Monday, November 9, 2009

Yankees Doodle Dandy

In the wake of the Yankees' stirring World Series championship,* a friend sent congratulations, tempered by his Yankees loathing: “Every year the Yanks don't win it is a victory for our national pastime in my opinion.”

Another confessed inner conflict, saying he really likes the team “except for A-Rod.”

Well. So it goes.

We Yankee fans are accustomed to such. Everybody needs a villain, it seems, and let’s face it, teams like the Padres, the Royals or those adorable loser Cubs just aren’t up to the role.

And so the Yankees go about their business of beating up teams at home in the Bronx, or traveling around the country and filling stadiums for other teams, and then beating them up.

“They’re buying championships!” critics cry. “The best team that money can buy!”

As if there’s something wrong with an owner trying to put the best team on the field. Besides, if money is the be-all, where are all those championships Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, Carl Pavano and Randy Johnson were supposed to bring? How about a little sympathy here for nine years without a ring?

“Steroids!” others shout. “Cheaters!”

Hey, the Yankees have been winning championships since the days when cigarettes and beer were their performance enhancers. Imagine what the Babe or Mickey could have done sober!

So, in the spirit of comity, let's give the Yankees their due for No. 27, move on to football season, and hate the team that really deserves it: the Patriots.




*Every Yankees' World Series championship is stirring. Every defeat is either gut-wrenching or heartbreaking (see Game 7, 2001).

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

A One, and a Two, and a ...

I count.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I’m important.” I mean, I count things. Actions. Stuff.

Not everything - that would be nuts. But a lot of things: stair steps, each skip of my jump rope, the number of pumps it takes to put air in my bicycle tires, the time it takes for my commuter train to arrive from the previous stop to mine.

I could tell you how many running strides I get to the minute, with a pretty fair degree of accuracy. On a driving trip, I could tell you how many miles I’d covered in the past hour, how that compared with the previous hour, and the overall average for the journey.

Research tells me this kind of behavior is consistent with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I find unsurprising. It can also apparently be a sign of depression, which I find depressing. But I can’t stop.

It is, after all, a compulsion. Like, say, repeatedly checking to see if you turned off the stove or iron. Which I also do.

And sometimes it’s useful. I count breaths when meditating, up to 12 and then starting over. Unfortunately, that also leads me to keep track of the number of cycles I’ve been through and to keep a running tally of how many more I have to go, which more or less defeats the purpose of meditation to begin with.

Still, as compulsions go, counting seems to be relatively benign. At least I’m not compulsively gambling away all my money, washing my hands 20 times an hour or rearranging my CDs and books so that they’ll be in alphabetical order.

Come to think of it, I wonder how many CDs and books I have...