Losing...

I think we warp our kids today.

A few weeks ago I was at my nephews baseball game. He was pitching. And well... when his team was at bat, they were rocking the other team. However, when they got to 6 runs, they stopped batting and switched sides. Apparently it is some mercy rule so everyone gets a chance.

WTF?

When I was 12, my baseball team scored 30 runs by the 4th inning and we proceeded to turn soft and finished winning 35 to nothing in 7 innings, which is all they would let us play back then anyway. 7 full innings, winner take all.

And the funny thing, we laughed, we joked... we rocked that other team and we all said at the end when we shook hands, "Good game!" Both teams... Good game... even though we slaughtered the shit out of the other team. We went on to be league champions that year and the other team, well... ha, they won a couple games but finished last. Every two years you went to a new team anyway and I was on the losing team when I was 13. So what...

I think about the difference of the winner take all attitude and this feeble mercy bullshit and think it is such a joke.

I had the good fortune of sitting next to a 2 year old on the plane last night. He was watching Cars and kept having his mom fast forward to the races to see Lightning McQueen win. Here, in the first 5 minutes of the movie, Pixar creates a likeable but seriously arrogant, narcissist who is hell bent on winning. And kids cheer the whole time!

Then he loses!

Then there is this whole side story of character development until finally he gets to the big race and WINS!! Disney magic.

Shit... What about the other cars? What about their feelings? Are they evil? Are they to be discarded because they are other colors and just not as good as Lightning McQueen's red paint? Pixar creates a winner, a winning attitude and a winning movie about winning when the times get tough and how while we are all supposed to be nice in shame, but overcome our losses to be the big winner.

Totally contradicts youth sports today and their stupid rules.

Win dammit!!!

The Babe Ruth Post...

I have this often reoccurring dream that hit me again last night. It comes in various forms and sometimes it is quite terrifying.

I am in college. I know this because the dream has the setting of my college in various forms... in the Music School... the Business School or some nasty ass dorm food dispenser.

Anyhow... I have this dream where I have this really really tough schedule. I am taking the max units and I have trouble running back and forth from the classes. One of which is this math class, which quite frankly I never had to take in college because I took Calculus in high school and I took some math class to get out of it. Or it was masked somewhere with one of my music theory classes or that worthless inferential statistics class. I don't know... Whatever.

Well I have this math class in my schedule in the dream. And anything could be happening in this dream and suddenly I have to go to math. In this math class, it is all way fucking hard math that I just do not want to donate my time too. And not only in these dreams, do I "blow off" the rest of math because it is so damn hard... I freaking forget to go and I have this big fat "F" on my report card because I forget to drop the class.

I noticed that today, in the real world, I woke up stressed to the fucking max today. And I had the dream last night. Am I forgetting to "drop something" before I fail?

I have to be in the SLC and So Cal this week... With a rapidly approaching baby.

714... and counting...