IN THE BEFORE TIME...THE LONG LONG AGO
It occurred to me the other day that even among my close friends, not much is known about me before I came to college. Sure some of you know about the video store and my high school friends (Amanda and Christy) and I've told more than my fair share of stories about Anthony (my best friend in high school that made it a point to sleep with all of my friends who were girls) as well as the tragedy that was my first serious relationship, although the seriousness of it is immediately thrown into question by the fact that it was never officially deemed a relationship, but other than these select few things my life is kind of a mystery. Granted it's a mystery that's not entirely unsolvable given my personality and with my undeniable love for movies it doesn't take Perry Mason to figure out what I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights doing. But I'm talking about more than that. I'm talking about serious, personal things, like how did I end up the where I am, and what happened along the way. So that is why, due to my incredible ego and laboring under the belief that people actually give a shit, I'm going to devote at least one section in each subsequent blog entry to my life before I set foot in Mcdavid; to the time before I was Adam's better half; to a time when...you get the fucking point.
...and tonight I start with...
TOE PICK
When I was fifteen I wanted to be a professional hockey player. I don't really know where I got the notion that I had the ability to do this. Maybe I'd just seen The Mighty Ducks too many times, but I really thought that's what I wanted to do with my life. And my father never discouraged me, God bless him. He never said "Will, look at the genes you're dealing with. You're five foot nothing. You're not gonna get any bigger...well, that gut of yours probably will, but regardless you don't have the body type to be a professional athlete, hockey player or otherwise." He never said that, but I'm sure he thought it more than once. Maybe part of him thought that I could actually make it if I tried hard enough. Or maybe he knew that sooner or later I'd come to realize the inevitable. Whatever the reason, he encouraged me to play ice hockey, and at that time I'd only ice skated once in my life.
I think it was at my twelfth birthday. Me and two of my friends went to the ice skating rink at the Plaza which, for those of you who haven't seen the establishment, isn't much more advanced than me going out to my front yard with a garden hose, giving it a good spray, and waiting for it to freeze. Still, I knew that if I was gonna be a professional hockey player, I'd probably have to learn how to ice skate. The only problem was that I didn't have a whole lot of time to learn. The season was coming up and I didn't want to wait until my junior year to start playing. So I took a couple of skating classes at the end of the summer and with little more than a few hours of ice time under my belt, that Fall I set out to play ice hockey.
My high school didn't have an ice hockey team. That could have been because the nearest hockey rink was more than half an hour away, or it could have been that when I started to play ice hockey I was, at least as far as I know, one of maybe five people in my entire school (pop. 2000+) to play ice hockey. Whatever the reason, the school district was in no rush to make a high school hockey team. Thus, I had to go to this scouting thing that was held on a pair of consecutive Saturdays. It was me and five other guys who apparently also belonged to high schools with no teams. They seemed like okay guys. I didn't try too hard to make friends, not only because I figured I'd never see them again, but also because at that time I was more than a little shy (an issue that I'll address at a later date).
So the six of us go out onto the ice that first Saturday, and much to my surprise I'm not the worst one out there. I certainly wasn't the best, but I wasn't out of place. We did a series of drills, and given that we were essentially trying out we should have been playing our hardest, but we weren't. Or at least I wasn't. All the while, standing along one of the benches, was a line of six or so coaches. A couple of them watched closely, but most of them just stood there waiting for a choice time to exit. After all, it was obvious after only a few minutes that none of us on the ice were great. Only a couple of us could even be considered good. And no, I'm not putting myself into that group.
The final thing we did on that first day was a drill that some coaches call "the ladder", others refer to it as "the mountain." I'm sure there's more names for it, and if you've watched Miracle, you've seen it. It's the drill that they do for like an hour after they tie Norway (I'm not sure it was Norway, but I'm too lazy to do any fact checking). At any rate, while the U.S. team had to do like a hundred of them, in our final drill that day we only did one. I know it doesn't sound like much, but after you've been on the ice for more than two hours one is plenty. I don't know whether or not that was the first ladder/mountain I'd ever done, God knows it wasn't the last, but the fact remains that of the six players on the ice I was the first one done.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.
So I went in the next week with a little bit of confidence, which was probably the worst thing that I could have done. The week before the other players didn't just half-ass it...they'd barely showed up, because that second week they skated circles around me. Not literally, that wasn't one of the drills or anything, but it could have been.
That second week the line of six or so coaches that had been there the week before had shrunk to two. Long story short (too late) the best guy among the six of us went to one team, and the other five of us were thrown onto the other: the Blue Valley North Mustangs. At the time I didn't know shit about Kansas schools, and I'm not sure after three years of high school hockey I learned all that much, but at the time Blue Valley North had just been built and the reason that they needed five players was because it was the first year that the school would have a team. Needless to say, I found this fitting.
Now I've said this before: that what happened to me on that team during those three years can in no way be recreated in the written word, and if it can be it's gonna take a writer much more talented than I, so I'll skip directly to the post script...the team ended when I left.
Not because of anything I did, but when I graduated six people on the team graduated with me. Seeing as how our roster only had like fifteen people on it, that was quite a loss, and they didn't get enough people the next year to give Blue Valley North their own team. The players who actually came back the next year got thrown onto some other team and to this day, nearly three years later, Blue Valley North still hasn't had a team.
The team only existed for three years, the three years that I was on it. And I don't know why, but I like that. I like that a lot.
FELTCHER, FROM CRANSTON?
I was reminded the other day, not through any real fault of my own, that you never truly forget the first person you had a crush on, or at the very least that the crush existed. For me, it was Megan Sanning, and while the details of how we met would make for interesting points in a short story, they are for all intents and purposes useless here. Suffice it to say that we met at school, which at the age of thirteen is pretty much where you meet everybody.
I don't know why I liked her, but I do know that I liked her immediately. She was cute, living on the border of pretty. As I recall she was short, but I think we all were. She didn't quite have boobs yet, but even then I knew there was more to girls that that. It probably had something to do with her smile. Just as I am today, back then I was a sucker for a beautiful smile. And she had a pretty good laugh too, which was the perfect compliment to my neverending barrage of jokes.
I started liking her at thirteen, but I didn't ask her out until I was sixteen. She turned me down of course since by that time she was dating seniors and I still didn't even have my license. But I was persistant. I kept asking her out, refusing to take no for an answer until that one day when I actually took no for an answer. My crush didn't die. I just didn't acknowledge it anymore, and it was about this time that I became interested in Jihan. We all know how well that turned out.
Until the other day I hadn't seen Megan in three years. I hadn't even thought about her in all that time and then suddenly there she was, working at Best Buy. Now I'm the kinda guy who likes to come home and see people I went to high school with working shitty jobs and say "hey, I'm going to school and you're working a shitty job...how do you like me now, punk?", but she wasn't just working there. She appeared to be the manager, and during our thirty second (literally thirty second) conversation she mentioned that she was going to school. So good for her. I don't really have anything over her, and therefore have no reason to brag, but hey...good for her.
Still, when I saw her, I didn't see a girl that I went to high school with, or a girl that I'd known for the better part of eight years, or even a girl that grew out of that awkward adolescent cute phase into a pretty attractive young woman. All I saw was a girl that I'd had a crush on at one time, and in that moment not only was I reminded that at one time I liked her, but I also realized that those days, the days of clumsy teenage crushes, are over for good.
WHY I SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HAVE KIDS
There was a moment today, and I stress moment, that made me question whether or not I should be allowed to have children. I was watching Dawson's Creek and I wondered if it would be possible for me to name my son Dawson, get him obsessed with movies, and set it up so that we lived in a small town with a creek and maybe I'd make him play with an underachieving kid named Pacey and force him into a relationship with Joey, the tomboy who might just live down the creek and would row over to our house and sneak into his bedroom window at night.
I was thinking about how cool that would be, and quickly calculating the amount of time it would take to make all of that happen when I realized that I need help. And I don't mean help setting it up, I mean serious help. For the love of God don't tell anyone...
MY BIONIC TOOTH
I've got a porcelain crown on one of my teeth. I know it's nothing special. Millions of people have them, but I'm convinced that now I have special powers. I like to think that I can chew through anything with that tooth. Say I need to cut some rope...scissors? Fuck that, I'll just use my tooth. What if there's a walnut lying around that needs some cracking? I'll just use my bionic tooth. I can do anything with it. There's no nerves, no pain.
I feel like a Bond villian.
TOP FIVE
Since 2004 is over, I figured I should divulge my list of the top five movies. Keep in mind these are my picks and I didn't see all that many movies. Anyway...here goes
1) Sideways
2) Closer
3) Eternal Sunshine
4) The Aviator
5) Garden State (sorry, I had to)
AND YET...AND YET I WONDER
I was at Walmart the other day, buying God knows what movie, and they'd put down that grainy salt stuff to keep the sidewalk from getting all icy, and I couldn't help but wonder - When they need to salt the sidewalk, is there like a shed around back that contains the materials to do this or do they just grab the stuff they need off of the shelves in the store?
Over the last few days this has been bothering me more than I'd like to admit.
My mind wanders...
It occurred to me the other day that even among my close friends, not much is known about me before I came to college. Sure some of you know about the video store and my high school friends (Amanda and Christy) and I've told more than my fair share of stories about Anthony (my best friend in high school that made it a point to sleep with all of my friends who were girls) as well as the tragedy that was my first serious relationship, although the seriousness of it is immediately thrown into question by the fact that it was never officially deemed a relationship, but other than these select few things my life is kind of a mystery. Granted it's a mystery that's not entirely unsolvable given my personality and with my undeniable love for movies it doesn't take Perry Mason to figure out what I spent most of my Friday and Saturday nights doing. But I'm talking about more than that. I'm talking about serious, personal things, like how did I end up the where I am, and what happened along the way. So that is why, due to my incredible ego and laboring under the belief that people actually give a shit, I'm going to devote at least one section in each subsequent blog entry to my life before I set foot in Mcdavid; to the time before I was Adam's better half; to a time when...you get the fucking point.
...and tonight I start with...
TOE PICK
When I was fifteen I wanted to be a professional hockey player. I don't really know where I got the notion that I had the ability to do this. Maybe I'd just seen The Mighty Ducks too many times, but I really thought that's what I wanted to do with my life. And my father never discouraged me, God bless him. He never said "Will, look at the genes you're dealing with. You're five foot nothing. You're not gonna get any bigger...well, that gut of yours probably will, but regardless you don't have the body type to be a professional athlete, hockey player or otherwise." He never said that, but I'm sure he thought it more than once. Maybe part of him thought that I could actually make it if I tried hard enough. Or maybe he knew that sooner or later I'd come to realize the inevitable. Whatever the reason, he encouraged me to play ice hockey, and at that time I'd only ice skated once in my life.
I think it was at my twelfth birthday. Me and two of my friends went to the ice skating rink at the Plaza which, for those of you who haven't seen the establishment, isn't much more advanced than me going out to my front yard with a garden hose, giving it a good spray, and waiting for it to freeze. Still, I knew that if I was gonna be a professional hockey player, I'd probably have to learn how to ice skate. The only problem was that I didn't have a whole lot of time to learn. The season was coming up and I didn't want to wait until my junior year to start playing. So I took a couple of skating classes at the end of the summer and with little more than a few hours of ice time under my belt, that Fall I set out to play ice hockey.
My high school didn't have an ice hockey team. That could have been because the nearest hockey rink was more than half an hour away, or it could have been that when I started to play ice hockey I was, at least as far as I know, one of maybe five people in my entire school (pop. 2000+) to play ice hockey. Whatever the reason, the school district was in no rush to make a high school hockey team. Thus, I had to go to this scouting thing that was held on a pair of consecutive Saturdays. It was me and five other guys who apparently also belonged to high schools with no teams. They seemed like okay guys. I didn't try too hard to make friends, not only because I figured I'd never see them again, but also because at that time I was more than a little shy (an issue that I'll address at a later date).
So the six of us go out onto the ice that first Saturday, and much to my surprise I'm not the worst one out there. I certainly wasn't the best, but I wasn't out of place. We did a series of drills, and given that we were essentially trying out we should have been playing our hardest, but we weren't. Or at least I wasn't. All the while, standing along one of the benches, was a line of six or so coaches. A couple of them watched closely, but most of them just stood there waiting for a choice time to exit. After all, it was obvious after only a few minutes that none of us on the ice were great. Only a couple of us could even be considered good. And no, I'm not putting myself into that group.
The final thing we did on that first day was a drill that some coaches call "the ladder", others refer to it as "the mountain." I'm sure there's more names for it, and if you've watched Miracle, you've seen it. It's the drill that they do for like an hour after they tie Norway (I'm not sure it was Norway, but I'm too lazy to do any fact checking). At any rate, while the U.S. team had to do like a hundred of them, in our final drill that day we only did one. I know it doesn't sound like much, but after you've been on the ice for more than two hours one is plenty. I don't know whether or not that was the first ladder/mountain I'd ever done, God knows it wasn't the last, but the fact remains that of the six players on the ice I was the first one done.
Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.
So I went in the next week with a little bit of confidence, which was probably the worst thing that I could have done. The week before the other players didn't just half-ass it...they'd barely showed up, because that second week they skated circles around me. Not literally, that wasn't one of the drills or anything, but it could have been.
That second week the line of six or so coaches that had been there the week before had shrunk to two. Long story short (too late) the best guy among the six of us went to one team, and the other five of us were thrown onto the other: the Blue Valley North Mustangs. At the time I didn't know shit about Kansas schools, and I'm not sure after three years of high school hockey I learned all that much, but at the time Blue Valley North had just been built and the reason that they needed five players was because it was the first year that the school would have a team. Needless to say, I found this fitting.
Now I've said this before: that what happened to me on that team during those three years can in no way be recreated in the written word, and if it can be it's gonna take a writer much more talented than I, so I'll skip directly to the post script...the team ended when I left.
Not because of anything I did, but when I graduated six people on the team graduated with me. Seeing as how our roster only had like fifteen people on it, that was quite a loss, and they didn't get enough people the next year to give Blue Valley North their own team. The players who actually came back the next year got thrown onto some other team and to this day, nearly three years later, Blue Valley North still hasn't had a team.
The team only existed for three years, the three years that I was on it. And I don't know why, but I like that. I like that a lot.
FELTCHER, FROM CRANSTON?
I was reminded the other day, not through any real fault of my own, that you never truly forget the first person you had a crush on, or at the very least that the crush existed. For me, it was Megan Sanning, and while the details of how we met would make for interesting points in a short story, they are for all intents and purposes useless here. Suffice it to say that we met at school, which at the age of thirteen is pretty much where you meet everybody.
I don't know why I liked her, but I do know that I liked her immediately. She was cute, living on the border of pretty. As I recall she was short, but I think we all were. She didn't quite have boobs yet, but even then I knew there was more to girls that that. It probably had something to do with her smile. Just as I am today, back then I was a sucker for a beautiful smile. And she had a pretty good laugh too, which was the perfect compliment to my neverending barrage of jokes.
I started liking her at thirteen, but I didn't ask her out until I was sixteen. She turned me down of course since by that time she was dating seniors and I still didn't even have my license. But I was persistant. I kept asking her out, refusing to take no for an answer until that one day when I actually took no for an answer. My crush didn't die. I just didn't acknowledge it anymore, and it was about this time that I became interested in Jihan. We all know how well that turned out.
Until the other day I hadn't seen Megan in three years. I hadn't even thought about her in all that time and then suddenly there she was, working at Best Buy. Now I'm the kinda guy who likes to come home and see people I went to high school with working shitty jobs and say "hey, I'm going to school and you're working a shitty job...how do you like me now, punk?", but she wasn't just working there. She appeared to be the manager, and during our thirty second (literally thirty second) conversation she mentioned that she was going to school. So good for her. I don't really have anything over her, and therefore have no reason to brag, but hey...good for her.
Still, when I saw her, I didn't see a girl that I went to high school with, or a girl that I'd known for the better part of eight years, or even a girl that grew out of that awkward adolescent cute phase into a pretty attractive young woman. All I saw was a girl that I'd had a crush on at one time, and in that moment not only was I reminded that at one time I liked her, but I also realized that those days, the days of clumsy teenage crushes, are over for good.
WHY I SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO HAVE KIDS
There was a moment today, and I stress moment, that made me question whether or not I should be allowed to have children. I was watching Dawson's Creek and I wondered if it would be possible for me to name my son Dawson, get him obsessed with movies, and set it up so that we lived in a small town with a creek and maybe I'd make him play with an underachieving kid named Pacey and force him into a relationship with Joey, the tomboy who might just live down the creek and would row over to our house and sneak into his bedroom window at night.
I was thinking about how cool that would be, and quickly calculating the amount of time it would take to make all of that happen when I realized that I need help. And I don't mean help setting it up, I mean serious help. For the love of God don't tell anyone...
MY BIONIC TOOTH
I've got a porcelain crown on one of my teeth. I know it's nothing special. Millions of people have them, but I'm convinced that now I have special powers. I like to think that I can chew through anything with that tooth. Say I need to cut some rope...scissors? Fuck that, I'll just use my tooth. What if there's a walnut lying around that needs some cracking? I'll just use my bionic tooth. I can do anything with it. There's no nerves, no pain.
I feel like a Bond villian.
TOP FIVE
Since 2004 is over, I figured I should divulge my list of the top five movies. Keep in mind these are my picks and I didn't see all that many movies. Anyway...here goes
1) Sideways
2) Closer
3) Eternal Sunshine
4) The Aviator
5) Garden State (sorry, I had to)
AND YET...AND YET I WONDER
I was at Walmart the other day, buying God knows what movie, and they'd put down that grainy salt stuff to keep the sidewalk from getting all icy, and I couldn't help but wonder - When they need to salt the sidewalk, is there like a shed around back that contains the materials to do this or do they just grab the stuff they need off of the shelves in the store?
Over the last few days this has been bothering me more than I'd like to admit.
My mind wanders...
