Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Section 138 in the news again!

Section 138 makes the news

So, no one wanted to buy my Giants tickets... or flaked on buying the tickets...
but what happens... I miss one of the most memorable Friday night games ever... just look at my previous entry... I almost never miss these games...

albeit, i missed the game for an important reason... everyone... give their shout outs to the birthday girl Mary Anne, my bro's fiancee... also, the other half of the quarter ton battery combo of which I am one half as the pitcher... my partner/cousin, Macho Marlon is the catcher and it was his birthday also and he was at the game...

if you didn't see the news... my home in the bleachers went bezerk when Bonds was ejected on a horrible call strike by the umpire...

and my second home family members felt justified in demonstrating their displeasure by filling the outfield with litter from the bleachers... now, i don't advocate tossing things that can injure people, but if i were there, I wouldn't have stopped anyone from doing it because I would be just as pissed...

there was an 11 minute delay,,, the Rockies were called off the field for their safety...

now, I didn't know any of this was going on because i was in the East Bay and all I really heard was the radio host say that if you were at the game... you would never forget tonight, for it was one of the most memorable moments at AT&T Park...

it felt like that scene from Fever Pitch when Jimmy Fallon gets the call from his friend that he missed the greatest Red Sox comeback in recent memory...

I seem to always miss some of the best 138 moments...
the infamous moment when my brother carried away by paramedics.... (because I was chaperoning the farewell dance)

Moises Alou's 300th career homerun that landed in the seat in front of me... (but I was interviewing students to be in leadership during spring break this year...)

and this....
fortunately, I made the more significant moments like the Bonds homers, and world series, and the other more personal moments of 138 amongst the family...


here's a recent article in the Chronicle... that discusses the attitude that apparently until now was unbeknownst to its writer Ray Ratto, but that I breathe everyday i'm out there in the bleachers...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/06/SPGUIKC3U31.DTL&hw=ratto&sn=001&sc=1000


seriously, why aren't more of you joining me out there for one of the best interactive moments in san francisco... if you're visiting our city... your visit is incomplete without paying a visit to the bleachers where you can recapture that candlestick spirit...


Finally! sacrifice for the greater good

Finally: the softball episode

Softball & varicose veins edition

A few people have been wondering what the hell are these varicose veins of which I speak. Let’s begin with some memories… I was 8 years old when I noticed an area of my right leg began to feel soft where my calf muscle should be. As the next four years ensued, the soft tissue area grew to look like I was turning into a plant/animal hybrid as a bunch of grapes began to poke through my calf. My brother likened it more to a snake slithering up or down my right leg. I began 8th grade (one of the worst years of my life) having to wear a white stocking on my leg. It did wonders for my social life. By the time I transferred to El Camino my sophomore year, I had to get custom made flesh toned stockings. I learned the important skills of having to stop runs in a stocking and shaving my legs (by that was also for tape jobs when I played football), although the hair on the left leg grows, whereas the right one doesn’t. I had surgery the summer before my senior but I still had to wear special pads to protect my leg, so try to imagine the ribbing a football player gets in a locker room when he had to slip on his stocking.


For those of you more scientifically-minded… the diagram to the left here explains why my leg looks so gross/sexy. The stocking compresses the veins so that the blood doesn’t pool back so much.



So why am I discussing this again….

Sometime in mid-July, our softball team, the Lil’ Giants, played in a semi-final playoff game. During 4 of the past 5 seasons we have finished 2nd--which sucks, especially because the last time my brother was horribly scarred and a teammate's father passed away during the game (the friend was with his family and not playing, some things are more important than softball... 138! 138!). We began the game determined not to lose again. Yet, the curse of the Padilla brothers befell me this time.

The plan going into the game was for me to be the starting pitcher for the first 4 innings and rotate Lance in to be the closer, since our styles contrast greatly it tends to confuse the hitters. Pitching is something that most teams appear to not concentrate on. Lance is talented with his variety of pitchers. I am getting better... enough to have started most of this season (Lance, of course, was playing with a bad shoulder suffered from the championship games months earlier).

I walk the leadoff man... which sucks. The second batter popped out. I had the third batter or he had me at a 3-1. He took the next pitch on the inside corner and was shocked and he glared back and I smiled wickedly. Next pitch, he lines hard right into my varicose veins. The ball deflects to 3rd base, which I try to run after, but my leg swells twice the size immediately and I collapse to the ground. I lay there for a couple of minutes and I am helped off the field. Lance asks me if I was hit where he thinks he saw it and I painfully shake my head and hiss out a YES!

For the rest of the game I'm laying on the bleachers with my leg elevated. Fortunately the wonderful fans of our softball team took care of me by getting me ice, checking the injury, allowing me to lean on them, etc. The sight was rather bleak and everyone considered sending me to the emergency but me, but I can't leave my team during a playoff game, which we fortunately won... Lance picked me up by pitching like he usually does and holding the other team down, but it was a close hard fought game.

But I didn't watch it, I heard the game and I had to deal with this...


My leg is already grotesque in the romantic sense, but this just added a whole new level of pain.

This had happened previously to me when i was 16 and I was playing a pick up football game in a park and that time I did have to go to the hospital. And this did lead to me having surgery a year later.





Now keep in mind the sight you see was unknown to my teammates, because they needed to focus on the championship game and they didn't need to worry about me. However, Lance strained his back in the second inning of the game and he left the dugout to ask me if I was well enough to go back into the game and that's when he saw the leg and realized I would be useless to him. He sucked it up but did give up 11 runs. He wasn't able to finish off his pitches like he usually did because his back was killing him.

But my team wasn't going to go down without a fight... (a couple seasons earlier we lost a championship after having a 10 run lead with 2 innings to go---some of you might remember it from earlier blogs regarding softball redemption)

We put a rally together and came back to win 18-13 in the final 3 innings. It was a wonderful moment to see out of the corner of my eye the team come together near second base and celebrate the long sought reward after 6 years of softball in the south city then daly city league. Oddly, we won the D-8 championship after always falling short in D-9, which is supposedly an easier league.




Here's the first team pic, I was able to get there briefly...










here's the next pic with the 11th man in the stands along with mascots...

i was in too much pain to stand for this picture... it sucked to not really be part of the celebrating, but i knew i helped all i could to get our team there...

and if you check out our season stats... you'll see Lance and I gave up less runs by far than any other team... unfortunately they don't keep pitching stats and the batting stats are way off... i actually batted .400 (not according to the scorekeepers, though) http://www.bayareastats.com/aDaly/damd8leg.htm
if you click on our team Lil Giants, you'll see the individual stats of those on the team...




here is the trophy and the game ball signed by everyone... we celebrated afterwards at Friday's... and I was stupid enough to go, but I wanted to feel like part of the team so to hell with some extra pain...









you'll notice on the list of top friends on myspace.com/psychoverse that the first couple people are affiliated with the team...


here's the leg two weeks later... the actual spot on the leg where i was hit didn't turn purple into 3 weeks in...

i finally went to the doctor and the swelling is no longer as severe but I do have a pocket of blood that apparently likes to live where it is and it may need to be drained...

it's been a month and the leg is almost normal... i hope to return to our new softball season on Aug. 20 after our bye on the 13th...

daly city bumped us up another division and we've lost our first three games this season but we still plan to take it all again...

unfortunately, chris paras tore his achilles' tendon in game 1

more sad news... the new school year starts in 15 days for me...

next episode: the ASB reunion/networking bash that was held just last Saturday...

Friday, August 04, 2006

Pop Culture Overdose

So what do I do when the Giants have a night off and I'm supposedly working on a slideshow for Saturday night's gathering... I procrastinate with some guilty pleasures...

television being the main culprit... i haven't really had to explore my junk tv options this summer; however, i think i made up for it today and i loved every guilty pleasureable moment

the night begins with Who Wants to be a Superhero on the Sci-Fi Channel... if you grew up on comics this show is perfect for you... Stan Lee hosts the show and puts contestants through a variety of activities to judge their character and to determine if the integrity is worthy of being immortalized in a Stan Lee comic... tonight was the second episode and i must confess i caught the first episode as a freebie on itunes... damn itunes... the show just makes me laugh as contestants race to a site, fend off attack dogs, overcome a mole, and get a costume make-over...

then the night degrades further as i can't help but watch VH1's world series of pop culture-the championship round... i think i probably got about 75% of the questions right... what i really learned from tonight's show... remember academy and country music award nominees and winners... I am oddly pleased with how much junk trivia is in my head...

11pm... news break and Jay Leno monologue (Letterman was a repeat)

midnight- TLC airs 101 Strange Things Removed from the Human Body... it's captivating... you see some of the inspiration for Grey's Anatomy when you see the two real-life people who were trapped together when they were both pierced with a pole, a man whose uterus was removed, a maggot inside someone's head, and an industrial bit that bore through an eye socket... oh yeah, and the motor home that went through a policeman's chest... thankfully he was wearing a bullet proof vest to deflect the wooden shrapnel and aluminum ciding away from his heart...

1 am - 3 am
oh my god... i'm back to VH1... the top 40 most awesomely bad love songs... i just love list shows... i can't get enough of them... they're playing all these really infamous slow jams that are all really irresistible... then suddenly the commentators talk about what is really being said in the lyrics and it really makes you think what's being said...

example Survivor's "The Search is Over" discusses a man who's slept with every woman practically and it turns out the love is life has been near him all along... really makes her feel good as she pines at the moon every night waiting for his realization...

other songs
"You're the Inspiration" by Chicago
"Eternal Flame" by the Bangles
"Joanna" by Kool & the Gang
"God Must Have Spent A Little More Time on You" (is that right?)
"All My Life" K-ci & Jo-Jo
"Get Here" by Oleta Adams
"Heaven" by Warrant
"This I Promise You" N'Sync
"Rosanna" by Toto (based on Rosanna Arquette)
"I Get Weak" by Belinda Carlisle
"When I See You Smile" by Bad English
forthcoming Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, Rod Stewart, Bryan Adams...

well, you should get the idea
and those are only the songs on the bottom half of the list...
time for me to go watch the top 20


What are your summer guilty pleasures?

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

I don't get the French?!?

So most of you should know all about the French soccer superstar Zidane who performed the head butt in a crucial moment of the World Cup Championship during overtime.

Well, the incident has no become so inFamous that two producers wrote a song about and it's topping the charts in the non-American world...

i just don't get it...

here's a link to the article:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13830268/

and the song itself (which is about to be re-recorded in many languages)...
just look at how soccer affects our lives

http://www.downloadtaxi.com/d/1154064455/

this seriously scares me...