This Is Hard

This is hard. Not building-a-deck or renovating-a- bathroom or rocket-science or listening-to-an-Amway-salesman hard, but hard nonetheless. I sit here in the early—and very, very unseasonably cold—days of March and read about Spring Training and the other baseballs goings on, the speculation about rookies and prospects and the ever-widening steroid scandal; and I have to remind myself not to root against the Red Sox and not to automatically feel a swell of pride when I read about something positive happening at Yankees camp. In some ways, I feel like I'm on a diet, but instead of having first to become conscious of and then second to begin to change, my eating habits, I have to become conscious of and then begin to change my cheering habits. So far, I'm getting pretty good at recognizing when I react to something, like the news that Daisuke Matsuzaka's first two outings in Spring Training have been tremendous. Normally, this would elicit an internal groan on my part, but I'm recognizing that reaction and doing what I can to at least quarantine it so that it doesn't poison the rest of my soul.

See, that's the hard part. And two things make it harder. The first is the fact that I can't explain this to Sam, how this whole fan-thing works and how I'm sacrificing something special to me for him. The second is the fact that fandom, or maybe fandemonium, is a difficult thing to get away from in this society. I'll give you one example that illustrates that: two weeks ago I was in Indiana on business. I had to visit a small, evangelical Christian school and help them deploy a new intranet. On the first day of my visit, I had lunch with the school's Chief Information Officer. He told me how he first became interested in this particular school when his children began to go to school there (this school is 200 miles from where he and his children lived at the time.) He said he liked the school's campus, the school's piety, and the school's athletic facilities. His mention of the athletic facilities turned the conversation predictably to sports and we spend the rest of the lunch break talking about big-time, Division I football. It turns out that the CIO at this school is an Ohio State University alumnus. Oh, I'm sorry: THE Ohio State University.

Granted, that story may do more to show the biases inherent in my thinking than anything else, but to me it demonstrates how pervasive sports are in our culture. They've become so pervasive that they've entered the realm previously occupied by the weather in that it's the only thing that everyone has in common.

So, like the dieter trying to pick the healthy path through the holiday party buffet table, I find myself taking baby steps towards fully embracing Red Sox fandom. For me, this seems like it's the only way this whole thing is going to work. But I ask you to be patient with me and take pity on me when necessary, because I'm new to all of this stuff and I have a lot of emotional baggage to deal with.