The Life of the Cubs

Well I moved the blog here http://tallfootballer.tumblr.com/

Posted by Kevin at 2:54 PM | 0 comments    

What is with people these days? I started combing my hair to the left instead of the right and everyone keeps telling me I look "boyish." I even got one comment from a lady checking my id who looked shocked that it said 1985 on it and said, "you look so young!" Younger than 24? I don't know I found the whole thing weird. But, as all the elder folk are telling me now, take it while you can get it... I don't want to look like I still live with my parents though. I feel plenty old.

In a way I am young. I fear more and more that the older I get the more attached to things I will become. I prefer feeling unattached when I think of things like a bank account, mortgage, kids, bills, all things that seems to consume the older population. Everything revolves around satisfying these quotas we build for ourselves. It all begins when we youth think we have to fall into the societal mold that is injected in us from the beginning of our lives. Growing up, our environment is full of old school family archetypes, Mom's at home, Dad's at work, kids get into mischief. Rarely, if ever, did we see a television show or have a class when the main protagonist was someone who explored themselves and their world outside of the cliche prototypes that society had to offer. So from the very beginning there is something in our brains that says "go to college," and, "get married, pro-create damnit!" Not that there's anything wrong with doing either of those, its just so expected of us anymore that if you do anything to the contrary people are almost offended.

Take my family for instance. Since the ripe old age of about 16 my Grandmother has been on me about making "great-grandbabies." Mind you I have all older siblings, some are in their thirties, and yet Grandmommy still insists on having some grandbabies from me. Now, I don't have a problem with babies. The are kind of weird and don't do much except look at you with the big puffy faces, but I can appreciate the idea. They aren't really cute to me until they can walk around and at least do stuff. What gets me most about babies, especially if they are your own, is how limiting they are. People say getting married is like putting on a ball and chain, really having kids is the ultimate ball and chain. For the rest of your life you will have to constantly worry about your child, picking them up from school, feeding them, making sure they are not psychotic, all thing that could prevent you from living your life how you want to live it. Some people want to have children, it is their ultimate desire and passion. For me, it is not, and people cannot understand that for some reason. I can barely take care of myself and keep myself stable, how could I possibly bring another human into this mess of an existence? Yes, I am selfish in this regard because I am putting myself before my potential children. I have some serious figuring out to do, and settling for that matter before children even become a glimmer of thought.

This was supposed to be a short post, so I'll end it here, but I have much more to write on this topic. It will have to come later though.

Posted by Kevin at 12:47 PM | 0 comments    

DC is great for people watching. As my wife well knows, sometimes you can get so fascinated with the weirdness of some people it's hard to look away. Some of the best people watching comes from my commute on Metro.

One evening I hopped on the red line towards Chinatown to transfer back to VA. In typical rush hour fashion the metro car quickly filled to capacity. If you don't know, capacity means everyone is 'sucking in' so to speak, you don't need to hold onto the railings because everyone is packed in so tightly no one is going anywhere. Even at that full you still have the idiots who fling themselves at the crowd through the doors in hopes that they'll land somewhere in the car that doesn't obstruct the 'doors closing.' And they are the same people that get arms, legs, purses, bags stuck in the doorway and eventually have to relent and leave the train to try again on the next one that is 1 minute behind. So on this one fateful evening one lady decided it was a good idea to bring pink lemonade on the Metro, despite the no food and no drinks policy. In fact that rule seemed to apply to everyone but her, as it does most food/drink culprits. Anyhow, this lady ended up pushed up against another lady that was sitting down. The sitting lady looked ominously at the standing lady at the careless fashion in which she was holding her pink lemonade. Standing lady began fiddling with her Ipod, which required elbowing two guys next to her. In the process of her fiddling, her pink lemonade began to tip at an angle. It did have a lid on it, but sometimes I suppose lids don't work to well. After a couple seconds of pressure some pink lemonade dribbled between the seam of the lid and the cup. As the drops of pink liquid fell on the sitting ladies white pants I couldn't do anything but helplessly stand there and brace myself for an all out battle. Here's what happened next:

Sitting Lady: Umm, excuse me!
(Standing Lady still fiddling with her Ipod)
(Sitting Lady taps Standing Lady violently on the forearm, Standing Lady turns, looks at her cup, looks at the lady, and immediately knows what happened)
Sitting Lady: Could you please not pour your drink on me
(Standing Lady stands there trying to muster an excuse)
Sitting Lady: You're not even supposed to have that on here anyways.
Standing Lady: Well it's for my Son.
Sitting Lady: And?
Standing Lady: Yea it's for him..
Sitting Lady: Ok, well you're still not supposed to have it.
Standing Lady: Well it's for my son, so, I don't give a damn (she turns her head matter of factly)
Sitting Lady: Well that's just great
(Standing lady turns away from her, putting her butt firmly in her face)
Sitting Lady: Thank you very much, it's such a delight at the end of my day to get drinks spilled all over me, thank you for being considerate
(Standing Lady continues to ignore her, pretending she doesn't hear anything, meanwhile I am cracking up and trying not to be too belligerent about finding humor in the situation)

Both of them continues to ignore each other until we got to Chinatown and departed our separate ways. Luckily this one ended peacefully, unlike other incidents in the past, but this one was still pretty humorous.

More to come...

Posted by Kevin at 3:14 PM | 0 comments    

This month seemed to zoom by rather quickly.

This morning as I am biking to King Street metro, I made my way through one of the many neighborhoods I pass through. At the entrance/exit of the neighborhood there is a gate that goes up and down based on a sensor that is installed on your car. There is room in the middle of this gate for walkers and bikers to pass through normally. Well, today I was riding closely behind a car on our way out of the neighborhood. Everything was fine, the gate lifted and I thought I could scooch on by out the gate. I was most definitely wrong! The gate comes flying down, I had a split second decision to make. As I am seeing my life flashing before my eyes my brain is hesitating between braking and full speed ahead. I manage to duck a bit, but the gate comes crashing down on top of my head. Wham!! It grazes off my helmet and hits my squarely in the back. Luckily I kept my balance enough to pretend to play off my embarrassment to the onlookers. I am just glad that I am not severely injured because the thought of that thing clotheslining me was running through my mind the whole time. I'm sure it looked funny, and in hindsight is pretty funny, but damn that was scary!

All is well, though, I am at work safely and have learned the 'dont try to beat the gate' lesson. Big changes coming up for June, mainly our new living space. We are moving tomorrow morning a few blocks away to Alfred st into a one bedroom apartment. Its a little smaller than what we're used to but it is much cheaper and will put us in a lot better position to do some other things, like experience life outside of living paycheck to paycheck. We're excited about that. We've hired some movers to come tomorrow, so hopefully the heavy lifting will be taken care of.

Soccer is in full swing. I am trying to register my team for Summer, but am not getting very many enthusiastic players coming through. I am seriously contemplating taking the summer off to train train train and train some more so in the fall I am a beast. We'll see what happens with that. Space Bananas FC is still going well, although the season is extremely short. We continue to lose every game by about 4 goals on average, which is terrible as well. I would say each opponent is generally getting between 15-25 shots per game, which is an adventure as a keeper. It's definitely been a learning experience.

Crossfit is in full effect, although this week only utilizing the classes twice seems like a waste, but I am going and loving it. Soreness runs rampant, but that's to be expected, I'm giving it a few months before I start judging myself too harshly, it's been humbling.

June looks good, after the move is over our one year wedding anniversary is coming up, hard to believe its been a year since we were in St John... Sigh, I miss St John...

Posted by Kevin at 10:27 AM | 0 comments    

Looking pretty clear this weekend. No Crossfit tomorrow, no game on Sunday, game on monday but at 8:30 pm, so essentially three days off which is so exciting to me! Going to work on seeing Terminator Salvation hopefully. Also, Saturday for all that don't know Washington Freedom and DC United have a doubleheader at RFK. If you already have United tickets you can show up at 4:30 and get in for the womens game. Brenn and I will be there, should be a good time, also check out the cheese papusas while your there, they are great! Sunday plan on doing a whole lot of nothing, although Brenn is trying to drag me to yoga, I'd love to go but we'll see how the legs feel after Murph... DOMS may come and kill my quads before too much longer. I also suppose I should partake in some beer drinking since it is memorial day weekend and all. I won't be at the beach or the pool but I can at least get in some brewsky's. Anyways, have a good weekend y'all.

Posted by Kevin at 4:27 PM | 0 comments    

Changed my apge header in honor of DCU now that City's season is over. Hopefully, this is the year we get that championship trophy back!

Posted by Kevin at 11:49 AM | 0 comments    

One thing I find really annoying is not being able to find paleo type foods when I'm at work. So last night I ran out of eggs when I was making a cobb salad for me and the misses. Sure, I could have run over to Balducci's and picked up a dozen but I was already in my PJ's and really didn't feel like changing, especially since my tired body was just 'food and sleep already!' Anyhow, I didn't pickup the eggs and went to bed. This morning, as I am planning out my meals etc I realize that I have nothing to make for breakfast, unless I want breakfast to be a can of tuna with some greens and a little EVOO (not really). So I packed up what I had (strawberries, broccoli, tuna, walnuts) and headed in to work. Now I am sitting here thinking, where the hell can I go to get jsut some flat out paleo food?

In particular, breakfast. Last time I went this route I ended up ordering an egg sandwich from Lawson's across the street. When I opened the sandwich, and ditched the bread, all that was left was maybe 1 and 1/2 eggs. That, simply won't do. I normally eat 4 eggs, so 1 and a half seems like a bad joke. And on top of everything else I noticed that indeed there was melted american cheese on top of the eggs, most certainly NOT paleo! Sigh, so it looks like its another intermittent fasting day for me, I'll probably have to head over to Sweet Green at lunch and build my own salad, naturally with tuna on it, yay, so exciting.

Also have soccer practice tonight. Looking forward to taking some shots after last weeks debacle. Should be some good weather, then to bed early so I can get to Crossfit in the morning since there is no 6:30 PM session on Friday for all of us who have no social lives and would like to workout at 6:30 on a Friday. I'll probably have to hit an early class so I can collect myself before going to work.

Finally, after work tomorrow, I can relax into a three day weekend, although I do have a game on Monday night. I really wish I didn't though as I could use a solid two 'off' days and catch up on some z's.

DCU won 5-3 last night, sounds like I missed a good one!
I found this interesting, LA is strange.

Posted by Kevin at 9:16 AM | 0 comments