Thursday, June 28, 2007

I Don't Think I Understood More Than Three Words Of That Last Post

There are times in your life when a concept suddenly hits you. Like being blindsided by a car at highway speed (not the speed limit, mind you, but actual driving speed) or that damned burst of sunlight as soon as you step out of a movie theater in the day, it's as if the whole world is different in the blink of an eye. Often you feel quite stupid for not having realized this revelation previously. I can think of several occasions for myself: Discovering what the word "porn" meant after years of rhetorically asking my parents and any passengers in our car what the sign that always read "no child porn here" referred to, realizing that the Pythagorean theorem applies to the sides of a triangle rather than its angles... it gets pretty nerdy from there on out so I'll just leave it at that.

My point here is this - There is an equal and opposite phenomena that abounds as well. I like to call this opposite-effect "Overous Headious". Clever, I know. The term describes the long-term sinking in of the realization that you have not caught on, and will never catch on, to something. In my case, sports are a subject of Overous Headious. I have never understood sports. I am incapable of remembering the rules, I cannot keep track of scoring systems, and titles of field positions and the like are absolutely Greek to me.



This is ironic, as I had a rather successful (though short-lived) career in elementary basketball and soccer teams as a kid. You would think that in several years of playing the games, I would remember some of the basic concepts. Granted, I do know the difference between 2-point and 3-point shots in basketball, but that's about it. In soccer, I was praised because I could score a goal from any location on the field; even as a goalie. However, I could not tell you anything about the sport other than "you have to get the ball into the other team's net, and you can't use your hands." Similarly with basketball - "you have to get the ball into your net, and you can't use your feet." ... Maybe it is the inherent similarities to these concepts that makes them memorable. That, or I could be declared legally retarded for not understanding that much about sports that I have personally played.

My point here, is that sports have always been beyond me. I do not mean I am physically incapable of playing sports, but rather I simply have a mental block on understanding sports. I will never be able to play for the sole reason of being unable to remember the rules, positions, scoring systems, and other fundamentals of any sport. This goes doubly so for football, which uses so many plays and terms that I actually become dizzy thinking about even trying to commit it all to memory. So, for all you readers out there that saw that last post and thought "I don't think I understood more than three words of that post", know that you are not alone.



Adios, Muchachos.

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