I have to say, in a weird self-referential sort of way, that writing these daily missives has done a nice job of focusing me on the weird stuff around me, and making me more receptive to new experiences. When my brother called to see if I wanted to play softball tonight, I didn't have to think twice about it, even though I've never played softball outside of once or twice at a family 4th of July picnic, had no idea where they were playing, and hadn't played or watched baseball in so long that I knew I'd have no idea what to pay attention to strategy-wise. All I knew was that it would push me outside my comfort zone (which otherwise consisted of going home and reading and trying to figure out how to put some darned Prev/Next/Index/Contact buttons on this page. Here's the 1.4 Mb tif. You will get my undying gratitude and a prize package full of wonderfulness from my kitchen drawers of miscellany if you can solve it for me) and give me new perspectives to mull over.

Love the whole new experiences thing, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that before it might have taken me a while to work up the nerve or to take the time to plan something, where now I've got this handy excuse of ScottMcJ to prod myself into quicker action. It's like when you're 13 at your first dance, and all the girls are on one side and all the boys are on the other side, and your friends are pushing and bribing you to go ask her to dance. It is what you want to do anyway, but once you have the smokescreen of pretending you are just doing it for the five bucks, it is easier to get in motion. They always say yes, too. But it never gets any easier to get over there and ask her. Why is that?

You would think that we guys would pick up on the fact that girls are actually very nice and sympathetic. I mean, heck, even when I, tragically geeky and uncoordinated and unable to dance and completely bereft of all rhythm (and there's an absolutely horrible picture from J~'s wedding that I would link to here except that, mercifully, I do not have a copy. Trust me, though. No rhythm. Untrainable) would ask a girl to dance, they always said yes and were always very nice, even as the ambulances were pulling away to take them to get their ankles set. Why don't we get over that fear of failure? Or most of us, anyway. I know a few guys who picked up on the truth and have taken confidence from it. But most people I know are still just like Jr. High/High School kids, clustering on the side of the gym, waiting and begging to be goaded into crossing the floor and asking Valisa to dance.

M~ asked me a few days ago why on earth people reminisce about HS as the best part of their life, and would trade lives in a second to be back in school. I have no idea. You could not pay me enough money to make it worthwhile. The self-consciousness and the shame and the over-analyzing everything that happens and the weird pressures and the trying to figure out who you are and the trying to build a separate identity while still living at home under your parents' rules and on and on and on. I'm okay with where I'm at now, and I realize that what came before was a necessary torture, but no ways would I want to repeat it.

On the other hand, if I could go back as I am now, that would be the best thing ever. I can't find a news article to verify it, but my grandparents were telling me a couple of weeks ago about this young-looking 30yo woman who stayed in high-school since she was 16. Just kept bouncing around from foster home to foster home. Pulled it off for twelve add'l years of high school. On the one hand, sure, it's pathetic. But on the other, isn't that the dream right there? Perpetual childhood and negation of responsibility?

Anyway, on the HS thing, I can't decide if people are romanticizing school years, or if they're just not taking into account that they weren't who they are now, and that they'd have to go through all that creation process again.

Especially given that if you think back, school was the hardest job you've ever had. You got up, bussed to work, dealt with six major projects every day (english, math, language, history, science, elective), had a bare half-hour for lunch, bussed home (and maybe that bus didn't make a million more stops than any bus you've had to ride since!), and then when you get home, you still have another two or three hours of work yet to do! No coming home and putting everything aside and just enjoying yourself, oh no. You had all sorts of extra work that you weren't given any time to even try to do during your regular work day.

After school, every other job should be a cinch. No way could you pay me to do that over. I just don't have the energy or concentration.

Yes, I was definitely thinking a lot about my childhood and adolescence this evening, as I was sitting in left field at the softball game. Thinking about old t-ball games, and how I just didn't get what was happening in the game, praying I wouldn't mess up and cause us to lose the game (what's your childhood worst nightmare? Scoring an own goal has got to be one of my tops. Last Wednesday at hockey I did exactly that. Meant to pass it behind the net, failed to miss the net, and ended up scoring on my own team. I could have died). I remember practicing baseball at the elementary school. I remember going out for and getting cut from the team in Jr High. Sports & Shame go together like Girls & Shame in my life.

Surprisingly, I was very happy to discover that the good parts all came back, and came very quickly and easily to me, and I was even moderately successful. I got on base, I caught a few pop flies, I grabbed a few grounders that got past third base. It was great. The skills came with so little effort compared to being a kid and having to fight for competence in everything you wanted to be good at.

I find that to be true with a lot of things. Stuff that used to be hard or difficult to grasp now just seems to make sense. Maybe it's a wider range of experience, or more muscle memory, or an improved ability to see patterns in things, or just fewer things going on in my life that I'm being asked to absorb and learn, but whatever it is, I feel a lot more capable than I ever did before. Without even really trying to learn or practice, I'm a better chess player now than I was when I was really working at it as a teen.

I wondered if that was part of what makes teenagerhood so difficult. You're moving into this time of increased capabilities where you don't have to practice twice a week down in the schoolyard to be good at baseball (though I also wonder how many of those practices were just to get us out of our parents' hair?). But at the same time, you're not fully there, which would be frustrating, to see that promise but not yet have the execution. Plus, you're still living under rules and restrictions that you didn't choose and which seem quite arbitrary. So you're feeling these huge horizons opening up in front of you, but are battling against both external restrictions and internal holdbacks. How insanely frustrating would that be?

At least now I can say that all my frustrations are internal failings. The causes have been neatly reduced to the single inescapable truth that everything that happens to me is my own fault. It's kind of comforting once you embrace it. You don't feel so put upon, and when you don't like how something is playing out, you know that it's within your power to remedy it. I guess it's some sort of small compensation for not having summers off.