Let’s talk about 2008.

Fuck it, I give in. Let’s talk about what I want to get done. That way, you can have a good laugh on December 31st, 2008.

Grad School: Finish, obviously. I only have one grade from this semester so far but I think I pulled some pretty decent numbers out of my ass. No procrastinating – I have one semester to do this. I need to look for an internship in the next couple of months that will satisfy that requirement of my Masters program. When that gets done, voila! I have another piece of paper to my name. And, presumably, a real job and a future. This time next year I’ll have something resembling a real life, which is at the same time frightening and exciting. I think I’m ready.

Dreisini Softball: Win the competitive division at Stony Brook in my last year. Avenge our loss in the 2005 title game to Chico’s Bail Bonds. Hit .500 with a .750 slugging percentage during our summer league and at the very least win a division championship with Dreisini. I hit .433/.517 last season. I can do this, especially if I get back to working out  (I’ve missed 2+ weeks, lazy ass that I am) and avoid any massive 1-15 slumps. As for our team, I believe in it. I feel good about these two paragraphs.

Last but not least, the big complicated one, my personal life: I think I’ve done a good job of sorting myself out lately. I’m not apologizing for who I am anymore. I does what I does, and I’m cool with that. However, as recent events remind me, I still do inexplicably dumb things sometimes. I need to not over-analyze things and get myself in trouble with people I shouldn’t be getting myself in trouble with. I am an over-thinker when I have too much time to myself, and I hate that. I just need to stay out of my own way, because really, things aren’t all that bad for me.

Additionally, I’m not going to say “I want a girlfriend ” because that’s silly and sets me up for disappointment (besides implying a sense of entitlement, some would say). I’m just going to be myself and not get too caught up in things I can’t control. I wish some things were different, but all I can try to do is the right thing. Let’s see what happens.

I also want to get a real mode of transportation. For the time being I’m going to have a 1989 Plymouth Voyager to run into the ground, which will fit in nicely with the dilapidated house I’m living in until school’s out. I’m making Easter the deadline for this one. At least I can carry my softball stuff in the van in the meantime.

This might be tough, but I hope to get to at least 10 Mets games in Shea’s final season, and especially the season finale September 28th against Florida. Thoughts of season finales against Florida make me throw up in my mouth a little. I actually would like to go to at least one game for each of my sports teams for the first time (yes, even the Knicks, if only to get thrown out of the arena in spectacular fashion).

I want to keep writing here, of course. It’s satisfying. And of course, your comments are great.

Bring on 2008! I’ve got my wits, my friends, and my mad player skills* on my side. Let’s fucking do it.  2008 is going to be the year of the Condor, bitches! Wow, that was corny. Even for me. I can sure talk myself up when I want to, though.

I’ll be celebrating in 18 hours and not reminiscent of anything I’ve written here so…whoo! Enjoy New Year’s everyone.

* - I couldn’t think of a third thing I had so I used the worst phrase imaginable instead. I stand by my decision.

I only read good sports blogs.

A couple of this writer’s favorites, Fire Joe Morgan and MetsBlog, are duking it out in the finals of the “sports blog of the year” tournament over at Busted Coverage. The voting runs until the very end of 2007.

I personally cast my vote for the hilarious FJM, but of course I also appreciate the work that’s put into MetsBlog (even if I think they tend to be too forgiving to management). Both are deserving candidates.

Not making it anywhere near the finals,surprisingly, was everyone’s favorite bastion of hard-hitting sports commentary: Hot Stove New York. Maybe next year, guys.

Update: Fire Joe Morgan won. Hooray!

Random rant and rave time!

Five favorite beers of the moment: Heineken, Sam Adams, Blue Point, Smithwicks, and whatever that extra dark stuff at John Harvard’s is that they don’t serve anymore.

The Mets got Matt Wise since I last spoke about them. Good move, even if his name isn’t Matt Wiseriguez LOL AM I RIGHT OMAR? Also, Brian Schneider looks like an actor playing a baseball player in a movie, if that makes any sense (I’m sure it doesn’t).

The Knicks suck. The Giants are a weak 10-5 team. The Rangers are schizophrenic. Scott Gomez leads the team in points? What?

I was going to make a list of my favorite songs of the year, but that requires too much work. I will say that I really like the Saul Williams/Trent Reznor “Sunday Bloody Sunday” cover, however, which is surprising because I always considered the original “un-coverable”.

Black Rock Tavern in Yaphank is a pretty nice bar.

Next sports jersey purchase: most likely a Manchester City powder blue.

New rule in regards to me and the opposite sex: if it seems way too easy, too perfect, or too obvious, don’t get worked up over it – it absolutely, completely, and without exception always is. Will 2008 be different? I know that I stopped holding my breath a while ago. If it happens, it happens.

I’ve almost completely broken in my new mitt in only a matter of days. Only three months to go until softball season!

Since I’m out of things to say, I will conclude this posting simply by saying: that is all.

Coming soon: FF6 character review and the amazing list of Mets shit that I own.

Fake internet personals continue to be amusing.

Today I direct you to Cajun Boy in the City by way of Deadspin. Who knew fake Craigslist personals for the purposes of satire were a big thing now? I thought it was just a place to vent about how fed up you were…um, ahem. Anyway.

Make sure to read the guy’s entire posting and all the responses. It’s…something. My favorite excerpts from his fake post include:

i mean with so many people out there whose lives are so less meaningful because they only make 60 or 70k a year, how could i not be happy?

i don’t even care if you’re jewish or some other religion that doesn’t celebrate christmas because my parents will be in france and will never find out.

finally, you need not worry about not being attracted to me. i’m 28 years old and i’ve still got the same looks/physique that i had when i wrestled in college and have had a certain part of my anatomy compared to a baby’s arm. i am also quite charming.

I’m not sure what my favorite thing about the myriad of responses are. Is it the sheer transparent greed of most of the women interested? Is it the desperate booty calls from women whose boyfriends were out of town? Is it the fact anyone took him and his rant about people with “less meaningful” lives making 60 or 70k a year seriously in the first place? I’m not sure, because it’s all pretty golden. At least some people seemed to get the joke, thankfully.

There’s no shortage of shallow materialists out there, men and women alike. It’s always amusing/horrifying/depressing to see more examples of it. Bravo, Cajun Boy, for exposing the dark underbelly of humanity we all knew was already there!

This reminds me: If I ever make a ton of money I’m only flaunting it at high school reunions. Why? Because fuck some of the people at my high school, that’s why. Power trip here I come!

“The guy with the Mazerati in the parking lot? Yeah, that’s me. You might not be able to see it thanks to all the glare my platinum bling is causing in your eyes, but it’s mine. Oh, you’re a lawyer? That’s cute, I think we just bought out your law firm. Sorry! Ha ha, no, really, I’m not sorry. I don’t give a fuck.”

Alright, so maybe that’s being a bit too much of an asshole.

Since that’s definitely not happening anyway (a masters in Public Policy can only get you to Nissan Maxima territory, I’m told) I’ll stick to being my usual modest self. You may argue with me calling myself modest, but remember that I have never worn a shirt that says “I AM THE FUCKING MAN” or bragged about my baby-arm sized member before.

I’m so modest that my “actual” Craigslist personal is more likely to sound like this:

HI! I AM VERY TALL AND I LIKE TO PLAY SOFTBALL, I AM A CAPTAIN OF MY TEAM AND ONE TIME I PLAYED WITH A FRACTURED WRIST SO YOU KNOW I HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!!! I ALSO ENJOY THE TV SHOW “SCRUBS” AS WELL AS A DELICIOUS STEAK! IF THIS TICKLES YOUR FANCY, CONTACT ME!!!!!!

What do you think? Take it easy on the caps lock? I think so, too.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

The amount of Mets-related merchandise I received has inspired me to catalog and document everything Mets related that I own as well as possibly do an MTV cribs-style breakdown of my now ridiculous-yet-awesome room. Stay tuned, I guess. 

Winter Break is finally here.

Time to start posting again! First post in a while means: unimportant life updates!

In case you were wondering how the fuckton of work I had the last two weeks turned out, I got it all done with and I think I did a halfway decent job on it. I aced my Ron Artest-inspired presentation and I got one other grade back for a class (Policy Analysis) that was also quite good. I’ll see how the rest of it turned out sometime between now and February. I found out during the final week that you can stay up indefinitely if you take 2 hour naps every 5 or 6 hours. Needless to say I continue to practice academic brinksmanship. If I have one school-related resolution for my final semester it’s to stop trying to screw myself over all the damned time, but I’ve been saying that since freshman year. I feel rather accomplished after that mess, all things considered, and I only have one semester left.

Shit, I only have one semester left, and then it’s the real world. No more putting it off. This time next year I could literally be anywhere. I need to start applying for internships in the next couple of months on Long Island and in New York City for the summer, and those could possibly lead to full-time work come fall 2008…

I’ve gotten pretty much everything I could’ve asked for this holiday season, and it’s nice to have a job and be able to give something back. However, I’ve only gotten a small percentage of my holiday shopping done. Holiday shopping is a bitch.

I will be spending the winter breaking in my new first base mitt. Booyah!

I don’t have a car available to me. This is problematic. I hope that by the time I go back to work (first full week after New Year’s) this will have been resolved. I also hope that I have a place to live, because apparently the District Attorney isn’t too happy with my landlady. Oops. I guess having 11 people in a house violates some kind of law.

There isn’t really much else to report. I’m glad 2007 is ending on a good note. Maybe, just maybe I’m starting to be at peace with myself. I’m feeling like 2008 is going to be full of possibilities, and I hope I can make good on all the things I want to do. Maybe if I feel especially sentimental I’ll write out my New Year’s resolutions here, but don’t hold your collective breath. I trust you weren’t going to, anyway.

I should be writing something more entertaining sometime in the near future. As for now, I’m going to spend the remainder of the night reorganizing my MP3 player’s catalog and pondering my strategy for acquiring a Wii.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone out there!

Thank You!

Just wanted to say thank you again to everyone who helped make yesterday pretty much one of the greatest days ever and took part in my birthday party.

Still a lot to be done before the semester’s over, good luck to everyone!

The Mitchell Report: The Aftermath

In all honestly there isn’t much to be said about the Mitchell Report on performance-enchancing drugs in baseball that hasn’t been said already. There has obviously been a major problem in the sport and a complete failure by the game’s caretakers to police it.

Nobody’s innocent – not the owners who made millions off increased attendance, not the players (users and non-users alike) who cashed in on the revenues with inflated contracts, and not the fans who naively spent their money to gawk at musclebound monsters that shattered home run records or, like in the case of mega-fraud Roger Clemens, strike batters out with ease. They all worked together to make this day a possibility, and now the entire baseball world is paying the price.

As far is Clemens is concerned, roid rage is a much better explanation for hurling a shattered bat at Mike Piazza than, say, mistaking it for the ball. I’m not the least bit surprised by him or many of the names on the list. Unlike Barry Bonds, he’ll have had the good fortune to have (more than likely now) retired before the world caught wind of his misdeeds, and it is unfortunate. I would’ve like to see what kind of vitriol this disgrace would’ve been shown in comparison to Bonds. Clemens joins several one-time Yankees teammates on Mitchell’s report, including Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Mike Stanton and Jason Grimsley.

The Mets, it appears, were the less juiced up of the 2000 Subway Series participants. I was crossing my fingers Mike Piazza wouldn’t be in the Mitchell report, and he wasn’t. The most prominent recent Met to be on it was Paul Lo Duca, who apparently saw the effects wear off after 2001 because he never approached his home run or slugging percentage totals from that year again (25 and .543, respectively). Todd Hundley, who preceded Piazza as the Mets catcher and was the first baseball player I actively followed, was unfortunately but unsurprisingly cited as well. Even Todd Pratt is named on it – if the list was the authority (and I’m completely sure it isn’t) we would be led to believe Mike Piazza was in fact the only “clean” Mets starting catcher since the early 1990’s. Other former Mets on the list include Lenny Dykstra, Matt Franco, Mo Vaughn (insert steroids-in-food joke here) and Carl Everett. Everett apparently doesn’t believe in dinosaurs but does believe in putting needles in his butt.

I’m actually somewhat surprised there weren’t more big names on the list of players linked to the drugs, all things considered. Unfortunately, you can’t assume anyone’s totally clean, and the report itself without a doubt does not include all offenders. This mess has stained the reputation of an entire generation of professional baseball players. They have their union and their sense of invincibility to thank for that.

You can see the entire report here and a list of players involved here. There has been some humorous commentary on the matter on Fire Joe Morgan, as well. I’m really not sure whether this is the beginning of a new era for baseball or just the start of a long parade of skeletons coming out of the closet for the entire sport. My guess is that it will probably be the latter, but for better or for worse as a fan of the game I’m going to have to deal with it.

To wrap up my thoughts, I wanted to point out that while baseball has an ugly tale to tell now, it should not have required any federal interference for this to be taken care of. Curiously, the National Football League has gotten what amounts to a free pass from the same people holding Major League Baseball to the fire, and if you really want skeletons to come out of the closet I’m fairly sure the NFL has plenty of those itself.

Some cheery advice!

I am here to let you know that Office 2007 is the biggest pile of dogshit to ever end up on my hard drive. I know, I know, it’s asking a lot to allow your PowerPoint files to be compatible with Office 2003. After all, if they were compatible, you wouldn’t be forcing schools and organizations to have to buy new licenses for your shitty product just so there wouldn’t be any issues with viewing a freaking presentation. I’m sure that money had nothing to do with it, though, and it was just a technological impossibility to make your files viewable on a version that came out a whopping four fucking years ago. Yeah.

By the way, nice new interface you douchebags. If I wanted a Mac interface I’d buy a Mac, throw back a can of PBR, listen to some shitty underground music on my i-Pod and do a whole bunch of other pretentious hipster bullshit. I didn’t ask for a shitty, thrown together, Mac-knockoff interface that was conceived by haphazardly throwing random icons in random places and giving everything a new font. I liked my organized, readable, pull-down menus, assholes. They were certainly more intuitive than this atrocity is.

I didn’t even mention the fact that this fucking thing crashes while I’m closing it 50% of the time. What a colossal piece of shit. What’s that? You crashed again? You’re sorry for the inconvenience and are going to run diagnostics? HOW ABOUT DIAGNOSING THIS SHIT BEFORE I INSTALL IT ON MY COMPUTER, YOU COCKS?

Speaking of shit, the Knicks are the worst franchise in professional sports. Congratulations, James Dolan! You’ve managed to turn one of the NBA’s marquee franchises into a complete joke! I’d write a whole rant on this disaster if it hadn’t been repeated ad nauseum absolutely everywhere else in the fucking world.

In slightly happier news, Eli Manning is continuing to be just mediocre enough to lead the Giants to the brink of another Wild Card playoff berth. First round exit, here we come! While I was watching the games today I also got to see a Jets fan and a Cowboys fan get into a bar fight, and that was pretty awesome.

I’m going to go back to deciphering a completely butchered PowerPoint 2003 presentation in my “new and improved” PowerPoint 2007 now. Is it Friday yet?

Condors everywhere, rejoice!

I direct you to today’s featured Wikipedia article . It’s on actual condors!

And yes, that is one ugly bird.