El segundo???

Well, it's been...a year? Not quite, but close. I'm doing a load of laundry at my dad's in the lower hours of the ante meridiem and watching the Arsenal-Barcelona Champions League fixture on DVR. I know the result. As a dedicated Arsenal fan, I suppose I should watch. We draw. 2-2. Barcelona has two away goals. Arshavin, Fabregas, and Gallas are done for the season with injury? I haven't checked the Twitter feed in awhile, but @arsenalmania and @arseblog and @BBCarsenal and others usually keep me well informed as to the goings on in and out of Emirates. Arsenal is the only team in any sport that I actively support, so anything that happens with them is a pretty big deal for me. Why do I support Arsenal? The Arsenal Way. Victoria Concordia Crescit. Victory Through Harmony. They play the best football. As a footballer myself, they are my dream team. If I were a couple of inches taller and had more of a drive, they would have been the team I aspired to play for. While he doesn't always make the best decisions, Arsene Wenger is a quality manager, and the team as a whole (for the most part) stays out of tabloid drama. Plus, the club has been run so that it is not hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. There exists a focus on player development, not to buy superstar after superstar a la Manchester City or Real Madrid. I could go on. So I will watch this game, and I'll probably feel sad and disappointed but at the same time slightly elated that we overcome a 2-0 deficit to tie the best team in the world? Who knows.

I have a small-but-developing crush on a girl. She studies French, so I see her quite frequently in the Foreign Languages building. She's beautiful. I've daydreamed about us traveling around Europe together before settling down and having awesome kids who are open-minded and list reading as a hobby on their Facebook pages, and then I come back to Realityland and remember that she's just 19. Too young for me, most likely. We'll see. I followed her out of the building today and insisted that we get lunch sometime. Perhaps I should have asked. If it goes well, I'll ask her on a real date. If nothing else, she's a wonderful girl, a good kind of girl for a friend, as well. And the award for the Least Heterosexual Statement of All Time goes to me.

I have all but quit talking to another girl who, for a long while, starred prominently in the narrative of my life. Perhaps I put her up on a higher pedestal than she deserves. I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that she has been dating a dude way below her (the dude, of course, holds himself in a much higher regard than he should). She spends so much free time watching television. And not even good television. It's just a waste. And she uses dudes. I've been used. I sound bitter, and maybe I am. But I just don't have much to say to her these days. I don't care to see her if she's in town. Perhaps that's crass, insensitive. I don't know. I'm going to do what works for me, and this has been working for me.

I will graduate with a degree in Spanish in May. I have no direction for the future. I do a lot of things I love--coaching soccer, reading, not much else--and I'm not sure what I am going to do to earn a steady income. If there were some way I could stay in my apartment and read all day before going out to the HS soccer field or the UC soccer complex...but sadly, that is not reality. Maybe I can find a third-shift job sitting behind a counter so i can read those John Williams novels, finish the Pynchon oeuvre, work through the novels of Charles Dickens, continue my acquisition of Spanish through the reading of Spanish-language novels...that would be ideal, I guess. We'll see what comes up this summer. Maybe I can make oodles of money teaching kids how to perform various footskills pertaining to soccer. I plan on calling in all of my favors for odd jobs (or perhaps even permanent jobs?). Once school starts back in the late summer, I'll substitute teach. That's $50 per day. I can do that. Granted, I'll need to substitute at least three days per week for it to be worthwhile; otherwise, I'll almost definitely have to find a real job, and probably one in retail or service. Blah blah blah. The memories of the hours and days and weeks and months slaved over frozen packages of broccoli and Marie Callendar's Fettucine Alfredo dinner entree that gives one's excrement a green coloration...not exactly fantastic. I recently read Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. An absolutely devastating novel. Characterizations of wretchedness. I can't recall much of the concept of "good" in the novel. It kind of reminded me of a combination of The Quiet American (which is frequently referenced in the novel) and The Things They Carried. Both novels shook me to the core, and Tree of Smoke ranks up there with them. Is war and its effects a growing current in contemporary literature? If so, I'm down. Next up (for pleasure, that is) are several more novels that pertain to war, most notably The Kindly Ones.

Well, I suppose that's it. I don't have anything more to write. Arsenal have survived a ridiculous first half onslaught from the Barcelona front line of Zlatan and Lionel. Maybe they can pull out a victory. Oh wait. Well, perhaps--especially if I find a job that puts me behind the counter in a hotel--I will update this thing with greater regularity. The catch is that I must write 1000+ words each time out. I'm there, probably as of this sentence, but I'm going to write just a little bit more just to make sure. Filler. Whatever works, right? And that does it. Next time.