Diamond life.

I've been in a bit of funk recently (that's a newsflash for you), but one beacon of hope this month has been postseason baseball. Sure, that beacon has flickered more than a candle in Elton's wind, often threatening to fizzle out completely, but we wouldn't be talking about my dear and much-missed Red Sox otherwise.

This year I haven't been able to watch any of the games on TV (ESPN does carry them), since, as you may have heard, I'm all, like, unsettled. Oh, and because many games have been on during my working hours. Yes, almost forgot about that. That would stop me. Yeah. I've never stayed home from work to watch the Oscars live, for instance.

So anyway, I've had to follow most of the past few highly dramatic games through mlb.com's Gameday feature. (By the way, you know that Curt Schilling's ankle will assume mythic proportions as time goes by. Years from now, people will talk about how blind old women touched the ankle and regained their sight, how the ankle helped orphaned little children pass their SATs and cured acne.) For about three mornings in a row, you would have found me rocking back and forth while staring at my computer screen, all the while sucking on my thumb in equal parts abject terror and anticipated delirium. So, you know, to anyone walking past my office, it would have looked just like any other morning.

The fourth morning -- the decisive game 7 -- I had to be in a boring meeting. Curses! (So to speak.) Blessedly, a colleague who's actually a fellow Sox fan helped out. You know that scene in the movies when someone is in a really important and tense meeting, with, say, Soviet supervillains, and he is on the verge of being forced into capitulating, but in the last moment someone sends in a hastily-scribbled note, which our hero unfolds and reads, thereby learning the location of the hostage. the gold, and the kitten up the tree, at which point he gets a triumphant gleam in his eye, gets up, overturns the meeting table, whips out his huge guns, and kills all the motherfuckers at the meeting? My morning was exactly like that, except for the "exactly" part. The note told me the score (4th inning, Sox lead 8-1, hallelujah); the murderous rampage was just a bonus.

So here we are in the world series. Aiiieeeee!!! I can't believe that I'm not in Boston for this (and some Janes-came-lately-to-Boston are). I realized today that the last game I saw in person at Fenway Park was, oddly enough, between the Sox and the Cards. The two teams never met this current season during interleague play, so this game was back in 2003. June 11, 2003, to be precise. I was in Boston for a little summer visit, and it was, I think, my penultimate day in the city. Because of that, my friends Soon and Michael wanted to have dinner one last time (in more ways than one, it turns out: last I heard, they had separated), so I arranged to meet them at 5 pm, figuring that I could make it to the park not too much after the game started.

The dinner was great -- we ate at a middle eastern place near Inman Square, which had some excellent cous cous -- but of course we yakked and yakked incessantly. Also, the service was s l o w; that cous cous apparently needed time to be harvested, the wheat separated from the chafe. When I finally took my leave and made it to the park, it was 8 something. To make matters worse, that was the day that Pedro was making his first start after coming off the disabled list, so the plan was for him to pitch only part of the game. So of course when I got to the park, Pedro had already put in his three innings, and had come out. To be replaced by John Burkett. Now, I liked Burkett when he was pitching for the Sox, because he was, like 50 years old, a little pudgy, and listed his hobbies as bowling and doing laundry. (Rock and roll, man.) All of which I identified with. But lord, is he the slowest pitcher ever. In the time he takes to wind up and get his 70 mile-per-hour "fast"ball to homeplate, entire planets are discovered and terraformed, and my waiter back at the restaurant would have even brought us dessert. The first three Pedro innings had been played in, like, a crisp hour and a half; I got there in time to watch Burkett take the same time to get three guys out. Plus it was drizzling, and my seat on the 3rd base side wasn't even that great. Not my my favorite day in the park.

But: we won that game. That's a good sign, right? Oh, here's something else. A few months after that game, my colleague -- the same one who passed me the note a few days ago -- and I realized that we were at the same game. We were both in Boston for separate work projects, and had somehow both decided independently to catch the same game. (My seats were much better, though.) What are the chances!? Actually, since we're both Sox fans, quite good, but still.

All this means something, I think. I'm just not sure what. So I'll hope that it all means that the Sox will win the series this year. (Even if they have to defeat my future husband Scott Rolen's team to do it. All's fair in love and war, baby.) About ten hours to the first pitch!

Posted at 10:34 PM ||

 
The most hysterical slip of the tongue coming during sexual harrassment that I hope to read all year.

This just in: Bill O'Reilly allegedly enjoys pleasuring women by using deep fried Middle Eastern balls of minced meat.

Posted at 1:41 PM ||