Half Awake, In a Fake Empire

The end is in sight. The summer paper that is somehow creepin into the winter. We will present our paper in about a week and a half, and, while slightly panicked, I am so happy that it will be over and we can all move on. Deception is out. Pricing nerd will be back in full force.

Also, almost over is my torturous soccer league. I thought I would love playing soccer. After all, I loved it my whole younger life, from kindergarten up through freshman year of college. Strictly for love of game, not the competition, as I never made the varsity and played on intramural (not university team) one year of college. I was the honorary captain of the VJ team, maybe because of seniority (literally, there weren't a lot of seniors on the jv) Actually, thinking about it now, I don't think that I made it through the whole college freshman season... Anyway, the point is that that ten years is a long time. Skills that were marginal at best get a mite rusty AFTER TEN YEARS.
To prepare for my first game, my man and I got a ball at Target and kicked it around the backyard. Of course, we wanted to go to the park, but, as I might have mentioned before, we have a beast of a dog who does not like to be left alone and does not play well at the park.

I know it's hard to believe, but trust me. 

So with the only other soccer practice area we could consider being the dog park, we settled for the backyard. Anyway, one errant kick headed straight for the satellite dish and I should have known soccer was not going to go well for me. $75 dollars and 5 days later our cable was restored and I was off to the first game. When the goalie asked me after 10 minutes if I had ever played soccer before, I realized:

1) I was not going to make any friends on the soccer team and

2) I suck worse than I had feared. 

The (sort of) good thing is that the rest of the team in general also kinda sucks. We do have some good players (My man: "You need to be more like Leslie") but we went six straight games without a goal. (My man: "I think your team's goal should be to score a goal." Meaning don't even think about winning). Another good thing is that once the other team is up ten goals you can get an extra player. That has happened to us. Several times. 

Oh yeah - it rains here too. Every Sunday. And we do not cancel games for that here in Eugene.

So anyway, tonight is my second to last game with the dear Soccer Otters. They are continuing to play an indoor league starting next week. I say they because I will not be there.

Related to soccer? Yes, but also everything else.

Some might say this advice is simplistic, but I think it's got to be the key to life, right? And, for real, I am not talking about soccer anymore. And, you know what? It's not simple. It's really complicated. And this advice is hard to follow. Inaction is easy. The key is forcing yourself to move when you need to IMO.