What are your favorite sports to watch and play?

Editor’s Note:

This is another one of those rambling entries because I realized very quickly I don’t know shit about sports. But most of you love my rambling, so I know it’s probably okay. 😉

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When I was 17, my crush was the goalie of the women’s soccer team at school. We ended up dating for a few months, and then she moved back to Canada, where she was picked for a college team that could get her to the Olympics. There are at least 10 different reasons why she left soccer after that, and I’m not entirely sure I understand any of them. But that’s not my story. That’s hers, and she’s a great writer so I hope some day she’ll tell it.

Yes, I did write her senior English final paper, but she used to have a blog, so I’ve forgiven her.

Also, I got a C on my own English final paper, so it made me feel good I got an A on hers (extraordinarily put upon, but still….). It’s not that I couldn’t have gotten an A on both. She’s neurotypical. She had the best notes ever. All I had to do was craft everything she’d already written down.

On the other hand, when I “write a paper,” I write them just like blog entries…. except I edit. I remember everything I read, so I am putting together sentences on the fly. My interest in a subject is directly connected to how fast I can craft a sentence on it without having to look anything up, because I’ve already read six books or whatever.

That’s why when the subject matter is interesting to me, the writing is tighter. The reason I try to remember everything I read is that unlike my first girlfriend, I do not have enough executive function to be able to pick and choose what I’m supposed to remember.

I inhale it all.

I think that’s what makes my blog entries interesting. I take in most everything through sight, and then write it down. My first girlfriend being a soccer player gave me a love for watching the game, because even when I didn’t understand the rules, I understood watching movement. It’s a ballet where the main characters are grass and blood.

I also think of dance as a sport, particularly those high school cheerleaders with the complicated routines and defiance of physics. In retrospect, I gained respect for cheerleaders by being in the marching band. We were all physically exerting ourselves at football games, and then the cheerleaders upped the ante with their own competitions in the off-season.

I only remember one cheerleader from my high school, JR, and he was my favorite because he was the only guy. Every cheerleading team needs a guy to help with the throwing and the catching. Plus, JR is straight. I can’t imagine it was a bad gig.

Many, many boys in dance and choir do it for the girls, and we appreciate it as long as they’re not creepy about it. I swear to God a tenor could walk into any choir anywhere and they’d be grateful to have him.

To me, singing is a sport, and I think only other singers would agree with me. If you don’t spend time training your body to get a solo-quality voice out of yourself, you won’t. This is because so much depends on your physical strength. You basically have to be able to inhale down to your feet and control the air so that it doesn’t all come out at once. That takes tremendous pressure on your diaphragm and breath control. You have to tighten down some muscles while keeping others loose. It’s a long process, and I think while not as demanding as soccer or ballet, we all learn the same types of breath control for being able to dance, run, and sing.

Getting winded on the field or the stage is inadvisable.

When I lived in Portland, most of my friends were baseball fans. I’ve always been a baseball fan in terms of going to games, but I won’t watch them on TV like my friends will. Without hot dogs and sodas at the ballpark, it loses a lot (to me). I don’t know that the Os would do well, but I’d love to see them against the Astros eventually. Now that they’ve moved leagues, they don’t come to Washington anymore.

In Portland, most of us rooted for the San Francisco Baseball Giants. I can think of one Mariners fan from my whole time there. Also in Portland, I was much more into football because Dana was. She never gave up her loyalty to WAS, but I love Pete Carroll and she respected that. I also love Russell Wilson.

In terms of basketball, I will watch LeBron James do anything, because he walks the walk. He gives so much charity everywhere he goes that it’s inspiring. And the way Dwayne Wade is raising his trans daughter gives me hope for other families.

Oh, and even before I met my first girlfriend, Ryan played lacrosse. He said something to me that I’ll never forget, because I wanted it to be memorable and it was, apparently. He’d just gotten home from six weeks of lacrosse camp (or maybe it was shorter, but I don’t remember. It was enough to completely change his body.) I told him that I liked his new look a lot, but it made him hug different. It sent the intended message. No matter what you look like, I love you, not your body, because he told me that almost 25 years later.

Again, we were unusual for kids. We were both old AF emotionally, so we treated our parents like in-laws from the beginning, us both calling the other’s “Mom and Dad.” I don’t know how my father felt about it, but a man worth paying attention to was paying attention to her daughter…. and being sweet to both her and Lindsay. This carried a lot of weight, and I knew it because she never treated any of my girlfriends that way. It was blatantly obvious.

But in addition to Ryan being sweet to my mother and sister, Ryan had an older brother I completely adored, because he and Ryan were so funny together. Inside jokes all over the place that I could join once I heard them.

Plus, I’ve always been the oldest and it was funny watching him pull the same stunts on Ryan that I pulled on Lindsay….. both before and after.

The funniest conversation I remember between Ryan and his dad was that Ryan had fallen off his bike, and was bleeding with road rash. His dad took one look at him and said, “geez. Is the bike okay? I learned later that being in a doctor’s house shapes you so much. Those kinds of retorts are par for the course.

And Caitlin once got her butt stitched up on the kitchen counter. That was before my time, but a legendary story. I believe I heard it on the night I went to her house for dinner, and we all came to find out that Cait had been picking the crab claws out of the gumbo all afternoon.

Maybe that’s her root. She likes working in restaurants, too. For Anthony Bourdain, it was oysters fresh off the beach in France.

I remember Cait being athletic, but don’t remember her formal sports. But our whole family likes watching the big games, even though we don’t watch every one. I mean, some of them do. Some of them are die hard Cowboys fans, and when I mentioned that I was a Cowboys fan she said the only way she could respect that was she liked Tom Landry. I told her that my memories of the Cowboys were mostly rooted in the 90s and it was okay to move on.

I’ve always rooted for the teams where I’ve lived except for the Nationals, because I don’t like the curly W on the hats. I do have one t-shirt that doesn’t have it on it, so it’s the only Nationals gear I own. I am much more partial to the Orioles, and when I lived here before, I was already a Giants fan. The Nationals are relatively new because we took a long break from The Senators (to our detriment, I think).

That also means that when I lived in Portland, I became a rabid Timbers fan, and even have a picture of me with their mascot somewhere. I didn’t really live in Houston when The Dynamo was established, and because Houston didn’t have an MLS team when I was in high school. I’ve always been a fan of DC United.

Everywhere my friends go that’s overseas, I ask them for a national jersey if they want to know what I want. I know there’s plenty of cheap knock-offs, so it’s not paying DC United prices.

Zac doesn’t follow sports at all, but he’s told me that he’d go to a minor league game if I wanted because he likes it better than MLB. So, we might do it, we might not because it’s a road trip to Hagersville to see the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.

The first time I went, I saw them play The Sugar Land Skeeters, and I was just as excited to meet them as I was The Crabs. That’s the thing about minor league baseball. You can get into deep conversations with the players because they have more time to talk after the game and they’re trying to get their adrenaline to come down.

The reason I wanted a deep conversation is that I really wanted to know how Caleb was doing. He lives in Louisiana and commutes for The Skeeters, so they were in Maryland during the height of Hurricane Harvey and he’d already been through Katrina. Because I knew what was going on in Houston/Sugar Land, I wasn’t just talking to him; I was asking questions about his experience from the other side.

My sister was running the relief effort at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He said that because of the touring schedule, he hadn’t even had time to check it out- grateful he wasn’t there and desperate to see if his house and truck still were.

I wished him well, but what even he doesn’t know is that I got a fabulous picture of him right before he hit the ball out of the park, and I took a million to get that one shot from the time the ball was in the pitcher’s mitt. The ball is several inches in front of the bat and he’s in perfect form…. and even if he wasn’t, he still got a home run. I wouldn’t have known the difference.

I think one of the things I really like about Supergrover is that she’s successful at her job (I think) because she played so many team sports as a child/teen. She already had experience with collaboration and not lording it over people. Delegation when you’re the boss is key, because you cannot micromanage the work, you have to hire the right people- the ones that are self-starters and persnickety about details on their own. It’s not on your plate and doesn’t have to be because there’s a special bond between coworkers who are invested and those who aren’t, as in, how fast productivity goes down when the boss has left the office.

That will always happen in top-down situations because the boss is so exhausting. It’s not fun to be micromanaged, especially by a narcissist.

Narcissism leads to very problematic behavior, like blowing up your phone at 3 AM and being mad you’re not awake to serve them. No family thing is important enough not to miss work. Leave your family thing when I need you.

Because in the military and all the intelligence agencies around here, that is true and ironclad no matter how your boss communicates, which is why there has to be a lot of support from your family to do those jobs. There are going to be missed birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays whether anyone likes it or not. The chessboard is at stake, the one thing that really is more important than being with your family and you can’t argue with it in any place, at any time.

Support to all those people is doing enough work on yourself to be a complete person when they’re gone. For some people, that means moving back in with their parents when their spouse is deployed so that they still have a support system. Others rely on chosen family because they live on base, either here or overseas.

According to Jonna Mendez, you have a choice as to whether you tell your family that you’re CIA or not. That’s because you don’t know if your family/friends are going to find it easier to help you live your cover, or whether they’ll blow it. One thing that Jonna talked about in the event for “The Moscow Rules” is that she didn’t tell her best friend she was CIA for 35 years… and that’s because she told her dad and her dad was impressed, so he told all his friends….. the ones who had seen her face, already knew who she was, etc. The more people that can attach those things, the more “in trouble” you feel.

However, with the military and intelligence, you just have to accept that some things are above your pay grade and you can only know so much. Like, “I can call you on a sat phone, but I can’t tell you where I am.” It’s not that the soldier/case officer doesn’t want to help you understand, it’s that they can’t because it would reveal troop movements if the sat phone was hacked.

I do not think that we are preparing for war ourselves. I think that those secrets are being kept so that no one knows who’s watching and where.

I can connect all of this to “Argo,” because there’s an “Argo” illustration for every occasion. To have people know what your face looks like reminds me of that scene where the “face book” has been ripped to shreds, and they get at least 20 people to sit there and line up the strips so they can see the pictures again, trying to stop the houseguests from getting out of Iran. This is because the diplomats didn’t have enough time to burn all the classifieds before the Iranis rushed in.

Let me say for the record that I do not have a dog in this race. Both the Americans and the Iranis have done horrible things to each other. I can understand Iran’s frustration at us getting the Shah out before they could prosecute him. I understand that it put the United States at a distinct disadvantage because we cut off diplomatic relations, closing the embassy altogether at that point.

I believe that’s why people like Tony and Jonna are every bit as effective as sending “a fully armed battalion to remind them of our love.” That’s because we can prevent a lot of boots on the ground with the right intelligence, because then we can go after someone diplomatically/politically instead of starting a war.

It is so disheartening to have a president who’s blind to the plight of Palestine. It is so complex we need to withdraw support from both sides immediately. It’s not our fight. That’s one that’s been going on for too long for us to rescue anyone. The president needs to realize that in their case, the call is coming from inside the house. We can’t police this one. It will work out every bit as well as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and any other conflict we’ve entered where there hasn’t been a thousand years of fighting over that land.

I also don’t know what Biden’s faith is telling him about Israel, and that’s bothersome as well. It is a damn problem, because all the Abramic branches are at war with themselves over this. Christians and Jews want to protect their holy places, and don’t understand that all Muslim holy places are in the same vicinity.

I am not sure that is the message Christianity and Judaism want to spread…. that Muslim lives are worth less.

Because that’s what they’re doing…. like it’s a sport.