talents.

The Super Bowl just came and went, and with it the usual round of "sportsball" jokes. I make them, too, though in my case it's genuinely ironic because not only have I grown to find the game interesting, I more or less know the rules to football, baseball, and basketball.

I grew up in a sports household. My father played team sports way back when, was at least pretty good at them, and remains convinced of their value, and my brothers are preternaturally gifted at them (it never seemed to matter which one they tried). I don't think it's cynical to say that if you're good at sports, you'll probably find sports teams to be welcoming and rewarding places to be.

I was not good at sports.

Outvoted as I was, sports tended to rule the television. As long as I shared the house with the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, or whoever happened to be on, I wanted to at least understand what I was seeing. So maybe Dad and I didn't have the same ideas about sports, but we did (and still do) very well together talking about how the world works, and I learned about free throws and off-sides and safeties and bunts.

(As I'm talking here about how I didn't fit in growing up, I want to give a shout out to Mom, who not only doesn't particularly care about sports as far as I know, but spent decades as the only female in a house full of males. There's a lot I don't know about how that was for her--only that she has been even happier than I would expect to have our wives join the family. Maybe she should start a blog.)

My two older nieces are now teenagers, and of course they're good at sports. So close! I've got a third niece, so maybe she'll be awkward. Probably not, though, since her father is the brother who, in addition to being preternaturally athletic, was also graceful enough to do some dancing.

I was not good at sports. In between having to suffer through sports, I read books and learned big words and things that interested me and coasted through school until it required hard work, at which point I underachieved because there didn't seem to be any point to working hard at things I didn't like. (I know, right? That's a different blog post.)

(Of course, now my son underachieves, and I worry about him like my parents worried about me. But he's underachieving years before I did, so my worrying is totally different. File under "The Great Wheel Turns.")

Funny enough, some years ago I was up in Gold Country for Thanksgiving and started throwing a football around with the teenagers, and I was surprised to discover I was good at it. I could feel the weight of the football in my arm and the roughness of it in my hand, and it gave just the right resistance for me to throw it in beautiful spinning arcs to where I wanted it to go.

This has its limits: I tore a muscle or something--undiagnosed, because why bother, as long as it gets better?--that took a year to fully heal. I still suck at basketball. But after a mere decade of martial arts, I developed a fraction of the sports ability my brothers were born with.

Not to undervalue the martial arts thing. As my niece discovered through ten minutes of trying to torment me in Cape Cod Bay, I'm really good at making people fall down when they're not expecting to.

toe-grinding 2: maybe another time

I canceled the surgery today, after seeing the surgeon yesterday. It was turning out to be more extensive and with a longer recovery, and while I was at aikido last night, it occurred to me that I'm not quite ready to give it up for any number of months.

About 10% of humans have an extra bone in their big toe. I'm one of them, and somehow the bone spur is interacting with it? And since the pain is where that extra bone is, there would be an incision in the pad of the toe to grind down the spur and take the bone out. That means 3 weeks on crutches, instead of 2-7 days, and an even longer recovery--even with the regular bone spur on the side of the toe, most patients report it takes at least a year to feel really healed.

I had the surgery scheduled for the 14th, and I'm just not ready to be on crutches for 3 weeks on short notice. Also I live in a second-floor one-bedroom apartment with no couch and steep stairs.

My plan is to stop running: I'll join the local gym and do elliptical or whatever. Stopping running should let me keep doing aikido. And I'll probably investigate some kind of bodywork: I'm not satisfied with this problem suddenly appearing 6 weeks ago, after not bothering me at all for the years since the root injury (fracturing the toe joints). It just doesn't add up, and the doctor didn't seem to have a good explanation for what's going on in there, which doesn't exactly make me want to cut my foot open and start removing bones.

So I'll try this for a few months and see how it goes.

toe-grinding

Something has been Obviously Wrong with my left big toe for a month or so, and it turns out to be a bone spur. A few years ago I had a month where I severely jammed both my big toes several times (aikido, of course), and apparently the reason it hurt so much was that one or more bones fractured. On the left, at least: I expect to eventually have the same problem on the right, which makes me wonder if I should just have them both ground down at once, because...

...while I can go running or whatever 2 weeks after the 10-minute outpatient surgery, I can't do barefoot athletics for 3-6 months.

Months and months without aikido. Hurf.

And yet, the toe is already discouraging me from training, so I might as well go ahead with it. Pfeh.

Stupid impermanence. =)

communication is a myth

My little brother is only two years younger than me, and every summer there was a quest to find ways to get rid of us find stuff for us to do during the summer days. This was back when cities could afford to offer services, and it turned out that tennis lessons (taught by one of my older brother's friends) worked well for us. It felt sort of familiar, since Mom had played at a club in town for a long time. So we played tennis for however many years.

My family has been lucky enough to spend regular chunks of time on Cape Cod throughout my life, and the house there is a short walk through the woods past the cemetery to a nearby condo development, with a tennis court. It's locked in a cage of split logs and chicken wire, with a combination lock, but the condos are mostly vacation rentals, so anyone will give you the combination, and we'd go and play pretty regularly, especially the summer we were working down there in the mid-90s.

(There, I once played this cute girl, who was one of those overdriven young athletes, with her own cranky Australian coach and everything, who wanted to make sure I'd be "enough of a challenge for her." She beat me, but it was harder than it should have been, and she was extremely frustrated at her inability to beat me faster. Not only am I a halfway decent tennis player, but at the time, I had an uncontrollable forehand with backspin on it, and it was just messing with her head. Now I can control it, and it still messes with people's heads.)

Our tennis excursions came up back home sometime later.

"No one stops you?", Mom asked.

"Yeah, you just walk in and play."

"It's not whites-only?"

I don't come from racist folk, so there was a confused, awkward silence.

"Um...isn't that illegal?"

Mom, of course, meant the traditional dress code--a feature of her tennis experiences, but not ours.

the World Cup

Chile won! 1-0 against Honduras. It was a good game, where by "good" we mean "Honduras put up a little fight but Chile dominated control of the ball the entire time."

Classes are canceled for the first and final games, and any time Chile is playing, so yesterday morning, instead of getting up at 6:15 and going into school, I got to sleep in, watch the game in bed, sleep some more, get up, have a leisurely breakfast, and watch the rest of the game. The U.S. could learn from this, if there was anything we cared about as much as Chileans care about soccer.

This week we've just been doing review for the oral test next week, and it's interesting to see the effect on their focus of us having conversation in Spanish, instead of me using limited English with lots of modeling, and them trying to understand. (The effect is "bad," for what it's worth.) The students have been asking me three questions:

1. Did I see the U.S. tie England?

They say "tie" [empatar] a certain way; if not disdain, then definitely a decided lack of prestige. Yes, I did watch the game, but I didn't think the U.S. played very well, except for our goalie. Acknowledging that my country's team played poorly seems to baffle them. I think they wanted to have a sort of "yo momma" back-and-forth about it.

2. Am I rooting for Chile? [I'm not sure how fanatic this implies I should be.]

Duh, of course.

3. Who do I support if the U.S. and Chile make the final?

Since I'm trying to communicate, I can't say "I don't really care that much"; I might as well respond with "Yes, I love tuna melts more than I love my girlfriend." (I don't like tuna melts, and they don't know what a tuna melt is.) They would sense that something weird was happening, but they wouldn't get what.

Only slightly less startling was the other honest-but-dodging answer: "It's not going to happen. The U.S. is going to lose."

Here's someone, their teacher, of all people, seemingly in full command of his faculties, saying...his country's team not only didn't play very well, but is going to lose?! In the World Cup? This just isn't done, I think.

Everyone chalks up my lack of crazed enthusiasm to being American, which isn't inaccurate; but I can't explain to them, any more than I can explain to sports fans in the States, that I just don't care about televised sports that much.

Remember: just because you're speaking the same language doesn't mean you're communicating.