basketball season

In my Word of the Day email this morning, the word was ‘perspicuous’.  It means ‘clearly expressed or presented; lucid’, but the second definition is the very similar apparently synonym ‘perspicacious’.  And that just seems a little excessive to me.

I have a more mellow station on Spotify for days when I’m not feeling like pumping it up.  There are some songs that, in my life, I have found myself strongly identifying with.  Naturally, a few years later, in a new stage of life, I come back to them and the song feels empty or insipid or maudlin: high school, undergrad, graduate school, any of the years in between with their growth through learning curves, and I’m not talking about school learning but the kind of learning curves that tell you something about yourself that you may not have known.

And you go through phases.  In my senior year of high school, I loved Mondays because I loved school.  I mean, I LOVED school.  Blessed with good friends in my classes, blessed with teachers and mentors who seemed, at the very least, amused and tolerant.  Since then, I haven’t had the same eagerness for the weekend to draw to a close, and I guess that’s normal.  Enjoy the weekends, man.  I haven’t had Sunday night anxiety in a while – I’m mostly indifferent about Mondays now.  I like to complain about them in a tongue-in-cheek way when something goes wrong.  It’s one of those human things.

I’ve always felt like Billy Joel is saying something that I understand in the song Vienna.  I’m not really a child anymore, but I still feel like one more often than not.  I’m growing less and less convinced that you ever actually learn how to become an adult.  There’s always something new.  I managed to get my car insurance into order last year, and this year I need to figure out how to do my taxes.  There is always something new.

The Syracuse-Pittsburgh game was this weekend.  It was Saturday afternoon at 4:00pm, and I watched it on my computer through the ESPN website.  I was really nervous about it.

Each year I take another little step up.  I caught the bug (predictably) in 2003, when our orange-jerseyed boys won the national championship and we sent Carmelo Anthony off to the NBA.  Since then, I have grown fonder and fonder of Syracuse basketball, keeping up a little bit better each year with my team.  Lately I’ve been reading about them on various websites, and I get a little more depth of knowledge (as you do when you read about anything!).

Pitt was supposed to be a tough opponent, and it was indeed a close game.  Sitting in my apartment and watching the game, I sometimes felt ready to explode because of the tense matchup!  I bet my neighbors have an idea that I might have been watching sports.  But close games are the most exciting to watch – especially when your team wins.

My favorite bit was probably Jim Boeheim’s quote, which I heard while getting ready to exit out of the browser and move on to whatever new thing I was going to do with my Saturday.  “This was a Big East game, that’s all this was.  Forget about ACC, it was a war down there.”

Get it, boys!  18-0.  In the past five years, our total record for our first 18 games of each season is 88-2.  Now those are some numbers that I like.