Basketball days

A few days ago, I attended a basketball game in which one of my nephews was playing. Watching one of my nephews' games always makes me long for the days when I played myself.

Now, I was never good. As a matter of fact, I sucked. Basketball wasn't offered for girls where I went to grade school, and by the time we moved to a school that did offer it, I was a seventh-grader, and I didn't even join the team until the following year. By then, my eighth-grade classmates had been playing for about five years. They were the PKs, as my best friend and I called them, the Popular Kids. Why I even joined the team at such at late date still baffles me. I think it was all the stories my mom used to tell about her glory days playing basketball. And possibly, it was because of the road trips with the boys, but I doubt it. My crush at the time was not very athletic.

But anyway, there I was, on a team full of girls I felt out of touch with, playing a sport I had no skill for and lacking the confidence to believe I could possibly get better at it. I was apprehensive, awkward, unambitious, untalented and so out of my element that I really have no clue what it is I'm fondly remembering these days as I sit in the stands watching my nephew play, wishing I was out on a court playing basketball with a bunch of friends, too. In truth, I didn't hate playing, but I hated feeling like I sucked so badly that I was embarrassing myself. And as out of sorts as I felt with my teammates, they were never rude to me a la "Mean Girls." So, maybe it was a fun time for me, and I just don't recall having all that much fun at the time.

Out with the old?

Every now and then, I get the urge for newness. And so, sometime in mid-December, foolishly believing that I would do something different with my blog, I just started deleting my posts. I wanted direction. I wanted focus. I wanted organization. I wanted, it seems, to just wake up one morning and not be the me I have been for the last 36 years.

It was the plan when I went crazy with the delete button to write concise, well-thought out commentary-type posts, but those kinds of things take time -- time I’m not willing to give right now because I want to fix up my house, catch up on my reading, work on some short stories and a whole lot of other things. I realized my mistake about 10 minutes after everything was gone.

So, while I mourn the loss of everything I had written last year -- despite the fact that the biggest reason I deleted it was because I thought it was stupid -- I begin again, with a whole lot of the same old crap.

Happy freakin’ new year.