HOORAY for the Red Sox!!
I've never been a huge sports fan. That is, I've never been a huge fan of "the big three" sports that the nation seems to think is so important to our culture. Indeed, I'm often surprised (at best) and disgusted (at worst) by the amount of time people spend watching these games and the amount of money the people playing the games make. I mean, there are people starving all over the nation, schools are running out of money to pay teachers, and the local NBA team is paying a pot smoking rapist a million bucks to run around a court trying to get a big orange ball through a net that's 10 feet off the ground.
Sorry, this might be an unpopular viewpoint, but it just doesn't make sense to me. But that said, I do harbor a soft spot for baseball, thanks to influence early in my life by my dad. Long before my dad or I discovered our dairy allergies, he and I used to sit in the living room on Sunday afternoons eating taco chips with nacho cheese dip and watching whatever baseball game was on network TV.
I get baseball. I understand (most of) the rules and for that reason I enjoy watching it. But I've never had a home-town baseball team. As a kid, my dad was a fan of the Yankees and the Mets, and used to take the bus and then the subway into NY City to watch the games from the little New Jersey town where they lived. Then, when he moved to the Portland area and the Yanks were bought by George Steinbrenner and the Mets started to really suck, my dad started supporting the Seattle Mariners. But I never really felt an affiliation with any of those teams. Growing up, I'd only been to Seattle once, so it seemed weird to call them my own. And upon growing older, I still appreciated the game but still didn't have a team I felt I could support.
Until now. Now I live in a place that has their very own baseball team, and guess what? Yesterday the Sox went and did it! They done won themselves a World Series title. Yippee!!! It was a big day here in New England. Aside from the news of Yassar Arafat's illness and potential removal to a hospital outside of Ramala, NPR had little to talk about this morning but the Boston Red Sox win.
And for good reason. The Sox haven't won a World Series title since 1918. They're planning a victory parade for Saturday morning but despite my joy at finally having a baseball team to call my own, I doubt if I'll go to the parade. Reports are predicting that more than 2 million people will be there and I'm just NOT a crowd person.
Also, I've got a work thing in the morning and then Rennie and I head to Cape Cod with my friend Amy - she just moved here from Portland as well and is in a similar boat as me: all her family is still there and she knows very few people here. I'm finally feeling better, too - today was the first day I didn't take any cold medicine! - so I'm hoping this will be a fun weekend.
