Decisions

As many a poet hath said, decisions are a real pain in the dick.

Recently, it seems that we've had a spate of situations where decisions made by umpires and referees and other assorted sports officials have been lightning rods for controversy, their calls have been questioned, argued, subjected to endless close-ups and replays and, in some cases, have even been overturned.

I feel bad for these poor sonsofbitches.

I mean, there they are, in the thick of things, trying not to get their heads knocked off by balls and cleats, charged with a seemingly impossible task: ensure that some asshole's foot was either to the left of some arbitrary white line or to the right of it, or on it, or his toe on it and his heel was not. Was a pass complete or incomplete? Was a goal good, or was it un... good? And they're there, these usually middle-aged to approaching elderly men, in their dress trousers, polo shirts and baseball caps, sharing the field with young bucks so juiced with testosterone that they should all be wearing lobster bibs, lest it leak out of their nostrils.

I mean, being a ref or an ump is a serious and scary business. Remember when Leslie Nielsen tried it in "The Naked Gun"? Frisking all those baseball players isn't easy.

Honestly, I don't envy anybody who has decisions to make in their lives and, I suppose, at one point or another, it's all of us-- it's going to be or was or is you, too, Smarty, so look out. It would be accurate to state that I have some rather significant decisions coming up in the next couple weeks/months and I'm not too terribly thrilled about the prospect of having to make these decisions, because any number of them carries with it the potential to either enhance or fuck up my life and the lives of those around me. And that's a big onus to carry for someone who still cracks up when looking at the word "onus."

I am pleased to note, however, that my life isn't filmed by NFL cameramen from multiple angles with telephoto lenses and my life also isn't being watched by millions of angry, ribald fans with their faces painted all kinds of fucked up colors who will have my head, balls, and knees for dinner if I make the "wrong" decisions.

One decision that my wife and I made recently was the decision to join a gym, and I think, unless a weight falls on my neck while I'm doing push-ups, that was probably a great decision. Sure, we lied and said that I was an active-status EMT to get the emergency provider membership discount but, wouldn't you? AT&T is still giving me ten percent off my cellphone bill, too. I don't feel bad about that at all. I feel, after 17 months of making $11.00/hr, I am owed something other than the hospital bedsheet I stole from our ambulance to cover the backseat of my car to protect it from dog fur.

So, we joined a gym. We're going today. I'm kind of excited about it. The chick who registered us was clearly exhibiting her tight... *ahem*... figure and, after we left with our new swipey cards my wife turned to me and said to me, "You were very well behaved."

I so am, aren't I?

Another decision I was tossing around was taking a blogbattical to focus on a.) a full-time job search and b.) writing substantative freelance material for the purpose of publication/compensation. My wife and I had a very serious conversation about this last night, about aspirations of becoming "a writer" and she said something that surprised me,

"I don't think you want to be famous, or even noted, for your writing, or for your acting, or anything. I think you're very comfortable writing your little blog and getting positive reinforcement sometimes from your readers and your friends, and doing G&S and community theatre, and doing it well, but I don't think you really want anything more than that."

It may sound funny, but I had never really thought about it quite like that.

“I mean, really," she said, "you don’t want an editor telling you what to do or messing around with the way you write things, and you don’t want anybody telling you what to write about. If you want to be funny one day, you’re funny on your blog—if you want to write about dead cops one day, you do that on your blog. That’s just your way. I think you just want to write because it’s fun and, if it’s still fun, do it. If it’s not, don’t.”

It is fun, of course. And it’s good practice. Is blogging stopping me from writing some publication-worthy opus? Probably not, though it’s a convenient excuse for not having more published work out there. So another decision I’ve made, today, I suppose, is the decision not to take a blogbattical, at least, not now. The way I look at it—a blog post takes me under half-an-hour to write. Is that really interfering with searching online for jobs? No. If I really, really had something deep within me that I wanted to write to submit to a literary journal to get published, could I do that, too? Sure I could. But, for now—this is good.

Quite.