Journalism has one foot firmly planted in the future, but has struggled mightily to get the other foot to follow.  An information superhighway threatens to chop off journalism’s lagging leg, but journalists remain.  They’ve adopted new techniques, and adapted to this digital age.  Journalism will thrive in the future, and will feature instant gratification for all users.

The uprising of digital strategy has put publishing groups, newspaper agencies, and magazine companies under a bottom-line, fiscal microscope.  Urged-on by a slow-moving economy, the digital shift has become an essential part of any companies’ future business plans.  The channels by which we receive our news and entertainment is currently in a state of flux, but one constant remains: journalism provides our content.

The news may never happen if there is no one around to witness and report what it is they’ve seen.  As the old adage goes, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?  Most definitely, yes.  The question has more accurately become, how quickly can we deliver news of the fallen tree to everyone world-wide?

We move today at break neck speeds, and often, that isn’t fast enough.  We ride the waves of 3G networks and tune into WiFi signals, all to check in on current events.  Sites like Facebook, SecondLife, and Twitter have changed the connotation of what we consider news, but in a broad sense, everyone posting to those sites is a journalist.  An example of this status update phenomenon, Chad Ochocinco, professional athlete for the NFL, launched the Ochocinco News Network in 2009.  The OCNN reports on the latest happenings around the NFL via Twitter, and boasts the slogan, “If I break it, you might as well believe it.”  The OCNN is powered by Motorola, and also has a Facebook page, which somehow seems to legitimize the OCNN as a real, NFL news outlet.

In 2001, when two towers fell in New York City, the tragic day was captured from the ground by dozens of citizen journalists.  They held their video recorders, and we followed their movements and reactions.  We watched their eye-witness reports as they ducked behind cars, and hid from overpowering clouds of dust and dirt.  When the second tower fell, we were all right there to watch it happen.  I myself still have some eerie memories of the sights, the sounds, the panic and the terror, delivered on that September morning.  Many view that day as the dawning of a new age, a shift in global economic power.  In the journalistic sense, the world was changed forever, because no matter where or when, life-altering news could be happening right then; how will you capture and report it?

Journalists are everywhere.  It’s the scope, accuracy, and depth of field of their reporting that determines our interest in what they have to say.  In the future of this industry, journalism will be even more competitive.  The market’s demand for compelling journalism will determine who stays and who goes.  Those who carry the tools for the trade with them at all times, are ultimately prepared to deliver the news, always.  The industry-wide digital shift means you can no longer be just a photographer or cameraman.  Agencies want someone who can do it all.  When I first began my course work for journalism in 2007, some of the first things I was told was, start a blog, learn HTML, get a Facebook page, and become as adept in all aspects of journalism as possible.  It’s advice I’ve followed and they are skills I hope to hone, as we move into the future of the world.

As print media waits while its digital cousin determines its market share, journalism is simultaneously becoming better, and worse.  Millions of self-proclaimed journalists create some terrible reporting, but also consecrates the best from the bad.  Like a mocha from a favorite coffee shop, the cream always rises to the top; the grounds remain in the bottom of the cup.  But the grounds are an integral part to the entire process.  Without them, there is no flavor.

Journalism isn’t dying.  She isn’t ringing her ink-stained hands with worry about the future.  She is simply changing, maturing, and preparing for uncertainty that is inherently part of reporting the news.  In the city of the future, newsstands may cease to exist.  Books may go completely digital, but this certainty will remain: journalism will always provide the content for the news.

The Kid followed in the footsteps of his father, who taught him how to play the game.  Ken Sr. instructed Junior on the three parts of baseball;  defense, hitting, and base running — defense being first.  Junior listened to his father, a long time Cincinnati Red, and himself became a pro player at age 17.  It wasn’t long before everyone in baseball knew, The Kid could play ball.

Ken Griffey Jr. made his MLB debut with the Seattle Mariners in April 1989.  In his first home field at-bat, Griffey swung and barreled a ball over the left field wall.  His home-town home run was one of hundreds more to come.  Griffey hit 417 home runs in front of Seattle crowds during his career as a Mariner.

Although his powerful swing was mighty enough to build a career on, Junior. was taught that defense came first.  The centerfielder played the game with reckless abandon, and challenged the dynamics of baseball physics on more than one occasion.  Junior routinely left the earth, and sacrificed his body to take away extra base hits.  He ran up walls and crashed into them.  He even brought one down in Baltimore.  Once, during his sophomore season, the Mariners traveled to Yankees Stadium, where Junior robbed slugger Jesse Barfield of his 200th career home run.  He jumped over the warning track and, in the same stride, leapt half way up the wall.  He extended his glove and snared the bleacher bound ball, then pulled it back into the field of play for the final out of the inning.  It was by all accounts, a spectacular play, and one of many defensive highlights Junior would create.

Throughout the 90’s decade, Griffey was a fixture among the best in the biz discussions.  Still today, he is hailed as one of the greatest center fielders to ever play the game.  He won 10-straight Gold Glove Awards, was selected to 10-consecutive All-Star teams, and he won seven Silver Slugger Awards, all during the 1990’s.  His induction into the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown seems eventual, but his influence on the game spans far greater stretches than his centerfield range ever did.  He is loved in Seattle where he made his debut, and equally cherished by thousands in Cincinnati.  But beyond the great impacts he made in the communities where he served as an ambassador of the game; Ken Griffey Jr. demonstrated for a generation of athletes, how fun and integrity should fit together in professional sports.

Though injuries plagued him through portions of his career, the infamous asterisks tied to so many of today’s great players, have no place in discussions of The Kid.  While Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire chased Roger Maris’ single season record for homeruns in 1998, Junior trailed not far behind, but ultimately fell short with 56 dingers, to McGwire’s 70, Sosa’s 66.  However, it seems fitting that the historic race between Sosa and McGwire easily forgets that Griffey almost did it too.  In the months leading up to the 2010 season, McGwire came clean about his steroid use as a pro player, and Sosa tested positive in 2003. Both players will forever remain a part and portion of the doped-up age of the MLB, and there is nothing they can ever do to erase their names from the pages of steroid-user history.

George Kenneth Griffey Jr. has remained untarnished and untouched by the dark cloud of scandal that hangs over baseball’s most powerful records.  Junior’s righteous credibility as a player who never touched steroids, rings a refreshing reminder of the child like innocence and wide eyed belief in our heroes, we used to share for the game.  It also reminds us of professional sports’ desperate need for greater integrity from their athletes, because what’s left when they retire is the impact they’ve left on the game, and the fans.  Griffey retired ranked fifth among the game’s most powerful men in history, with 630 home runs.  Barry Bonds* sits atop the prestigious list and holds the record for most career ‘outta heres, with 762.

The Kid retired from major league baseball in May 2010, after 22 big-league seasons.  He finished his career in Seattle, where his indelible mark impressed baseball fans, from the very beginning.  His individual accolades and highlight reel never culminated into a championship, but perhaps that isn’t why the game needed Junior.  We didn’t need individuality or prestige.  We have enough pride and ego in the game to suffice already.  Rather, what the game needed The Kid to do is teach the baseball world about integrity.  We needed him to offer a counter point during the darkest age of modern era baseball; when cheating ran rampant.  He is not the savior of baseball, because the game would have continued with or without Ken Griffey Jr., but throughout his stay, Junior demonstrated how to play the game, the right way.

Not everybody lives in the monoculture, of course, but it takes a very specific effort to not fall into it. Since one of the qualities of culture is that it is ubiquitous, the monoculture cannot simply be removed; it has to be replaced with something else every bit as encompassing and central to the identities of those who live in it.

The only large alternatives to the secular mainstream that the monoculture presents are religious fundamentalist movements. The two most powerful cultures outside of the western secular humanist capitalist tradition are Protestant Christian fundamentalism and conservative Islamic theology. (Contain your hate mail; I’m not equating the two strains of culture, just noting that they contain similar responses to the cultural hegemony of the monoculture.)

Monoculture is worldly and sinful, goes the argument from conservative Christian groups, and the general response is two-fold. On one hand, they attempt to realign the broad culture more along what they consider proper, acceptable lines (see efforts to push into law various restrictions on gay marriage, or street preaching, or pamphleteering. These efforts could all be loosely encapsulated under ‘missionary’ work to a sinful world). The other response is to build a parallel cultural structure for themselves.

The effort of American conservative Protestant groups to build this secondary cultural environment for themselves is not readily apparent to the outsider, because it’s not aimed at the world. It’s entirely built for the believer’s benefit, with little pieces crossing over into the mainstream occasionally. Veggie Tales. Bibleman. Fireproof. Conservative Christians have their own movie industry and its own version of the Oscars. They have their own radio stations and websites specializing in content specifically for their consumption. The have their version of Roger Ebert, even, reviewing movies based on their religious message as opposed to any artistic criterion. They have their own bands, own concerts, own section of the bookstore. It’s a vast drop-in replacement for the monoculture, each piece of the secular culture having its analogue in the spiritual mirror.

That’s one response to the overweening ubiquity of the monoculture, relatively benign but hard to maintain. The other reaction is exemplified in the reaction of the Islamic fundamentalists in their war against Western culture: a complete rejection of the secularization of everyday life and the moral relativism that the monoculture has at its core. Instead of the parallel design of Christian counterculture, Islamic fundamentalist reaction centers on a destruction and replacement of the monoculture with a similarly monolithic and ubiquitous cultural edifice.

The roots of this can be found in the reaction to the secularist governments that were instituted across the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century with Islamist group like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Rulers across the region imported secular-oriented governments to the region, some under pressure from Western powers eager for governments (not necessarily democracies) at least theoretically aligned with their interests, others under the leadership of rulers who equated the collapse of the region in power and importance with the role of Islam as a governing force. This secularization policy was strongest in Turkey, where Ataturk imposed a regime of cultural secularization on the still very Muslim populace.

The blowback from this divorce between the governments of the region and their citizens’ religious beliefs would result in the overthrow of the (corrupt and oppressive) Shah of Iran and the assassination of the (repressive and fatally-conciliatory-toward-Israel) President of Egypt Anwar El Sadat in 1981, among other reactions. When a radical cleric preaches death to the unbelievers, he is not only calling for the destruction of citizens of the West but of an entire culture — the western postmodern monoculture, to be replaced by an Islamic hegemony. For these radicals, it is not enough to co-exist, as the Evangelicals attempt to; they understand, implicitly, that the monoculture will bleed through and eventually absorb/co-opt competition. There can be only one winner.

I don’t believe that there are any other broad movements against the monoculture. Even punitive actions against the mainstream — not owning a television, not listening to Top 40 radio stations — are simply part of the narrative of mainstream vs. outsider that the monoculture encompasses. And they’re generally negative actions, a rejection of some part of culture, and not a construction of a replacement or alternative.

The monoculture exists and is perpetuated because, deep down, this is what we wanted. It is not imposed upon us, but created implicitly through our acceptance of it. So next time you complain about what you see around you, remind yourself that it’s up to you what that environment is. The monoculture is ruthlessly meritocratic when it comes to its contents, providing us with exactly what we want, all the time. The only way to change it, then, is to change ourselves.

CC/ atl10trader

Picture this scenario:  You are at a party and a person wearing dark rimmed glasses clad in tailored black clothes  sits down and starts talking to you.  They open their mouth and out pours “The spatial quality of this habitation is a little reminiscent of Gropius with a marriage of Corbu, but only due to the ribbon windows juxtaposed to that Breuer chair”.   At that moment, all you can do is smile and nod.   Then think up an excuse to get away from that person.

This situation is not uncommon.  Conversing with architects and designers can be informative and interesting, it just takes that one person to kill the conversation.  But don’t be glum, there is a way to understand what they are saying without going too far.  Here are a few definitions to help you:

Palladio: A Renaissance architect that used classical principles in his designs.  (i.e.: symmetry, columns, greco roman design).  Example:  The columns create a  palladian effect on the facade of that structure.

Juxtapose: to be right next to.  (For some reason architects like to use that word).  Example: The arched entry is juxtaposed to the non arched entry.

Celebrate: To bring attention to.  (Using a verb in different context makes things pop!) Example: The trees planted along the sidewalk celebrate the path to the back door.

Corbu: A famous architect born Charles Eduoard Jeannerct then changed his name to Le Corbusier.  Corbu or Le Corb, or Corb is how many architects refer to him.  (After years of studying him, architects start to know his work  on a relaxed basis so they can refer to him by shortened names).   He was pivotal to the International Style.  Example: see the introduction.

International Style: A design style in the 1920s and 30s.  It is the birth of modern architecture.  (It just sounds cool if you refer to it).  If you want to know more about it, read the book “The International Style” by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.

Hopefully this will enlighten you to the complex world of architecture.  There will be more words to come…

I prostrate my mind before you tonight after hours upon hours of television-watching with the dog, which has given me a headache that could kill the pope and still have enough left over to take down a couple of those fancy Swiss guards of his. And I do this for your amusement.

At least try and look grateful.

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the strange things that the hyper-connected world that we now inhabit — that we’ve allowed to come into existence around us — produces all sorts of strange privacy implications that we could never have imagined.

I’ve been playing around with Foursquare lately. (My account, which is quite boring since I don’t go out to bars, which is the target market for an application like Foursquare.) It used to be that Foursquare was only available in selected cities, but now that it’s opened up to use from basically anywhere, there have been a flood of somewhat… interesting ‘venues’ added to the service. Many people appear to be adding their houses, and it was in this context that I noticed this venue: “House of skanky bitch“.

I first saw in on the mobile app on my phone, and chuckled, building up an entire history for the location. “I bet whoever set that up for that location knows that the chick who lives there doesn’t use Foursquare, and really does consider this the house where you go for booty calls.” I imagined a check-in list as long as your arm of various guys marking their territory, a digital record of the, yes, skankitude of this residence.

A side-note, getting back to my incredible headache: I wonder if this is what people with coprolalia feel like. This headache is making me feel like typing fuck over and over again. Fuck. Doesn’t make my headache feel any better, though. Fuck.

I pulled the House of Skanky Bitch up on my computer to actually, you know, check my raving, sordid imagination against reality, and it turns out I’m a horrible misogynist. If I’m guessing correctly from the fact that just three people have ever checked in there, all female, it’s self-titled and entirely self-deprecating. All three have obvious homes of their own that they’ve checked in at as well, with similarly horrible titles.

The broader point here is this: I now know an awful lot about Christina A., Sammy B., and Sonia M. that I doubt they’re comfortable with me knowing. For Sonia there, a prodigious Foursquare user, I now have not only a list of places she’s been lately, but I could, conceivably, work out when she’s out drinking and either track her down all stalker-like or go rob her guaranteed-empty house. I have her full name, via her Facebook page, as well as her major. She has a formspring page where people can ask her anonymous questions, a twitter account, and a blog. Googling her common username soniamonia turns up a further wealth of information.

My point is, we regurgitate an enormous amount of information into the world about ourselves these days without even thinking about it. Sites exist to call attention to this: Please Rob Me got a lot of press attention when it was launched as a proof-of-concept automation of mining Foursquare listings to find empty houses, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a page on location-based services that’s an interesting read.

It doesn’t matter, of course, what groups like the EFF say, or the dire warnings they give. These services are too tempting to stay away from, and their default settings won’t be changed by 90% of their users, and everyone will eventually know where everyone else is all the time. Who knows if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s the next step in the evolution of the internet.

Now, I’ll let you know where to find me for the next, oh, 12 hours or so: in my bed, praying to whatever god might be listening that my head stops pounding long enough to let me go to sleep. I swear, I’m never watching television again. Stuff rots your brain. Literally.

View the world through an unfiltered lens, and wait for the right situation to develop.  I pull off to the shoulder side on the long road of life, and reach into the back seat for a little black bag.  Its memory making contents are pulled from their compartments, and the blinding caps are removed.

Through an unlocked door, into an empty lane of traffic, I cross over to the other side, and descend a few feet down a steep embankment.  From here, I can see everything.  My eyes adjust their aperture, and I can see it all; like I’m taking an unfiltered look down, from on top of the world.

I hold the ergonomic design against my steady palm, curl my right index finger over the top of a six sided box.  It hangs securely fastened to a black strap lassoed around my neck.  My left hand cradles the nozzle, and adjusts my depth of sight; on my black, magic box.

I scrunch my face, flatten my nose, curl my single brown eye into the sight, wink the other one closed.  I take care for a moment to consider the site, another to take and consider the light.  Evaluate the source of my current display, then wrap my head around what’s inside of the frame.

The electronic box awaits my fire command, and I shoot from the edges in.  She poses, she sways, she sings, she behaves.  She shows off her colors.  Contrasting types of darks and bright, she shades and creates with blue, red, and green.  Mountains and leaves, feathers and seas, I capture them all with my shutter speed, time machine.

Picture what you consider beautiful, capture that thought, and remember what you saw.

I hate these days where I wake up to the rain and have a headache.  What is worse is that I know why I have a headache, and it has nothing to do with soju.

Removing mold from a Korean apartment is quite the undertaking, as mold in Korea grows with a vengeance.  Imagine New Orleans post-Katrina and you’ll get the idea. Mold never goes away here.  It lies still and waits for opportunity before rising and spreading and striking and suffocating.

Until recently, most Koreans were indifferent to the miracle of bleach.  Many thought it would kill the environment.  As an American clean freak I have felt compelled to educate my friends on the use of this chemical, while at the same time educating myself on how to properly use it on concrete walls covered with wallpaper in the right amount so as to avoid making the place unlivable for a weekend.

Logic and science dictate that mold only grows in warm, damp areas where the air is still and there is something organic to eat.  Apparently logic and science haven’t visited my Korean apartment, where a fan pointed directly at concrete walls does nothing but anger the beast.

Since my arrival my life has been one where I’m constantly fighting some kind of illness caused by something in the air or water.  The mold isn’t the only thing that will bring you down in Korea.  There’s always the “yellow dust” that blows over from industrial China.  Not to mention the government’s hypocritical stance of simultaneously touting environmentalism while failing to implement modern controls on automobile emissions…or better yet emissions controls on those factories to the north of my neighborhood, Songgang-dong.

It isn’t all bad I suppose.  It is a matter of perspective.  This is a chunk of granite that has been Asia’s whipping post for over a thousand years. They are trying here.  Trying to make money.  Trying to educate their kids.  Trying to become more relevant.  It is working. Slowly.  Maybe the next generation will step into the first world.

In the mean time what they should be trying to do is to figure out how to build better buildings that don’t grow mold so guys like me who are trying to enjoy a different culture don’t feel like hell on rainy days because of that black crap growing in the corner of the apartment.

The speakeasy exists in American culture as a wonderful relic of the Prohibition era, when gathering together under the same roof as a bunch of other people in order to get sauced was completely illegal unless you all happened to be drinking wine and having little crackers to go with it.

It’s a relic of a time when not every piece of information was archived and easily searchable, as it is today. Except for some minor exceptions, where venue owners want to either create that exclusive atmosphere or are engaging in actual illegal activity, that sort of thing simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s only possible to be obscure through an act of will in the Age of Google; thirty years ago that was the default condition. This is not a judgment — it’s merely an observation. Perhaps this state of affairs is better than the alternative, perhaps it’s ruined our sense of proportion. It’s hard to tell when we’re in the middle of it.

In any event, with the death of obscurity, the counter-culture lost its ability to be underground in any real sense. This isn’t a new problem for the counter-culture. After all, accusations of selling out have dogged those arrayed against popular culture for as long as there has been a division between what the masses enjoy and what the elite, self-selected seekers enjoyed. (Did ancient tribes, sitting around the campfire, accuse their shaman of ‘dumbing down’ the esoterica of the rites for mass consumption? Might rivals have risen up as ‘purists’, claiming to be closer to the ‘source’, where yet more esoteric mysteries awaited for the striving seeker?)

“Counter-culture” is a neologism, really. It sprang into existence in the late 1960s to try and apply a name to the social upheaval that was marked as anti-war, pro-sexual-freedom, and most definitely interested in toppling the dominant culture of the time, that of the growing bureaucratic technocracy of JFK and Johnson. Subculture, although an older word (originally used to simply describe, in a technical sense, the various currents within a society), also took on the somewhat negative connotation of something illicit at this time.

The counter-culture existed for a deeper reason than giving the disaffected of every generation a refuge, where they could meet other alienated citizens and try and figure out how to combat what they saw as structural rot. It stood as the challenge to a consensus — any consensus, be it a political one, or an economic one, or even simple broad cultural agreements. When that vanished, and the counter-culture merged with mainstream culture, that dialectic was lost; there is no longer any large-scale systematic way of seeking truths that the mainstream does not accept or recognize. Worse, there is no longer a way to speak Truth to Power from an ‘uncorrupted’ position — everything has been touched by the mainstream now, and there is no hiding place from its reach. No one has the moral high ground.

So there is no counter-culture anymore. Fine. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as generic British characters say on the television. I don’t need a counter-culture; I have my niche grouping, where everyone already gets me, and likes the same bands that I do, and reads the same blogs, and we all follow each other on twitter. The echo chamber is complete, total, and suffocating. And if we don’t consider the deeper meaning of our acceptance of the mainstream, well, that’s alright. I’m sure somebody’s thinking about this stuff, right?

Right?

Part 1: Whose Monoculture Is It, Anyway?
Next: Discontents; or, Handle With Care

Humid, thick, the air is heavy inside an air-conditioned airport.  My black suitcase rolls behind me and my shoulder carries the weight of everything else I couldn’t fit, but have to bring along.  The other travelers are all around me, scurrying about from boards to boarding, pulling behind them suitcases much like mine.  Ticket counters fill on both sides and a few angry, grounded fliers are countered by vested smiles and hopeful assurances that their plights will be made better.  I am not one of these angry travelers.  No, I am simply passing through.

I fill my lungs with warm European air and it calms my nerves.  Sunshine filters through the tiled, solar-paneled ceiling, and it spreads across the concourse in a soft, soothing array of light and shadow.  Each breath warms my blood, and euphorically, delivers me to the edge of reason, and back down the other side, and I wish you would be here to see the things I see.

There is an endless train of reappearing stairs that beckons me to climb aboard, and I accept the invitation.  Pressing my hand to the weathered, black rubber that cycles with the steps, I feel like nothing will ever be the same again.  Reflecting a blue-eyed smile, a maroon-haired passer by, I’ve the feeling I’ve discovered a beauty that was forgotten; at least for me, the beauty had been ignored and subsequently, forgotten.

Nothing is the same as the feeling of discovery; a moment when experience takes place of curiosity, and the proverbial door is opened for continued exploration.  Today, here, I‘ve reopened some forgotten door, and terrified of forgetting once again, I‘m soaking everything in.  Regarding the substance and taste, I can smell the walls, I can feel the warmth of the world envelop my soul as pockets of compressed air wave over me on my magic staircase.  Expresso and freshly baked bread form an alliance and tease my tongue, and tempt my gut.  A tall echo of voices clamors off the white walls and vaulted glass ceilings.  I listen for their language and compare it to my own.  Silently, I roll my R’s and I mouth the few words I hear and understand.

My suitcase rolls once again, though I feel I’m standing still.  Like the earth rotates without me.  As though time has allowed me to remain behind, to which, I am obliged.  I take it all in, attempting to appreciate all the things I’ve missed.

The sounds, the substance, the sight, the taste, the smell; this life, I am a tourist.  We are all simply passing through.

There are players.  There are the type of players who play by the rules, and then there are the players who refuse.  Playing by the rules is safe.  The game goes as planned; the result is rarely a surprise.  The risk these players, the rule abiding athletes, face: is to themselves.  A predictable life.  A safe game.  The end result can often times be underwhelming, making them wish maybe just once they’d played dirty or even warmed the bench.  If only they’d taken a moment–just watched for one second.

The rule breakers don’t have it much better.  What is there to gain by abstaining from play?  Sure, make your own rules, face the consequences for breaking their rules, refuse to play once in a while.  But eventually the game will go on without you.  It passes you by, oblivious.  And even if you stay in the game, you take the chance that the other players won’t like to play by your rules.It’s getting to be that time of year.  February 14th, and the joy that it brings.  That last sentence was written in sarcasm, for those of you who don’t read it fluently.  This year I’ve been thinking a lot about the game.  The rules.

To some people, it’s a Hallmark holiday at best.  Why should one day out of the year be any different?  You can show the people you care about, well, that you care about them all year, every day, any day you choose.  But these people probably don’t.  They’re playing by their own rules, however admirable they may be.  If you’re team doesn’t know your rules, you’re finished.

Some people go all out.  Flowers and chocolates and stuffed animals and dinner.  And dessert.  They’re playing by the rules.  The rules of clichés, and obligatory romance.  But, lets face it: who doesn’t want to be picked to play on that team?  At the very least, for the dessert.  Try and convince me you couldn’t go for a cookie right this second.

For others, it’s a day to drink the feelings.  Eat the absence.  Even the kid who’s picked last knows the rules of the game.  Knows what it means to be picked last.  Sometimes we forget just to turn our heads to the side, and realize there’s half the team benched right along side us.

But sometimes it can be nice to sit it out.  No pressure.  Playing the game, either by the rules or against them, can be a lot of work.  Take that moment to get your head back in the game.  How do you want to play?  What rules can you break?  What rules will you follow?  It doesn’t have to be black or white.  Sometimes it’s nice in the gray.

At the end of it all, when the pitch is quiet and the wounds are wrapped, it doesn’t really matter.  Scores are just numbers.  Trophies will be handed out all over again next year.  Players are traded, and others retire altogether.  What’s going to do you the most good, isn’t winning.  Loosing sucks, but you learn.  In truth, it really is how you play the game.