Frommatics

Hey, y’all. It’s been a long time since I last posted, and I’m glad you’re still with me. I’ve been loaded down with work over the last few weeks, but now that school has taken a two-week hiatus, I present to you the first segment of the Frommedy 2012 political take.

It’s time to write about the election. I’m not Anderson Cooper or Bill O’Reilly, so I can’t give you up-to-the-minute, behind-the-scenes expert analysis, but I can give you a novel perspective on the upcoming Presidential Nominations/Election. Think of me as Fox News with a teenage mouth and some experience in stand-up comedy.

Let’s start with Newt Gingrich. I’ll just put it out there: I don’t like him. He comes across as more of a comical, let’s-do-things-the-old-way fellow than a legitimate presidential nominee. He left his first two wives in what can almost be described as sitcom-like betrayal, and just take one look at his third wife—platinum blonde, chic, and thin—and you get the feeling that she may be at risk of pulling a pre-1995 Cindy McCain and develop a crazy addiction. But even if I (or 98% of America) could get over his calamity of a personal life, the crap that comes out of Gingrich’s mouth still makes him unelectable. This guy scares me more than any candidate I’ve seen in my short few years as a politics follower, because he’s so full of s***. I cannot fathom the man who calls himself “the most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times” as a person who is capable of sitting in the Oval Office and running our country, and yet there are a legitimate number of people who are fighting to put him in the White House. A man who had eighty-four ethics charges filed against him in his term as Speaker of the House should not be running for what is arguably the most powerful job in the world.  But I actually hope he pulls out the Republican Nomination, so Barack Obama can crush him in a landslide come general election time. 

I don’t think Michelle Bachmann or Herman Cain were ever running legitimate candidacies, and I still don’t think Rick Santorum has any idea that he’s never and will never be seriously considered a runner in this race to the White House. I only mention these people because each one has or had a semi-legit following, and so I try to understand what it is about each candidate that people find appealing. With those guys, I really have no idea. During an interview, Santorum once compared same-sex marriage to pedophilia and bestiality. Come on, man. It’s 2012. Are you deliberately trying to lose the gay vote? And, Listen, Rick, if you were really competitive at this point, Obama would be going after you with political anti-ads. He’s not. He’s saving his firepower for…

I think Romney is a good guy. I wouldn’t vote for him, but he’s bright, he appears to be honest, and he seems to have America’s best intentions at heart. He looks like he genuinely supports the average Joe, and isn’t looking to exploit the presidency for the power that it offers. And he likes meatloaf cakes for his birthday! How could you not like a guy who wants nothing more than meatloaf cakes for his birthday? Anyway, our country has, of late, essentially become a business with a huge pile of debts, and it’s going to take a pretty talented businessman to dig us out of this $15 trillion hole. With a background in the financial sector, Romney could possibly do a decent job of starting that uphill climb. Now, the guy is worth roughly $100 million, but he doesn’t seem to be digging too deep into his own pockets in order to outspend and outcampaign the other candidates. On some level, I do agree with common knowledge: he’s quite flippy-floppy about some of the major issues (like general global policy and gay marriage), and I think he changes his opinion more to please the masses than he does because his opinion actually changes. Despite that, I think it’s safe to say that he’s all but the surefire frontrunner to win the Republican Nomination, which means it’s Mitt vs. Barack come November. I can’t wait to watch the presidential drama unfold.

I know that Obama is in no way the end-all be-all two-term president. He’ll never be Lincoln, FDR, or JFK because he doesn’t have the firepower or ballsiness to do the dirty work and accomplish the progress that those men did. He’s not going to end slavery, solve a horrific economy, or promote civil rights. However, I think that in early 2008, our country was in the worst condition we’ve seen it since the Great Depression. Obama was handed an incredibly crappy situation when he took office for his first term, and we can’t expect him to turn us into the perfect country in four years. Hell, look at us: up until a year ago, we didn’t allow gay soldiers in our armed forces, and right now we’ve got a candidate running for president who wants to get rid of literally every penny of foreign aid that we hand out. (I’ll let you figure out which one it is, but hint: his first name is Ron and his last name isn’t Reagan.) We have ambassadors and “defense” leaders who don’t know the first thing about the countries they’re supposed to be protecting and supporting, and a pathetic amount of dispute within our legislative branch.

Here’s a fun fact: our country’s unofficial approval rating of Congress is lower right now than it has EVER been. You could put a group of America’s brightest teenagers inside the House of Representatives building and they’d probably make more progress than the elected “officials” who are sitting in that building as we speak. I don’t understand how our country has such a potential for greatness and yet we continuously shoot ourselves in the foot by hiring and electing people to lead us who would probably be better suited as McDonald’s cashiers. Perhaps, this is because the people with the most potential in this country don’t enter politics.

But enough ranting and raging. I think that Obama is the best option for President at this point. As the incumbent, he knows what he’s doing to a certain extent, and, more than anything, there doesn’t seem to be a Republican who shows any promise of more progress than Obama has accomplished. And, despite a shifty economy and all the hype about the Republican nomination, I think that this country’s voters will agree with me in November. But it’ll be a fun wrestling match to watch either way.

So, Romney vs. Obama? Sounds like Clash of the Titans: Political Edition.

P.S. Stay tuned for more political Frommalysis.

Squashed

There’s a new sport breeding in my household. It’s not flashy, it’s not macho, and it doesn’t have a Super Bowl at the end of its season, but it does exist.

It’s squash.

No, not the vegetable. There’s a sport called squash. I started playing a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been playing tons since.

I will admit that at times, it almost feels like something I have to apologize about. When I used to tell people that I wrestle, their first reaction would often be amazement feigned with mock fear or vice versa. But with squash? Not so much. I usually get a laugh and then, “No, really, what do you play?” Or, something along the lines of “Rich kid alert!” or “Do you have to wear a tie for that?”

How I got into squash is actually a pretty interesting story, considering that it’s not exactly common for people to jump from one of the most rugged, instinct-driven sports in the world to a more highbrow and civilized game.

Speaking of highbrow, the people who go to my school aren’t exactly inner-city kids. There are a few kids on scholarship and receiving financial aid, but the atmosphere is still one of pressure and privilege, which makes it no surprise that the school harbors so many squash players. That’s not to say that every racket-wielding kid has a trust fund, but I’ve noticed that a lot of them finish their private lessons and then walk outside into the plush, heated embrace of their parents’ Lexus SUVs and BMWs.

Anyways, apparently the eventual goal of intensely playing squash is to improve your status in “the rankings”. It’s not like tennis or college basketball where there are a set number of spots for a coveted standing, i.e. there’s no such thing as being “ranked” or “unranked”. Everybody’s got a number. What you’re trying to do is improve yours. All it takes to get one is to play in a few tournaments and then complete a simple test, neither of which I’ve done yet. When I do, I’m sure I’ll be #7532 or something, since I have no competitive history and I’m so new to squash. But there are two kids in my grade who rank in the top five in the country (yes, you read that right), so it kind of feels like the pressure is on to get better ASAP.

But the other side of knowing two incredibly talented, well-connected squash kids is that you start off with a huge advantage. You know the best brands to buy, the right coaches to use, and the great places to play at. I am lucky enough to be friendly with both of them, and one of them, named Julia, connected me to this wonderful coach who she’s been using for several years. This guy gives something like sixteen hour-long lessons a day, and doesn’t appear to be human. But he’s an incredible mentor and teacher (and is also a former national champion) so your chances of getting a lesson with him are comparable to getting a date with one of the Kardashian sisters.

Enter connection: here. Julia and I aren’t all that close, but whatever. She hooked me up with a god.

His name is Obadi, called “Obi” (pronounced like “Kobe”, as in Kobe Bryant) for short. Obi is a charming, Nigerian former national champion squash player, and, keeping in mind that I’ve only had three lessons with him, is one of the most lovable people I have ever met. He’s smart and critical in a gentle and attentive way. It’s impossible to get a lesson with him unless you know somebody (i.e. Julia, who sang his praises before I even met the guy), and he mentioned that she almost forced him to take me over several other clients who wanted the 6:00 to 7:00 PM time slot. In fact, the only reason that that spot was even open is because Julia hurt her back a few weeks ago and can’t play again until the summer. She and Obi are very close, and that definitely helped me get the nod.

Anyways, playing with him feels similar to a dream. It’s almost like a combination squash lesson-therapy session. His coaching somehow also helps coach you through your life problems, and when you walk out of playing with him for an hour, you feel ready to tackle the world’s hardest geometry proof or make a run at the most un-gettable female in your high school (a feeling that quickly fades once you actually sit down to attempt the task). Those lessons literally fly by, and I sometimes look up at the clock after we’re done and wonder if it’s been magnetized by his Nigerian awesomeness in an effort to fool me out of my full hour. Not to mention that he’s already made me ten times better at squash.

But, while Obi is amazing, my squash skills could still use some improvement. I’m taking another, twice-weekly clinic that’s held at a much more well known club than the one my Nigerian friend plays at, and its popularity attracts a lot of beginners, which makes this class perfect for me. The only problem is that it’s primarily comprised of small children.

I’m not a large guy by any means, but when your peers are all under the age of ten, you become known as the “Big Kid”. I’m not kidding. Kids have actually started to address me as that, and several of my little brother’s friends have come up to me, introduced themselves, and then crushed me in less time than it takes you to say ”I feel bad for that guy”. But the instructor tries to work a little reverse-psychology on the less-talented people. He puts the best kids in court A, the decent kids in court C, and the terrible kids in court B, so he has you thinking that your skills are at least passable. It took me a few weeks to figure all this out.

Anyways, after many lost games and tribulations, I finally won a match, albeit against a pudgy 4^th-grade girl named Sophie.

Did I mention that, after beating her by a measly two points, she quickly performed the obligatory handshake and then proceeded to storm out of the court and demand that her mother feed her a fudge cupcake?

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I do feel special.

I just wonder how Sophie would do on the wrestling mat.

Family Guy

“Dangerous people don’t break into your home. They live in it,” says Greg House on a recent episode of his eponymous show “House”. I wouldn’t call the guy a role model, but he does his job well (albeit in an unorthodox and illegal way), and hearing his cynical beats of wisdom can reassure you that you’re not the only crazy one out there.

We just came back from winter break, and during the longer vacations between the many months of school, my family usually takes a trip somewhere. Our trips are almost always fun. You’re on vacation, you’re relaxing, and you’re seeing the sights. And a little time with the family is never a bad thing.

But I emphasize a little time with family. Don’t get me wrong. I love my mom, my dad, and my little brother. We’re a family, and as far as I know, there aren’t any Ponzi-scheme/rat-infestation/children-living-in-the-attic situations currently going on. Nothing to call DYFS over.

Our trip this December was to California. We flew into LAX and planned to visit LA for a few days and then amble our way up the coast to San Francisco, where we’d meet my uncle, my aunt, and their toddler. On paper it was a recipe for success. And while we weren’t driving, it was.

People underestimate how far apart the two biggest cities in California are. According to MapQuest, it’s a little over 380 miles and about six hours. But we wanted to stretch it out as we drove next to the ocean, because what healthier thing to do on vacation than sit in a tiny hybrid car with limited air conditioning and try to entertain yourself without pissing off the other three members of your family? Over the course of three days, we were in that car for over ten hours, slowly pooling our neuroses together in a race to see which one would vomit/scream/cry/have a nervous breakdown first.

I’m only kidding. But seriously, I don’t advise that any family spend more than a couple hours cooped up in a car without taking frequent let’s-admit-that-we’re-sick-of-each-other-and-take-a-quick-Starbucks-breather pit stops. At least for families like mine. It’s no fun being at each other’s throats, and the little one always ends up getting picked on the most. That’s just how it works. Of course, the big one doesn’t get his way 100% of the time, either. For example, 25 minutes into our trip, my little brother “got” carsick and decided that the only way to fix it was to wolf down a diet Coke that was twice the size of a full-grown watermelon and then demand to ride shotgun. I will say this; he’s got the acting genes.

The trip itself was a blast. In Los Angeles, we kicked off the vacation with what has become a tradition in my family: a three-hour late start on our first day. Go, fam. We were in LA, center of the entertainment industry and home to some of the most fascinating and messed-up people in the world. If you want to see neurotic, go read up on celebrity news. Or get married for 72 days, or name your child after a color on the American flag. (Blue Ivory Carter, daughter of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, you’ve accomplished more in your first week of existence—being featured on a Billboard’s Top 10 Songs list—than most of the 2012 Republican presidential nominees have in their lives.)

On our first day, we took a private tour of Warner Brothers Studios (and saw the Friends’ set and a couple of cars from the Batman movies, as well as the stage where they shoot “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien,” “Pretty Little Liars,” and “2 Broke Girls”), and shamelessly continued to do touristy stuff for the duration of our stay in the City of Angels. We visited the Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Kodak Theatre, and the Getty. Call me aspirational, but my favorite part was Beverly Hills. Walking down Rodeo Drive, eating at the stellar restaurants, knowing I was in the midst of more than a few super-connected people; it all seemed so lovely and dreamlike. My favorite part might’ve been driving through the famous Hollywood Hills and staring mesmerized at the absurdly beautiful and expensive homes that house the top agents, actors, and comedians who dominate the industry that I someday hope to work in.  I know, dream on. And I will.

Anyways, after a few days, we left Los Angeles and began our odyssey up to San Francisco. One of our notable pit stops was  just north of San Simeon, where we saw a gathering of elephant seals. The female seals had just given birth a few days ago, and it was awe-inspiring seeing the mothers feeding their newborns and the fathers fighting for dominance over one another. There was one mother seal feeding two babies instead of  one, and we asked the guide standing near us why. He said  that she had stolen one of those baby seals from another nursing mother, and was now trying to feed both. What she didn’t realize was that she didn’t have enough milk to sustain both babies, and now the chances were good that both babies would die. Nature can be brutal.

After spending about an hour watching the seals, we left San Simeon and kept driving up to Berkeley. We were wrecks in every sense of the word, but we managed to pull it together to look semi-decent for my dad’s brother and his family that night. Now, I’m not an adult, but I know that it’s rare to have a really delicious meal served to you that you both don’t have to a) pay for and b) wait around for any number of hours after you’re finished eating to hear how the cook’s day went. That’s where you hit the jackpot with “extended” family. Everybody’s obviously close enough so that they’re not going to charge you anything for the food you eat, but the two families also don’t see one another enough to share the dreary, ultra-specific details of their weeks at the dinner table. It’s like culinary and familial heaven all wrapped up in into one heaping plate of awesome, which came that night in the form of an excellent Pad Thai dish with noodles and fresh chicken; everything made completely from scratch. The fact that my uncle and his wife have an adorable 1-year old baby just added to the hominess of the evening.

The next day, with the entertainment industry capital light years behind us, my family and I resorted to finding new ways to explore the area and/or keep our craziness at bay. For my mom, this meant finding as many we-haven’t-seen-each-other-since-college-but-that-doesn’t-mean-our-families-can’t-have-dinner-together-semi-friends as possible across the Bay Area and making sure we ate a meal with every single one of them. Oh, joy.

The next few days were a blur, but I do remember one of the more memorable “friends” and her accompanying entourage. They were the perfect family, just too perfect. The mom, or alpha-mom, was clearly the boss. She has some high-powered job in San Francisco, and her husband is a stay-at-home dad. Her children were 11 and 7, which perfectly matches the ages of my brother and me. Except that they don’t.

My mom insisted that all would be fine. “You’ll be sitting right next to us, her kids will be sophisticated and interesting, and I think you’ll really like her!” she promised. How bad could the night get?

Bad. The mom wanted nothing more than to reconnect with her old friend, and by nothing more, I mean she literally only spoke to my mom. Plus, her kids could not have been less responsive. When we walked in, her son was pouring over a book titled “Lego Lunatics,” and I think the girl was doing math homework. In short, I could tell that we weren’t going to be discussing the latest episode of “Family Guy” with these two. I tried starting a conversation every once in a while, but they expressed no interest in talking to my brother or me. To give you some perspective, by the end of the dinner, my brother’s hand was covered in upside-down crosses inspired by the hit new family sitcom, “The Devil Inside,” and I was halfway done with writing this post. I don’t think I’ve ever needed a electronic device so much.

However, the family as a whole offered one redeeming trait: they all worked well together. Even though their kids’ chemistry couldn’t have gelled worse with ours, they seemed to like each other, and I respect that. My parents, my brother, and I are all pretty lively people, but sometimes we struggle with the idea of staying out of each other’s way. Your family might consist of some of the funniest, savviest people on the planet, but if you can’t sit down and have a meal together, you’re in real trouble. So, whether your mom draws comparisons to Nancy from “Weeds” or she’s graced the cover of Parenting Magazine, we should all be as peaceful as possible with our families, because, deep down, they will love us like nobody else.

Vox Populari

In the fall of 2010, I started taking stand-up comedy classes in New York City. Two minutes into the first class, the guy handed us a packet of questions. Our answers to them weren’t supposed to be funny; they were supposed to serve as the launching point for our acts and whatever material we would incorporate into them. I took three or four classes with the same comedy troupe, and all of the questions changed from class to class, except one: “What does it take to become popular in high school?”

If you’re an adult reading this, you‘re probably thinking back to your high school days and thanking God that you don’t have to muddle through this stuff anymore. But if you’re a teenager, my guess is that you’re living some version of the following:
• You’re not popular but you want to be.
• You are popular but the pressure is getting to you.
• You were popular but the pressure was too strong so you backed away.
• You’re kind of popular and you’d like to be more so.
• You’ll never be popular and you don’t even care, though maybe you do, just a little bit.

And if you’re a middle school or elementary school kid and you’re reading this blog, know that I would take a couple extra geometry problems any day over walking into school and seeing your crush making out with a senior.

Yes, that actually happened. I get thirty feet into the front entrance of my high school, and…Oh look! Brad Foxwell is locking mouths with the girl I wanted to ask to our winter dance. A fine start to the day.

It’d be easy to throw hordes of clichés out about what it’s like to be in high school, and here are a few that you probably hear the most;
• High school is hard for everyone.
• High school changes people, but by college, everybody mellows out.
• High school is full of people who are at the mercy of their hormones and hormones make everyone crazy and aggressive, so don’t take it personally (although I don’t know how to tell you not to)
• How you do in high school doesn’t forecast how you do later in life. I promise.
• It’s really important you do well in high school. But no pressure.

All true and all bull. The bottom line is that high school is rough.

I go to a diverse private school, and I think it’s fairly representative of what goes on at other schools. Sometimes you gotta wonder: Why do people act the way they do? How can otherwise nice people devolve into fire-breathing dragons in order to achieve social success? Is it nature or nurture that drives people to alienate friends, harass teachers, and do anything within and beyond reason to achieve “popularity”? Are some boys born susceptible to being emotionally and psychologically tied to the Queen Bees’ opinions of them? Are some girls born to naturally kick dirt in the eyes of any guy who doesn’t look like Ryan Gosling or Dwight Howard?

Lots of questions, not a lot of answers. Everyone wants to be popular but why?

Right now I’m studying the Roman Empire in history class, and a word that often comes up is the root of the word “popular”. The Romans were big on mentioning it in the names of their assemblies, the great philosophical insights of the time like the works of Virgil and Seneca, and in general keeping the word “popular” a part of Roman culture. One of the most famous sayings to survive the fall of Rome was the phrase printed on every statue, temple, amphitheater, and even the Coliseum: “senatus populusque romanus.” (Roughly translated: “The senate and the people of Rome.”) Another well-known line: “vox populi,” or “the voice of the people”. There are many other examples, but the word “populus” or “populi” generally carried the meaning of “common” or “of the people”. It had nothing to do with being elite or selective. And, considering that the Roman Empire lasted nearly a thousand years, I think we can assume that they had a good thing going there.

So, my question is, how has this concept of popularity been so distorted in our modern American society to have now become some elusive game that makes friends willing to strong-arm each other for?

It’s not impossible, obviously. People climb the high school ladder all the time. But what I struggle to understand is why someone would throw up their hands and commit to being a crappy person (or, as Holden Caulfield would say in The Catcher in the Rye, a “phoney”) for the last few years of his/her childhood just to have a chance with some blonde bombshell? (Well, everyone knows why. She’s pretty and the desire to be pretty and be with pretty girls is what drives teenagers.)

When I tell people I’m a freshman in high school, usually one of the first questions they ask is some variation of “What have you learned from it so far?” This isn’t as evident in middle school as it now is in high school, but I’ve realized that being super “in” comes with some hefty drawbacks in addition to whatever glorious upside it seems to present. One is that, for the most part, you seem to be forced to leave your old, legitimate friends for kids with who you don’t actually have anything in common.

The really frustrating aspect of this is that you just don’t win by being a nice guy in high school. Of course, it’s easy for me to sit here and write this on my laptop, but if a Queen Bee approached me and wanted to hang out, would I really decline her offer? Uh, no.

It feels at times like the tried-and-true path to popularity in high school is to abandon your true friends and become a total bonehead, and I don’t fully understand how or why the system is set up to work that way. In college, it’s obviously a different story, but for now, it feels like the good guys have no option but just to sit back and let the schmucks run the show for the next few years.

I know this is an age-old phenomenon. Teens wanting to be popular is nothing new, but now the technological revolution is putting a new spin on it that acts as a serrated edge to an already pointy knife.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, my school’s winter dance, officially called “Snowball,” is in a few weeks. It’s Sadie Hawkins style, which means that the girls ask the guys. That kind of turns the boys into sitting ducks, praying that they get asked and hoping that their social standing is acceptable enough to score a date. Since, as a guy, you can’t actually asked anybody, all you can do is befriend as many girls as possible and hope that one of them thinks you’re cute or funny.

Of course, when you ask somebody to be your date to a high school dance, you’re not proposing to him or her. There’s really no attachment whatsoever, besides awkwardly dancing with them during the one slow song the DJ plays and possibly hooking up with the guy or girl at an after-party. It’s not marriage. You don’t have to think they’re attentive to you, you don’t have to believe in the same ideals, and you certainly don’t have to be in love with them; in fact, you don’t really even have to like them. You just have to find them mildly attractive and/or be socially conscious enough to know that having your name attached to the other person’s name might raise your social standing.

And with Snowball coming up, I can already see a spike in all this back-and-forth, jockeying-for-position-on-the-hierarchy bullcrap that dominates the weeks leading up to a major social occasion.

So, where does that leave me? Or you?

Wrestling with Wrestling

I’m no Neanderthal. I’ve never been a super athlete, never brandished a 6-pack, never dated a Queen Bee (or whatever the politically correct term is for high school divas). If you can imagine a bunch of teenagers sitting in a room together, I’m definitely not the one hogging the pull-up bar or doing one-handed push-ups with his shirt off. I’ve been invited to try out the jock ropes a couple times, but I always surprise myself with the kind of vague, creative excuses I come up with to literally avoid butting heads with some of the more infamous guys in my grade. I’ve really just never seen myself as a jock.

But there was one sport that required intense physical drive, which for some reason enthralled me: Wrestling. I know it sounds ridiculous. If this kid doesn’t like getting beaten around, what is he doing strapping on a singlet and inviting a man-child with zero percent body fat to pin him to a mat?

If you didn’t cringe when you read that you’ve either never watched a match or you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wrestling is probably the world’s oldest sport. It’s been around since cavemen were fighting each other for food. The animals do it. I saw a couple of alpha male elephant seals go at it today on the California coast. They drew blood, until one of them slunk away. Even they know that in wrestling, it’s you vs. him. Mono y mono. And only one of you is going to get up from the mat smiling.

There is a small contingent of people who find the good in wrestling, and I fall into that category. On the first day of seventh grade, I needed a sport to do, and while walking to the basketball courts (and what I’m sure would have been a laughably mediocre basketball career), my friend Ken, who knows the ins and outs of my school better than I do, came up to me and said, “Hey Matt, Stevenson (a senior) told me basketball blows. Let’s go to wrestling.” Thus began my career.

I entered wrestling after having played three years of low-level hockey. During that period I had amassed three or four concussions. The deal with my pediatrician and parents was basically to wrestle until I got a concussion. Not that it was necessarily going to happen, but if it did, I needed to know that five concussions would mark the end of my time as a wrestler.

But first I had to survive opening week. At first, wrestling was awful. My legs were shaking, my stomach was functioning more like a punching bag than a bodily organ, and my confidence had fallen off a cliff. The first kid I ever wrestled pinned me in 19 seconds, and my teammates and I later named him “The Ax Murderer” because of his shaved head and bone-chillingly nonchalant facial expressions. You didn’t think he was going to pin you; you thought he was going to abduct you and take you back to his home planet. After that match, I was certain that my wrestling career was going to be shorter than a Kim Kardashian marriage.

But things changed. I toughened up, I lost some weight, and things became bearable. Wrestling life wasn’t pretty, but it was manageable. Since then, wrestling has dominated all my winters. I’ve gotten a little better, and I’ve learned how to mentally adapt to such an inherently brutal sport. I learned that it’s a great adrenaline booster, and from a parenting perspective it supposedly takes the edge off a teenage boy’s “angst”. I started to actually love wrestling. So, naturally, I completely forgot about the concussion rule.

Until last week.

My usual partner, Andrew, was sick that day with a sinus infection, so I was matched with Shane, a senior, who could only be described as a human-gorilla combination. He didn’t look fearsome, but with his arms around you and his legs churning away on the mat, you felt like King Kong’s prey. Anyway, we were in “neutral position,” which is basically just circling each other like two animals on the prowl, staring each other down, waiting for the other to make the tiniest slip. We both attempted a “takedown” (a move that, if done correctly, takes the other person down on the mat) at the exact same time, and our heads collided. If he even felt it, he was ready to continue right away, but I was seeing stars. I knew it was a concussion. The mental haziness, the clouded thoughts, the sensitivity to light; all my familiar symptoms were there. All that was left to do was check with my doctor, who confirmed it.

“Matt, you need to find a new sport,” he said, “or at least one that won’t give you Alzheimer’s.”

Well, that helps.

Now a decision must be made. I have to do some sport, and yet the definition of “sport” for a teenage guy often includes some level of tackling/roughhousing/physical domination. Football, hockey, wrestling, etc., are things that take the jagged edge off life as a teenager, something that sports like golf and curling don’t really do. So, what now?

That’s what I’m wrestling with.

Look. Like.

As rich a topic as Facebook is and as fundamentally insidious and time wasting as it may be, I hate to only mention it in brief, but I promise to explore it more later.

I’m sure any of you who keep tabs on a Facebook page know what a profile picture is. It’s what people see first; it’s putting your best foot forward (and as in “best foot” I mean that one picture of you on vacation where you look significantly more attractive than you do on a regular basis). For teenagers, especially for girls, the number of “likes” on a girl’s profile picture, or “pro pic,” are directly proportionate to the emphasis she places on looking artificially pretty. On one end of the spectrum we’ve got the everyday regular “1 or 2 likes” plain Jane. On the other end of the spectrum we’ve got a Queen Bee who will take literally a hundred pictures of herself to get the “perfect” one, and those girls, ironically, are the ones getting 200, 300, 400 likes. It sounds preposterous to anyone over the age of 17, but it’s true. Images fly around the stratosphere, and you become known for your “pro pic”.

Until a few weeks ago, I was under the impression that a Facebook profile picture was just that: a picture. You might feel giddy if more people are interested in it than you were expecting, but at the end of the day, there would be a new one; nobody was making any money or creating opportunities for themselves via their “pro pic”.

Facebook has done it again!

One of my friends is what you’d consider a “crowd pleaser”. We’ll call her Lisa**. Lisa is pretty. But until high school (at which point the male libido skyrocketed and guys began bowing to her every whim), she didn’t really know it. When Lisa and I met, we were both neurotic, confused sixth graders, ahead of many of our classmates intellectually but restricted by the fact that we were 12 years old. We’ve been friends since, and somehow the structure of our relationship has allowed the attention she gets to not be a problem for either of us. Lisa is pretty in a natural way, not really someone who looks fantastic done up in gobs of make-up and designer clothes.

To bridge the connection here, Lisa’s profile pictures have always been modest; maybe a picture of her making funny faces with a friend, one of her from camp, etc. Never more than five or ten “likes”. But a few nights ago, I checked Facebook for a seventh time in 20 minutes and found a new picture.

To be fair, she looks stunning. Her face is angled just right, she has the perfect amount of make-up on, and there is snow falling gently in the background. The focus is on her, and rightfully so. But it just doesn’t feel right.

She looks, well how does she look? Like someone I don’t know. Like someone I might like to know but probably won’t in this lifetime. Like someone who is trying hard to be liked and liked and liked in that crazy alternate universe we know as FB.

Sometimes I like it. And sometimes I don’t.


**Lisa is not a real person. She is a composite based on over one-hundred people that I know, ranging from teenage girls through women in their sixties and seventies.

Yo

I spent five minutes on the design of this page and five hours trying to figure out what to write. Maybe I should just skip writing all together and continue refreshing the page like Mark Zuckerberg at the end of “The Social Network”. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

Kidding.

These bloggings (FYI that’s a word) are going to be short. Just imagine I’m feeding you little bite-sized brownies that are actually updates on the strange world of teenagers. To add some perspective, while writing this, spell check auto-changed the word “bloggings” to “floggings,” and as it turns out they may fare more like the latter.

The plan? What you see here will be whatever’s in the news that jolts my mind or pisses me off. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a guy who punches walls for the thrill of it, but sometimes I just need to exorcise some “what the f***?” feelings. It’s not venting per se, but in the world of teenagers, if something happens and you don’t like it, you can’t go on Katie McPerfect’s Facebook wall and post “you are a dumb worthless slut”. You just can’t, because if you do, Katie McPerfect will slam you sideways. So instead, I will blog, and leave Katie McPerfect and her clones alone.

We’ll discuss everything and anything. If it’s an ass**** move by NFL.com writer Jason La Canfora to call New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning the worst starting quarterback in football, I’ll yell about it. Or maybe I felt shocked by the movie “Ides of March” with George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, where everybody who twists the truth achieves greatness and the ones who act like gentlemen get nothing, and worse. Then I might bring up how appropriate the name of that movie is, and then go into the details of what exactly happened on the real Ides of March, one of history’s most fateful days.

If you’re reading this and you’re not directly related to me, thank you. If you are related to me, great. I can’t wait to see you at New Year’s, where you can remind me of any spelling errors I made. Either way, I hope you’re enjoying your first brownie. Eat on.