9.15.2001


In late October and early November, I told my friends and family that I was planning on staying ignorant of the results of the national presidential election. I was not going to watch any television or listen to the radio. I would avert my eyes when walking near newsstands. My plan was to answer the phone and say, "Hello. I don't know who won the election. Please don't tell me." The plan lasted about half a day. On the morning after the election, I talked to someone and said that I didn't know who had won. He said, "Me neither." I got curious and that was the end of that.

I wanted to see how jarring it was to intentionally ignore something that everyone else was focused on. I wanted to see if, through sheer force of will, I could change the reality of the world.

This week, I've been thinking about that again. One of the qualities of this terror (not, by any stretch of the imagination, the most terrible) is its intrusiveness. I feel like I've reached the point at which I can take no more and it's startling to realize that I have no place to turn -- no refuge from the horror. I'm not sure if this inability to escape the news is good or bad, or, like most of the qualities of human experience, a little of both. Last night, though, while I was driving home at midnight, listening to the same cassette for the fifteenth straight time, a group of twenty or thirty people stood on the corner with candles lit, waving to the cars passing by. I don't know if our inability to escape the reality of the world is good or bad, but, for the first time in a while, I was happy for the intrusion.
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9.11.2001



Two weeks ago.
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9.8.2001


I went to my final Red Sox game of the year last week. The Red Sox have had a frustrating season -- they were expected (given their postseason acquisition of Manny Ramirez and the fact that it was supposed to be the last year under the Yawkey trust ownership) to make a push for the World Series. I don't want to go into any detail about the myriad ways the Red Sox failed this year (because I will want to cry), but it was/is a depressing season for Boston baseball fans.

The tickets I had gotten for this game were in the right field roof boxes, somewhere I hadn't sat before. The roof boxes give you a different view of the stadium than anywhere else. You get a panoramic view that you don't get from any of the other seats. The best part for me was that you can really see into the bullpens. You can see the pitchers stirring around -- we watched Cleveland's John Rocker go through his insanely enthusiastic warmup routine.

I don't know the significance of this, but they cut the grass differently in the two bullpens. The visiting bullpen grass is cut in S-shaped runs (see right), while the Red Sox bullpen is cut straight. I wonder if this is part of a subversive attempt to mess with the visitor's relief pitchers' minds.
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9.5.2001


A couple of nights ago, I heard Monty Hall give an interview on some late night syndicated sports (don't ask me why) talk radio show. Hall said that on Let's Make a Deal, the contestants who won the crappy prizes (goats or an outhouse or a plastic kid's wading pool - what were they called? Zoinks or something?) were not really given the crappy prize. They were offered an exchange backstage for something "nicer" like a color television. Is nothing sacred?

The Monty Hall Problem.
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mark@markand.com
aim: mdanderson45