Sentential Links

OK, let's try and get back to some semblance of normalcy around here, shall we? Linkage!

:: When someone, or several someones, say and do stuff that I think is crazy, I can yell and scream at them, but I have found this to be singularly unhelpful in getting rid of my frustration. It just doesn’t make me feel better, but rather, gives me the sense that I’m as out of control as they are. (I admire Roger's ability to calm himself down in such situations. I've never much been tested thereof; I can only remember one such instance when someone shouted something to me from the safety of their moving car, and it was so stupid that I just stood there laughing. It was a kid who commented on my hair by yelling something like "Nice mullet!", when my hair isn't even a mullet. Cracked me up. But it gives me pause that I, a long-haired dude more often than not decked out in outfits that are less than fashionable, get this kind of thing less than a black guy. I'm pretty sure that I'm more odd than Roger. Strange world we live in.)

:: I am not one of those people who leave the TV on as “background noise” but there’s something about football noise that is sort of… I don’t know… comforting, I guess. It’s a relatively steady noise - the crowd noise and the constant chattering of the commentators. Sometimes the noise will go up in reaction to something happening in the game but overall there’s a uniformity to it. It’s almost like music. (This is true...plus there's the fact that outside of one-sided blowouts, with most football games you can usually be assured that at some point, something of at least mild interest will take place on the field. Sure, you might miss a great play here and there, but few sports lend themselves to rejoining after not paying a lot of attention like football. That said, I watched less football this season than I have in many years -- I have not watched a single game all the way through, and most weekends not a single play, since Week Four. I'm not sure if my general interest is waning or if it's just the cumulative effect of thirteen years of my team being lousy, but even most years I can gin up interest in other games, here and there. Now, I'm not even sure I'll bother watching the Super Bowl.

All that said, I am, as usual, insanely happy to see St. Tom the Overrated walk off the field a loser in his last game of the season!)

:: I'm trying to come up with a word to describe my feelings about this movie, and the word I keep coming up with is "ordeal." This was an ordeal. This was less a film than an endurance test. What do I get for surviving it? (SamuraiFrog did not find Les Miserables to his liking. My review is forthcoming. It will be a tad more positive than his!)

:: I seem to remember epic snowfalls like this from my youth but maybe it just looked like a lot of snow because I was a smaller person. (There's something to this, I think. Many a time I've revisited places I remember from my youth that I recall as being huge only to discover that they are, in fact, quite small.)

:: Oh the proverbial ‘pie in the face’ act. That gag never seems to go out of style. I guess you could say this was one of our ‘Why not?’ to-do’s. Fun for the sake of fun. It was either that or bathe in a tub full of jello, which John wouldn’t go for, so a pie in the face it was. (A wise choice, I think. Pies in the face are fun and whacky. A tub full of jello is...ewwww.)

:: I miss him. There is so much I still would love to say to him. I had always hoped (and, frankly, assumed) that we would get close again. I assumed our drifting apart was a phase. (He had drifted away from many of us in his last 3 years or so.) Unfortunately, I will never get that chance now. But I love him, and I will always love him: for who he was then, and for the many years of friendship that followed. He was the best. Truly the best. (I hope, when I am gone, that someone can write about me that way.)

:: So dear friends, live your life like it's fiction. Love like a romance novel, seek like a good mystery, hope like an underdog story and fight like a fantasy warrior.

More next week!