Living a Dream

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

For a little while now I've been feeling a bit empty. Part of it is the overarching malaise of living in 2018 America. Part of it is being at a crossroads in life and not knowing which way to turn. Part of it is because it's been 90+ degrees outside for most of the past month. There's not really a great answer to all of it, but it's happening. But one of the things that I keep thinking about is how I think I'd like to start drawing. Or painting. Or something. I want to make visual art, but I'm completely terrified of it. What's more, I don't think I consider my own artistic pursuits to be "good" enough to actually pursue. I explored this idea a little bit on an Instagram post where I edited a photo, and it has kept me thinking further about this. With words, I don't have any issues with confidence, and that means I don't second-guess what I said. Even if I say something that pisses people off, I have confidence in the fact that I (...

Jenna and I spent a chunk of this week in Northern Virginia, in the area around Shenandoah National Park. Shenandoah (which it turns out I've been pronouncing incorrectly for my entire life) was great. There were hikes of all levels and lengths, varying difficulty, varying crowd-levels, and lots more. The park wasn't in full-swing yet, as some of the camping areas don't open until "summer," but there were still plenty of people out enjoying nature, which is nice. Being in nature gets me thinking. After a day of driving along Skyline Drive and doing several small hikes, we hiked a trail called Bearfence . After an incredibly fun scramble up the rocks to the actual peak, we were greeted with what I can only imagine is the best lookout point in the entire park. Sitting on top of a mountain - looking over dozens of other mountains - is a special feeling. As tiny houses in tiny faraway towns fill your vision, you start to think about how those are just people. From...

Sometimes you read things online that can't be true. Sometimes those things turn out to be true. About a year ago I read that the hyrax is the closest living relative to the elephant. The hyrax is roughly the size of a domesticated rabbit - maybe smaller - and looks like a mix between a capybara and a rat. Here is its wiki page . It's amazing. The genetic similarities (if you don't read the wiki page) are because they have similar testicle situations (great band name), their mammaries are patterned in a way that's similar to manatees and elephants, and their "tusks" come from the incisors (same as elephants) whereas almost all animals have "tusks" from their canine teeth. How can something that maxes out at about 10 pounds be nearest relative to something that weighs about 200 pounds at birth? Science is amazing. And while I do want to explore how the above question can be answered, I'll do that on my own time or read about it on the intern...

Boy, it's been tough to catch my breath this week. This week saw a LOT of words go to NBA articles of mine. Two ended up getting published - this one and this one - and a third one hasn't yet seen the light of day because it needs to be reconfigured after the NBA trade deadline. The three of them were about 4500 words total, so that's something. Additionally, we've been dog-sitting for a german shepherd who spent her first 18 hours in our home strengthening every negative connotation I had of german shepherds. She effectively didn't stop whining even once the first night, while also occasionally barking like a lunatic and keeping us up all night. She's also super-high energy, which is fine if you're not used to having a dog that's part dog and part ottoman, like this angel. At any rate, the week has turned into waking up earlier than normal, throwing a ball 20x in the backyard, going for a 2+ mile walk, throwing the ball again as soon as I get...

At some point in college, it dawned on me that my group of friends from home was unusual. Yes, we were all weirdly close an did some objectively strange things to each other (and with each other, but mainly to each other), but apparently it was weird to stay so close to people from your hometown. We all thought nothing of it, because that's just the way we were. Others, however, were surprised and often confused. Some of them were "adopted" into the group of us from the Chesterland area, and it's hard to say how much they still stayed in touch with people who didn't go to high school with us, because they sure assimilated into our friends-since-early-childhood clique. But still, that was only college. Later, I moved to Chicago and found that there were people who I hadn't seen in years who would gladly, willingly, almost eagerly bail me out of I was in a pinch or needed a place to stay. These were people I wasn't even necessarily close  with when we were...

As is common in this challenge, yesterday's 1000 words went to the NBA . Today's thousand, however, are headed back here. Writing a lot has this curious effect where it makes you think about writing a lot. For me, I was at work yesterday (tutoring English, but there weren't a lot of students) and started working on the above-mentioned basketball article. It was kind of a slog. Sometimes basketball writing takes a lot of time and effort, because it can't just be off-the-cuff ideas. It has to make sense: If I'm suggesting that two teams make a trade, the trade has to be viable, the salaries have to match, the players have to be relatively good fits on the other team, and their productivity needs to be taken into account. As such, I can't just suggest a trade in 5 minutes and write 300 words on it. So yesterday, like I said, I was working on that article. People at work kept popping in to chat because it was a slow day all around, which led to me not getting th...

This is a big day. This is a big blog post. This is my first time writing from my newly decorated desk/office space in the basement of my house. I learned a while ago that I have a tough time focusing on writing if I don't have a dedicated place to do that writing. It's fine to sit on the couch and write about a basketball game that I'm currently watching, but it's very hard to sit and write about something meaningful while relaxing on the couch. My brain is wired to use couch-time as leisure time, meaning I will browse Twitter or a thousand other sites instead of actually paying attention to what I'm "supposed to" be writing about. Last week I got a desk from a friend of mine and plunked it in the corner of our basement. I sat down at the desk and I wrote. It went pretty well. The desk is small - about 40 inches across and 18 deep, according to my unbelievably bad spatial reasoning - and I truly just put it in the corner and sat down. But I wanted mor...

I'm trying to get healthier. Or maybe I'm trying to stay healthy. Or maybe I just don't want to be fat. It's at least one of those things. When I started dating Jenna 4+ years ago, I slowly started losing weight. I weighed about 215 pounds when we met, but I was in pretty good shape - running 3-6 miles a couple times a week, biking to work when weather allowed, going to the gym semi regularly. My diet was...not great. Jenna scolded me for eating Pop Tarts, which I miss terribly to this day. She only ever really drinks water. I used to drink a lot of milk. Even with skim milk, if I drank a quart a day, that was several hundred calories that weren't super necessary. We would go for walks pretty commonly and she just ate healthier than I did at the time, so by osmosis I started losing weight. By the time we moved to Italy I was down to about 200-205 pounds on a regular basis. I remember telling a friend (looking at you, Lubelski) that at some point I just wanted ...

I've had a blank document open on my laptop for over an hour now. I've been browsing the internet, leaving the room, walking the dog, and looking at basketball stats for a new NBA article (my 1000 words yesterday went to another Cavs basketball article at Hashtag Basketball ). After finally starting to write, and completing the first paragraph, I managed to sidetrack myself for another 15 minutes. Even when I came back to write the previous sentence, I almost clicked to a new Chrome tab instead of pressing on into this sentence. The point of this is that writing can be really hard. It seems like it would be easy - just write whatever is on your mind - but how often is what's on our mind a coherent thought? Rarely, right? Our thoughts zip around from the episode of Parks & Rec we watched yesterday to that dog we saw across the street to a video we saw on Facebook to oh man I just burped to I wonder if my Prime delivery is going to arrive today or tomorrow. Weirdly,...

Yesterday's 1000 words went to Hashtag Basketball , so I'm three for three. Today is feeling a little tougher, so today I'm going to try something different. At home I have something called " Story Cubes ," which are 6-sided dice with an image on each side. The idea is that you roll the dice and make up a story using all nine words. Typically you start with "Once upon a time..." It's somewhere between a party game and a creative activity. Since I'm at work (on a slow day) and the dice are at home, I'm going to use a 9-word generation from RandomWordGenerator.com and make up a story. This should be weird. I'm setting the max number of syllables per word at 4. Here's the list: Story, translate, popular, smell, bloody, rule, authorise (with an S?! I'm gonna change that), variation, volunteer. The goal will be to start typing in a moment and create the entire story in one fell swoop, but if a student comes in, I'll have to ...

This one hurts. We've been fostering a dog named Ginger for the past two weeks. I've always been reluctant to foster dogs because I love dogs so much that it hurts. I love dogs for all the reasons anyone loves dogs, except I'm just a big dope and love them a little extra. Jenna has always wanted to do this and I've always resisted because I knew that I'd get too attached to having an extra dog in the house. We've done kittens, which is a lot of fun, and I've never had quite that feeling. With kittens, there are always multiples so it always feels like a bit too much to handle in the long-term. Also, they're just babies so they haven't gotten used to any kind of life (only partially true, I realize) and I know that once they go to their adoptive homes, they'll be there for a long time. But then there's Ginger. We thought about fostering a dog because our dog, Hachi, gets kind of lonely and he loves cold weather. However, we humans love c...

I don't actually know if I'll publish all of these, but the idea is to write 1,000 words per weekday over at least the next month. They won't all be here on my blog - they can be independent projects (books and the like) or more likely, basketball articles - but the idea is to get words on a document and see where they go. Writing can be hard. It's hard to focus on an idea unless I have a real  idea to start with. Just typing until something comes out feels like cheating or like it shouldn't count for anything, because I didn't go in with a purpose. But I guess writing is   the purpose, so it can't be a failure. Countless people will say that the trick to writing is to just start doing it. I'm hoping that's the case here, but so far it's not doing a whole lot. In life news, I went skiing today. I grew up less than 5 miles from a ski "resort" and yet I never skied there. Ever. My brothers skied, my friends skied, and my dad even sk...

The era of Cleveland Cavaliers basketball between LeBron's stints was, at best, tumultuous. There was off-court drama, coaching nightmares (Byron Scott, baby!), and a rotating cast of oddball role players. Most of all, of course, there was LeBron's shadow. How fitting, then, that in the season after he left, the Cavaliers went on an NBA record 26 game losing streak. They were bad. Really bad. For a good time, take a look at their season-recap Basketball-Reference page . Of the 19 players who filled out the roster, one is still playing in the NBA, a mere seven years later (Ramon Sessions). A long afternoon could be spent finding gems within this page. Believe me, I have browsed it at length. And from that browsing I noticed some things. Before the streak even started, the Cavs had a pretty wild trio of losses. Starting November 30th, they lost three straight games by a combined 80 points: a 19 point loss, then a 27 point loss, then a 34 point loss. That's terrible. And y...