Something unexpected, wonderful and terrifying happened last week: My job actually became interesting and not, like temporarily. I basically figured out the new media angle for my magazine. All of a sudden, there’s a lot of work to do and it’s even kind of… exhilirating.
Anyhow.
Not much else today. I haven’t had a haircut in quite some time. It’s getting funny.
I just finished a game of Scrabble in which I was handed every opportunity to win, and I did. My opponent tends to take losses pretty hard even when he shouldn’t, and there’s no question he thoroughly outplayed me. I got three “bingos” for 150 bonus points, owing to outrageously good tile fortune, and he got only one, for 50. I won by 12. While planning for and around the bingos is certainly part of the game, the higher your score without them, the better lemonade you’ve made. I was going to write him and tell him this, but I know he doesn’t want to hear it—he just wants to win, and would take it as gloating on my part, not because it would be per se but because we’ve been over this enough to understand how he would feel about it.
I have my own blind spots. Yesterday my flag football team lost to the #1 team in the league in an exceptionally close game. We were ranked fourteenth coming in, and as recently as two weeks ago lost 38-0 in our second game. After that, though, something clicked, and we won last week. This week, we held our own and fell apart but most of the team was happy with the result. The one person who wasn’t was me, and no one could figure it out, because I had played at least (objectively) a decent game as quarterback. The only problem was I threw two interceptions on our “girl plays”—the mandatory once-per-four-down plays that must go to a female—when I vowed not to throw picks at the outset. One teammate couldn’t figure out why I was so down about it until he mentioned it to the quarterback of another team at the postgame bar roundup. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You NEVER forget interceptions.” And at that point my teammate knew that there was nothing he could say to me to make me forget them, even if it wasn’t the end of the world. It’s just one of those things.
If I felt bad yesterday, I can’t imagine what Peyton Manning is going to feel like for the next 50 years.
When I was younger, I once lamented to a friend that some day we’d have to give up video games. I meant that we’d have to grow up, and growing up likely did not involve them, and he looked at me like I was crazy. “I’ll still play video games when I’m an adult,” he said, and he was the last person I expected to hear say that.
I think we were both right. I was just in his wedding, and I think that’s a conclusive sign of some sort of maturity, especially at our age. And at the wedding he told me how much he loves Tiger Woods 10 for the Wii. Full disclosure: I had never really played the Wii until his bachelor party this summer, and even then we were playing just the rinky-dink yet amazing games that come with the system. I returned from the bachelor party (at the Jersey Shore!) on Sunday. Monday, on my way home from work, I went to Target and bought a Wii… and had immediate buyer’s remorse which didn’t quite go away with hours of playing Wii Tennis, so I basically shelved it for awhile. After the wedding I wanted the Tiger Woods game, though, but it never came up again until another friend wanted to decompress after a Business School exam last Friday and suggested we take some swings. The Wii Sports games can only amuse you for so long, so I suggested I should just buy the Tiger Woods game, and I did.
We had a great time playing the game, but when the friend left, I was struck by something like a remorse that went beyond just the $80 I spent on the game and controller upgrade. It was a deep shame, really, that I was 32 years old and spending money on a video game to be played primarily by myself, behind closed doors, something I had long sworn that I wouldn’t do. I had played video games in the years since high school, and played a lot of them, but I always played them with people: They were a form of social interaction, however lowbrow. Now I was living alone, and spent a bunch of money I could have spent on picture frames or art or whatever on a game that simulates a sport I don’t even like.
So what happened? I played the everliving shit out of the game. After avoiding it for a few days based on actual, full-time work, I popped it in Tuesday night and played about 60 holes. I might have been ashamed at myself for doing so, but I wasn’t about to stop. Not that night anyway. I put aside plans to go to the gym (because I’m running a four-mile race Sunday morning with little training) until Wednesday. I woke up Wednesday with sore arms, which I thought would be an impediment to playing the game more and push me to the treadmill, which I loathe more than the real game of golf (at least you’re doing something). I was wrong. I played 120 holes.
On Thursday, my arms were sorer than before, and I planned all day to come home and play the game, but when I got home, I just couldn’t do it very effectively. I missed shots I could have made and realized that I simply had played too much, and in doing so saw where I had matured and still had room to grow up.
Do I still think video games are the provenance of children, on a fundamental level? Yes. But I think the bigger concern is the attitude one takes toward video games. If I was “missing” the shots I was “missing” yesterday 10 years ago, I would have been furious at myself, even if I didn’t want to admit it. Everything I did at any moment had to be perfect, which was the source of my problems; it wasn’t that I was playing too much XBox. Getting over that was one stage of maturity, and most assuredly a more important one that simply “not playing video games” in order to give me some false sense of maturity. My friend is naturally more even-keeled than I am, and spent more of his early twenties sitting around playing video games than I did without any sort of deleterious effect, but I suspect that married life won’t give him decreasing opportunities to wield the “club.” It’s probably waning as we speak, but maybe his rounds on the “course” are the few refuges from full-onset adulthood—ones that he most certainly knows, and fully accepts, are fleeting.
For me, playing the shit out of this game has had the opposite effect. I was so determined to “grow up” that I tried to just go around a very fundamental step: Living comfortably on my own, doing the same things I did as a child, and seeing their limits clear enough to transcend them. Playing Tiger Woods 10 fills my time with something that is necessarily worse than what I’d like to replace it with, but it’s better than avoid playing it on the grounds that doing nothing will lead me there.
For reasons I can’t properly explain, the Miley Cyrus song “Party in the USA” is stuck in my head, only that’s not what I’m hearing. I’m hearing “Party in the USDA,” and I’m imagining smocked, hair-capped, and plastic-gloved meat inspectors jamming to the song. I often rewrite songs in my head, but usually I just insert the word “chickens,” in honor of the nickname of my childhood dog, into the lyrics. I think this is a sign of perhaps not having grown up as much as I like to think I have done, which is fine. Or maybe in this specific instance it’s just a defense mechanism so that I won’t have to admit I *actually* have a Miley Cyrus song in my head, one that I’m fairly sure I’ve never heard from beginning to end.
I also thought about going with USTA, but thinking of the US Open crowd listening to the song seemed a little too on-the-mark.
Politico is a good website to visit if something big just happened and you want news on it. Question Time would be a good example. Otherwise it’s like the WWE: Every day the top news story the BIGGEST STORY EVER! THE REPUBLICANS ARE WINNING! THE DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING! And so forth.
I understand how this could be an extremely valuable tool inside the Beltway. It strikes me as colossally stupid outside of it.
There have been two relatively high-profile rule changes in the NFL this year. The first rule is that there are no more “incidental” facemask grapping penalties, which used to be 5 yards; all facemask penalites are now 15-yard personal fouls. The second rule is that a player can no longer be judged to have been “forced out” of bounds when trying to get his feet in the playing field while making a catch. The refs could previously judge whether or not the player “would have” gotten his feet down if he is knocked out of bounds while in air, but the NFL removed that rule this year. The rules changes have one thing in common: it takes a subjective judgment out of the refs’ hands. The goal of the rules is to reduce the number of qualitative judgments that are necessary on the field in favor of the number of quantitative judgments. It is a good system.
I have been thinking about the NFL and its constant rules-tinkering as I’ve been reading about America’s torture laws, and how John Yoo and others won’t be face penalties for writing briefs that permitted the U.S. to torture people while George W. Bush was in office. While a panel found that Yoo used “poor judgment” in creating his briefs, it found that he did not act outside of the purview of the law; he had not, then, extended executive power beyond its actual borders. This is a load of horseshit, the equivalent of ignoring what was once a five-yard facemask penalty on Yoo and excusing the harsher penalty because the intent was not believed to be bad enough. There is no room for question of intent here. It is illegal to torture. A law was broken, and the penalty must be paid, the same way NFL coaches do not get to unilaterally decree that certain rules do not apply to them. When rules are broken, people must be held accountable, otherwise the rules were not really broken.
I am flabbergasted that a judgment of “poor judgment” itself can even be rendered here. While our President strives to overturn the binary nature of our politics, this is a situation where it actually exists for our own good. What has happened here is an epic failure of our legal system, and should shake our nation to its core.
I don’t think any other show taps the potential of the Internet as well as Lost does, by intentionally sending its viewers on these wild goose chases to learn ancient and modern theories and philosophy in the service of trying to figure out what’s happening on a television show. Shoot, Lost is the only reason I read Flannery O’Connor, which means Lost is the only reason I’ve argued with Mik about Flannery O’Connor, and thus is the only reason I’ve read emails Mary Gaitskill sent to Mik about Flannery O’Connor, and is thus the only reason I’ve then re-read Flannery O’Connor to see how my interpretations match with Mik’s and Mary Gaitskill’s interpretations of Flannery O’Connor. Pushing it further, Lost is the only reason I mentioned Flannery O’Connor to my former roommate James, who said she was his favorite author. And all that is based on three seconds of screentime last spring. I’m not a nut to figure out what everything “means” on Lost, because I know full well that if you’re trying to “solve” it through hidden clues UR DOIN IT RONG, but I was without a book to read at the time, saw Jacob reading a F O’C joint, and bought it. Now I know enough to hold my own in a conversation with serious English Literature hedz. Thanks for jumping out that window, John Locke. Keep plucking that chicken.
If you want to read some good recaps—and Lost is the one show where the recap is, if not crucial, certainly helpful for you to get to whatever level of understanding you desire (even if it intentionally slows your roll)—go here or here or here.
If I’m reading this correctly, more than $6 trillion worth of national debt is excluded from the budget because it’s from Frannie and Freddie, which aren’t 100 percent government entities but are enough such that Peter Orszag, before he was actually making the budget, said:
We are saying that the degree of control exercised by the federal government over these entities is so strong that the best treatment is to incorporate them into the federal budget.
So I guess my claim that the budget was boring was a lie. It’s the budget that’s a lie.
For all the talk about obstructionist politicians acting like children, it sure seems like us regular old citizens are often treated like kids. Rover’s on a farm upstate, playing with other dogs.
I’m sorry if that sounds cynical, because I’m not cynical about it. I’m not sure it matters much if the debt is $6 trillion or $12 trillion as long as there’s an underlying process for fixing the whole thing. It just seems that either the process is so big it’s hard to explain, even in a State of the Union address, or that there’s a fear that suddenly $12 trillion is politically radioactive because of this country’s fear of two-digit numbers (or 14, as it were). I’m not as afraid of a little or a lot of debt, or even a little more of it, as I am of being systematically shut out of the process. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to be included. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. I appreciate the difficulty of governing, but the inches we give to government seem to turn into miles so quickly that it’s clearly not us who are being irresponsible. Anyone who says that this sort of deception is part of the job of governing clearly isn’t really trying to change things.
At the same time, I still think Obama is doing a great job. I think that this, like health care, represents a negative the GOP is already going to hold against him, so he might as well just come out and give us the damage. I think he’s trying to forestall a tipping point that passed a long time ago. If the Republicans don’t believe in truths, half-truths aren’t going to help you any. If you really want to change the conversation, change it. You might be able to win without doing so, and we’ll be better for it, but not as good as we could be.
h/t to Wolves on the link
Bryan Joiner 