Duck Season, Wabbit Season. Baseball SEASON!!

Do you smell that? It's a combination of beer, mustard, naugahyde, and HGH.

It's Baseball season! My favorite time of year. When the spring training games end and the games actually start to mean something. When grown men run onto a field and get paid millions of dollars to play the same exact game I grew up playing. When the records are all 0-0 and the Padres and Mariners have the same chance as the Yankees and Red Sox, for a weekend or two anyway.

In a year where there might be no football season, it makes the baseball season and its opener all the more exciting for me. Play ball!

Duck Rape Orgy, Apparently

I was sitting on my balcony when all of a sudden a Tasmanian Devil-esque cloud of feathers flew down to the grass right below me. I caught this out of the corner of my eye and walked to the edge of the balcony to see what the hell it was. It was three ducks. Two of the males were fighting over the one female while the female made repeated attempts to get away from both of them. I couldn't quite tell if one of the males was trying to fight the other off of the female or if he was trying to get him off of her so that he could rape her...It was a confusing, frenzied feather-filled five minutes.

The funniest part is that they all flew away in another cloud of feathers and five minutes later, the police walked by because there was a scheduled building inspection this afternoon and all I wanted to yell was, "Where were you five minutes ago?! There was a duck being raped and you could have stopped it!!"

Small Wonders

Sometimes it seems to me that the status quo is indestructible. I'm not sure if this is objective reality or just a matter of perception, but it always seems like when you take two steps forward here, you take two steps backward somewhere else.

In the grand scheme of things, it even seems like nothing revolutionary ever happens. In those moments when you seem to have an epiphany and sense that you are actually close to achieving something you have always wanted to, something brings you crashing back down to reality. I think it is just the idealistic expectation that causes this, because so many times, it turns out that it wasn't a debilitating crash because it was never an epiphany to begin with. We are always looking for these giant leaps rather than simply taking small steps to get somewhere. It always seems like we are unhappy when it actually takes time and work to achieve something and I'm one of the worst culprits of this.

I heard someone on the radio today say that "happiness is reality divided by expectations." I couldn't and didn't try to say it better myself.

Another quote comes to mind as a mantra that I might try to rid myself of this terrible little "silver pill" syndrome. I call it a "silver pill" syndrome because it seems like a lot of people, especially Americans want everything delivered to them in one easy to swallow pill that requires no time or skill or effort to achieve. I picture silver because it matches the hue of the platter it's carried in on in my caricature. I think it would be beneficial to pull away from this complex of huge leaps and concentrate on taking some smaller steps. To do that, I think I might turn to an old cliche from Lao Tzu as a mantra:

"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

Irish I was Irish...Oh wait, I am!

The one thing I love about being Irish is that we don't care who claims to be Irish. I don't think I've ever heard someone call someone out for celebrating St. Patrick's because they aren't Irish. I love St. Patrick's Day because everyone is Irish today if you want to be. It's the closest I get to being proud of my ethnicity. I still can't be proud of something I had no control over and was just an accident of birth.

I love the inclusiveness though. A day that celebrates complete unity of nationality; a day when everyone is Irish if they want to be!

"What'd you say? You're Japanese? who cares?! Today you can be Irish too! What? you don't wanna be Irish? Eh, that's alright! You still drink alcohol, right?! Ok, then have a Guinness and be Japanese! Happy St. Patrick's Day!"

Apathy! (and other Addictive Oxymorons)

We're all addicts. Some addictions are more outright dangerous than others: Heroin, Cocaine, Crack...etc. But the way our brain works, we're all psychologically dependent on something. It all just depends on what that is that you are chasing. It doesn't even necessarily has to be a bad thing. There are so many things we are addicted to and everyone is slightly different.

sex addiction
love addiction
television addiction
puzzle addiction
music addiction
noise addiction
social addiction
isolation addiction
travel addiction
power addiction
money addiction
intimacy addiction
popularity addiction
relationship addiction
food addiction
clean addiction
work addiction

Pick your poison, but we need things psychologically. Personally, I'm an intimacy addict. It ties into relationship and love addiction. I always need to be around someone who I'm close to. If I'm not, I'm generally unhappy. That's the rub. These paragons of our lives dictate our happiness. If you are addicted to two different things, you are actually kind of lucky. You are less likely to be without two things than only one. Because, as an addict, being in the absence of your own little drug is when you become miserable. Although it is easier to be happy with only one addiction, because if it is present, everything else becomes simple. Everything else fades into the background.

The odd phenomenon is that the thing we are addicted to usually becomes the hardest thing to achieve. Detachment is the better part of achievement. It's why when you place so much importance on something you usually fail and watch someone who doesn't give a shit about it get exactly what you wanted. The best part of this is that normally you are achieving their heart's desire without even realizing it simply because you don't give a shit about it.

The word was "Good", not "God"

Sometimes I think the word "God" was a typo. Sometimes I wonder if all of religion and spirituality from the time of its birth was actually a gross misunderstanding; a bad accent or someone talking with their mouthful.

Especially when you consider that the whole concept of "God" revolves around goodness. In regard to the thought of good versus evil and the thought of God versus Devil, and the fact that God is supposed to be beneficent, the ultimate paragon of goodness and morality, just makes me think about this possibility further. Don't get me wrong, I get that the idea of deities was around before the idea of one God, but the idea that morality and good versus evil was embodied in one creator surfaced with monotheism. I think that the possibility lies in the origins of monotheistic tendencies.

Someone may have been sitting around one day. Maybe he was a writer, or a philosopher. He was thinking about the nature of good and evil, and waxing philosophic about it. Maybe his name was Brian or Jesus. He engaged in discussions with people around him about his ideas regarding the dichotomy between good and evil. The fact that the epitome of good was something we could never completely understand because of relative perspectives. One of his followers misheard the word but not the sentiment.

"Ahhh, so this 'God' is a mystery we will never understand. We can use that to explain things we don't understand and we won't have to think about them anymore! You, sir, are a genius, what was your name again? Jesus? Nah, Jesusians doesn't really have a great ring to it....what was your last name? Christ? Christians....that could work!"

And a discussion about good and evil transcends into God and religion's origins. Not saying it is true, I just think it's possible.

The Truth about False

The uncomfortable truth is that more people are hurt by people telling the truth than by people telling lies. Don't get all excited, you liars. I'm not taking your side, the sole reason this is true is that most lies never actually come to light. When they do, it's pretty much double the blow as it would have been had you just been honest in the first place. But since it is relatively rare, the sheer amount of people being hurt by the truth just easily surpasses those hurt by lies. It is an uncomfortable truth and one that I have never been able to stomach very easily or adapt to very well. I'm not good at those little white lies that keep people happy even though they themselves know it's not true. And trust me, I seem to hurt many more people than my friends to whom it comes like second nature to lie about little things.

Apocalypse

I think we all have our own apocalypses.

Zen and the Art of Fixing my Own Bicycle

There is a permeating mentality that I see more and more of lately: "Let someone else do it." I have it with certain things. But with most things, I like to think I take the punishment for what I get myself into, rather than try to weasel out of it. Probably wishful thinking, but there is at least one area in which I can say that I am to a stubborn extent.

If I want to buy the cheapest, crappiest bicycle possible, then I'm going to deal with it rather than bringing it back to the store and returning it. For the last week, my neighbors have seen me outside with the bike turned upside down, working on its brakes because they were installed wrong. Everybody keeps on telling me to just bring it back and return it. But you know what, I knew what I was getting into when I got the cheapest bicycle there was at the cheapest store there was. I'm gonna fix it myself. It's just the way I am.

Ever since college, one of my favorite stories is when I got home from class one day, my then roommate informed me in a decently distressed tone that the kitchen cupboard door had come loose and wouldn't close, just hang down from the hinge. He told me that he called building and grounds about it and said they weren't going to be able to get to it for a while.

I looked at him like he had 4 heads. I couldn't believe he called B&G for something as simple as a loose hinge. I promptly walked into my room, pulled out my cordless drill, walked into the kitchen and fixed the cupboard door in what amounted to a good 10 seconds of work. My roommate proceeded to look at me like I had 4 heads, astounded by my "aptitude for carpentry". I screwed in a loose screw....

So I've not been as successful with my bicycle, but I'm going to keep trying if it kills me...and if my brakes don't work while I'm riding it one day, it actually might kill me. But I don't care, right now it is sitting in the other room with a piece of gum MacGyver'd in between the cantilever brake system. I'm hoping when it dries, it will push the brake wire far enough to tighten the mechanism and pull the brake flush against the wheel. Probably won't work, but damn if I'll stop trying!