There’s a feeling of sadness for multiple reasons. First being that I have no more “vacation” to look forward to for the rest of the year. Some people set in their mind that vacation is upcoming and that helps them get through the day. This is the first feeling when I consider that I have one more off day till work for the rest of my year. The second feeling of sadness comes from getting older and realizing that family vacations are changing. There will come a day when you won’t be able to get everyone together like we are still able to do. Just spending an entire week together with my family is something that we don’t get to do 51 weeks out of the year. Simple things like my mom doing puzzles, listening to music together, going to the beach, JC being JC, and never catching any fish. I suppose these are all just normal feelings when a vacation comes to an end but for some reason the older you get the more it hits you.

In other news, the Superstars lost in the championship game 9-1 to a team that just played better. I’m not even going to go into detail but after some questionable base running in the first inning, a shouting match spectacle, and the other team hitting line drive single after single, we weren’t winning the game. Perhaps my post on winning (or not caring about winning) should be pointed out in my 0-7 performance on the day (2 games) with a strike out when the bases were loaded and a nice inning ending double play. I think it’s fair to say though that that wasn’t turning point, although fairly embarrassing. Softball has come to an end and I’m not complaining. For some reason I always feel like baseball singles out people and thus makes for pressure situations that I just prefer to avoid. Basically when the Shee says he gets nervous before every round of golf, I feel that way playing baseball. There is no comfort level because I just play once a week. This seems to be my excuse for everything but I’m just not a jack of all trades. I can be good at some things, but not everything. Which brings me to Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers.

The basic idea is it takes 10,000 hours to master something. Meaning you put in 10,000 hours of work on a specific task and you can achieve mastery. Now consider softball from my point of view. I didn’t play between the ages of 15 and 25, and now I play one hour a week for 8 weeks. There isn’t any level of confidence in my softball playing and I suppose it showed today. This translates to just about everything that I’ve been doing lately. When I was a kid I used to be way better at sports. I’d play baseball 5 times a week for an entire season. I’d go to basketball camps every week during winter and then again in summer, plus playing on travel teams and such. Now it’s just play every once in a while and see what happens. I suppose you could look at this as an excuse but it’s just matter of fact. The ability is there, the skill set is not. It really comes down to practice but where is the time? I don’t have the time or the energy to do all these things. My life example. I wake up, I work till 5, I run till 6 because this keeps me in shape and is more important to me than any sport. Now I choose between the golf range, the tennis court, the softball field, the basketball court… There are just so many things to do. This works on simple things like Frisbee throwing too. My point is that its hard to be good at everything. I’m not that talented. I know this was a real downer post but life has its ups and downs.