Rebecca Hates Sports

I am not a girly girl. I know the difference between a miter saw and a router, and I am pretty sure I have been wearing eyeliner incorrectly for the past fifteen years. But if someone so much as underhand throws a partially deflated beach ball in my direction, I instantly sprout press-on nails and a mini skirt and squeal, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeee! That ball-thing is going to kill meeeee!”

How do I hate sports? Let me count the ways:

1.       I hate playing sports. I have foggy memories of some sort of T-ball set up, but I don’t know how that panned out. And maybe Bocce? Hmmm. That seems unlikely. I really should interview my parents on the subject and get back to you.

     

      Yes, college freshman three weeks into your Psych 101 class, I hate sports because I am bad at them. Good job. Clap, clap, clap. 

      You would think I would be a good athlete. I am a good runner and have oddly long legs for my height. My husband can’t get into fifth gear when I am in the passenger seat. I wish that was a reference to some strange sex move, but it isn’t. Anyway, he has dubbed me “The Crane Wife”. Again, not a sex move. Pervs.

2.       I hate watching sporting events. Whether live or televised, being a spectator at a sporting event is my idea of Dante-style Purgatory. American football is particularly dreadful. Everything happens in fifteen-second intervals. Then it all stops and thick-necked men in suits bray unsolicited conjecture on what they should have done, and which player is most valuable. Games last for hours. The viewers get angry and eat lots of chips. I have often thought that one could put a herd of bison in jerseys and let them wander around the field, grazing and pooping and getting spooked by air horns and it would look pretty much the same. 

      Because of my membership in the marching band, I attended every single football game for my four years of high school. The ONLY THING I REMEMBER from those four years is the low brass getting in trouble for playing “Another One Bites the Dust” when football players got injured and had to be taken off the field.

     

      I went to a Cincinnati Reds game once and found it such a bewildering cacophony of advertisements and giant screens that I could barely focus on the microscopic players scurrying around, spitting, and slapping one another’s rears far below.

3.       Sports movies are all terrible. They are all exactly the same and horribly predictable. A motley crew of mismatched losers and a coach with some personal problem come together and either Win the Big Game Against All Odds OR Lose the Big Game But It Doesn’t Matter Because They Grew So Much As People. Lots of balls flying through the air in slow motion. Gah. 

      The only exception would be A League of Their Own, for obvious reasons. Field of Dreams is okay. 

      Does Alien vs. Predator count as a sports movie? 

      I think it should. 

Chuck Wendig Fills Me With Ire

For you sillies who don’t know, Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. I was lured in by one of his blog posts that my sister-in-law put up on Facebook. It was about raising small children and it was irreverently hilarious, unlike most parenting blogs, which are sentimental, boring, and preachy. Like a sucker, I subscribed to it, http://terribleminds.com/ramble/blog/. Well. He does write about funny kid stuff; but primarily he dishes out writerly wisdom for the Ambitiously Scribulous. That, that is the salt in the wound, the sriracha in the tear duct, the sand in the bikini bottoms. Let me tell you a bit about myself.

In college, I worked at a coffee shop, didn’t shave anything or wear a bra, and thought that having children contributed to overpopulation and was evil. Since then I have revised my personal philosophy and spawned three ridiculous children who will almost certainly make the world a better place. Well, the middle one might explode it. I caught her frenching an electrical outlet the other day. And before you say anything, there was an outlet cover. She knows how to pull those out. Anyway.

At this juncture in the space-time continuum, I am teaching high school English online whilst mommying said three children. I would not change it for the world; but it is pretty stressful. I work in say, four to ten minute-long intervals, bookended by someone needing something. Crackers, Neosporin, rescue from mortal peril. All day every day. I mean, I’m not going to Shutter Island them or anything; but they drive me legit bonkers.

Like every English teacher worth her or his salt, I secretly think I am a good writer. I would commit messy, badly-planned murder for a year to just WRITE. I wanna be Annie Proulx, Douglas Adams, Chuck Palahniuk, Charlotte Bronte, Kurt Vonnegut. But who doesn’t? I tell myself that all of the little outlines hanging out in the “Writing” folder on my desktop could be fleshed out into some really good stuff. I tell myself I could bang out a short novel in a few months, if I had the chance to just write.  In the meantime, and because I fear failure, I tell no one about the writing. Shhhh. Enter Chuck Wendig.

If you are serious about writing, you’ll make it happen, he says. 

Saying you don’t have enough time is just an excuse, he says.

Get to it and write, he says. 

And that, that is why Chuck Wendig Fills Me With Ire. Since I have subscribed to his devil-blog, his spirit has been wafting about my house on Cupid wings, peppering me with delightfully crass anatomical insults like Dick Tit and Ass Gnome. Actually, I came up with those, but he would totally say them.

But the point is he bothers me because I want to write but I am REALLY QUITE BUSY. I honestly think that I don’t have the physical coordination to cram anything else into my life. Right now, for example, I am gazing at what appears to be an underfed spider monkey demonstrating the Pile Driver on an indifferent pony keg. My eyes focus and I realize that it is just the middle child repeatedly body-slamming the baby. Should probably attend to that.

To silence the Wendig-demon, I have decided to join the league of d-bags who have a blog. I make no commitment to post on a regular basis. I might not ever post again. Who knows?

My three year old pops her curly blonde head up next to my computer.

“Whatcha doin’, Mommeee?”

I minimize the browser with the guilty start of a busted porn connoisseur.

“What? Nothing. Drugs. Mommy’s doing drugs.”

So there you have it.

Bloggity blog.