Top 10 posts of 2013

So, I've been out of commission (post-wise) for a little over a week now, but as we wrap up 2013, I'll do the same with my blog, and talk about my ten favorite posts from this year. Not necessarily those with the most pageviews, but the ones that I enjoyed writing the most. Or were most meaningful. There really isn't any criteria for this, and there isn't any order, but these are the ten posts out of all the posts of 2013 that I'm going with. In chronological order...

1. Valley of the shadow of death. It was cool to be able to talk about Lost in this sense...actually no, I don't talk about Lost at all here. Well, the 23rd Psalm is referenced in the show, has its own episode, blah blah blah. Point is, I still believe these words now, and one example of people not giving themselves credit is in sports. Every time someone who hits the game-winning shot, or a walkoff home run, thanks God for their success, I cry out for that player to take some of the credit. GOD DIDN'T HIT THAT HOME RUN! This is what this post gets at, and I like it.

2. Murder, we wrote. Yes, I would have loved it if the Patriots beat the Ravens in the AFC Championship game, and had gone on to win the Super Bowl, but this is still an important post to me because it reminds us of the feel-good stories that we should be thinking about.

3. 7 things I'm glad I did at Stonehill. Stonehill kicks ass, and one of the reasons it does is because people can do whatever they want, so they do, and then they get really passionate about what they do and want to tell the world. And what's even better about Stonehill is that everyone gets each other's passion. It may not be shared, but there's something that everyone feels strongly about, and it's because they got involved. Thus, this post.

4. 5 funny autocorrects. This is something that will never fail to make me laugh, and it's important that we laugh, and are able to laugh. Plus, it's always good that this kind of stuff usually involves crude, adult humor.

5. Death be not proud. It had been a while since I was able to spin off some contradictory writing, but I think I pulled it off in this post. Acknowledging the absence of realness makes our lives real - understanding that we will die makes life that much more important. I wish there was a really good House compilation video that has clips of House talking about this, because it's one of his main beliefs, and something that is talked about on the show fairly often.

6. 7 days, 7 thoughts. This is just an important post to me. It was one of those posts that was half to myself and half to everyone reading (possibly even you!), and with everything that had gone down this past April, to be able to put some of it in perspective was necessary and helpful for me.

7. 100 questions to ask people. With no posts from May, June, or July, this may have been somewhat of a lackluster summer...hunh...anyway, doing long surveys is always fun, because you get to learn something about yourself that you might have never thought about if you weren't doing a long survey.

8. "The Earth Is Not A Cold Place" running diary, revisited. I can't have a "Best Of" post without putting some EITS on the list. It was fun enough to do this the first time around, but to be able to have fresh ideas about my favorite album ever was cool to think about. There's something special, almost sacred, about sitting in a quiet place with what you consider to be the most important music you know and writing about it.

9. Boston Strongest, pt. 2. The second of my three "Hey, the Red Sox won the World Series" post saga talked about what this win meant of the city of Boston, and what Boston meant for these 2013 Red Sox. Again, this is something that I felt that I had to put on the list, so here it is.

10. Win or lose, together. It was good to actually understand why my favorite two sports teams are my favorite two sports teams. A semester of Sport Psychology did me some good, and got me asking some important questions, to myself and to sports in general, and it was fun to think about what makes me like certain teams over others. Plus, I got to reference my days as a varsity basketball player, all four points' worth.

I feel as though I could do this forever, that I could have a Top 50 of 2013 and get away with it, and just talk about every blog post that wasn't a throwaway blog post. That's a good thing, I think, that I know my posts well enough to be able to pull them up and talk about them in a little paragraph. So in looking back at the year that was 2013, we now look ahead to what 2014 will bring us, and for my blog, I'm not sure. It'll be interesting to see what happens after graduation, if that'll leave me with way more time to blog, or if I'll phase it out. I really hope it's not the latter, because I love blogging and having a place where I can talk about pretty much anything. So thanks for reading, and thanks for reading all year long!

Somewhere to go, pt. 2

Yeah, I did it again, one of those annoying two-part blog posts that leaves you wondering why I didn't just do it in one blog post. Unless you don't think that, in which case, yeah, I did it again, one of those awesome two-part blog posts that exists as two separate posts because the ideas are different enough to have their own space, yet connected to be considered one and the same. Or something like that.

Anyway, the beginning of part one. You can't get lost without having somewhere to go. This is a revelation that I came to, or came to me, a couple of months ago. It made a lot of sense to me, and seemed like a phrase that was already spoken and put on bumper stickers and the like. Nothing. Which is cool because it's totally my idea now. For the other three things, the Lost video, the quote from Jim Valvano, and lyrics from "Lost?" by Coldplay (I use "?" because that's the version I was listening to just now)...those are just the three things I thought of, independent of each other. I was reminded of Locke telling Sun how he stopped looking, I recalled Jimmy V talking about where he came from, and I've always liked the first two lines of "Lost?". But as far as what this is about...

Three years ago, I started this blog, which means that I've been blogging for three years. It's been fun, and something that I'm incredibly glad I did and kept up with. It's helped me to put some things in perspective, spread ideas that I have about things, and has been a neat filing cabinet for anything of relative importance that I've thought and sent out to the public sphere in the past three years.

So much of how we perceive our lives is up to our own, personal interpretation. For example, take this picture. If you're this person, what are you thinking? My sport psych professor showed us this picture, and my first reaction was something like let's go. Other people said that that was a long way to run, and one person said something to the effect of "good thing I just finished my run." Think about what each of those different thoughts means, and the kind of mindset you're taking on as a result. Think about the Red Sox, who lost 93 games in 2012, and yet, in July, far from a guaranteed 2013 postseason, the Red Sox clubhouse was gearing up for a parade. Every day was another day closer to the parade, because that's the mindset that team set out to have.

At some point in your life, you will feel lost. You have probably already felt lost at some point before now, and you probably will feel lost at some point after now. You might even feel lost reading these words, wondering how any of this might actually help you find your way. These words aren't helping you. You are helping you - your thoughts, your interpretation, your mindset. Sure, you might be lost. But you can't be lost without having somewhere to go.

Somewhere to go, pt. 1

You can't get lost without having somewhere to go.



"It’s so important to know where you are. I know where I am right now. How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal. You have to be willing to work for it."  -Jim Valvano

Just because I'm losing
Doesn't mean I'm lost
Doesn't mean I'll stop
Doesn't mean I'm across

Just because I'm hurting
Doesn't mean I'm hurt
Doesn't mean I didn't get what I deserved
No better and no worse

I just got lost
Every river that I tried to cross
Every door I ever tried was locked
Oh and I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off

You might be a big fish in a little pond
Doesn't mean you've won
'Cause along may come a bigger one

And you'll be lost
Every river that you tried to cross
Every gun you ever held went off
Oh and I'm just waiting 'til the firing's stopped
Oh and I'm just waiting 'til the shine wears off

Win or lose, together

A few weeks into the 2012 baseball season, I explored the idea of choosing your allegiance as far as sports teams go. It's important to note that this post was in the middle of a crisis that I was having about our beloved Red Sox and the mess that was the 69-93 campaign in 2012. A couple of months back, I blogged about the 2013 Red Sox and how this may have been the most fun team I've ever followed. So I ask myself (and you, dear reader) the question, why do we like certain sports teams?

Above all, what I think the end of the line is for reasons we like sports teams is that it feels good. The journey that we take may be different, but the end destination is the same - we like a given sports team because it feels good to do so. Now, to keep breaking it down...why does it feel good? The next step for me would be winning - if you were taking a random sample of 500 NCAA men's basketball fans, I'm guessing that no more than one of those people is a fan of Grambling University, the team who went 0-28 in the 2012-13 season, losing all but one game by double-digits. Winning makes sense, but plenty of people hate teams who win (see: New York Yankees, New England Patriots, Duke Blue Devils). Regionally, I made the claim in my first link in this post that we grow up in the same city in which a lot of our favorites sports teams play. But I'm a huge fan of Duke basketball, so where did that come from? Some number of years ago (I think 2003) I saw Duke on TV and saw the Cameron Crazies going absolutely nuts and thought hey, that's pretty awesome. Turns out the team played (and still plays) really good basketball, had (and still has) one of the greatest coaches in history, and was straight-up fun to watch. I enjoyed watching Duke basketball because I felt that I was there. I loved the 2013 Red Sox because I felt that I was a part of the team, that this World Series win was as much mine as it was anyone else's in the city of Boston.

The difference between teams you like and teams you love is that you feel that you're a part of the team, that you have a vested interest in the outcome of every game. In the past two Patriots seasons, we've seen losses in the AFC Championship and in the Super Bowl. I got over those two losses in a combined five minutes. But when Duke gets knocked out of the NCAA Tournament, or the Red Sox miss out on the playoffs, it's a lot worse. That being said, it's also much better on the other side (three World Series championships, and an NCAA Championship in 2010 for Duke). So anecdotally, the reason I love the sports teams I do is because I feel like I'm part of the team, that we win and we lose together. (One really cool phenomena is when "we win," but "they lost." Tell people about the most recent game your favorite team played, and if they won, see how often you use "we." If they lost, see if you cut ties from the team.)

My high school basketball team always broke huddles in practice, timeouts, whatever, with "win or lose" from the coach and "together" by the team. I think that's a fitting theme to this post and title, because with your favorite teams, it's win or lose, together.

Final thoughts

(Editor's Note: This is in no way an ultimate blog post, nor the indication of a hiatus. Simply some thoughts on the day before the start of finals. I had to use the cool-sounding title, so apologies if you thought I was going anywhere.)

My favorite phenomenon regarding finals week is the reality that somehow, you have all the time in the world on your hands. During the last two weeks of class, I was freaking out about the two unit tests, cumulative final, group presentation, and paper that I would have to worry about in a seven-day span. It's an average amount of finals work for the semesters that I've had, but I think I was freaking out about it a little more than usual. But now that it's Reading Day, I could wake up whenever I wanted, and I had all day to do...well, nothing, really. Ran some errands in the morning, finished up the third season of House (I know, that has been horribly lacking, but there will be updates all throughout winter break, I hope), edited said paper, and I'm just kind of hanging around for the rest of the day. I hope this is what the working world is like, where you do what you need to and then you don't really have to do much. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

One album that I've been listening to all day is Old World Romance by the artist Sea Wolf. I can't really explain what kind of music it is, because I can't articulate it yet. A part of this album sounds like it belongs at the end of a House episode. The singer sounds like a watered-down version of Bob Dylan, which could be a stretch, but I thought it at one point. The sound of the songs is pretty much like this - I feel that I've heard these songs before, but I feel that I haven't heard them in this particular way. It's like a spinoff TV show that eventually takes on its own personality. That might make no sense, but there are some good songs nonetheless. "Priscilla" and "Saint Catherine Street" are my two favorites, so check those out if you have some time.

This is the first time that I've given conscious thought to the fact that there are a decent number of people who read my blog who have already graduated college (at least, I hope so). By which I mean the Stonehill Class of 2013, but even then, I know my parents read this, hell, 19 people from Ukraine have come across my blog in the past week. There isn't really much more I have to say than I'm now aware of this, but it's just something that's interesting, that I don't think I can write a blog post where any given person coming across it will find it useful or enjoyable. I wonder if I've done that before...I should go back and look. Or perhaps start writing to accomplish this. Interesting thoughts.

Well, I think that's it for now. Like I said, I have nothing to do, so maybe I'll stir for a while, maybe play some GTA IV, maybe nap. In case you already forgot, here's "Saint Catherine Street" by Sea Wolf.

Why are we here?

A little over a year and a half ago, I asked myself "Why are we here?" in a blog post about learning. That was a pretty general post that came from Relay for Life, but now I'm here to talk about school. (Editor's Note: I'm not sure what it is about this semester, but I'm afraid that I'm starting to not like school, and as a result, not like Stonehill. I really hope I'm wrong with the latter.) Why are we in school? Why are we in college, graduate school, whatever it is? To get a job? Because that's the logical next step? Because someone may be paying for us to be in school? Why can't we just be here to learn? One question I've been getting asked is what I want to do with my life as a Math/Psych double-major. I love the look on people's faces when I tell them I want to work in sports, because you wouldn't really figure that to be the number one choice for either of those fields of study. Grad school sounds much more viable. But you know what? I like psychology to the point where I want to take enough classes in it to say that I am an expert at it. I truly enjoy learning about psychology and the practical nature of the subject matter. And it's been in my psychology classes where I've learned that we need to ask ourselves more than just why we're here. We need to ask ourselves why we're here, and what we're really learning. One reason for attending college, that we talked about in the IDEAS seminar last spring, was that people develop themselves as individuals. And it's a question that I'm struggling with right now, because I'm wondering if we actually need college to do this. Why can't we develop ourselves on our own time, without dropping $200,000 over four years? In my Sport Psych class today, our last class of the semester, we talked about changes we would make, and most of the students (myself included) talked about how relating class material to our own lives, our own experiences as athletes made the class more enjoyable, and helped us to understand sport psychology better. Better than any textbook spitting out information could. Because I can go to Google for any old information, but I can't go to Google for how I'm thinking and feeling about something. And those thoughts and feelings are what drive us, as much value as people may place on information. I believe that there's so much more value in understanding ourselves, and I know that I always go back to this post, but that's because learning about ourselves is one of the best things we can do. So please, ask yourself not only why we're here, but what we're doing here and what we're going to get out of it. Because if you think that we're just here to learn information, there's more to it. And if you think that we're just here to learn about ourselves, there's more to it. It's the interaction of the two, how we understand the interaction of those two, and how we understand ourselves in terms of those two, that makes being here worth it.

If you have the time, check out this song. It's called "Communal Blood" by This Will Destroy You. It's really good for writing a single, long paragraph blog post about something you feel strongly about.

10 reasons why I shouldn't win Mr. Stonehill

Here's the deal - this Saturday, December 7, at 7:30pm, I'll be making a complete fool of myself. This, in and of itself, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, because I regularly make a complete fool of myself. But what's special about Saturday is that I'll be doing this in front of two thousand people, which will be fun and interesting, to say the least. For both me and you, should you decide to go. Which you totally should, and which is also why I'm blogging about this. Because as much as I could sit here and tell you all the fun stuff I have planned, there are ten other reasons why Mr. Stonehill 2013 is going to be a night to remember. So, here we go - 10 reasons why I shouldn't win Mr. Stonehill, going in alphabetical order for the rest of my fellow contestants.

Bryan Bosworth - Hands down my favorite swimsuit wear. No secrets will be revealed here (or anywhere in this post), but as a person of simple and well-done humor, Bryan is all over it. He's also put a ton of work into his talent and it will show on Saturday.

Winslow Cilfone - In one of our last practices this past Sunday, we pretty much agreed that Winslow had already won the People's Choice Award. In addition to capturing the hearts of every human within a five mile radius of Easton, I'm convinced that he has various wildlife following him around, too.

Tim Culverhouse - Dude got his own Stonehill marketing video...I could probably stop there, but Tim is someone who will be an all-around force come competition time. He's a prominent face in the radio station and The Summit, so his publicity can only be a good thing.

Xavier "X" Dixon - I actually almost walked out when he performed his talent for us last night at rehearsal...he's taken this competition to a new level and will have to be met by the rest of us in terms of focus and overall showmanship. Plus there's an unpredictability that comes with X that will be fun to see live.

James Dunn - Roommate love aside, I think he's been the most into our practices and rehearsals. I wouldn't be surprised if he has cameras set up so he can review film and improve his technique heading into the competition. The past three winners of Mr. Stonehill were all heavily involved in either SGA, Peer Mentor, or Student Ambassador, and James hits the trifecta.

Brian "Freshman" Gavin - Huge props to Freshman, because there was no way I would have done this in my first year at Stonehill (evidenced by my not doing this in my first year at Stonehill). He's made a name for himself among ten other guys who are older than him, and he'll look to cement his legacy in Mr. Stonehill history with a solid performance on Saturday.

Ryan McCormick - It's going to be 7:15pm on Saturday night, and Ryan will still be the only person who has any idea what his performance is going to look like. From what we've seen, I know that he's going to bring it, and his energy level will be tough to match throughout the night. We could have five consecutive nights of Mr. Stonehill and Ryan would bring 100% to each of those nights. I can only imagine what 500% will look like on Saturday.

Brendan Murray - Kid has had an absolute blast being a part of this competition. No one has seen him show the slightest bit of worry regarding his talent, other performances, or really anything to do with Mr. Stonehill. I'm not sure if it's ice in his veins, or that he's just superb at blocking out outside noise, but Brendan will certainly be focusing on the victory on Saturday, and it will be a delight to watch.

Burke Oppenheim - Many people will see his contribution to Mr. Stonehill as putting together all of this incredible advertising. All these pictures, all the infographics and designs...all him. The thing is, he's still preparing to win this competition. He's got a few tricks up his sleeve that will be absolutely spectacular, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was already crafting a Burke victory poster.

Matt Smith - Put his talent up against any that you can think of, and he'd probably win. As the only returning Mr. Stonehill contestant, he knows the ins and outs of the competition, and despite being a junior, has a leg up on the competition with his experience. Look to see someone who is focused and will draw on his veteran experience to pull off a very possible upset.

Bonus - Matt Tardiff (written by James Dunn) - Out of everyone in this competition, Matt is probably the most willing to make a complete fool of himself. Lucky for him, that's the name of the game at Mr. Stonehill. Look for Matt to be in his natural habitat on Saturday - recklessly silly, with just the right amount of true talent to bring home the win.

So, there you have it. My competition (and me), but in a different sense, the people who I'm working with to make Mr. Stonehill one of the best nights ever. After a couple of months of practicing, with the competition less than a week away, I can truly say that it's been nothing but fun to be a part of this, and I've seen the same in the ten people I just talked about. So get over to Mr. Stonehill on Saturday at 7:30. Bring your friends, bring your neighbors, bring people you pass in your residence halls. Because there are eleven very good reasons you should go.

Don't miss out on the event of the year!

The dog days are (almost) over

Alright, revelation time, everyone. Once we get back from Thanksgiving break, it's go-time, the home stretch of the semester. Fewer than twenty days separate us from winter break, depending on when your finals end. And the time before Thanksgiving break, at least for me, has always been the dog days of the semester. The period of time lasting a couple weeks where you're just done with the semester. Projects, tests, papers, homework assignments...just not about that life. But Thanksgiving break comes and goes, you spend time with whoever you spend time with, you come back, and BAM it's December and nearing the end of the semester. For me, it's three unit tests (two of which are during finals), a cumulative final, a paper, and two projects until I am done with the Fall 2013 semester.

But I started thinking about it...for us seniors, this period of time is also the dog days of our time at Stonehill. I can't speak for everyone by saying that this is my 7th semester on campus (talking to you, abroad folk), but everyone has spent 3+ years calling themselves a student at Stonehill College. There is exactly 1/6 of the semester left - 19 of 114 days in the semester. Regarding total time spent at Stonehill, it's a little closer to 14.6%. Which means that for the only time in our Stonehill careers, we will face the dog days of the semester and of our careers. My point is, where we're at in the semester is proportionally the same as where we're at in our time at Stonehill.

And I've definitely felt this toll in the twofold nature that it has at this point in time; we have to think about the usual slew of homework/papers/tests/etc., but it's also post-grad plans, living arrangements, job possibilities, and everything else that comes with graduation. So it's tough, it's definitely tough. But if there's one thing that we (as seniors) have learned in our time at Stonehill, it's that you make it out alive. We're here in the fall of senior year because we've made it through six semesters so far. So during these last 2-3 weeks, if you feel the affects of the dog days, believe that you'll make it out soon. Because fewer than twenty days separate us from winter break, but also from the best semester that we'll have at Stonehill.