Lazy

It's time for me to just admit it: I'm lazy.

I waited to do my laundry until I was wearing the absolute last pair of dress socks I owned.

I see one dish that hasn't moved since I arrived here a few weeks ago.

Boxes are still unpacked, sometimes still in the way of things I need.

When I get a free moment, though, I plunked down on the couch and watched a movie... when I still had clothes to fold. (Hey, they're clean, right?)

I think my fondness for watching DVDs might even stem from this admitted laziness. While watching TV, you need to flip the channel between commercials and possibly every half hour. For two hours with a movie, you don't have to do anything.

I got to thinking about this while reading about my college bud Michael Smoose's blog about running in a triathlon last weekend. Makes you sit back and think, "What have I done?"

I'll get to that triathlon... right after I finish unpacking and doing the dishes.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

It's safe to say I'm not one who changes things abruptly without careful consideration. I'm relatively conservative in dress, appearance and even diet. So, to anyone who knows me well, it'd take an act of God to get me to change my hairstyle.

Or maybe it'd just take an act of loneliness. Three times in the past three weeks, I've heard women tell me I'd be extremely attractive if I updated my look a little bit. After all, I've had the same hairstyle for as long as I can remember. I'm not so sure I wasn't born with that hairstyle. I've been wearing the same type of wire-frame, big-lens glasses since abandoning the thick, brown-frame look in sixth grade.

So Wednesday I finally did something abrupt. I got my hair cut off. Almost entirely.

Gone are the bangs and what some friends nicknamed the "sweep," the little wave generated by years of pushing the bangs from my left to my right. [I still try to push it occasionally.] Gone is most of the hair on the sides and back. Gone is a lot of the hair on the top. It closely resembles a military crew cut, really.

It's pretty dramatic. I'm not entirely sure I like it, but I entrusted myself to a female barber [barberette?] and told her I'd go with whatever she thought would look good on me. Now that the sides are growing in a little bit, I'm beginning to see the benefits.

It's amazing how much teasing a haircut can generate. Reminds me of elementary school, where people taunted you every time you had your ears lowered. Mostly it's a shock to them. It was something of a shock to me, the first time I saw it too.

The next step comes Monday, when I go in for a much-needed vision exam. I'm about ready to try something more stylish there too.

Those ladies better come a-callin' now...

Nightmarish weekend

Nightmare... now that's a word that makes you think, "Oh-my-gosh-what-the-heck-happened-to-David-and-where-should-we-send-financia-lsupport-or-perhaps-just-a-12-pack-of-Guinness?"

Girls high school tennis happened. LPGA golf happened.

Due to my vastly inferior knowledge about what events are important around here yet, we didn't have anyone around to cover the all-important Delaware County Girls Tennis Tournament today. And, because of my vastly inferior knowledge of how to say no to my boss, I'd already put myself down to cover the LPGA Tour stop in Dublin for the Wendy's Championship for Children on Thursday and Sunday.

In short, this is the absolute worst combination of things to cover that I can imagine. Maybe we could throw in a house fire from my intern days in between.

I'm not going to devalue these sports as a whole. Not right now at least. But I will rip on the difficulty in watching them and understanding what's happening.

We'll start with the golf first. A golf course covers perhaps 10 acres of land, all with little paths connecting each of the 18 holes. The players are moving along the course at an unknown rate of speed, in groups of three or so. There's really no telling where they might be. If you know where they are, there's no telling where they might be by the time you find that hole. If you find them, there's no guarantee that the player you've gone to watch will do anything interesting on the holes you follow along. And, oh yeah, while you're gone there's a chance the Tour officials will bring someone into the media center for an interview, so you'd miss that.

Thus you get some of the laziest good journalism I've ever seen. There are a number of golf writers [and NASCAR's the same, I'm told] who simply sit in the media center, watching TV, paying some attention to the boards on the wall that explain what's happening and then running into a press conference to gather quotes.

In short, they're covering a sport they're not really watching, just monitoring.

That's also my gripe with covering the tennis. The tournament locale today was just down the street, so they get high marks for my personal convenience. But there are eight matches going on at the same time. You can go look at the tournament official's cheat sheet to see which pairing might be what, but then you might miss something more interesting down the line.

Oddly enough, both of these sports force you to follow the favorite. You have to guess who you think might work and pray you won't miss out on seeing the real winner altogether.

Never mind writing about this stuff... it's all in cliches and terminology that typical people just don't understand. Heck, I'm in the sports realm and only understand it partially. This won't help people get interested in your sport which hasn't reached the mainstream.

In an effort to make this somewhat constructive, one of my favorite non-mainstream coaches to ever deal with was Rob Kilmer, the girls soccer coach at Sherando High School in Virginia. He wasn't amazingly witty or funny, but he was extremely informative. He used the terminology, then he explained what it meant to both me and my readers. More coaches should consider mainstreaming their language to build a better following.