Hit by a Pitch

Earlier this evening, I entertained myself by watching YouTube videos of Blake Griffin flopping. (Go here to check it out — I’m sure there are additions being made every minute.)

There are two things that are going to destroy the NBA. The first is shitty, ridiculous officiating. First of all, there is no reason “superstars” should get more favorable calls than any other player. A foul is a foul, period. Every foul should be called the same way no matter who’s on the giving end and who’s on the receiving end. And fewer fouls should be called because that shit is boring (if I wanted to sit around watching guys shoot free throws I’d — well, I’d punch myself and then get shitfaced because WTF) and it stops the flow of the game.

The second thing that’s going to destroy the NBA is the flopping. Flopping is #2 on my sports shit list, right after concussions, serious health issues, and suicide with respect to current and former NFL players. The first part of the problem with flopping is that guys do it at all. The second part of the problem is that shitty, ridiculous referees end up rewarding them by calling fouls when they see a flop. Like, oh man, dude is falling to the ground, which must mean someone hacked him. No. He’s just flopping.

Blake Griffin is an NBA superstar known for his aggro dunks. He’s also a goddamn flopping flopper, which kind of doesn’t make sense because you’d think someone so allegedly badass would be able to function like an adult instead of flopping. One time, he hit himself with his own hand and flopped. Seriously.

My favorite Blake Griffin flopping video was this one, which made me LOL.

When my ex-husband¹ and I moved to our first “real” place after I graduated from law school,² we bought new furniture. Our law school place had been furnished with hand-me-down couches from my aunt and uncle, which were fabulous velvet blue-and-white floral things that I didn’t appreciate and slipcovered. We had a couch³ and gigantic chair custom made. They were humungous, traditional pieces. I remember sitting in a furniture showroom and picking out wood finishes and fabric. The couch was mossy green, with dark wood accents and dark-toned back cushions and coordinating jewel-toned paisley-ish accent pillows. The gigantic chair was done in the paisley-ish pattern.

It’s funny how at age 28, I was older than I am now.

I remember sitting in our naked Andersonville apartment, listening to stuff like Get Involved by Raphael Saadiq (still one of my favorite songs of all time, here wait you can listen to it now),

waiting for the delivery guys to come with our furniture. When it arrived, I realized with dismay that it was too big for our living room, which always looked like it was overflowing with a couch set at a jaunty angle because that was the only option; gigantic chair; large Pottery Barn coffee table; and huge entertainment center we got from, I think, Carson’s. This was around the same time I bought a huge dining room table and chairs from Pottery Barn, which is funny because now that I’m to the point where I’m old enough to actually want a legitimate dining room table, I’d never shell out the $$$ on Pottery Barn stuff, which really isn’t my style, but I will have this dining room table and chairs until the end of time because I suspect they will last that long and at least I had the foresight to get chairs that are not the same color as the table.⁴

When my ex-husband⁵ and I moved to our condo in Oak Park, this large, traditional furniture fit right in. It was lovely, if I can use the word “lovely,” which I’d prefer not to but it seems to fit here. It looked something like this.

My ex-husband and I had the most amicable divorce of all time. I don’t really talk about him here, but it’s maybe worth saying that I think he’s an awesome person and hope he’s exceptionally happy now. We just weren’t right for each other in the long run — no hard feelings, on my part at least. We split everything pretty much right down the middle, and I got all the stuff because I was the one still living in the condo and I was the one who cared about all the stuff.

So this furniture came with me when I ended up with Ben and we moved to Nederland, Colorado. It didn’t really fit there, either. It was like the girl who hits her groove in high school and then spends the rest of her life wondering why everybody isn’t always telling her how awesome she is. It was a little much for Ned, but it fit and was fine. It was a tight squeeze when we moved to our apartment in Baker, too, but we didn’t mind because it was temporary.

When we moved to our house, the furniture didn’t really fit, either. It was also a little worse for the wear, having suffered through years of cat scratches and, well, cat puke. It happens. Eventually, we bought a modern sectional and put the couch, gigantic chair, and coffee table in the basement. The entertainment center currently is used for storage in Soren’s room.

I have a hard time getting rid of things. As a person who has the word “impermanence” (in Chinese⁶) tattooed on my arm,  the deep attachments I form to inanimate objects bother me a lot. This sort of thing makes me feel weak, lame, and shallow. But I’ve always been like that, since childhood when I used to make sure all my stuffed animals, dolls, and Barbies were sitting comfortably at all times. To this day, if I see a random toy on the floor at Target, for example, I have to pick it up and put it back on the shelf, face up, where I hope it’s happy. I’m always adjusting the stuff in Soren’s crib.⁷ I’m so lame.

So this furniture sat in our basement for years. It’s especially hard for me to part with something nice, and the couch and gigantic chair, in particular, are very nice. Custom made, even, and I’m not a person who has custom-made shit. Maybe we’ll use this stuff again one day. Maybe we’ll need it, when we’re somehow destitute and can never afford furniture again.⁸ Maybe we’ll have a large room of some sort one day that needs large furniture, and we’ll have a home for stuff I bought when I was living a totally different life a long time ago.

On a philosophical level, I understand that thoughts and attachments like this probably in some way hold me back. From what I don’t know. But they make me feel weighted down, I guess you could say, and I know that’s not good. Plus, Ben is always annoyed by all my stuff, which has gradually taken over the basement, the garage, and even the attic that doesn’t even have a floor and that can be accessed only by precariously perched ladder in the bathroom. So I finally agreed to get rid of the couch and the gigantic chair.

The good thing about living in the hood is that, if you put anything by the dumpsters,⁹ somebody will take it. So I agreed that Ben could take the couch and the gigantic chair to the dumpsters.

The people who live two doors down from us, right by the dumpsters, are hippies. They like to take stuff people bring to the dumpsters. They wanted the couch and the gigantic chair. So Ben helped the neighbors bring the furniture into the house, and I felt a little happy that my old stuff that was very nice even if not in the best condition found a new home.

Today, I walked past the neighbors’ house and saw the gigantic chair unceremoniously sitting on the porch, its legs scattered around it. I thought about how it had rained a lot lately, and the chair was probably wet and soggy. I was sad about it. Which is silly, because it’s something I didn’t need any more, and it’s somewhere doing something, maybe, for someone, and that’s the best I could hope for, really.

And then I was sad about being sad about a chair.
_______
Notes
1. We were not yet married at the time.
2. We lived in the little apartment building in the heart of Andersonville in Chicago that always had a Swedish flag displayed. Sometimes, Swedish tourists would buzz us to say hi. It was a tiny place but I loved living there.
3. Where do you stand on the couch/sofa issue? I suspect sofa is the better answer, but I always say couch. Is this a midwestern thing? Until the day I die, I will refuse to utter midwesternisms such as “pop” and “supper,” but goddamn if I don’t say “couch.”
4. When in doubt, always get furniture that isn’t too matchy-matchy. Bedroom sets, for example, should not exist.
5. We were married at this point.
6. For what it’s worth, which I suspect is not much, my ex-husband is half Chinese.
7. I suspect Soren is too old for a crib and has been napping on a cot at daycare for ages, but since we put the crib on its lowest setting, he hasn’t climbed out or complained about being in there and I’m frankly terrified by the thought of a toddler being able to get up and move freely throughout the house while Ben and I are sleeping.
8. I have a distinct memory of my maternal grandmother, from whom I get my claustrophobia, keeping a large number of canned goods in her basement. The stash was well-organized and neat enough to not be alarming, but I suspect it was motivated by thoughts similar to the ones I have sometimes wherein I think I’ll never be able to buy anything ever again.
9. Where we live, there are several dumpsters in the alley at the end of the block. This is where you take your garbage. We do have curbside (or, well, alleyside) recycling pickup.

I was so, so, so excited about going to the Chihuahua races today. Did you know about the Chihuahua races? Well, they exist. It’s a thing at Cinco de Mayo, which is your typical street fair kind of thing (think Taste of Chicago but less hot, crowded, expensive, and annoying). I’m not always into your typical street fair kind of thing (I always want to be, but then when I think about it, I’m all, well, there’s overpriced food that probably isn’t that good, average to below average beer, porta potties, and a bunch of shit you’re not actually going to buy), but when I heard about the Chihuahua races, I was all in for Cinco de Mayo this year.

We busted our asses to get there on time today and got there to find . . .  well, a bunch of people standing around what I presume were the Chihuahua races but, not being 6’7″, I couldn’t see a damn thing but the backs of people’s heads. So that was a bummer. So we met up with some pals and had an average beer and, surprisingly, come cheap food that wasn’t bad at all (including vegetarian red chili, which I didn’t know was a thing but was freaking awesome). Then the clouds came in and it got cold as hell and I had to bike home while having to pee (I thought it wasn’t that urgent but, when biking home in the biting cold wind, realized it was). So that was that.

The good news is that the Chihuahua races presented the opportunity for the inaugural wearing of my fancy new hat. The Kentucky Derby, which I object to on moral grounds because I don’t believe horse racing to be completely lacking in animal cruelty, always makes me want to wear a fancy hat and, I don’t know, go around being fancy. I don’t really have the opportunity go around being fancy, so sometimes I’ll take advantage of something where it might be marginally acceptable to go around being sort of fancy. So I wore my hat to the Chihuahua races, which are kind of like the Kentucky Derby only with more beer and fewer rich people, and it wasn’t, as they say, no thing.

Next year, I will get to the Chihuahua races very, very early so I can get a spot in the front row. Or I’ll ask Javale McGee to come with so I can sit on his shoulders. Also we are totally bringing Sadie, who can pass as a Chihuahua if you’re drunk and don’t know about min pins.

AP Photo/Peter Kramer

Soren does this thing where sometimes he refers to other women as mommy. It used to happen more often than it does now and include women on tv and in real life. My favorite mommy of all time was Erin Andrews because I think it’s safe to assume that if my child erroneously refers to Erin Andrews as mommy, it’s because mommy looks like Erin Andrews such that it’s only logical that he’d mistake Erin Andrews for mommy. Mommy has a long history of being fond of Erin Andrews.

It doesn’t happen all that often any more, but when it does, it tends to be at Argonaut (big liquor store) and involve allegedly hot women. At least this is how Ben reports it, because the mommy sightings don’t happen when mommy is around. After a trip to Argonaut, Ben will say that Soren picked out several hot mommies at the store. Of course, I interpret this as meaning that I’m hot, because that’s logical. Right?

(I’ve never been sure whether Soren refers to other women as mommy because they remind him of me or because his understanding of women in general is that they’re mommies. It’s probably the latter, but I’ll never miss the opportunity to subtly advocate for the position that Erin Andrews and attractive women buying beer remind someone of me.)

The same thing has never happened with daddy, despite the fact that I watch a lot of sports, which, I presume, is an area rife with the opportunity to find daddies. Until today. Soren and I went to the fancy Whole Foods,¹ mainly to get some gluten,² tofu,³ seitan, and a birthday card for daddy (I wouldn’t normally buy a birthday card at Whole Foods but, full disclosure, I’m too lazy to go to a whole ‘nother store just to buy a card when I’m at a store that sells cards). Right before Soren picked out a birthday card for daddy (it features a dog wearing a tiara made from actual rhinestones, which would not have been my first choice for a birthday card for my husband, but now that I think about it, it’s an admirable choice), he saw this hippie dude with a beard going into the bathroom. “Daddy!” he said to the guy. The guy smiled and said hi to him, which was nice.

But then I was all, hey wait a minute. Why that guy? Ben doesn’t look like a hippie dude with a beard. And what if that dude thinks I’m hanging out with my kid at Whole Foods shopping for a new daddy and he’s it? Oh man that’s how Lifetime movies or an episode of Fatal Encounters start.

So anyway, Ben looks like a random hippie dude with a beard and I look like Erin Andrews. Yep.

Notes
_______
1. I hate the word “clusterfuck,” but lunchtime-ish trips to this particular Whole Foods location qualify. To deal with it, I fantasize about doing non-Whole-Foodsy things at Whole Foods. Today, I thought about how it would be fun to tailgate in the Whole Foods parking lot with friends and the people you encounter on Twitter who seem really cool and always make you laugh. We’d blast Aphex Twin and have a nice spread of food and an endless supply of cocaine (just kidding about the cocaine, of course, it’s just that you need to be sufficiently scandalous) and a large basket of free-range eggs we’d throw at people driving Audis. What’s up with people driving Audis? I used to think people who drove BMWs were assholes, but people driving Audis asshole them out of the water these days. So aggressive and annoying, and so likely to be at the Cherry Creek Whole Foods for lunch, where they’d get some kind of bland salad — you know, the kind that has way too much oil and not nearly enough flavor even after you add salt like 3 times — and aggressively jangle their keys while waiting in a line that doesn’t move quickly enough. In other news, when I go to a store looking like complete ass and there’s no self-checkout, I’m going to get in the line of the cashier who looks the most like the put-upon mom from an 80s movie.
2. If you’re ever at Whole Foods looking for the gluten, it’s in the gluten-free section. It took me so long to find it I felt like an urban pioneer (like a boss, I don’t ask for directions). I ended up in the gluten-free section, where I was met with, like, an entire wall of little bags of gluten-free flours and shit, and it seemed like the kind of place that would have a little bag of gluten, but then I thought it would be mean and/or weird to put the gluten right where the people who can’t/don’t eat gluten would be shopping. So I looked all over the store and when I didn’t find it anywhere, I figured I’d have to order it online, which is what I always do for everything but then sometimes I feel bad for not shopping local and all that shit, not that buying gluten from the Cherry Creek Whole Foods really counts but whatever. It really seemed like if it was going to be anywhere, it was going to be in the gluten-free aisle, so I headed back over there and finally found it, in a box instead of a little bag, which might be why I missed it in the first place.
3. Soren and I are big fans of the tamari tofu from the Whole Foods salad bar. We don’t go to Whole Foods very often, but when I ask Soren if he wants to go to Whole Foods, his response is always, “Go to Whole Foods and get tofu!” Then when we get to Whole Foods, he’s all, “Tofu! Hooray!” And then someone at Whole Foods smiles at this and I feel bad for thinking that going to Whole Foods makes me want to do coke and throw eggs at cars.