The Bronze Medal

I love these bookmarks and I love that our library is participating in this program.

Here’s some stuff I read last month.

What makes it such a great children’s pastime is also what makes it so goddamned difficult for even proto-adults to play well. As major-league pitcher Ron Darling famously said: “Most people have the physical ability to play this game. To excel in it, I think it’s in your head.” What he means is: If you are conscious of yourself—like, at all—baseball will eat you alive. It measures you against an absolute standard—1.000 batting average, 1.000 fielding average, 0.00 earned-run average—and it reminds you every step of the way that you are falling short. If you can’t handle that, if you get interrupted by the infinite regression of anxiety and doubt…you are fucked. To be good, you either have to be so self-assured as to be nigh catatonic, or you have to choose to pay attention in the most literal way. That is, you have to realize that your attention is a valuable, finite resource, and how you choose to spend it the one skill—not speed, not power—that separates the wheat from the chaff. “Control your thoughts before they control you,” read the pubescent marginalia in my dog-eared copy of The Mental Game of Baseball, the big-leaguer’s Bible. Dear to me was its koan, “If there’s no future, there’s no distraction.

— Kent Russell, The Boys of Lancaster

Had an early morning meeting but the rest of the day off. So I headed to the diner for second breakfast.

Everything about this is perfect, even the call number. By Emily Lloyd.

There’s a mobile pet adoption unit at the library today! I really really need to move to an apartment complex that allows dogs.

As I grew older, I started to understand the importance of insights accumulated and laid over one another, rather than isolated. But I think the teen-age quote fetish is ultimately a good thing. It is evidence of the way a mind is built: randomly, piece by piece, working slowly through the dark with the few truths one finds or has been given. Children are experts on negative capability—in their comfort with what they don’t know, with not seeing the full picture, with moving without knowing what they are moving toward.

— Alice Bolin, The Methodless Method

Men should be feminists. That’s how I see it. Feminism is a set of tools to improve society.

— Sarah Hall

Wait I think I’ve got my shows mixed up…

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