i think that it is worrisome that people care so much about sports and so little about the world around them. not that it is terrible to care about sports, just that if you have to make a choice, i think that the world should win out. in other news i heard someone use the term zero-sum game in a completely inappropriate sense, and i wanted to correct them but i am trying to be less pretentious so i didn't.
not eating meat is a lot easier than being nice to everyone. you would think that self control would extend to all aspects of life, but it seems that some types are different than others. i think that strengths we build, like the muscles in our body, are all much more differentiated than we suspect. the emotional strength to be faithful in a marriage is different from the strength to be faithful in the church is different from the strength to avoid certain mistakes.
13 years ago
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"It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift." ROger Angell, 1975 The New Yorker
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