live lives of great intrigue and duplicity.  That seems like a lot of work.  I like chilling out, cracking jokes, and trying not to die inside.

I’m a guy with a lot to say but I’m poor at articulating ideas on the fly.  For instance, I was trying to tell a friend about anything interesting in my life recently and my mind was preoccupied with firing off anti-personnel rounds into splicers (not slang).  But even when I’m not playing Bioshock, relating tales of daily events doesn’t go well because I don’t encounter real-world drama.  But without such events, does that make my life uninteresting and unmemorable?  I don’t think so because the way I think about the world is still amusing, despite my inaction on that world.  I try to engage in real-world interactions and activities.  It’s just that when I do, it tends to go…poorly.

For instance, this past Sunday I played my first game of kickball in about fourteen years.  By the end, I learned some very important lessons.  The most important lesson was that friends don’t tell you you’re out of shape.  They invite you to join their kickball league and let you find out for yourself.  As I was on the verge of passing out and having my heart explode, I could feel 10-year-old Matt looking at me in disgust.  “You ruled this game in 4th grade!  You blew it!  You were the kickball king and you blew it!”  It wasn’t just that running to catch the ball was exhausting.  No, I was terrible at just about every aspect: I couldn’t catch the ball.  I couldn’t kick the ball.  I couldn’t throw the ball.  Basically, I was deficient at just about every basic skill you needed to play kickball.

Ironically, I signed on not for the exercise but to get out and meet people.  I don’t go to bars or clubs.  Those are places built on pretense and guile and I don’t have the time, patience, or tolerance for that behavior.  I tried it a few years back and it’s just not me.  It’s all too contrived and it reminds me of dancing in that if you’re good at it, you’ll have a lot of fun, but if you have no rhythm and sense of timing, you’ll be too busy trying to remember the steps to enjoy yourself.  So the alternative is group activities and here was an opportunity that presented itself.  I remembered Stephen Colbert’s advice from his commencement speech at Knox College that it’s good to say “Yes and…” (and yes, I draw my wisdom from the commencement speeches of late night comedians) because it makes for opportunities and new adventures.  I accepted the invitation and prepared for kickball glory.  I didn’t think far enough ahead to “Meeting people is great but first you have to make a good first impression,” Ending a kickball game on the verge of death is not a good first impression.  Manly qualities that chicks dig aren’t conveyed as you gasp for life and have cholesterol oozing out your skin.  Furthermore, never in my life has my athletic prowess been one of my defining characteristics.  Sports don’t get give me the chance to show off my humor, my passion, or my collection of interesting t-shirts.  Sports just irritate my competitive spirit and then put me into a losing battle since I’m 5’7″ and have no muscle mass.

Matters were not helped by the opposing team.  My assumption about the league were that teams were made up of people that just came out to goof off and have some fun on a Sunday afternoon.  Maybe as the season progresses, I’ll encounter such teams.  But we, the Lumberjacks (I’m psyched to be on a team called The Lumberjacks but I think for the $50 a slapped down to join the league, the team name should at least be on the t-shirt instead of the twenty-odd corporate logos), were up against the Five-tool Players who are apparently working to get accepted into the International Kickball Invitational which will be watched the world over on The Ocho.  They had a squadron of players as opposed to the measly seven of us that had to play every inning and would have to kick through every line-up if we didn’t get out so easily.  Of course, it’s hard to get on base when there are nine people covering just 150 square-feet.

But this is my quandry: despite how badly I sucked, I want to be better.  I’m too competitive to just do this for fun, especially if all the other teams are taking this seriously.  I want to compete and not lose 148 to 1.  No one on my team was really able to explain to me how getting beatdown on a Sunday afternoon was a fun time.  Or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear them because my ears were filled with blood.  All I know is that my thighs hurt like hell and my pride’s not much better.  But hey, at least I got to meet some new people and showed off my poor sportsman ship and horrifying physique.  That’s a win in my book.

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