Burning My Travels Clean

I feel I have lost all motivation to blog.  Sorry everyone, maybe you'll hear from me sooner or later, but until something big sparks my interest, I doubt it.  Enjoy your days everybody, there isn't time to do anything else!  And if this is it, it was fun while it lasted.

I was reading the paper today (in case you are wondering, I read the New York Times because I feel like USA today has way too many pictures and is more likely to include headlines that read, "America lays the smack down in ___!" Not exactly how I like my news) when I noticed and read two articles that were so obviously contradictory to one another that I was shocked (and a little amused admittedly) to see them within the same newspaper!  The first one on the front page was rather optimistic (but ultimately controverting as these things have proven to be) and the other, the main headline of the business section, radically opposite and much more defeatist in its approach (sadly, also much closer to the truth).  The two headlines read, "Poll Finds Brightening Outlook on U.S. Economy," and "After Recession, Recovery Will Take Years."  The articles proved to be less counterfactual then their headlines would initially suggest but I thought that when juxtaposed they painted a pretty clear image of the current economic situation and peoples perception of said recession.  The two facts that these articles discuss throughout are undoubtably facts; you can't really argue that, but it's the third fact that is inadvertently stated that I find interesting.  Ceterus paribus, it would take years for the economy to recover from the point it is at now, and all signs are obviously pointing towards further declines; this is what the second article is saying essentially.  The funny thing is that despite this inevitability, the first article, and the pole that it used for its data, suggests that people are feeling 39% more confidant that the economy is getting better, or at least heading in the right direction.  Huh?  Is down the right direction?  The facts state that the economy is bad, getting worse, and will be bad for a long time.  People are increasingly optimistic . . . oh I get it!

Not the performance I was hoping for, or the one I know I'm capable of.  Disappointing.  Oh well, I guess all I can do is put it behind me and try and do better in the remaining drills manana.  Good luck to me.

I have a feeling sleep will not come easy tonight.  Tomorrow I get to see if I measure up, or more specifically if my numbers add up to the expected level of a college football player.  Tomorrow is the combine, essentially Linfield's pro day.  The people from nike's SPARQ program are coming down which is good in a way but bad in another.  It's good in the sense that we'll have all the best timing technology and actual professionals running the drills.  The bad is that with all that laser timing, it can really expose how fast you actually are, or slow as my current fear suggests.  We're running a 20 yard dash, three different cone drills, and of course the crown jewel measuring stick of them all, the 40.  You know when you go into the gym and talk with people about lifting, the first thing they ask is, "so what's your bench?"  Well, the 40 yard dash is the football fields version of the weight rooms bench press, or maybe loosely comparable to how to big your penis is when you're trying to get casted in a porno.  Ok that last one is kinda ridiculous but the point remains the same.  Anyways, after that they are going to test our vertical leap, broad jump, med ball toss, bench press, squat max, and potentially our power cleans.  Then they measure your height and weight and compile those with all the other numbers amassed throughout the day and somehow compute them into what becomes your "power score."  Can you imagine the weight that final number can carry? "Oh this guys a 96, but this guys a 112 so we should play the second guy more."  Thats a shit load of pressure!  That number is going to be carried around on coaches clipboards through spring practice, through the summer, and all the way up to the season.  Hopefully I don't choke.

When I first moved into my dorm last semester back at WSU, I remember meeting these two kids in the front room of our suite, Brian and Ben.  You only get one first impression as they say, and during our initial encounter, Brian and Ben were playing Halo . . .  with wireless headsets . . . in gamer chairs.  With that, and as things were back then, my roommate Mike and I were on high code red nerd-alert whenever they stopped playing Halo and ventured out into the outlying areas beyond their own room.  We both thought for sure that the guys in room 201-A (I don't actually know if that is actually their room number) were larpers and level 80 wowers.  As later discovered, they don't larp, and the real reason Brian and Ben never talked to us was there acute fear of being bro-raped.  Brian and Ben were larping, wowing nerds, and Mike and I were naty ice, visor wearing bro's.  Proof that stereotypes suck dick.  After that initial encounter, it took a thoroughly repugnant moldy batch of month old rice to give rise to further interaction.  From memory I recall the note written on my rice cooker read, "Who's FUCKING rice cooker is this?!  This is disgusting.  Clean up your shit."  Now that I think about it, everything I just said is beside the point I've been meaning to make.