Not writing in a time of crisis

I don't have time to write anything here these days, but I thought I'd just post something anyway, just to let people know that I haven't forgotten I have a blog.

Big presentation to work on for Thursday night, paper due Monday, another paper due next Thursday, and then a third paper due the Thursday after that. Plus two psych exams mixed in somewhere in there too. So, please, forgive me.

When I get home (this just in... December 15!), I'll start writing more here. A lot more. Until then, keep your collective shirts on, everyone.

Writing in a time of crisis

I don't normally write anything here in the late afternoon or evening. I'm not in the right mood... too tired after a day of classes to think, too bored with the quiet dorm to be interesting.

But today I feel as though I should have something to focus on, because if I let my mind wander, I might hurt somebody. I'm not in the best of moods. It's not just that Al Franken is on the Tufts campus right now (he is), or that I couldn't get tickets (I couldn't). It's also the fact that, unless I'm really fortunate next January, my schedule next semester is going to royally suck.

About a week ago, I had a list of five courses: comparative politics, astronomy, US history, macroeconomics, and intermediate journalism. Everything looked great, and the schedule was perfect, and then came yesterday. I log onto the course offerings website to check on course statuses, just making sure my classes weren't full. I find out that history and journalism each have three slots left, and there are about a thousand sophomores still registering before I get my turn.

So I decide to pick a backup class for each -- judicial politics for history and non-fiction writing for journalism -- and check back today. Today I find that not only are history and journalism gone, but non-fiction writing is too. I don't feel like bothering with a Plan C, since nothing else really appeals to me right now, so it looks like I'm stuck with just four classes. But it really gets on my nerves that the two classes that fill up were the two that I really wanted to take. Oh well. Such is life.

As for this semester's classes, psych is still incredibly boring, but at least I had a night off from studying last night, since my professors were dumb enough to put the same chapter on the syllabus twice. We're studying cognition and language development this week, and then on Friday I'm going to the psych building to be a human subject (everyone needs to log four hours to pass the course). In polisci, I just finished a paper on national character and how it's formed... interesting stuff, but harder to write about than I expected. We'll see how that turns out. And in English, I just read Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers, and I'm in the process of writing a paper on that too.

The whole journalism thing is back in full swing again, and now I'm writing about both baseball and basketball. For the Observer, I did an Eastern Conference NBA preview that came out on the 28th, and I have two baseball articles -- a Hot Stove preview and an opinion piece about the Cy Young winners -- that aren't on the website yet. And for the Daily, I've officially started covering Tufts basketball; my first article came out today.

I'll be the first to admit: it isn't that good. It's not the length that discourages me -- I was asked for 300 to 500 words and I handed in 435 -- it's the simplicity. To me, it just seems like a really lame, boring article. My excuse is the following: I was given walking directions to, and a phone number for, the coach's office, and basically was to figure the rest out from there, and have an article done by 3PM yesterday. So Will, Nate and I, the three basketball reporters, walk to the gym at 9:30 yesterday morning (just being awake at that hour was a big accomplishment for me), hoping to introduce ourselves, get a few quotes, and find contact info for players we could talk to for future research. Of course, he isn't there. So I head back to my dorm, leave half a million phone messages and emails, and pray that he calls me back. By 2:30, I've got nothing, and a half hour to write an article. So I spend the next 23 minutes researching Tufts basketball on the internet and banging out the dullest article in the history of "journalism." Just as I'm hitting the last key to finish typing the last mind-numbingly boring word, my phone rings at 2:53. Of course, it's Coach Sheldon. I ask him all my questions over the phone, vigorously scribbling down every last word of quotableness I can find, and by 2:58, I thank him, say goodbye, and hang up. I spend six minutes reorganizing my article to make the quotes fit well, and at 3:04, it's time to turn in my article. Already four minutes late, I have no time to track down players for comment.

Good story, huh?

And speaking of sportswriting, Alan Schwarz is coming to Tufts on Thursday. I'm really psyched, not only because I just finished his book, but also because it'll be nice to meet someone who actually made it in the sportswriting world, and talk to him about his job. He's also signing copies of The Numbers Game for free. I think I might really like this guy... rumor has it he picked Eric Wedge over Ozzie for Manager of the Year.

Not to be outdone by the history department, my baseball analysis teachers decided to plan a little pregame show for the Schwarz lecture, starting at six on Thursday. To my disbelief, they managed to book Bill Freaking James, the godfather of baseball statistics, the Sultan of Scorebook himself, to come talk to our class before we walk to the Schwarz lecture as a class. I don't know how they pulled it off, but I'm amazed. He's authored or co-authored countless baseball books (Amazon says 174, but that's not counting the Baseball Abstracts he published himself by hand when he first started out), and he's the genius behind tons of baseball stats, among them Win Shares, Runs Created, park effects, Pythagorean wins, similarity scores, and minor league equivalancies. I know I'm rambling, and I know this is Greek to 90% of the people reading this, but I can't help myself. I'm looking forward to this a bit.

In preparation for the coming of my Messiah, I've been working like a dog on my research project, trying to analyze the tendencies of closers in bullpens. I've taken note of every pitcher who's recorded at least 90% of his team's saves in a season in the twenty-first century (there are 45 of them), and my goal is to put every single game from each of these seasons in a spreadsheet, and analyze my data. Right now, it's still early (seven down, 38 to go) but it looks like I could prove that closers perform best when they have a mix of eighth- and ninth-inning appearances, and when they come in in mid-inning with runners on base.

I want to have a good chunk of the data analyzed by Thursday so I can show Mr. James, but I have thousands of box scores to record, and it's a bit time-consuming. My goal is to finish the ten 2005 seasons I'm working on (Rivera, Lidge, Hoffman, Wagner, Nathan, Ryan, Jones, Baez, Cordero, and Guardado), and then draw up some graphs and charts and things Thursday afternoon. Right now I've recorded all the data I need for seven of the ten; I'm right on track.

Anyway, that's enough of my boring project. I would move on to complaining about baseball awards here, but the Rookie of the Year voters got it right for once, and my Cy Young complaints are already in the Observer article that I don't feel like rehashing now. I will say two things though: one, people really shouldn't look for me to concur when they complain to me about A-Rod beating David Ortiz for the MVP. They're wrong. I'm as big a Red Sox fan as anyone, but Alex Rodriguez is a flat-out better player than Ortiz, and always have been. Give up. And two, I will never understand why an MVP has to come from a playoff team. Derrek Lee was robbed in the NL voting, and I'm pretty sure that Reason #1 is the fact that the other 24 Cubs would be better employees of a Burger King than a major league baseball team. That's not his fault! He's still a more valuable player than Albert Pujols, and he shouldn't be denied MVP honors just because he couldn't carry the Cubbies to the playoffs. End rant.

Wow, I should probably write in the early evenings more often. I just cranked out almost 1500 words in a little over an hour. I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm hungry, and plus, the Celtics just might be in the process of handing Detroit their first loss. This requires my immediate attention. Until next time...

Victory, at long last!

I don't know what exactly there is to say about our governor-elect that hasn't already been said. Pretty much everyone who reads this blog has been on the Tim Kaine bandwagon for just as long as I have, so I don't have really anything groundbreaking to add.

I do, however, want to take a step back and think about the Virginian political climate as a whole. The 2005 election makes it eight times in a row that Virginians have elected their governor from the opposite party of our nation's president. It's strange; we're quite the conservative state, but at the same time, we've never been interested in conserving the status quo set in place by the leader of the free world. I see two possible explanations for this trend, one of them flattering, and one of them... not so much.

On one hand, it's possible that the moderate voters of Virginia have a deep, complex understanding of the importance of checks and balances. To elect a Democratic governor with a Democrat already in the White House would give too much power to the liberal side of the spectrum -- so when Clinton is president, we elect George Allen and Jim Gilmore. Conversely, to elect a Republican in Virginia when there's a Republican head of state would give too much power to the conservatives. With George Bush in Washington, we elect Mark Warner and one Timothy Michael Kaine.

If we take this angle, then I have to say: I'm really impressed with how noble Virginians are. They're bringing justice to the state's political climate. After all, in a political culture that's split down the middle, it's only fair that the two parties share the power at all times.

Then again, if we interpret Virginian voters in a different way, it doesn't make us look so good. What if we're just really gullible people, and we're too susceptible to smear attacks against the presidency? What if we were brainwashed by anti-Democratic ads while the Clinton presidency was wrought with scandal, and then by anti-Republican ads after Bush took us to war? This isn't quite as noble as the first theory, is it? It means that we can't detach political issues on the local level from those on the national level, and we're letting relatively irrelevant factors bias our voting habits.

I don't know which of these theories to believe, but I do think there has to be some explanation for this trend. Eight times in a row! The last time we elected a governor from the president's side of the aisle was 1973, when Mills Godwin and Richard Nixon were both Republicans. It's incredible -- especially when you consider that we're a traditionally Republican state, but we've picked the Democrat five times out of the eight.

If you don't buy into this pattern, and you think it's all random noise, then maybe you see a realignment forming, and the Democrats' stronghold on the Virginia statehouse is emblematic of a liberal return to glory nationwide. That's possible too! Kilgore lost in Virginia, Doug Forrester lost in New Jersey, California rejected pretty much every idea Ahnold had to offer, and, by the way, our president's approval rating is sitting pretty at a staggering 37 percent.

Either way, this Kaine victory really gets me thinking. It has a lot of relevance in society as a whole, especially if it hurts the reputation of the Republicans currently in power in Washington. We'll see how that pans out.

On a less deep-in-thought and more woo-hoo-we-won note, I can't believe we pulled this one out! It's the first time I've been on the winning side since being old enough to vote, and it feels good. I've always been a bit of a pessimist, but Kaine's comeback this summer really made me a believer. (Not having Jerry Kilgore ruin the world for four years is a nice bonus too.)

In other news...

-I'm really, really praying that Manny doesn't get traded. The latest news I've heard is that he and Garret Anderson are both refusing to play a DH role. This means that Manny can't go to the Angels, since left field there is Anderson's for good. And if the Mets don't put Lastings Milledge on the table, there's pretty much no offer they can make that's worth our time. I don't want Mike Cameron in the outfield at Fenway... it makes me cringe just to think about it.

-The Observer finally started updating their website again. There's an NBA preview (I did the Eastern Conference half) in this week's sports section, plus an opinion piece on merging Tufts and Hopkins that I thought was worth a read and a chuckle or two.

-Tuesday's psych exam was a horrible test. I've read, reread, and re-reread the sections of the textbook we were tested on, and there were several test questions on material that's blatantly not in the book. Plus the test barely covered the dozens of pages of content the book had on neurotransmitters in the brain, which I of course studied for hours.

-Next week I get to start covering Division III college basketball for the Daily. Time to gear up for the 102nd season in the history of Jumbos basketball. How exciting.

That's all I have to say for now. This isn't exactly the best week for blogging for me... schoolwork is piling up. My psych reading's done, but I have a whole lot of research to do on what the writings of Rousseau, Aristotle, Hume, and Montesquieu have to say about national character and how it's formed. Then I'll follow that up with a study of the run-prevention tendencies of Brad Lidge, Joe Nathan and Trevor Hoffman. And perhaps a bit of reading about teenage girls in Hasidic Jewish societies?

And maybe some sleep, if there's time.

My hatred of the White Sox... continued

One of the great things about blogs is that they make for great conversation starters. Every time I write something here, I'll inevitably see someone in the next day or two start up a dialogue with me about something I write, and often, it's good for a decent debate or two.

Never is this more true than when I write about sports. It's tough for me, because I want to have the occasional deep analysis of issues in baseball and basketball, but at the same time I don't want all the non-sports fanatics (or the football-only fans) to give up on reading this thing. So here's what I'll do. If you don't care for baseball, feel free to stop reading; I'll write more next week, and you can come back then (on second thought, the last few paragraphs might be mildly interesting... perhaps you could skim those). But if you'd like, continue onward. In response to certain comments posted here earlier tonight, I'd like to take this opportunity to expand upon my White Sox hatred.

Nothing makes me happier than sitting down at my computer to see the words "starkiespree: i just raped your blog" waiting for me in my away messages. There's nothing more fun than a good old fashioned argument with the one and only Lord Starkweather about our national pastime. Normally I would just respond to his comments with a witty little retort in a comment of my own, but since no one ever bothers to read the comments because they're full of inane drivel (not to insult anyone, I'm as guilty as anyone else), I'm writing a whole new entry. Besides, this is an issue that I know a lot about, so I wouldn't mind going into more detail on it. Let's walk through this debate one step at a time.

"Evans you have such a limited knowledge of baseball and I have no idea how they made you NL beat writer or whatever."

Always fun to kick things off with a personal attack. They work better when they're true though.

"Do you even comprehend how much more valuable Podsednik is than Carlos Lee? Wow. We are talking about the best basestealer in the game vs. someone who wouldn't even be in my top ten outfielders (because I know you are going to ask who- Manny, Andruw Jones, Ichiro, Sheff, Vlad, Jason Bay, Cabrera, Abreu, Burrell, Giles (in no particular order)- and I'm sure I left out at least 5 more)."

First of all, Scott Podsednik is clearly not a more valuable player than Carlos Lee. Podsednik is an overrated baserunner, a powerless hitter, and generally a misunderstood player. Lee is a dependable 30-home run slugger, who can carry the heart of an order.

"Best basestealer in the game" is quite a bold assertion about Podsednik -- in fact, it's pretty much just wrong. Podsednik only stole 59 bases because Ozzie ran him into the ground (and not just Scotty Pods... he also abused the steal signal with Pablo Ozuna and Juan Uribe). Podsednik led the majors in times caught stealing, and it wasn't close. He was thrown out 23 times, laughing in the faces of his nearest competitors with 17.

Using a nifty little sabermetric tool called the Run Expectancy Matrix, one can actually calculate the risk-reward ratio associated with an attempted steal. If you want to see the actual matrix, Google will do the trick, but if not, it's easy to explain. Basically, every situation you can come across in an inning (number of outs, locations of baserunners), there is an average number of runs a team can expect to score. Using this data, you can determine just how useful a stolen base is.

Now, a new matrix gets published every year, so the numbers fluctuate, but generally, if a runner can steal bases at a rate of about 75% success, then he is an effective base stealer. If he's above 75, he is causing his team to score more runs; if he is below, he's causing them to score fewer.

Which leads us to an astonishing truth: Scott Podsednik, by stealing 71.9% of the bases he attempts to steal, is not only not the game's best basestealer, he is a BAD one. He is actually hurting his team with his baserunning. I kid you not.

(If you're looking for the real best basestealer in baseball, I'd recommend sticking close to home. Your buddy Jose Reyes ain't bad.)

So his "speed" is a detriment, and his offense is fairly mediocre to boot. He barely brought his OPS up to .700 this season, but he's still well below the league average of .750. He hit zero home runs this season (fewer than Jason Schmidt, Mike Hampton, and Jeff Suppan, just to name a few), and his slugging percentage was lower than his on-base. That means he was better at walking than at hitting anything other than a single (and he wasn't even that good at walking either). We may very well be talking about the least powerful hitter in baseball.

Podsednik's defense was good, but by no means outstanding. I'm sure there were several better AL left fielders this season -- Coco Crisp and Carl Crawford are two names that come to mind. All in all, you're looking at a mediocre baseball player who ends up being incredibly overhyped as a result of being misused by his manager. Someday, Ozzie will realize that it's Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye who carry his offense, and not Podsednik.

"Lee isn't in the top FIFTY in OPS either. For someone whose only worth is to be a slugger that is pretty bad. I won't even talk about how much better Podsednik's defense is. Sorry to say, but it seems like you are just being a typical superficial analyst and focusing on the gaudy HR and RBI stats and not looking at more specifics. Right now, I am going to go look up win shares and see how Lee compares."

I don't know why you insist on bringing OPS or Win Shares into this argument. Podsednik's OPS was a miserable .700, whereas Lee topped the .800 mark for the fourth year in a row, finishing this season at .811. I don't care how Lee compares to the rest of baseball; we're talking about trading him for Scott Podsednik, and Podsednik's a sub-par hitter.

I couldn't possibly care less about RBI totals (and you're lucky, because if I did, I'd be going crazy over Scotty's astounding total of 25). But my focus on home runs has nothing to do with superficiality. Statisticians like Bill James, when they try to calculate figures like Win Shares, try to quantify the value of each individual contribution to an offense, and the home run is generally considered four to five times more powerful than the stolen base. The fact of the matter is, when a player goes an entire regular season without hitting a home run, he's pathetic.

And if you really must look at Win Shares, then I suppose you could go ahead and compare Podsednik's total of 12 to Lee's 24. I don't think that'll help your argument.

" There are 9 outfielders (yessss Floyd) in the NL alone with more win shares than Lee, including Brady Clark, his teammate."

Wonderful. Again, it's irrelevant; of those nine, none of them have been traded for Carlos Lee. And if you're interested, you could browse the list of AL leaders in win shares. If you have the attention span to keep scrolling down, you might eventually find Pods in a tie for 103rd. But hey... among just outfielders, that tie is for an impressive 29th place.

I've heard every argument in the book about how Scott Podsednik wins games in Chicago in ways that the sabermetricians can't measure. But if you ask me, they're all bullshit. The fact of the matter is, the White Sox won in 2005 thanks to their pitching. Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia, Jose Contreras, and Brandon McCarthy were ridiculous this season. The credit doesn't go to the offense. In fact, the team finished ninth in the American League in runs scored. (In 2004, when their left fielder was some guy named Lee, they were third, behind only the Red Sox and Yankees.)

I apologize for going so far overboard just to respond to one silly little Blogger comment. But I just couldn't help myself. If there's one thing I know far too well for my own good, it's baseball; I might as well show off every now and then.

Come to think of it, I kinda like this style of blogging. Having an actual topic, and going into it with a bit of depth, seems a lot more interesting to me than simply wandering aimlessly through a pile of topics that all somehow connect to my life in some random way.

Perhaps there will be more of these to come in the near future. I haven't decided on anything for sure yet, but if I do decide to keep writing entries like this, here are a few potential topics:

-Why I absolutely despise Jerry Kilgore
-Why my opinion of Tim Kaine isn't exactly phenomenal either, although he's still the lesser of two evils
-Why I think there's a glimmer of hope for the Celtics this season
-Why I think there's nothing of the sort for the Red Sox in 2006, however
-Why I am absolutely sick of the fixation that college students (and applicants) have on the Ivy League

In addition to these, I have a few ideas for book/movie/music reviews in mind. Feel free to sound off on what you'd like to see next. I'd love to have some input from the people who actually read this blog, because I don't want to bore you all. (Offend you, occasionally... but bore you? Never.)

Random rumblings about the world

I know I said I was aiming for weekly posts, and I know I came up a little bit short. But eight days isn't bad, and I was waiting for something to bring my mood up, because I don't write well when I'm pissed off, and certain resignations of certain Red Sox high-level officers ruined the first half of my week. So anyway, this is the best I can do.

Anyway, the Red Sox will be lucky to finish over .500 next season. Theo will really, really, really be missed, and his assistant Josh Byrnes, who's in Arizona now, will be too. We need someone in our front office to be working on re-signing Damon right now, and on top of that, Manny might actually be serious about a trade this time, and that might need to be looked into by a real GM, which we don't have. The only thing our Theo-less organization has done so far is re-sign Mike Timlin, who will be in his forties by Opening Day. We're looking at a team with pretty much average pitching, and if things don't fall into place this offseason, it's not a lot more than a Papi-centric offense (featuring a record-setting number of intentional walks).

So the reason I'm in a good mood (really, I swear, I am) is that there is at least one team in Boston that can win, and that is the 1-0 Celtics. Paul Pierce just led the Celtics-Knicks game in not only points with 30 (that one was expected), but rebounds with 12 -- even Eddy Curry only had eight. This guy is the real deal; he can really carry this team. I'm also really excited about Delonte West, who had nine assists and turned the ball over just once. He's playing really well for a second-year point guard.

In other news, I'm 19 now. It doesn't feel that different from being 18, to tell the truth, but birthdays are always nice. I was thrilled to receive a bounty of new books as birthday presents (I know... I read now... it's scary). It'll probably take me until I'm 20 to finish them all, but I'm already hard at work on Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, and it's really interesting stuff. Not always easy to get on board with, but extremely thought-provoking. I'd recommend it to anyone with an open mind.

The best birthday present of all was probably one that wasn't a material thing, and it came from a guy I've never even met. Yes, you guessed it... I'm referring to the one and only Scott Rasmussen. The latest poll on the Kaine-Kilgore race is showing Tim Kaine with his first lead. With only six days left (actually, the clock's striking midnight as I write this sentence, so make it five), I'm hoping he can hold on. I'm becoming more and more disgusted by Jerry Kilgore every day; if he wins, I may end up losing all hope for humanity.

Speaking of politics, I'm planning on signing up for another polisci course next semester. After a conference with my advisor, my latest list of courses is looking like comparative politics, astronomy, US history, macroeconomics, and intermediate journalism. This list is probably subject to a dozen more tweakings before the 16th, when everything gets finalized, but that's the latest update.

I'm in between projects right now with the Daily... now that baseball season's over and done with, there's not a lot for me to do. I'm being promised that there's other stuff waiting for me, but for now, I have a week off. I've moved on to basketball with my Observer sportswriting, but my first article isn't online yet. I'll try to update things here when it goes up ("it" refers to an Eastern Conference preview).

As for everyone who laughed in my face after all my baseball predictions backfired, I apologize for being such a moron, and I promise it'll never happen again. But in my defense, I wasn't at all alone. Peter Gammons and Rob Neyer both wrote pieces on ESPN.com predicting an Astros win. I suppose even geniuses like Peter, Rob, and I are human. Sometimes decently above-average teams like the White Sox can get lucky and win.

I could stop whining about this whole World Series issue now, but we all know that isn't my style. So, without further ado... the Top 5 White Sox Who Don't Deserve Championship Rings.

5. AJ Pierzynski. He's a dirty, dirty cheater. Anyone who tries to steal first base, and gets away with it, is subhuman scum. Plus he's a horrible hitter. His on-base percentage was a whopping .308, and he grounded into 27 double plays (a White Sox all-time record).

4. Scott Podsednik. Probably the most overrated player in baseball. Honestly. I could steal 59 bases if you gave me 82 tries. Plus, it doesn't take a master baseball statistician to see that a player with higher on-base than slugging, and zero home runs, has absolutely no batting power whatsoever.

3. Carl Everett. As clubhouse cancers go, this guy is pretty much as bad as it gets. He's a good baseball player I suppose, but I just can't stand the man.

2. Ozzie Guillen. "Smartball," "Ozzieball," "Smallball," whatever you call it, it's garbage. He tries way too many steals, sacrifices, and bunts when he shouldn't, and he can't manage a pitching staff.

1. Kenny Williams. Not everyone has heard of him because he's a front-office guy. But the White Sox GM has gotten tons of credit for being the mastermind behind the championship season, when really, Williams didn't do anything all that special. Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland and Paul Konerko were the real heroes of that team, and they were already in place when Williams got there. All Kenny did was acquire... well, all of the other four guys on this list. Carlos Lee for Podsednik? How does that man have a job?

Plus, here's an excerpt from a Tom Verducci article this October...

"By the way, McCarthy very nearly wound up in the Boston rotation this season. When the Red Sox agreed to trade Nomar Garciaparra to the White Sox for Magglio Ordonez after the 2003 season -- contingent on getting a deal done with Texas for Alex Rodriguez -- Boston asked for two low-level minor leaguers. One of them was McCarthy, a former 17th-round pick who had 125 strikeouts and 15 walks in rookie ball. The Red Sox didn't know much about him but were impressed by those stats. The White Sox easily agreed to put him in the deal."

According to one of Theo's assistants, that isn't the whole story. Not only did Kenny agree to deal his franchise player and a future All-Star in exchange for an injury-prone shortstop in the twilight of his career, but his response wasn't just that he "easily agreed." His actual response was "McCarthy... who's that?"

I kid you not.

With all that out of the way, now I can promise to stop complaining about baseball... after all, October's over and it's time to move on. Now that November's here I can focus on other things, I suppose.

Like college applications! Only twelve more days before Tufts's ED deadline! There's still plenty of time for every high school senior reading this to have a last-minute change of heart and apply here early. I promise, you won't regret it. No? Okay, well, I tried.

There's also Election Day, and I suppose there's not much left for me to do there but cross my fingers and hope for the best. I hope everyone down there in Virginia is doing what they can to avert the potential electoral disaster on the way.

Plus there's tons of schoolwork. With the semester nearing two-thirds of the way over, my psych class (which has three tests) and my polisci class (three papers) all have milestone assignments coming next week. And then there's an entire novel to read for English in a week, and a research paper on the way in baseball analysis, a class which is turning out to be a lot harder than I thought.

That reminds me. I shouldn't be writing this now. I have a psych book to bury my face in for a few hours (shoot me now, please).

So... I suppose the long, drawn-out entry makes up for the eight-day wait. So if you've been complaining about the infrequent updates here, I hope you'll accept my apology. If you've been inspired by my writings and decided to revive a blogging career of your own, I extend to you my congratulations. And if you don't really care about this thing except it gives you a chance to make fun of my horrible baseball predictions... well, then... I should book the next flight down to Austin to stab you in the face. Until then, signing off.