Oh hey friends. It has come to my attention that I owe y'all a blog post.
It has also come to my attention that I don't owe you anything. So there.
(awkward silence)
Heh, blogging is awesome. I don't have to write right now, but because I'm a cool person, I'm going to. So here goes...
Tonight I'm going to talk a little bit about one of the things I love most in the world: baseball.
You see, this story goes back to 2007 when I decided to follow the Rockies. My first medium of choice in following them was the Rocky Mountain News (rest its soul), but I eventually switched to the most awesome way to follow a game besides being there in person: the radio.
Radio was made for baseball, and baseball was made for radio. So from then on I hung on every pitch, every deep fly, and every final out from the radio. It took me on amazing adventures through awesome wins and made me want to throw things at it after horrible losses. It's awesome, seriously.
Well, being a freshman in highschool in late 2007 through the 2008 season, I obviously had to wake up early for school the next day. And being homeschooled, my dad would enforce sleep strictly and tell us to turn off our lights and procede to sleep. This is exactly what I did during the winter. But when February rolled around, everything changed.
I remember the first Spring Training game in 2008 because I recorded it onto my camera and made it into an audio file because I missed it live. I also became very familiar with the meaningless game, listening to it in future offseasons whenever I got bored, until the day finally came when I couldn't take the depression of listening to players who were no longer with the Rockies play. (I suppose I might feel the same way listening to a 2011 Spring Training game....hahaha....sigh).
At first, I fed my pink Hello Kitty boom box on the side of my bed and up underneath a pillow. The regular season started. Whenever there were games, I would jump onto my bed with the radio turned up just enough so that only I could hear it when I pressed my ear close by. I loved late night west coast games...those were the nights when my dad thought I had gone to sleep at 9, when in reality the game would end at 11 and the postgame show would go longer (if the Rockies won). Sometimes, a light would go on in the hallway, and then I'd shove my Hello Kitty baseball listening device far underneath the pillows and my head would roll over to the other side, and I'd pretend to sleep. Being a baseball fan is hard.
My dad had an old school iPod with earbuds. He eventually got new, better quality ones, and without explicit permission, I inherited the old ones. (I also have this same old iPod now after my brother gave it to me.) Now being the type of person I am (nerd, baseball fan), I permanently placed my boom box under the pillows in the corner of my bed, hooked up the earbuds to it, and fed one earbud through my pillow case so it was hidden, but if my ear was placed properly near it, I could still hear the radio. I know: freshman me was awesome.
It was the ultimate baseball addiction enabler besides the internet. For many years following (well, four), I operated like this, and it was perfect. I could pretend to sleep and not sleep and not have to shuffle when I heard my parents' footsteps coming up the stairs. The only problem is that it damaged my attention span forever, causing me to pretend to carry conversations while listening to a game. This damage carried on to even being distracted at anything when the Rockies were on, and zoning out in general when boring people spoke to me. Baseball has doomed my college career.
But as the seasons went on and I fell in love more and more with the game, my ear buds were there. They were there for listening to Opening Day during school and the 22-inning game the night before I had to wake up for school. They were there for the Spilly Slam and Todd Helton's 2000th hit and Ubaldo's no-hitter. They were there for inside curveballs, running catches, amazing 9-run 9th innings, swinging strikeouts, walk-off doubles, and blown saves. And they were there for the tears and laughter that came with each moment. I even took them to a couple game to listen to my radio and brought them along when I saw the Rockies in San Francisco. I guess you could say we were close.
This season sucked. That's all. My earbuds agreed, and started to turn an off-white color and fray a bit until finally the wires started showing and I couldn't take them out of my laptop without fear of them breaking.
So I replaced them.
Here's my new purple earbuds next to my swagged-out laptop.
They're a lot different. I don't know how I feel about them yet. Huh. I guess the same goes for the Rockies. They're so different, I still love them, but I don't know how I feel about them and what the future holds for them. But for now, I can only hope my new ear buds will come with me on a lot of memory trips and last more than five years. Oh and studying, yeah. I can use them while studying.
