18 November 2010

Day 236: Dan Walker (guest blogger)

Summerland by Michael Chabon.  ISBN: 9780786808779.

I guess I should talk about baseball.

Being a nerd and all, I'm not all up on my sports.  I always got C's in gym due to being out of shape and thoroughly unconcerned with the whole winning and losing bit.  I'm not terribly coordinated, and I sure don't give a damn about team spirit.  I'm one of those people who watches the Super Bowl for the commercials (because, damn, they funny).

But yeah, baseball.  It's never appealed to me, what with the running and the sliding in the dirt and the having to hit/catch a hard little ball with a hard little stick of wood/thin leather glove.  It's kind of like golf, only more sadistic.  I'd much rather play kickball, which at least has you aiming for a much larger target.

Which is funny, because one of the few sports I like playing is tennis (the other one is soccer).  At least the rackets have much larger surface area than a baseball bat, and you don't have to worry about having more than one other person on your team, if that.  I was very surprised when I first took tennis in gym class, how much I enjoyed it, and I can't really say for certain what about the game appeals to me.  I do know that I took it again during the requisite second year of gym class (we got to pick about four different activities per semester).

Baseball, football, hockey, basketball: it probably is the team aspect which turns me away.  I never liked working in groups as a student, so why should playing on a team be any different?  And yet, reading this book, a game of baseball seemed so nice.  Who knows, if I hadn't been so awkward and uncoordinated, maybe I could have come to appreciate a leisurely game of baseball between friends.

Dan Walker (pseudonym) is a writer from Northeast Ohio, who would be teaching ESL if he wasn't unemployed temporarily working at a bookstore. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Wright State University in 2004 and a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language from Kent State University in 2009. He will make some lucky librarian a wonderful husband someday.

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