November 23: getting ready to rumble

Tonight was my little (6' 3" )brother's first basketball game - ever. Up until this point in our lives I have played more organized b-ball than him. Though I have fun waving that statistic around, it isn't saying very much. I was just recounting to my mom tonight the climax of my basketball career which peaked at age nine -- a vivid and horrible memory. It was a co-ed team and I went up to battle for a ball with this kid with shaggy hair and as we came down I accidentally scratched him pretty bad (I can still feel it sometimes in my nightmares and it's horrible)...anyways, he cried and I felt terrible about it. He also convinced his whole team to cheer mean things about me the "cat-lady" with claws. It was very scarring for me (I hope it wasn't too scarring for his arm) and that was pretty much the most exciting bit of my hoop dreams which is OK. Anyways, Bill has always been a baseball boy but this fall he decided to try out for the basketball team even though he'd never played before. He made JV and played the first game of the season tonight. That kid is just so versatile. It is really inspiring actually...I guess it is possible to do things you haven't been training for your whole life. Some skills are transferable. You just have to ignore the people who tell you you can't do it, that you've missed your chance, and that "this isn't the way it's done." We all could probably stand to have more of that kind of approach to life.

I was thinking about that while I was watching the game tonight and how it pertains to my own life. One very small example is that I know that one thing I would really enjoy is to be a sports photographer. I love looking at the sports pages and seeing the photos where a dramatic motion is captured in a single frame, or you can feel the victory on one flat 4x6 shot. I'm always proud of the person who took it.

And I must say that my inside look at the world of sports photography does give me reason to hope that I too could ascend such lofty goals. You see, my senior year of high school volleyball on the very "Ranger Man" you see on the court above, a newspaper photographer came to take some shots of us....after clicking away for a while he said that "we were moving too fast" and it wasn't working. We were moving too fast? Tell me, what is one to do when playing an aerobic sport? This isn't chess! His solution was to pose us AS IF we were actually playing. I was having integrity issues with the whole thing but I ended up going along with it and have the picture to prove it. I had to pretend like I had just set the volleyball by reaching my arms in full extension as if I was really setting the ball to my friend Christy. Christy had to stand on a chair and "spike" the ball -- pretend spike the ball that is. It was ri-dic-u-lous. I hope that people all over the city thought we looked really fierce when they saw that picture. We worked hard to make it look accurate. So, all this to say, if that's the crack-squad they've got working in the sports photography industry right now, maybe there is hope for me. I think I just need a camera that clicks its little shutter faster (even if I time it up perfectly, if there is too much movement it gets blurry). BUT, for now I've told myself that this year of taking pictures is a good chance to learn as much as I can from my basic point-and-click. And I still like the way this one came out tonight. It was a good game too :)