Man asks me how long I have been blogging for and I say if it is the electronic kind you can go back 17 years, unless that includes the electronic mail kind too.
He asks what I mean and I say there might be people out there who got longer emails from me for closer to 19 years or so…maybe.
“What is the difference?”
“I am not sure how to quantify it, I’d have to think about it.”
“Give me your first thought.”
“It took a while to find my rhythm.”
There is a pause followed by a question regarding how many readers I have.
“I am not certain, I can make a guess. Most don’t know me and those who do don’t seem to have any interest. It is ok, I haven’t ever encouraged them to. I suppose if you live with me you feel like you know all you care to know. Or maybe it is need, not sure. Don’t really think about it.”
Sometimes I wonder what happens if all we had were words.
What happens six or seven generations from now when I am gone and all who knew me are too.
Will these words still be around in some form for someone to read and will they provide much insight into who I am or give off the essence of what I once was.
Sometimes I want them too but most of the time it doesn’t bother me much because I have bigger challenges and concerns to focus upon.
So the commentary here is still a way for me to clear my head, clarify and organize my thoughts.
A way to communicate some ideas that I think might be useful and or important to myself and others.
There are some people in circles I travel complaining about trans people competing in sports.
They don’t think it is fair for someone transitioning from man to woman to play against other women because they think they have an unfair advantage.
I understand their point but lean towards not being bothered by it because nature doesn’t play fair.
Men like Shaquille O’Neal and Yao Ming come to mind. They are enormous and more than a few found it incredibly difficult to play against them.
I can point out other examples, but what really jumps out at me is something Malcom Gladwell wrote about in Outliers.
He wrote about the advantages of hockey players born earlier in the year. Take a look at this excerpt from an interview he did with ESPN.
The first chapter in “Outliers” is about how some Canadian hockey players born in the first months of the year enjoy advantages that those born later in the year don’t have. You also write that birth month correlates closely with success in other sports. Why is this?
It’s a beautiful example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Canada, the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey programs is Jan. 1. Canada also takes hockey really seriously, so coaches start streaming the best hockey players into elite programs, where they practice more and play more games and get better coaching, as early as 8 or 9. But who tends to be the “best” player at age 8 or 8? The oldest, of course — the kids born nearest the cut-off date, who can be as much as almost a year older than kids born at the other end of the cut-off date. When you are 8 years old, 10 or 11 extra months of maturity means a lot.
So those kids get special attention. That’s why there are more players in the NHL born in January and February and March than any other months. You see the same pattern, to an even more extreme degree, in soccer in Europe and baseball here in the U.S. It’s one of those bizarre, little-remarked-upon facts of professional sports. They’re biased against kids with the wrong birthday.
I know stories about kids here in the US who were held back a year by their parents for the same reason.
When you are young that age difference often translates into size and maturity. It may give you extra playing time that leads to more time to work on your craft and to do so with coaching.
In addition to that you can integrate questions about what happens when kids get access to private training and better equipment. They are getting it to gain an advantage.
So when people talk about what is fair with allowing trans people compete with their chosen sex I am not sure I can fully buy into the idea of fairness.
None of that takes into account skill, which is a whole different conversation.
Bottom line to me is this isn’t as simple a discussion as some would like it to be.
Epilogue
There is a crazy sort of energy in the air and I can’t decide if some of it is tied into knowing I am getting my second shot tomorrow.
I am anxious to get it done and feel like I have some more protection against Covid19. Not going to lie, I have never believed it would kill me but never felt a need to find out.
Never wanted to learn if I would be a long hauler or discover I was very wrong about it. There is no medal, need or reward.
I just want to find out if it is going to knock me for a loop and get past the craziness caused by my dislike of being stuck in a line of cars I can’t get out of during.
That is because it is an early morning appointment and I am slow in the morning. So I am doing the mature thing and waking up two hours early so I have time to get things settled.
Most likely things will be easy and simple, but there are moments like last weekend in which aliens tried to crawl out of my belly.
That was fun.
Anyhoo, it is time to end this post and take care of words that need to be placed elsewhere.
