Oct 26 2009
Monday Morning Banalities
1. Series Match-Up – I like a Yankees-Phillies series. First, it’s old school. I don’t know what a Colorado Rocky is, but its only barely a baseball team. In general, I don’t trust baseball teams that purport to represent entire states. That’s right. I said it. A baseball team should represent a city, not a state. Now, before you go off all half-cocked telling me that the New York Yankees and the New York Mets represent the state of New York, let me just stop you. The Yankees were founded long before such nonsense existed – when all teams were indexed to a city. The Mets, for their part, could never be mistaken for representing, say, Watkins Glen, New York, first because they are the Metropolitans, and second because their colors very obviously refer to the colors of the City of New York, and not the state of New York (the nonsense about the Mets colors referring to the Giants and Dodgers old colors is just silly, and hardly worth a mention). So much for that. But Florida? Arizona? Texas? Colorado? This is some new and painfully corporate contrivance meant to produce wide demographic identification (the worst offender appears in another sport – the Carolina Panthers: they don’t even bother restricting themselves to a state). I like World Series when they are Philadelphia v. New York, or Chicago v. Boston, or Detroit v. Los Angeles. This Colorado v. Texas shite has got to go.
Second, these teams are pretty evenly matched. Yankee fans who think the NL team will be a push-over this year, in the style of the hapless 99 Padres, have another thing coming. Indeed, I’d say that Philly is the stronger team at this point, largely because the Yankee offense has been so uneven, especially with runners in scoring position. When the bottom of the line-up hits, and the top of the line-up do their thing, the 09 Yankees are essentially unstoppable. We saw this on display in Game 4 – with all pistons firing, the Angels looked like what they were: a pathetically outmatched team. But there have been real offensive problems, and I don’t just mean Swisher’s performance (though his defense has certainly argued for his continued inclusion in the line-up). The Yankee bats have been iffy at best, which of course can’t be said of the Phillies. NY has been saved by three factors: opponent errors, stellar pitching, and clutch A-Rod. (For just a signal of how A-Rod smacked down Mike Scioscia’s strategy, he was on base five times last night, with two singles and THREE walks, all of which involved Angel pitchers trying to keep the ball the fuck away from his wheelhouse, which itself seems massive at this point. They even walked in a run pitching around A-Rod. Compare games 1 and 2, when Scioscia tried to pitch Rodriguez with impunity, hoping to break his confidence. Bzzzt. Try again next year.) On the other side, of course, is Ryan Howard, who has been tearing up anything in his path since Game 1 of the postseason. Clutch v. clutch. Tight pitching v. tight pitching, and even the Phillies pen didn’t seem all that bad. And Jeter v. Rollins? This should be interesting.
Geez, dude, I didn’t know that you had to go through all that (and of course, I’m trying hard to read between the lines) and wish I weren’t so so oblivious all the time.
I appreciate how you situate the question of ethics (which is how I am interpreting your quesiton about the benefit of the doubt) in the context of both trauma and the structure of institutions. Today, emotionally, I still repeatedly return to traumatic moments in my past — long periods of unemployment between 1994-5, then loosing a job in 1996 due questionable circumsances in which I knew I was at fault but not in a way that warranted the action that was taken (an action that was taken against me but not against others who’d done similar or worse things, and everyone involved admitted that the situation was unfair), repeatedly wanting to quit grad. school between 2003-2006 and hating my own dissertation half the time. I remember having a panic attack once in Japan in 1997 just because something happened that reminded me of how I lost my job — just the reminder was enough to make me feel panic even though in actuality I knew I had nothing to feel panic about. Anyway, all of these events go through my mind at least once a week. I even wrote a story about my experiences in 1994-1996 while in the midst of writing my dissertation a decade later. In some ways I think these events make me a better teacher, because I get the “real” that the theory and the literature is about and because I can connect on that level with students. I remember being asked during a job interview what I thought made me a good teacher, and I answered, “my failures.” Also, in some ways it also makes me a more productive person because I always feel this anxiety that what I have now can be taken from me at any moment unless I’m somehow “better” — more engaged, more engaging, more interdisciplinary, etc. — than everyone else.
Oddly, however, I find myself repeating some of the same risky behavior that led to problems in the past. For instance, being a smartass on faculty list-serves, resisting norms of etiquette and social behavior, my in-your-face radical politics, dropping the F-bomb in class often, overly engaged with extra-curriculars that aren’t recognized by the institution/field as counting towards promotion. You’d think, given my past experiences, I’d want to play it as much by the book as I could in order to avoid having to experience the trauma again, but instead, just the opposite is the case….
Sorry, way too much information for a comment, but your blog post just kind of brought that out of me.