i've reached a blogging milestone! 100 posts! if i wrote one post a year that would be a century of posts! if you paid me a penny per post, well sir/ma'am, i'd have a dollar. thanks for reading guys.
i wanted to be suzyn waldman.
that's not true. i wanted to replace suzyn waldman. i still want to replace her, just not necessarily with me anymore.
i've loved baseball for as long as i can remember. with the Mets opening their AA facility in my hometown in 1992, i quickly took a liking to the Yankees. but i took an even greater liking to clearing the dinner table ten minutes before a game and making it there by first pitch on my dad's arm. when other girls in sixth grade cliques were drooling over Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic and practicing the "Bye, Bye, Bye" dance in the Saint James Middle School parking lot during recess, i was content as an awkward outsider with less popular friends, plastering my binders with photos of diving stops by Tino Martinez and salivating over David Cone's ability to make Major League hitters look like they were swinging at wiffleballs instead of cowhide.
i remember my responsible parents sending me to bed when the Yankees would play on the West coast. games typically had a 10:05 p.m. first pitch and were often on school nights at the beginning and end of the the 162 game (plus if you are lucky) journey. my arguments were quickly dismissed in summer, too, because apparently it's unreasonable for a 10-year-old girl to stay up past 1 a.m. for a regular season baseball game. it's where my mom and dad practiced their parental inflection in the phrase "asked and answered, Kate Elizabeth." you're welcome for the opportunity, parents. so i'd wait until i heard the pitter patter of my parents footsteps fleeting down our creaky stairs. i'd then turn the dial of my radio alarm clock (before we had cell phones with alarms, or cell phones at all) to "The Team: 1430 AM." my heart would race with anticipation of whether we would face Hudson, Mulder, or Zito, the "big three" of the Oakland A's rotation, or which Seattle Mariner Graeme Llyod would unnecessarily run in from the bullpen to fight.(yes, by the way, i use the collective "we" when referring to "my" sports teams...my dad has asked me on multiple occasions when i signed a contract). my jitters were quickly soothed by Michael Kay's description of the Yankees "midnight blue caps" or the melodic lull of John Sterling's voice, no matter how bombastic his phrasing.
it was then i decided i wanted to be a sports announcer. i craved the radio waves that buzzed with intimacy. and i really liked drowning out Buck and McCarver's t.v. announcing with the radio broadcast, too. that's still true.
but Michael Kay and John Sterling were there for me even when my middle school friends were cruel, or when the guy i had a crush on liked someone else, or when it wasn't cool for my sister to hang out with me anymore, or when those mindbogglingly painful and complicated life events hit you and you need an escape. that's still true, too.
i crafted Michael Kay a letter of admiration, telling him i want to be in the booth someday, too. i didn't expect a response; my sentiments were not unique. thousands of wide-eyed baseball enthusiasts would vie for Michael Kay's spot. but he responded with a letter three times as long and exponentially more meaningful to a preteen dreamer. i even quoted him in my Grandfather's eulogy, a much more weighted experience than any baseball game i could ever call.
this was all i ever wanted. and it all changed.
i went to college and i fell in love. with music. i've always loved music, but for the first time i delved far beyond the hits of the radio. i discovered Ari Hest and Bryan Fenkart and Anna Nalick and Charlotte Martin and even rediscovered radio artists for their worth rather than their hits, like John Mayer far beyond "Your Body is a Wonderland" and Ben Folds light years past "Brick." for the first time, i cheated on baseball, though i had my musical theater flirtations in the past. suddenly everything i had wanted wasn't what i wanted anymore. at 18 i entered a charming Seton Hall campus wanting to announce baseball. at 21, i left my South Orange apartment hoping to satisfy my hunger for Public Relations better than the Seton Hall cafeteria had fed me years before. as John Sterling always says (and says and says) "you can't predict baseball." also you can't predict life, or even ourselves. and we're us!
i remember when i decided to make the jump from "everything i once wanted" to "what i want now." my internal friction as a girl on the fringe of her twenty-somethings was upsettingly cliche. i was abandoning my most genuine desire for an unknown variable, which is kind how us twenty-somethings define our lives. i have many sources that can tell you i was never good at finding "x," and they'd be right. how do you resolve that what you've always wanted isn't what you want anymore? i thought maybe i was just running away from what i want because it was on the edge of becoming very real. i didn't know if my change was driven by this fear, or if i feared the change itself. everyone had said announcing was a remarkable fit for me. the jump to PR was by no means a giant leap, but it seems like a far stride when you weren't planning any steps in the first place. then it occurred to me that what i always wanted remains, it just has a different face than i intended. i didn't know that i wanted this, but it's DNA was floating around with a different form.
determining whether i was changing what i want because i was scared of how real it was becoming or whether i was taking a risk to go after what i never knew i wanted was a mountainous task because both peaks are familiar. both routes are very human. if we outgrow the verbatim interpretation of what we laid out, it is easy to pack up shop and say you were never the shop-type entrepreneur in the first place. we replace it with something that "feels kind of good" and leaves us "content," or at least half full. usually when we refer to something as half full, we view that as optimistic. but when we are pouring out a glass that was once bubbling and overflowing, we are probably running away from this delicious beverage, and quite possibly contemplating this exact same scenario hiding behind a beer glass. this all seems to be an overly developed definition of settling out fear. i've always had a hard time letting my head hit the pillow when i thought i was settling. i'm more than okay with that.
when we dive into the unknown to try and swim to the depths of a greater happiness, we are taking a risk. we are usually driven by guts. instinct. motivation. the pit in our stomach that grows undeniable. that "i just know" feeling. often times you sound like a lunatic to everyone else in your life because you just can't explain it. but also, you don't sound that crazy, because everyone has been borderline intuition. it's not necessarily that calling that priests and nuns lecture about, but you are convinced it is built into your bones. i'm usually a proponent of the go for it! methodology because i'd rather fail then wonder.
my sister said that the force behind one of her biggest life decisions was "the meeting point between desperation and clarity." though this may appear dramatic or appear like it fits in limited contexts, it has an underlying applicable common thread that i think is universal. if we want it bad enough, or on some level are desperate, we can't always see clearly because we are so overwhelmed by this desire. when we have all the clarity we need, we can lose our passion in the throws of clearheaded logic. it is the meeting point between these to where we take the plunge.
change ain't just a campaign slogan.
-k.
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Now playing: City And Colour - Waiting
via FoxyTunes
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