Overheard at the boxing gym today, coach to a newcomer who was struggling to get good power in his left jab:
“Don’t reach in man, step in. You got nothin’ if you just reachin’.”
life
Greatest
The way a soccer player celebrates a game-winning goal has to be one of the greatest things ever, whether Saturday morning pickup or the World Cup final. Iniesta looked like a little kid after he scored the goal today*. Picture a child one sunny afternoon celebrating a backyard goal in London or Guatemala or Seattle or wherever else; it’s just so honest, pure and joyful.
The same goes for the moment of a loss–a missed shot or a bumbled save. Straight up pure sadness, dejection and disappointment show their full colors. Again in that moment the pro athlete is no different than the little heartbroken child.
In these greatest moments we’re all like children in wonder and feeling. That means something and is not small.
We all should take this to heart more often.
—
*For when I can’t remember why that means anything special: the ’10 World Cup final was today, Spain vs. Netherlands, and Iniesta put the ball in the net in the 26th minute of stoppage time for the win for Spain. VIVA ESPANA VIVA VIVA LA FURIA ROJA!!!!
By the way, Iniesta’s tank top writing is a tribute to a fellow Spanish soccer player who died of a heart attack not too long ago.
Wow, today
Ok…I’ve resisted a long time. I have not wanted to be one of those harking naffs who writes a really boring several paragraphs every day about every day. Well here are lots of paragraphs about today, because today was nuts.
1. World Cup:
-Tim Howard, you are incredible. Past making boss saves, the one corner at the end, when the other keep jumped up to punch it and his HAND was just barely higher than your HEAD. That is awesome. To the rest of the boys in red, white and blue: you rock. Way to represent your country to the world, what an incredible run. I can’t say it any better than a radio announcer did: “there is nothing left. Those boys left everything they had on the field.”
2. My little sister:
She’s in Texas right now for the annual National Jumprope Tournament, she spent all of yesterday puking her guts out and her 4 person team took first place in their age bracket today. Like…what? How does that work? How is that humanly possible? She will be on ESPN competing against all other 4 person teams for the Grand Champion title.
Dear Beth: go hit your routine tomorrow like you never have before. Go hit it in the teeth with a big chair so hard, swing for the fences and show’em what you’ve got.
(no photo can capture the awesomeness here, so no photo here shall be)
3. Ham Radio:
After one evening (6+ hours) and one morning (2+ hours) of intense strong-coffee-aided studying of radio, I passed the FCC General Class Amateur Radio exam (lots of capital letters there). Jason and my pops did the same. We can now use all VHF/UHF bands and almost (there are, like, two tiny restrictions) all HF bands. “HF” means wavelengths from 10 to 160 meters. That’s some long waves. With a bit of practice, that means free (well…after buying a radio. Ouch.) and cooler-than-skype worldwide communication with friends and family.
It’s also a good excuse to, someday when I have the pickup I’ll go offroad-camping-exploring in, have a wicked awesome radio on the dash and a nice big antenna swaying from the back bumper.
4. “You can put that on the label, baby.”
(see the post above this one)
What a day.
Edit:
…and I just now (10:30pm) discovered a better way to slice cheese. No joke.
The best yet
Pre-post note #1:
It’s a bit late to finish it now, but I’m working on writing/editing what I think about the “best” photo(s) I will ever take in my life. Hopefully this weekend I’ll have it coherently together.
Pre-post note #2:
These are the last shots I’ll be taking with Dad’s Nikkormat; hello Nikon F3 :D. Dear new camera: I hope you and I will do lots together and I appreciate that you double as a battle mace when I unlatch one side of your neck strap.
I decided to try Ilford’s C-41 400 film (so I can get it processed for…*drumroll*…cheaper. notice a trend?), XP2 Super. I like it, and when I finally get access to a good scanner, I’ll put it up against the non-C-41 (HP5+) shots I’ve got and see what differences there are.
This roll is the best photography I’ve done. I could be wrong about that..time may tell (do I hope it will in fact tell? I’m not sure). Here’s something odd though: I was convinced that one particular frame was the single best picture I’d taken, ever. Like, no doubting at all, I knew this. It wasn’t…it flopped. It flopped really badly. Composition, focus, aperture setting and all the works. It’s frustrating, but I can’t bring myself to be too cranky, considering how well so many other shots came through. Uncorrelated to that, I pulled my act together and numbered the scans by frame # finally.
Without more ado, here’re eight shots I feel good about:
By twos
Two things I hate:
1. Hurtful words; straight up my friend, I hate these.
2. “What could’ve been;” the quotation marks are important here…I have never seen good of any form come from “what could’ve been,” and I know a lot of bad of all sorts that’s come from it.
Two pieces of wisdom from a dayhike to Camp Muir:
1. Put on sunblock the second time. Always; period.
2. As calories begin to seem positively delicious entirely because they simply are calories, so does any/all food begin to seem positively delicious. Finishing a long hike at 5:00pm = hello you beautiful lukewarm Burger King Sausage Biscuit that I left on the dashboard 11 hours prior. Mmmmmm.
Two aspirations:
1. Have a porch and make real nice wooden chairs for it.
2. Tend a small garden, and keep a planter box (for the aforenoted porch) of flowers; I think they’d be Carnations.
From the mountain
Here are a few black and whites I shot on a hike up to Camp Muir the Saturday before last. It was a very somber day; on the way to the mountain my friend and I stopped at Burger King for breakfast at 4:30, we got to the mountain at 6:00 and talked with the ranger about avalanche conditions. Static filled radio reports from his handset filled the office, he was strained and chewing tobacco: an hour and a half earlier there’d been an avalanche on the mountain. Status reports were spotty, but there were at least half a dozen climbers hit and one likely fatality.
The exposures were taken with the same camera and lens setup, a Nikkormat and Nikkor 50mm f1.4; I shot Kodak Plus-X 125 film rated at 100. I’ve gone on the cheap and am doing my own scans now, but unfortunately I couldn’t get the really-fancy negative scanner at school to work, so again the scans are with a low end flatbed scanner. Hopefully I’ll have good scans in a few weeks. And again, same deal with the scan # versus the exposure #. Lastly, I do plan to touch up the ones that have obvious mechanical/chemical errors, i.e. the odd non-graduated horizontal tint/shade line in #’s two and five.
That day left a lot on my mind and heart, but none of it is really present and/or clear enough to be able to describe coherently; I want to though. Maybe in a few weeks, or months.
Edit:
I added three more shots. 6/24/10 DP
Two excerpts–
–from All the Pretty Horses, written by Cormac McCarthy
——–
Rawlins mounted up. You ready? he said.
I been ready.
They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pasture-land. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once a jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and the thousand worlds for the choosing.
——–
That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
——
The final final paper!
While this short scribbling is the type of thing generally reserved for twitter or facebook, they say your most important audience is yourself, and in this case the most important audience dearly feels this short scribbling is more significant than facebook world and/or twitter world are good for.
Without more ado:
When I click the button in the other open browser tab, I will have submitted the last homework (ironically an essay on education) of my undergrad career; my last lecture is today from 1:00 to 3:20.
*click*
*silence*
Wow.
Edit:
Class got out at slightly after 2:00. College is an interesting thing; I finished it this afternoon.
Faith
Tuesday May 25 3:30am
Could God be real?
Could love, pain and beauty, true and deep and human, be real?
I sit outside on the last stair down from the back porch to the yard. A light breeze (the type that sets a sailboat to drifting almost-imperceptibly on a glassy-calm bay at night) rustles through the leaves of nearby Cottonwoods. Inhaling deeply I smell a mix of rain, dew, fragrant flowers, and fresh cut grass–it’s May. Looking to the East I can barely make out the faint orange glow of dawn coming, only an hour or so away. Grandma’s gone now, my buddy Joe has been gone for just over 8 months. My oldest brother is joyfully wedded to the love of his life, and my other brother is near there.
Is jesus christ real?
Are love, pain and beauty real?
Storm is wild enough for sailing
Bridge is weak enough to cross
This body frail enough for fighting
I’m home enough to know I’m lost
Land unfit enough for planting
Barren enough to conceive
Poor enough to gain the treasure
Enough a cynic to believe
The motorcycle wave
If you get it, you get it.
Front porch coffee–
(I love sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee, thinking hard or lightly wondering, sometimes not thinking at all, or joking and talking with a friend.
The porch has got to be the best place to watch and hear and smell the season: breezy summer afternoons (fragrant lilacs and freshly cut grass), fiery autumn sunsets (last-chance backyard BBQing and simply crisp air), et cetera.
Stairs, curbs, or benches are all reasonable porch-substitutes; however the porch can’t ever be truly beat, especially if it’s old and weathered.
A good cup of coffee is often just right, too.)
–It’s a good name.
3 Months
I recently read “The Last Lecture,” the autobiography of a rapidly dying man, Randy Pausch. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He did try a new hail-mary operation, but it didn’t work; the cancer was terminal. Pausch was a certifiably crazy character, had incredible wisdom to share, and wrote it out very well. Understandably, The Last Lecture became wildly popular. I definitely recommend it–I’m not sure that I agree with all his ideas, but regardless the wisdom he shares is amazing and inspiring.