Saturday, August 21, 2004

Why is it?

I'm wondering why some people can be incredibly cool in some situations and then total jackasses in others. What makes a person lose their temper, lose their control when confronted by challenging obstacles? I take challenges personally and I internalize them. I don't hold grudges. I do my best and if my best isn't good enough I keep doing my best until it is good enough.

I know I think too much. I know I generalize on these pages. I know that most of you have no idea what I'm talking about. I don't know why I don't name names and detail experiences like other bloggers do. I guess it's that the things I write about are generalizations of everyone's experiences, or at least I'd like to think that they are.

I was talking to a friend last night and he was concerned about sounding pretensious. Even though we were discussing pychological and philosophical issues in which pretensiousness is almost a prerequisite. I don't fault people for not wanting to seem pretensious, though at some point we all are somewhat pretensious. I want to let that friend know that our discussion was enlightening and interesting. His depth of analysis really astounded me. I can only hope that he continues in life as a free thinker.

I have another friend with whom I was chatting this morning. He did the typical friday night thing: went to a club, got drunk, took a female home and had sex. Usually I'd be pretty happy for the guy. But in this case he was stupid. He has some form of hepatitis, I'm not sure which one. Yet he didn't feel the need to communicate this to the female that he had sex with. She could not make an informed decision regarding her participation in the sex. Yeah, I have a huge problem with that. I equate what my friend did to taking a partner home, putting on a blindfold and randomly shooting a handgun around the room. The female has a chance of not getting sick, a chance of not beoming infected with this particular type of hepatitis, but also she has a chance of contracting this disease. Please people, if you are too drunk to have an open dialogue about your illnesses, don't have sex. There are too many people in this world that are the unwilling and unwitting recipients of diseases such as hepatitis and AIDS because of a partner that is too embarassed, too drunk or too self-centered to discuss their predicament.

I am continually surprised by the human body and it's limitations. Last night I played in a round-robin roller hockey tournament. There were three teams, each with six players and a goalie. My team played the first two games, had a game off and then played the final two games. That's right, four games in one evening. The first game we won. I'm not sure how we won the game because the team we played against had alot of high-calibre players. They could shoot, pass and skate circles around us almost at will. The second game we lost, we just didn't have the energy to compete against the fresh legs of that team. We rested during the third game of the evening.

We played the fourth game and had a come from behind victory. The team was on fire. Everyone was skating, everyone was talking, everyone was back-checking. It was a thing of beauty to behold. I've never been so proud of a team as I was after that game. We were tired, we were sweaty, our legs were like jello and were were victorious. I could have cried. After the game when we were shaking hands with the other team, one of them decides to talk a bunch of smack to one of my teammates. It looked like it was getting serious, so I grabbed the guy from the other team and skated him away.

"Get the F*** off of me." He said.

"Back off." I said.

This went on for a few minutes, until he decided that backing off was a pretty wise thing to do. I let him go and nothing else happened. It felt good sticking up for my teammate (who is also one of my best friends) and though I know he could have handled the situation, I don't let people step up on any of my friends.

By this time we were dead tired. I guess exhaustion is a better name for what we were experiencing. I've been truly mentally and physically exhausted only a few times, most of which were in my Marine Corps days. I think that the everyone on the team was running close to the "E" after the third game. Two minutes of rest and the fourth game was on. This was the championship game, every thing was riding upon this one single, solitary game. We would win or lose based solely upon our performance in this last game.

They got a quick goal and deflated us early. We started chasing them and stopped playing our game. We were tired and made many mistakes, which they capitalized upon each and every time. We'd lose a faceoff and they'd score. We, or more appropriately I, would make a defensive coverage mistake and they'd score. I felt like crap. We stopped talking to each other in lieu of yelling. Instead of playing the patient passing game we started playing the "one man against the whole team" game. In real life hockey isn't like a video game, but when you're tired you make critical mistakes. With 7:37 left in the third I approached the face-off circle, mid-court. I started my Patton-esque speech. "There's seven thirty seven left in this game boys, you guys gonna live or are you gonna roll over and die?" I won the face-off back to my guy, he passed it across to the other D. Two guys chased him, he found me in the seam, I used their D as a screen and shot it high stick side. SCORE!!!!! I got back into the face-off circle. "There's seven minutes and seven seconds left in this game boys, do you wanna live or do you want to roll over and die?" I won it back to my guy. He couldn't find the opposite D, the other team was wise to what we were trying to do. We struggled for the next few minutes. I was the walking, skating and living dead. I went to the bench. I could barely lift my legs to climb in.

We lost the game. We came in second. Second out of three teams. I could sit here and complain about this or complain about that but the truth is that we were out of gas. We didn't have the energy to beat them. And they played a great game. I know they were tired too, but they really took it to us. My hat's off to everyone on my team: Jamie, Jan, Jason, Juan, Mike and Pat. You guys gave it your best. My hat's off to the winning team: Andrew, Chris, Chuck, Jay, Jono, Kevin and Tucker. You guys played a great game!

That's all for now I think.

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