I just watched an awesome documentary one the 1980 U.S.
Hockey Team. For all intents and purposes, to billions of
people across the world, that game represented the democracy
against communism. It wasn’t just us against the Soviets. It
was us against the Iranians, who had held 52 Americans for
over 100 days at that point. It was us against ourselves and
everything we were up against. It’s amazing to me that the
Soviets showed up – today people would have to fear some
lunatic trying to blow up a bunch of athletes. If only all
wars could be fought on the field……..

I just finished watching *61. God I love that movie. Makes
me wish I’d been alive in the 1960s – back when baseball was
pure and the game was simple. Far as I have heard, they
don’t think steroids came into play on the field until the
late ‘70s.

I’m not going to lie: I hate the Yankees, just like most
people. I think they buy wins and championships. Even guys
like Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, who were amazing ball
players, lived the lives of celebrities and made you wonder
which was more important them – baseball or the perks that
came along with it.

I’m sure that Roger Maris wasn’t as simple and pure as the
movie *61 portrayed him. But you can tell that there was
something about Roger Maris that was special – he just loved
the game. I think the reason I like Maris so much is that he
did it without the support of the Yankee fans. Those damn
Yankee fans, who yell and scream and curse, didn’t
appreciate him and made fun of him, and he just went ahead
and did what he had to do anyways.

For the sake of Roger Maris, I hope that Mike McGwire and
Sammy Sosa didn’t take steroids. I think that he would love
to see someone break his record, but he’d want them to do it
right – without steroids.

I don’t know what we can do to make our sport pure again,
but for my sake and the sake of my future kids, I hope
baseball (and basketball and football etc..) can get it
together and make watching it something special again.

And sometimes you wake up and realize the thing you fear the most has become your reality...

Does anyone else feel like life is moving so fast you are missing substantial portions just by blinking?

My junior year's almost over. I can't believe it. I don't feel like I've been in Virginia for three years, nor do I feel like I've been a college student for three years. There's still soooooo much I haven't done and so much I want and need to do.

I try to make it a policy in life never to look back. You can't change on the past so why dwell on it? Lately, however, I've been wondering how my life would have been different if I'd done this or that. Would it be better or worse? Why do that; you're just torturing yourself. You made the decisions you did and things have worked out the way they have, so just move on from this day on.

It always makes me catch my breath when I think of how old I am. I'm 21 years old. People still see that as pretty young, but I see it as old. I'm not old enough to be twenty-one. My childhood and my teens are officially behind me. Pretty soon, my school life will be behind me. Everyone always says college is the best time of your life. What if that's true? I'm 3/4 the way through the best time of my life. And while some points have been amazing, others haven't been that great. Is that really as good as it gets?

Since most of my friends are older than me, I've been thinking alot about what happens when you get out of college. You grow up, you get a job. Maybe you live on your own. Maybe you live on a completely different coast than your family. How do you meet people? In college, there are some 15,000 people your age, always around. How do you meet people when you grow up? I'm a very social person, I'm going to need people...even when I grow up.

I wish life moved just a little slower. Despite recent hard times, and despite what people may say, life rocks. And you only get it once. You only get to go through it once. So you might as well squeeze everything out of it you can. I'm not sure if I'm doing that, but I'm trying. I'm hoping things might go differently next year, and I can really squeeze every drop of life out of each day. Because you'll never have it again, so you might as well take everything you can get out of it.

I always wonder, when I look back on this stage in my life, what will I remember? And who will I remember? When I look back at each of the states and each of the schools I've been in, the things you think you'll always remember, you don't. It's the weird little things that you remember for the rest of your life. I wonder what I'll remember most about college.

Beginning to ramble again. Night all.

I just got back from seeing Hotel Rwanda. It was one of those movies you don't enjoy seeing. You don't walk out of the theater and say "that was a good movie." You walk out and say "That was powerful. I'm glad I saw it."

This is one of the hardest things I've had to see in my life. I'm your average American kid; sheltered in some ways and not in others. I don't care who you are or how much you think you've seen in your life: you have not seen this. The pure hate someone can have for another is unbelievable. I don't understand how you can hate someone you don't know. I guess it's the same way people in the Middle East hate Americans, and many Americans hate people in the Middle East.

Throughout the movie, you could hear people crying. Honestly, I think I was too scared to cry. I wanted to; I even tried to make myself cry towards the end. I felt so unfeeling that I couldn't shed a tear for these people. It may have only been a movie but it was based on a real event. And not a real event like the Holocaust - an event that happened when I was alive; when I was eleven years old.

I remember hearing about the genocide some, but at that time I lived in Seattle and was hearing a lot more about what was happening in Bosnia and Serbia. That seemed closer to me, more real. It may have been because we had some Bosnian refugees in my class. I remember one day we were watching one of those news programs made for classrooms about what was happening in Bosnia. The kid sitting next to me, who had moved from Bosnia less than a year ago started crying and got up to leave. I just stared at him - I'd never seen a guy my age cry. Later, I found out his father was killed in a Bosnian concentration camp. I felt horrible; I wanted to do something, but I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what that felt like.

The worst thing about all this is that the genocide in Rwanda wasn't the only one. There have been other genocides in South Africa, Kenya, and Somalia. While they usually occupy about 5 minutes of the news in America, they are usually put after whether or not the Sixers won and how T.O. is feeling in the order of importance.

This may sound crazy, but during the movie I decided that I was without a doubt adopting children when I grew up. I've been considering this for many years. I'm not really sure why, it's not like I plan on doing it anytime soon. In six or seven years maybe, who knows. But this movie absolutely convinced me. Why would I bring another child into this world when there are already so many that are needing someone to love them? I have absolutely made up my mind that I am adopting children from another country. I don't care if they are babies or older, I don't care if they are white or black or yellow or hot pink with white stripes. I don't care if I have a husband or if I do it alone. It's just something I'm going to do.

Sounds crazy right? It's kinda funny that I will change my mind about what classes I am going to take next semester eight or nine times but when it comes to really big things, I make decisions randomly, out of the blue one day. Usually though, when I'm convicted of something, I stick to it to the best of my ability. We shall see.

This is all rambling. But it's nice to sit down and just write what pops into my head. We'll have to see if I keep this weblog thing going.