My Dad, Charlie Brown

I have literally hundreds of great soccer memories.  After 20 years of soccer (many of which I played on multiple teams), I could go on for hours about the magical plays, incredible screw-ups, disastrous weather, and hilarious mishaps that happened to my teammates and myself.  However, today I’m going to write about one of my absolute favorite memories.

Like many of my recent posts, this is once again a story from when I was younger and lived in Eastern Washington.

Each season, right before our big spring soccer tournament, the team had a parents-versus-players soccer game.  It was always a lot of fun, mostly because my team almost always tromped our parents.  During this particular game, however, the weather had been less than cooperative.  It had rained all day and I remember thinking that I was going to be really sad if we couldn’t play our parents.  This year my dad was going to play.  He had been pushing me to get more into basketball, but he had never played soccer before (to my knowledge). I figured that if I had to play his favorite sport, it was completely fair that he had to try mine.

Thankfully, the weather cleared up just in time and we were able to play as planned, although it was really muddy.  Not the puddle muddy, though.  This was the thick, slimy mud that you get when the ground is saturated with water, but not quite saturated enough to form puddles.  My teammates and I loved it, of course.  We had cleats.  The parents, on the other hand, made sure to be very careful because most of them were just wearing regular athletic shoes.

I’ve pretty much always played defense.  I learned early on that I could greatly reduce the amount of running I had to do if I played back.  How, you ask?  Once a defender gets to the ball, they clear it and then can stop running. Therefore, if I got to the ball first, I got to stop running first.  Midfield never seems to stop running and forwards/strikers are constantly making runs while the person with the ball passes to someone else. Before you start asking, yes, I did play keeper (and still do). Much less running, but also more jammed fingers and bruises.

Tragically, the coach liked to switch things up during the parent v players game.  I had to play forward while the girls who rarely played back got to play my coveted defense position.  I think that the coach figured that it would be fairer if we ended up playing positions that we weren’t very good at so that the dads and moms had something almost resembling a fighting chance.

While I stood at the halfway line, waiting for us to get the ball back, I saw my dad surge into a giant opening in the defense and Kelli’s dad passed him the ball.  Now, my dad is a big guy.  He’s 6’4” and had played basketball for most of his life, so he wasn’t just any dad.  He was the athletic dad.  I cringed as he set up the ball, knowing full well that if he sent that thing at our poor goalkeeper, she’d probably break an arm.

He planted his foot and I almost looked away, not wanting to witness the bloodbath that I knew was about to take place.  Except that it never happened.  Rather than crushing the ball and sending it screaming into the goal, my dad’s foot slipped out from under him in fine Charlie Brown fashion.

I’m not sure if you know this, but when a guy as big as my dad hits a patch of swampy, slimy, icky mud with the amount of force that he did, they will actually flip so that they are parallel to the ground before actually starting to fall back to earth. True story.

As my dad hit the ground with a wet “splat,” the other girl that was playing forward with me turned and said, “Hey, isn’t that your dad?”

While Kelli’s dad assisted my dad to his feet, I quickly responded with, “No, no, that’s Kelli’s dad.”  Then I jogged off out of earshot so that I didn’t have to answer the question again.

Fortunately, my dad was fine, albeit very, very muddy. When the game ended (I don’t even remember who won) and my dad looked for me, I went up to him and, without making eye contact, muttered, “I’ll meet you at the car.” I was far too embarrassed to be seen with Charlie Brown dad.  I mean, my dad was supposed to be awesome and fantastic and amazing at every sport, ever, on the face of the earth. This joker?  What would people think if they realized that my dad was that dad? Obviously that would make me a laughingstock.  The entire school would laugh at me.  Forever. And no, it never occurred to me that absolutely nobody cared that my dad pulled a Charlie Brown.

My father, wonderful person that he is, understood my embarrassment and met me by the parking lot and we walked out to the car together.  To this day he will say that he’s grateful that he was never a real soccer player.  We aren’t sure if his insurance would have ever been able to cover the amount of damage he would have inflicted on himself. 

Despite a long soccer career, multiple awards, and tournament wins, I can honestly say that this is the best soccer memory I have, beyond a doubt.  One of these days I might be able to convince my dad to try soccer again, but probably not as a participant.  Perhaps I’ll talk him into joining me for an MLS game the next time he’s in town. Certainly worth consideration…

High School Science Class

In high school there were a lot of fun people, a lot of weird people, a lot of interesting people, and a lot of popular people (I was not one of the popular people).  However, there was a special category that I reserved for those that were spectacularly stupid.  This is a story about one such person.

In high school science classes, we were assigned lab partners.  I think that the teachers wanted to pair up the smart kids with the less intelligent or less motivated students to ensure everyone passed the class.  That way the teachers wouldn’t be stuck with all of the special little morons for another year.

I always knew that I would be paired with someone who had little or no motivation.  This year, however, I got a not-so-pleasant surprise.  Not only was my lab partner a flaming pile of fecal matter, he self-identified as a member of the Aryan Nations.  Seriously.  He actually tried to explain to me how “white power is just the way the world works.” 

To be fair to my teacher, I’m 99% certain that he had no idea that the one minority student in the class was paired with the guy who couldn’t wait to move to Idaho to be a white supremacist anarchist. Actually, I’m not convinced that my partner even knew what an anarchist is let alone correctly identified himself as one.

Anyhow, my partner’s racial/ethnic preferences were made blindingly clear to me on the day that he explained that he understood that I didn’t choose to be born to a mixed race family.  In fact, he didn’t hold it against me at all (thanks?) and was totally okay with being my lab partner for the year. However, he did ask that I simply take the time and make an effort to “truly embrace your white half.”

I’m serious.  You have no idea how much I wish that I were making this up. 

Rather than becoming offended, however, I wondered what he meant by that.  Was I only supposed to use the right half of my body?  Was I not allowed to use my legs?  Did I have to focus on making sure that my eyes looked extra wide all of the time?  Was I supposed to wear makeup to hide the darker pigment of my skin?  I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what he meant by his request.

Further evidence that I was an idiot in high school: I didn’t report this to the teacher or school and I stayed his lab partner for the rest of the semester. I continued to be confused by him as he said at one point that he “don’t really like minorities, but I’ll make an exception for you,” and “You’re one of the only non-white people that I like.”  I once again highlight that I was one of literally less than a dozen minority students at my high school. I highly doubt that this guy knew more than one or two other people that weren’t white.

To this day, I occasionally recall this guy from high school and always laugh.  I wonder if things like this are still prevalent opinions and beliefs back in my hometown.  Friends that still live in the area have told me that there has been a lot of development since I moved away seven or eight years ago, but I’d like to point out that the overall voting trend has stayed the same and, in some instances, has become more conservative, if anything.

Maybe I’ll figure out what on earth this poor idiot was telling me some day.  Maybe I won’t ever know what the ignorant teenage white supremacist meant (I just realized that such a description is redundant in oh-so-many ways). In any case, at least I can laugh at it now and I’ve done what I can to not only embrace “my white half” but also to embrace my “non-white half” and as many other aspects of “me” that I can. 

Evidence that Racism Isn't Dead

Every once in awhile I get blown away by someone.  In this case it was not a good thing.

I went over to Eastern Washington for a friends wedding. At one point I stopped at a grocery store in this sleepy town of around 30,000 residents so that I could pick up some allergy medicine. While I was paying at the register, a punk high school kid walked out of the store, clearly not paying for the items in his hands. The cashier rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, they do that all the time.  Those gangbangers just take whatever they feel like.”

I gave her one of my “are you serious” looks at that point, hoping that she was joking.  She was, after all, only about 16 or 17 years old herself. Maybe she was just being a sarcastic high school student.

Unfortunately, she continued, “I’m just waiting for them to come in here some day and shoot everyone. I know that one day I’m going to get shot.”

While this would normally result in little more than an eye roll from me, she directed that last sentence at the guy behind me in line.  The Mexican guy.  This little white high school girl seriously looked at the only Mexican guy in line to buy his groceries (in this case those groceries were some dish soap and a soda) and talked about how she thinks gangbangers are going to shoot her.

What. The. Hell.

I was so stunned that I could not think of anything to say to this little princess.  Looking back on this situation, I’m livid that I didn’t use the opportunity to stand up for the poor guy behind me. He did nothing to earn that kind of negative attention.  There was nothing to set him apart from any of us in line other than the tone of his skin. 

It’s incredible that people think that racism is no longer a problem in the US. If something like this ever happens around me again, I hope that I have the wherewithal to respond and tell the person speaking that they shouldn’t be making assumptions like that about people.

Baby Basketball

One of the best parts of visiting home is talking about the ridiculous things that happened while I was growing up.  Today I actually learned something new about how I reacted when my dad asked me about playing basketball.

Just for some background, I am very accident prone.  However, I come by it honestly.  When I was younger, my dad managed to get a substantial cut on one of his fingers during a game.  We had to go to the hospital so that he could get stitches.  When he finally got back to basketball, I was thrilled.  Not because I had any particular love of basketball, but because basketball days were the only time that I got money from my mom to buy a soda from the magical soda machine that had strawberry punch soda.  To this day, I cannot figure out what on earth that soda was, but it's the only machine I can remember seeing that had those little red and pink cans.

I had just put in my two quarters (does anyone else remember when a vending machine soda only cost 50 cents?) and was gleefully preparing to open the can when my mother came dashing out of the gym. She told me to quickly grab my things because we had to take Dad back to the hospital for more stitches. At this point I rolled my eyes at her and said, "But he already had stitches last time!"

Despite my irritation, we once more appeared at the hospital for stitches.  My dad jokes that his medical file would probably be about 6 inches thick with just a list of his sports-related injuries.  Looking back on it, I'm not entirely certain that the medical staff didn't recognize him on sight.

When I finally became old enough to play in a basketball league, my dad was very excited. I was fast from playing soccer and I was scrappy because I was always one of the smallest girls on the team.  He had also had me practice jumps so that I'd be extra-prepared for that wonderful day when I would step out onto the basketball court.

He asked me, "Well, honey, what would you say to playing basketball? You're old enough to join a team now." His grin was cheshire-like in its delight.

I looked at him skeptically.  "No, I don't really want to play."

Shocked, he responded with, "Why not? Do you not like basketball?"

Precocious daughter that I was, I told him very matter-of-factly that, "No, I like basketball just fine.  I just don't like hospitals."

Eventually my dad convinced me to play basketball and I never had to go to the hospital because of a basketball-related injury.  However, I think that this is one of his most humorous basketball memories of me.

Small Town Girl?

I never thought of my hometown as particularly rural.  Sure, I had friends that lived on farms and raised animals or grew crops.  Sure, I knew people who drove 45 minutes to get to the grocery store.  Sure, the number of guns and diesel trucks nearly outnumbered people. However, I lived in a city.  My school district had two whole high schools. There are two colleges in my hometown and a state university less than an hour away.  It never occurred to me that these things might not have been “proof” that I lived in a big city.  I knew I wasn’t living in New York or LA, but it was still pretty big, right? I didn’t realize how small it really was until I moved away to college.

In hindsight, there were things that happened when I was little that horrify me today. Nothing sinister or violent, of course, but things that are just not okay.  For example:

“Coach, why do you always make me play in the outfield position facing the sun? I don’t like it.” My 10-year-old self rubbed at her eyes, frustrated at how boring the outfield was in elementary softball.  Also, why was the sun always at just the right angle to make the visor on my giant softball hat useless?

Coach got down on one knee, making him only slightly taller than me. “Well, you see, it’s easier for you than the other girls.”

After a moment of confusion, I exercised my razor-sharp wit and responded with, “I don’t get it.”

Coach smiled at me and said simply, “The other girls all need to squint when they face the sun. You’re already naturally squinting.”

As an adult, I look back on that interaction and am outraged.  As a kid I took it in stride and thought smugly to myself, “I am genetically superior,” while trotting out to take my sun-facing outfield position, eyes squinting so much that they were nearly shut.

Now that I have lived in an actual city for the last seven years, I realize that my hometown was much less citified than I thought.  However, it really wasn’t a bad place to grow up.  Despite the ridiculous assumptions and interactions with people, they were generally not saying these things out of malice, but were speaking from a position of ignorance.  One day maybe I’ll want to go back for more than a week at a time, but until that day arrives, I’m going to stay in my adopted city and appreciate that now I can finally blend in.

Letter to My Younger Self

Dear younger self,

Most of the time people write these letters to their younger selves after their lives have finally stopped sucking.  They are happily married, have their 2.5 kids, a house with a white picket fence, and a stable career.  Well, I’m writing to you without any assurances that we will ever achieve any of those things.   In fact, currently we are unemployed, single, taking on debt that could easily reach six figures so that we can go back to school, and struggling to make rent payments. 

Don’t worry too much, though.  Your future isn’t tragically awful.  You will finally make friends once you get to middle school, two of whom will stay friends with you for the rest of your life.  In fact, they will pretty much become a second set of siblings to you.  Speaking of siblings, you and your younger brother really won’t get along until after you move away for college.  Until then, it might be best to try to stay in different rooms from each other in order to avoid World War III. 

High school will be a very interesting time for you.  You will have some significant highs, win big awards, apply to college, get your first job, and play so many sports that you will be in the best shape of your life.  You will also have some significant lows. In particular, you might want to be careful once your friends start dating people and get “serious.”  Just because you think of them as your best friends doesn’t mean that they won’t hesitate to move you to the back burner in order to keep their boyfriend.  None of those relationships will ultimately pan out, but it will result in irreparable damage to your friendship with them. Oh, you will also have an opportunity to finally put a certain jerk in his place by taking four dates with you to one school dance.  Trust me, it’ll be awesome. One more thing: don’t give up on that thing that you tried out for in middle school band.  Something will come of it in high school.

You will graduate in the top 10% of your class and move on to a large university. You will go through no less than 5 majors before finally settling on the area of study that you will find fulfilling.  During that time, you will meet many new people and make some fantastic connections.  You will travel all over the world and have opportunities to step far, far outside of your comfort zone. Don’t hesitate when those opportunities present themselves, but also do a gut check every once in awhile.  You’ll know what the right choice is.

After graduation, life will not go the way you expect it to.  Rather than falling into a great job that puts you on a trajectory to greatness, you will struggle to find work.  However, remember those friends from middle school I mentioned earlier?  You will get to take an incredible trip with one of them during the summer after you graduate.  It’s not something that you would expect to enjoy, but it will produce some of the best memories you have with that person for years to come.

Despite your best intentions, plans, and hard work, you will continue to struggle to figure out what to do with your life and where you are going.  In fact, when you write this letter to yourself, you still won’t be sure where you’re going or whether or not you are making the best decision regarding your future.  You will continue to wonder what it is that you are doing wrong when it comes to dating even though you probably aren’t doing anything wrong, per se.  It just isn’t the right time in your life to find that Special Someone.  Despite struggling with depression, anxiety, loneliness, and feeling like you are somehow falling behind your peers, you are sure of one thing: things will ultimately work out in the end.  Probably in a way that you totally didn’t expect.  Even though you will have days where you feel like an utter failure and you will often think that everything you try is a waste of time, you know deep down in your gut that this is just a temporary state and that, ultimately, your efforts will bear fruit.

Now go outside, enjoy the sun, and get ready for your soccer game!

Sincerely,

Your future self  

Oh!  About those friends from middle school…Still your friends, only now they are married. To each other.  Their wedding will be a fantastic day and you will be so happy for them that you’ll want to explode.

Crap Weather Friends

We all have those friends that are only around when things go well: fair weather friends.  When you’re employed, in a great relationship, have lots of free time, etc, these are the friends who are always down to get up and go out to do something. Of course, as soon as life starts getting difficult, as it is wont to do, they disappear as if by magic. This phenomena has been expounded upon by numerous academics, pundits, and facebook status updates.

However, as I am sitting here in limbo (see also: unemployment), I’ve discovered a new kind of friend: the crap weather friend.  These are friends that only talk to you or interact with you when they need something from you.

I’m not talking about people who simply ask for favors when their lives get crazy-busy.  I’m also not talking about people who are down on their luck and need a little extra help now and again.  I’m referring to people that don’t talk to you unless you have something to offer them.

Over the past few weeks, I have discovered a slew of these friends.  To be fair, they haven’t always acted this way and some of them are extremely busy right now with significant others, work, school, etc. I try to give them as much leeway as I can to account for life getting crazy, but when things become a trend that I can no longer ignore, then I have to relegate them to the crap weather friend category.

For example, one of my friends has begun to treat me with what I almost-jokingly refer to as benign neglect.  I will text message, call, or e-mail them to check in and see how things are going, but never get a response.  However, when I contact them in order to ask how some of their problems are going and whether or not they have been resolved, I get an almost instantaneous response.  Again, I am trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that life is getting in the way, but I still have to wonder…

Another case occurred when I tried to call a friend of mine because I was feeling really down about things.  I don’t do well when I’m unemployed and I was getting cabin fever.  When they called me back, they were very distracted because they were getting ready to meet up with other folks for dinner.  While I appreciated that they had bothered to call me back at all, I was disappointed that they could only take 5 inattentive minutes to check in with me and then didn’t call back when they had more free time (and yes, I did call them again later with the same result).

To complete my use of examples today, I’ve been helping a number of folks look for new apartments since I have much more time on my hands then they do.  I will routinely send them e-mails with apartments they are looking for in their price range, near bus lines, with in-unit washer/dryer, etc.  The typical response to this is a “thanks so much!” and then nothing else.  Even though most of these folks asked me to help them out, they don’t contact me at all with things as simple as updates on how their apartment hunt is going unless I inquire first.  I’ve waited until later in the week when I know their schedules tend to wind down a bit to see if they would be able to hang out, grab coffee, whatever, but rarely do these people respond at all.

As a temporary solution, I have been trying to reach out to other friends so that I do not feel the absence of these friends quite as sharply.  Perhaps this is simply another phase of life where another group of us drift apart and go our separate ways.  If so, I better get on top of things and start filling up my calendar!

If you wonder whether or not you might be a crap weather friend to someone, I've devised a list of attributes to check for:

1. Are there certain friends of yours who only become involved in your life when it sucks/gets busy/something big happens?

2. Is there a particular friend that you contact only when life sucks?

3. Are there people that you spend time with when life's got you down, but you don't spend time with when life is going well? 

If you answered "yes" to these questions, maybe it's time to take a good look at your life and decide whether or not that's the kind of person you want to be.