I have no dog in this fight (The beginning of my search for a new favorite team)

I love me some baseball

It was definitely my first love when it came to sports. It was the first game I learned to play, and more importantly it was the first -and really, only- game I was ever really good at. I set the Hunter Elementary 6th Grade Softball Tournament record with 15 home runs, in eight games! At twelve years old I was the best player in the neighborhood. Unfortunately I hit my peak at fourteen, after which I decided it was more fun to be a shithead than a ballplayer and spent the next two years being grounded for one reason or another, and thus not being allowed to keep playing little league. By the time I stopped antagonizing my parents at 15 and tried out for my high school team the pitchers went from throwing 60 mph to the mid-70's, and the pitches moved in ways I'd never seen before. I went from hitting line drives in the gap to foul tips in the catchers mitt, and that spelled the end of my baseball career.

So while I wasn't destined to play the game, I still love watching it and keeping up with the goings-on, but growing up in Utah meant I didn't have the luxury of a natural home-town team. Salt Lake City is 500+ miles from Denver, and slightly further from Phoenix and any of the California teams. My first favorite player was Mike Piazza, mostly because he was a bad ass and played my favorite position, catcher (because they get to wear all that cool gear) and he could hit the ball a freakin' mile, so at first I gravitated toward liking the Dodgers. It helped that the guy my mom married around that same time grew up in L.A., but that all came apart the first time I actually went to the "City of Angels" I cried for half the flight as the change in air pressure made my head feel like it was going to explode, and my experience got only slightly better once we finally landed. The first thing I remember seeing was all the smog, it was a concrete jungle, and the people were assholes and drove like it, too. Disney Land was crowded as hell and then there was all that smog. I fell out of like with that city in less than a week, I've been back a handful of times since and my opinion of the place hasn't changed. Oh yeah, then the Dodgers shipped Piazza to the Marlins (who then slung him over to the Mets a week later). After that I've regarded the boys in blue with mere ambivalence.

After that I kind of floated around, we had a AAA team in Salt Lake, the Buzz were an affiliate of the Twins at the time, who had an awesome farm system which allowed me to watch players such as LaTroy Hawkins, Todd Walker, A.J. Pierzinski and David Ortiz before they moved up to the bigs. Then later when the Angels became the affiliate I got to see the likes of David Eckstein, Chone Figgins and John Lackey suit 'em up. Still though, I never felt much for the Twins or Halos, they were too far away, and never showed up on TV.

Speaking of TV, I watched more than my share of Cubs and Braves games on WGN and TBS, respectively. I developed something of an affinity for the Cubbies, Wrigley Field is an awesome venue, and they played games in the daytime, and Mark Grace was an awesome defensive first-baseman (which is what I was playing in little league at the time) but I never made the leap to claim them as my team. As for the Braves, their fate was sealed during my time as a Dodgers fan, when the two teams faced off (one of the few times I got to watch the Dodgers on tv since TBS was really good at covering almost every Braves game back then) the Braves always beat the crap out of the Dodgers, I appreciated the all-around talent of Chipper Jones, but their embarrassment of my favorite club left a sour taste that never really went away, even after the Dodgers fell out of favor.

Finally around 1999 my team found me. The Red Sox grew on me. They had a goofy-looking ballpark, an ambiguous nickname, a knuckleball pitcher (Tim Wakefield, the Dodgers had Tom Candiotti back in the day) and eventually they had player that I'd actually seen play live (David Ortiz). I also really liked to watch Carl Everett play, it's kind of embarassing to admit, but this is before I understood how much of a douche he was/is.

Anyhow, the Sox and I had a great run. In High School one of my best friends was also a Soxman, and in 2004 we went batshit crazy when they came back from three games down against the Stankees to win the series in seven then swept the Cardinals in the World Series, it was a great time.

As the next few years passed by I stuck with the team, but I started to waver a bit. The Boston front office started trading away all of their prospects and handing out gargantuan contracts much the same way their nemeses in New York did, it's hard to call the team in the Bronx the "Evil Empire" for topping $200 million a year in player salaries when you're own club is close behind at around $175 millionish. The free-spending and lack of homegrown talent never sat very well with me, but it didn't push me off completely.

My Red Sox fanhood has slowly unraveled since moving to the East Coast in 2006 for a few reasons in addition to what I've already mentioned. I came to realize more and more the meaning of the term "Masshole" the Sox fan base, instead of loathing in self pity was now filled with feelings of entitlement, and I honestly believe they'd eat their own young for another World Series win, and the routine booing of their own players never sat well. The tipping point came when news surfaced that David Ortiz, next to Kevin Youkilis my favorite player, and one of the main reasons I became a Sox fan to begin with, had been using performance enhancers in 2003. I'm not one to put athletes on a moral pedestal of any kind, but this caused me to lose all respect for him as a ballplayer, Big Papi was a cheater, and in hindsight that was when I decided I was finished with the Sox.

Another thing happened in my personal life that completely removed me from the Red Sox nation. I spent the summers of 2008 and '09 working at a summer camp with little access to the outside world. This baseball sabbatical has wiped the slate clean in my mind, I didn't move away from the Sox, rather they moved away from me, so it's time to move on.

So here I am, a baseball lover without a favorite team, I don't like living in this limbo, but I don't want to jump from bandwagon to bandwagon either. My plan is to use this blog to systematically explore the merits of every team in the league, and hopefully by the end I'll be able to adopt a new franchise as my favorite. At this point I only have a rough idea of what my criteria will be, but I'll figure it out in the next little while and try and get it in place before I go through the search team by team. It should be fun.

The Downfall of the Democratic Party (written in 2005)

Yet another blast from the past in the form of an old newspaper column I wrote for the Jan. 7, 2005 edition of the Snowdrift. In it I make a mention of Barack and Joe B as being a direction the Dems need to move toward, not avoid. I'm not saying I predicted the future, but I guess even a blind nut finds a squirrel every once in a while, also, it's interesting to see how much it still applies to the BS we're dealing with today.

The Downfall of the Democratic Party

The political climate was primed for change. A faltering economy along with an extended (Which nowadays means unsuccessful) war effort overseas had left President George W. Bush vulnerable to a lot of criticism. He also isn’t the most eloquent public speaker and couldn’t debate his way out of a paper bag. John Kerry had the election within his grasp, then he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

What’s been going on with those Democrats lately anyway? Of course they’ve lost the last two presidential elections with two less than inspiring candidates in Al Gore and “Ketchupman” Kerry, but what about all of the Congressional seats they’ve been losing –With November’s election the Republican Party picked up sixteen Congressional seats to increase their majority to forty— The liberal wing of our political system has been hemorrhaging for years, and there’s plenty of blame to go around.

The biggest problem with the Democratic Party is shoddy organization. In other words they’re like your 16-month-old nephew, no control of when they make a mess of themselves. Would you ever see a member of the Republican Party get on stage at the Democratic National Convention and bash his party’s presidential candidate? Not unless he wanted to endure a few rounds of Chinese nipple torture he wouldn’t.

Okay, so he’d really only lose all of his reelection campaign contributions along with any powers he may have had in the backroom committee meetings (a.k.a. “smoke-filled room shady dealings”) until he would ultimately be replaced come election time, but you get my point. But what happens when Senator Zell Miller (D-GA) jumps on stage at the GOP Convention and bashes Kerry? Nothing, unless you call punishment scratching “Zell Eats Poo” on his office desk with a penknife.

Democrats also have a tendency to try to be too much like Republicans. When Republicans lose to Democrats, do they turn around and say, "Gee we need to be more like them in order to win"? Never. But that's what Democrats do when they lose to Republicans. What does that do? It softens support among the base, it seems phony to moderates, and conservatives are going to vote real-deal Republican, not Republican Lite.

Since when was “liberal” a dirty word? There are great aspects of liberalism, just like there are great aspects of conservatism, yet John Kerry spent his entire campaign hiding from his liberal label and the party as a whole did their best to hide from their more liberal members in Howard Dean and Sen. Joe Biden (D-CT) instead of standing up for themselves and describing what the whole vision of liberalism is about a la Barack Obama (D-IL) ““If there are people in this country that are going to bed hungry and sick and sleeping in the streets, my duty as an American citizen has not been fulfilled.”

If the liberals would wake up from their fantasyland they would see a great opportunity lying before them. There is currently no party that truly, completely and unapologetically represents the interests of working-class Americans who are finding their jobs vanishing, their benefits shrinking, their towns falling on hard times, and their economic interests being ignored. That’s the party of the Old Left, that party is now dead.

Democrats need to return to their roots if they want to win. They have to find their spine. They have to rediscover their purpose and their vision. Because if liberalism is such a bad thing, why should anyone vote Democrat?

Losing as a character-building activity

Here's another classic from my newswriting career. The following is a column I wrote for the sports section published in April of 2005. Enjoy.

A long time ago somebody said “You can’t win until you first know how to lose.” Whoever came up with this saying was kidding himself and he ought to be kicked in the shin for his efforts.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on losing I did attend a high school that boasted a .317 winning percentage (in all sports combined) so I have a feeling that I know what I’m talking about. We certainly knew how to lose, but winning never seemed to come as easily. This years Snow College football team won as many games this season (7) as my high school team won in four years.

But you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s easy to have a lot of school spirit when your team wins more games than it loses. It takes a much tougher fan to pull for the side that is losing seven out of every ten games. You need a thick skin and a big heart to endure an entire season in that sort of grueling atmosphere.

When you are rooting for an unsuccessful program you learn to enjoy humble pie by the slice. The losses come in droves and before long losing becomes easier to bear because you no longer fear it, you have done it plenty of times before, and when that one big win comes around you thrive off of it for months.

During my senior year our school’s football team finally managed to win our homecoming game for the first time in the history of the school against arguably our biggest rival that we had never beaten.

And although we lost a lot more games than we won throughout the rest of the school year all anybody ever talked about until the day of graduation was how we miraculously beat Bingham that Friday night in September.

Losing also brings the school community together. Everybody is fighting the good fight together. There is no “jock” clique because who wants to be in a clique that can’t win? Other, more successful school programs also get more attention, I still remember the first time I caught myself bragging to some kids from a rival school, “Your wrestlers may be good, but our Madrigals would rock your world any day of the week.”

Now all 3,000 or so of us have come together in this salad bowl of experiences that is Snow College, all of us bringing our own special ingredients to the table where we get to cheer for a winning athletic program.

Those of us that came from winning high schools will teach the rest of us how to win, and the rest of us from the less than successful programs will teach the winners how to live up the wins and live down the losses.

Mormon Missionary punches assailant... who knew!?!

This here is a feature article I wrote about a roommate I had in college back in March of 2005. Lots of missionaries have interesting stories about their time in the field, but this is one of the more... unique tales I've ever heard. Matt is a great guy and allowed me to interview him for this article, hopefully he doesn't mind me reproducing this piece now that he's all growed up and has the whole 'wife-and-kids' thing going on, people may not want them knowing how bad-ass he was back in the day.

Matthew H. considered himself lucky. He had only a few weeks to go on his LDS Church mission in Midwestern Brazil and except for a few close calls he had never been robbed even though almost every single one of his companions had at least one story about being assaulted. His luck ran out in September 2004.

He and his companion were leaving from an investigators* home at about 10 p.m. and were walking through a very dangerous neighborhood. “We were basically putting the importance of teaching somebody over our safety. We had actually been told that we shouldn’t walk around there at night but we really didn’t have a choice because we had an appointment to keep. And we figured that we were missionaries and the Lord would protect us”

As they walked they decided to take the long way home because it was the better lit of the two paths. To pass the time they discussed a scripture from the Doctrine & Covenants and were reciting it when Matt looked to the end of the road at the only dark spot on the entire path that was between two buildings.

“I could see two silhouettes of people in the darkness, but I couldn’t tell what they were doing because we were too far away for me to tell for sure. So I didn’t think anything of it and we kept walking.”

As they got closer to the men they could see that one was on a bike and the two men appeared to be having a conversation on the side of the road. “It made me kind of nervous because normal people don’t just hang out in a dark alleyway,” said Matt, “but we continued anyway.”

Then as the two missionaries got even closer one of the men approached him. “He asked for a little bit of money, I thought he was a beggar or something.” But the man wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer.

“He reached out for me but I hit his hand and backed away before he could grab my tie. So he reached over and grabbed my companion by his tie and started yelling to the other man ‘Pega o alto!’ which is Portuguese for ‘Get the tall one,’ (Matt stands 6’4”) my companion wasn’t really sure what was going on. He grew up in a ritzy California neighborhood and had only been in the mission field for three weeks and didn’t speak Portuguese very well so when I was yelling ‘Sai dai! Solta ele! (Get away from there! Let go of him!) He didn’t understand what was going on and had no idea he was being mugged.

“As a missionary we’re taught to not really react to people like that. You’re told you should just give them your money or whatever they want. So I tried to see if he had a knife and I couldn’t see anything in his hand.”

And then Matt did something the robber was not expecting. He went after him.
“Strangely the first thing that came to my mind was ‘punch him.’ He was still yelling for his partner but the other man just sat on his bike like maybe he didn’t want to rob us or something, so I knew it would be two against one so I walked after him and raised my fist, when the robber saw what I was doing he looked at me like I was crazy and said ‘O que esta fazendo?’ (what are you doing?). Apparently he didn’t think missionaries could hit anybody.”

As Matt went after the man, the robber, now scared and still holding on to his companion’s tie, started maneuvering around trying to get away and keep Matt’s companion in front of him so that the missionary couldn’t get a good shot at him, Matt swung anyway.

“My knuckle caught the side of his face and it was just enough to make him stumble backward and let go of the tie and my companion and I took the opportunity and sprinted away.”

The two muggers didn’t take chase and Matt and his companion made it home without further incident. “I didn’t tell anybody, especially my mom, until I got back.”
Despite the frightening ordeal Matt says he learned a valuable lesson from what he calls his own stupidity, “The experience taught me a lot, I learned that you don’t pray for protection and then go and put yourself in a dangerous situation.”


*an investigator is a prospective LDS convert for those of you not privy to the Mormon jargon :)

Poem I wrote in high school, it doesn't suck too bad

I try and save everything I write, and I mean everything. Up until I moved to North Carolina I still had notes I'd exchanged with friends in middle school. Tonight I was looking for something and turned up this old gem I wrote when I was 16.

Egads (no idea why I used this for a title)

We heard a shriek,
and dashed through the field
giggling inanely.
The grassed masks our nakedness,
you shout over your shoulder,
"You are a sea turtle,
now I will show you real power!"

My grandma hearkens again
cat thrown over her shoulder
It's one of those weird-looking ones
with the nine tails in all.
You duck behind a tree stump
but I keep running.
Her cat wont bite me today
because I am the sea turtle,
and I know real power.

I stumble and fall to the rocks.
One of those little bastards
imbedded itself in my heel.
I pry it from my foot
but the old woman has me.
She drags me home
by the scruff of my neck
and gives me a bath
The last one I'll take, I promise myself
Tomorrow I will escape again.

jason Kubota
3/10/02

I wrote this for my creative writing class, I think we were given some random sentence fragments and the assignment was to work it into a poem, that's my guess at least.

Kicking up some dust

Yeah, so... I've kind of neglected this here blog like an unwanted red-headed stepchild.

My bad. I originally planned to update the blog all summer with all the fun stuff going on at camp, but things changed. The internet hardly worked, and overall I was just too damned busy. Plus at some point I wasn't too happy with the performance/actions of some of my employees at camp (anybody who's ever worked at a camp knows what drama can go on) and I didn't feel venting my frustrations online where it can be found by anyone was the best route to travel. Looking back, it was an experience that taught me lessons I never would have learned, and a lot of those lessons weren't enjoyable, but I'm much better off for it, and I reap the rewards of that experience every day. My self-critical nature makes my mistakes more memorable, but I try to remind myself that it's about the kids, and in that respect I think I did a damn good job, even though by the time the summer was over I wanted my exit interview to go something like this

I kid of course, I met a lot of amazing people last summer, and I wouldn't trade any of it for the world.

So like I was saying, it's been over a year since my last post, I don't feel like I have enough interesting things to say to keep this ship cruising every day, but I'm going to start off by sharing some of the stuff I wrote when I was much younger and idealistic, including news articles and even some (gasp) poetry I wrote when I actually liked to write the stuff (i.e. before I realized how bad I was at it) it'll be an interesting little experiment, we'll see how it goes.

What I learned this semester

After spending two years away from the world of academia I made my much anticipated return to college life at a new University in a new state. It's been an interesting semester, so in order to celebrate it's ending (finally), I'm going to jot down a few things I learned since August.

• I don't miss Utah's embarrassingly ridiculous liquor laws

• You can try to take the South out of the University, but you can't take the University out of the South

• Refereeing a flag football game is more difficult than most people would think

• Frat games are definitely the worst to officiate.

• Cutco knives are very sharp. I almost lost the tip of a finger to one

• Kneffel is filling
  

• Deep-fried pecan pie is delicious.

• A deep-fried Snickers bar isn't worth the money.

• Clark Dining Hall is the red-headed stepchild of the NCSU dining halls.

• The NCSU Volleyball team would cut off their nose to spite their face.
  

• Wood Hall is the red-headed stepchild of the NCSU Residence Halls. On the edge of campus, no convenient bus routes to North Campus, basically an afterthought.

• Getting drunk at 10 a.m. isn't as much fun as it sounds
  

Misadventures in American Sign Language

I was looking through my ASL dictionary today and it got me thinking about some of my early experiences in trying to communicate via ASL. I took an ASL I class when I was a junior in high school (way back in 2002-2003) but my first experience using the language as the only mode of communication with somebody wasn't until the summer of 2008, more than five years later.

I had just started working at Camp Sertoma, and it turned out that eight or nine of the people I was working with were deaf, and after a few days of staff training I was really eager to be able to communicate with these people and get to know them. One day I was talking with the Desiree (who is deaf) and Maggie (who is a CODA, or a Child of a Deaf Adult, so essentially she's bilingual) and Maggie was forcing me to try and sign the conversation myself. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but CODA's are often treated as built-in translators and they aren't always in love with that fact.

Anyway, I was getting to know Desi when I tried to sign "I had ASL class five years ago" but instead I signed, literally "I had ASL class five fuck ago" Desiree immediately started laughing, and Maggie said "Dude, you just said five fuck ago." Needless to say I was embarassed.

Another good story happened several weeks later. I had been teaching an astronomy class, and I was heading back to the main building on camp for my hour off. On my way I crossed paths with my group of campers and my partner, Juju. I tried to sign to him "my hour off" but I was carrying something, and my signing was unclear. Juju saw what I signed and his eyes got all big, turns out he thought I had said to "fuck off." But fortunately Juju and I got along great as partners and he probably knew that I would never knowingly tell him off like that, so I corrected myself and no feelings were hurt.

I'm not sure why it is that a lot of my experiences with messing up my signing involve me signing the word "fuck." Maybe I just have a crude mind like that.

Plastic Wallets

Earlier this summer I finally broke down and bought my first new wallet in like... three years. It's not that my old wallet was all that great, by the time I finally got rid of it looked like it had been rode hard and put away wet. Most of the sleeves and little pouch things were torn and stuff was falling out of it all the time. I finally made up my mind to get a new one when I lost my credit card at the movie theatre :O , the Apex PD ended up visiting my parents, scaring the crap out of them thinking I'd been busted for doing something stupid, but really they had just gotten the billing address for the card (how?) and were trying to locate me. I was watching a movie at the time, my parents called me, and everything ended just fine. Many thanks to the boys in blue in A-Town.

Anyhow, I bought a new wallet the next day. I decided to do something different. Instead of my old standby, the leather bi-fold (I'm not a fan of that tri-fold crap) and went with a Mossimo pleather bi-fold. It has a trendy green stripe on one side and little breathing-holes similar to what you find on the tops of tennis shoes. Plus it was only like $12.

Turns out that was a big mistake. The pleather isn't exactly conducive to heat, and between my hot ass and the 100 degree, 70% humidity of the NC Piedmont region, it doesn't have anywhere to hide. It gets warm and sticks much the same way your ass sticks to a leather seat on a hot summer day. Opening the damn things sounds like a crunching potato chip and prying a credit card or the occasional dolla bill is a feat of engineering.

I hate my wallet, but the saddest part has to do with me being a tightwad now that I'm temporarily unemployed. I can't justify the dough to purchase a new wallet to store my dough. Is it me, or does it seem odd to spend money on something to store your money in?

I'm going to bed.

Seeing things as I am

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

-Anais Nin

Yeah yeah, that's me trying to be deep.

So I can't sleep a wink. I watched some MSNBC Documentaries and then a little bit of Meet the Press, which is usually good for a snore, but then I started reading. Usually a half hour of reading can knock me right out, but lately it just gets me all riled up and restless.

Anyhow, the book I'm reading is called Dog Days and it's authored by Ana Marie Cox. The story is somewhat entertaining, and it's an easy read, and I've just realized that this has absolutely nothing to do with what I want this to be about, onward.

After reading a bit I got this crazy idea to dig up my old journals from my gradeschool years and take a gander. Now I'm further from being asleep now than I was before the Sunday Night Football game.

The first one I cracked open had the date 11-29-99 scrawled at the top. Dude! Seven years ago! I was 13! I read the first paragraph and was struck by a lead pipe of irony.

"I was looking for a book today, and I found one of my old journals. It was from when I was in the 6th grade! And I read it and found out that I was a really corny guy back then. So I decided to start a new one."

I can't help but laugh at that passage, because if I were starting a new journal today I'd probably write that same passage over again. The more things change (CLICHE WARNING! Unless you have a strong stomach I would urge you to skip to the next paragraph) the more they stay the same.

But I'm not going to start a new journal. For one writing by hand is just too slow for me to handle anymore. Also, this has sort of become my journal, but hopefully this is a tad more readable.

So anyway, I've been reading through the entry's, and the first thing I realize is that I wasn't as mature back then as I thought I was. Also, for as smart as I was I could be awful dense, like the time when I was trying to get ahold of a girl and nobody was answering the phone, so I dialed *67 to block my number on the caller ID and called her again and that time she magically answered, I made the astute observation: "she sounded like she didn't want to talk to me." If I could go back in time I'd bop my younger self on the nose. Come to think of it, that'd make a fascinating plot for a teenpop sci-fi novel, but I digress.

Around wintertime of '99 and early '00 I was really good at keeping my journal up to date, with entry's almost every day. At the same time I was having a rather tumoltuous relationship with a girl that had just moved to town from Kentucky. She had severe baggage; I was overbearing and needy, it was a perfect fit. Reading over this again after all these years is actually quite entertaining. I went from being the kid that would write "boobies! yay!" to "the world hates me, I cannot go on!" to "I love her so much, I could never be without her" and back again. Through all the drama and teenage excess I can kind of watch myself grow up through it all, which is probably the most interesting part to me.

Anyhow, I'm thinking about transcribing some of the journal entry's and posting them chronologically so that both of my loyal readers can enjoy the tales of middle school adolescent drama seen through the eyes of a slightly bored and severely convused 14-year-old. We'll see what happens.

JK