I swore that I would never play again after I quit. With good reason, I’d say. The year I played World of Warcraft religiously I hung out less with friends, saw my personal life take a hit, and received some of the worst grades of my undergraduate career.

People who really know me know that obsessing over a video game isn’t exactly odd behavior for me. I play an astounding number of hours of video games each year, but this was past that line. We’re talking canceling social engagements to make a raid or just not leaving my room for anything but meals all weekend. Clearly not healthy behavior.

Then the unspeakable happened: Bioware announced that they would be continuing their Old Republic franchise in an MMO form. My moratorium was in serious jeopardy. I love Bioware games and I was particularly fond of the Old Republic stuff too. The ban would have to be lifted.

Of course I couldn’t just dive in. Rules have to be observed. When it came down to it, the biggest one that I was forcing myself to follow was to never let the game get in the way of my social life. That means no canceling dates or hanging out with friends in favor of playing the game. It sounds obvious, but I didn’t manage it before.

So far I’ve been doing pretty well with TOR. It’s nothing at all like WoW. I did start getting into work and going to bed later, but I’ve yet to cancel any social engagements and I’ve been actively keeping up with my friends and family. I kept myself from overcommitting by joining a chill guild that has a pretty loose raid schedule. So far we’ve made good progress in the game without too much drama at all. Overall, it’s been a much more pleasant experience than playing WoW was.

A lot changes in two years. Back in 2009 I went up to NYC with Min and Duffy to catch the Cornell vs. BU ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden. It was a lot of fun and it was taking place only a year after we graduated.

Funny thing about school is that people cycle out. Every four years, on average, the slate is wiped clean. 2011 was the year Cornell was officially emptied for me. The last friend I knew on campus had graduated in May, which means that my reasons for being at the school, reunions aside, have all but disappeared.

Every year after graduation means another year of drifting apart from the relationships that were so crucial and big in my life during undergrad. I keep close with a few important ones, but you can’t argue with the drift of time. People who graduated and went to the same city I did aren’t there any more. People who did are now functionally too far away to see frequently. For someone who moved around a lot as a kid like I did, this feels like a natural attrition rate, but I still wish my close friends lived closer.

It felt like everyone I knew was at that MSG game in 2009 and like we made a bigger effort to rendezvous. I know that, numerically, the numbers were probably about the same in 2011 (a lot of people from undergrad live in/around NYC, so it’s not really a trip for them), but the game was far less of a foregone conclusion to me this year. I think I’ll probably go again in 2013, but it’ll be one of those things I have to think about, you know? It’ll probably be the same way with class reunions. Five years is next year. I bet that’s the biggest turnout 2008 gets (ten years might be bigger because of our obsession with powers of 10, but I’m hedging my bets on five) because Cornell gets smaller and smaller in our memories the longer we’re away from it.

That’s what I cherished so much about going to the game this year. I got to see my favorite people from undergrad once again. Sure, I also got to see some I didn’t like and it also felt far too short, but these moments will never be this easy as the years keep marching on.

Last year I know I freaked out a bit about stagnating, but I ultimately think I wasn’t ready to mature or be older. I mean, I can’t say that I’m there yet, but I think I may be getting a chance to be halfway there. It won’t be much longer before I’m an uncle. That’s crazy.

Was I expecting to learn that my brother was having a kid back in October? No way. I mean, the invitation was a little weird and out of character, but I wasn’t expecting that kind of bombshell to be dropped on me.

I use bombshell as a descriptor, but we all know that the extent to which this will actively affect my life will not necessarily be huge. I’m not personally responsible for a new life, my brother and sister-in-law are. It’s just….crazy. I mean, I know my brother is three years older than me and we’re both closer to 30 than we are to 20, but still! He’s a guy I remember at age eight!

When you think about it, it’s kind of weird that I think of this as a huge event. I’ve got plenty of cousins with kids. The oldest of them are older than my youngest siblings, so I’ve had a long time to be used to people of my generation having kids, but this is my brother, man.

I also find that my sense of responsibility is much greater than it was when I was in undergrad. I mean, maybe it has to do with being older or maybe it has to do with occasionally caring for my younger siblings, but I have no fears about taking care of young kids. Just six years ago I would have been paralyzed with fear that a kid would choke on something or I’d drop her or something like that. Now it feels like it’s not a big deal at all.

The other thing I’ve learned, mostly from Eric, is how exciting and scary the prospect of parenthood is. I’ve seen his emotions range on the spectrum of ecstatic to terrified and that makes a lot of sense. His life is about to change tremendously and I have a lot of respect for him and Danielle for taking on what amounts one of the most important roles, on an individual level, for people.

There’s a long way to go before the kid is up and walking around and talking, but how mind blowing is it that something that started as two cells merged together is gonna have a personality and a voice and she’s gonna call me “Tio”. Bizarre.

(Photo courtesy DJOtaku)

Growing up in Florida made me privy to, on average, at least one tropical storm or mild hurricane each year. We never lived on the beach, but we lived through some pretty serious hurricanes. Andrew, for example, absolutely destroyed parts of Miami that were a mere 20 miles south of us. We lost power for a week or so after that hurricane. Hurricanes aren’t jokes, but living through some pretty devastating ones has left me with a cavalier attitude toward them.

The eastern seaboard was absolutely flipping out about Hurricane Irene before it made landfall. Look, I get that a few people died and there was a lot of property damage and power was lost, etc., but my mind was blown at how worried people were. I mean, this was a hurricane that was powerful in the south, but there was almost no chance of it reaching the colder northern waters at anything higher than CAT 1, right?

In the end it was just a tropical storm far offshore when Baltimore experienced its fury. This hurricane was forecast to be the apocalyptic end of New York City by the newsmedia and I knew they were being sensationalist, but all the repetition and fear and mania started to convince me that, well, maybe something catastrophic might happen. This is going to lead to a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” type catastrophe in this country. I just know it. As a result of these frequent misjudgments of weather and natural disasters many people I know, including myself, now take everything the news says with a grain of salt. Maybe one day the big one will come ashore up north, but no one is going to care.

As a small aside to the hurricane business above, this was also the month an earthquake hit DC and forced the evacuation of the building I work at. I was in my car driving back to the office when the quake hit and, I’ve gotta say, I was pretty disappointed I didn’t even feel or notice it. Florida’s not really seismically active (on a scale people would feel), so I didn’t get to experience any as a child, and I missed my big chance to feel a non-threatening earthquake out east yet again! Earthquakes sound terrifying, but I just want to experience one, you know?

The devastation Hurricane Irene caused at my brother's house (Photo courtesy DJOtaku)

When your favorite baseball team is in its final year of its current incarnation and ready to change its name, stadium, logo, and identity, you want to pay attention. When they’re the dark horse contender for the wild card in the pre-season, it thrills you to your core. Then June happens.

For a little more background, the Florida Marlins were holding a strong second place in the NL East going into June. That’s about two months into the season, or about a third of the way done, and things were looking good. Then disaster struck.

The first of June was the beginning of an eight game losing streak to start the month. Seven of those losses were by one run. Over the entire month of June, a month containing 28 games, the Marlins only managed to win five.

Five.

They dropped from a competitive second place to fifth, last in the division. Their manager retired and they dug up an ancient fossil to lead the team. Nothing. The season was essentially over. They were able to pull up to fourth place for a short spell, but they quickly lapsed back into last place for the last ⅔ of the season.

It killed the season for me. I entered the 2011 baseball season with high hopes, savagely devouring all kinds of baseball information through the off-season to prep for the 162-game marathon and I was maintaining that interest all the way to June. It’s not like I stopped paying attention to baseball, but I wasn’t able to muster the same enthusiasm. I still enjoyed watching the games, but I no longer looked forward to catching them each night.

Maybe that means I’m not a real fan, but it wasn’t easy to swallow the bitter pill of the 2011 season. I didn’t want the Florida Marlins to enter their off-season cocoon on such a down note. This is a team that I love and, although the spirit of the team remains and I’m firmly in the Miami Marlins camp, I know that it’ll never be the same. They have new colors, new uniforms, and new swag, but that came at the cost of being the scrappy underdogs. No one likes the Miami Heat. Will everyone hate the new-look Marlins? I mean, it’s not like we had much of an identity before. It was more of a, “Oh yeah, the Marlins are in the NL East too, huh,” kind of vibe for a long time (aside from the aberrant 1997 and 2003 seasons where we kicked ass). Now things aren’t the same and I didn’t get to love them on their way out.

I think that’s for the best. Despite my nostalgia and love, I’m ready to see that old team reborn into something new. I’m tired of being a fan of the laughing stock of baseball. Considering the population in the area, Miami should have an interesting, successful baseball team. Let’s hope the new year brings legitimacy and success for the Fish.

Hanley Ramirez, our former short stop and soon-to-be 3rd baseman

I’m gonna cheat and combine events from July and May for this entry into the Fukubukuro because I want to talk about my first real run-ins with crime. For those who don’t know, May was the month my house was broken into and burglarized and July was the month my car window was smashed in and GPS was stolen. On their own those are pretty horrible events with financial impact. I had to change locks and replace stolen/damaged property. It also cost me time talking to the police and various administrators to suspend accounts and it caused a lot of frustration due to the incompetence of the Baltimore Police Department.

I mean, let’s be honest here: if someone steals an internet-ready device and uses it on the internet, their location should be forfeit, right? Yet the Baltimore Police Department, in its infinite wisdom, can’t be bothered to subpoena an ISP to find out where the device was used. They are beyond useless, difficult to get a hold of, and unnecessarily condescending considering their atrocious reputation and pathetic inability to solve and/or stop crimes.

Phew, ok, I need to cool down. Talking about how useless the Baltimore Police Department is gets me all riled up. More to the point, the real harm that was done to me when my house and car were broken into is all psychological. It’s all in having your personal space violated and your sense of security dashed. The night of the burglary I was sound asleep upstairs and my roommate was gone. I very nearly slept downstairs on the couch and I also very nearly invited Min over to hang out. Both could have been disastrous.

Losing stuff is just losing stuff. It sucks and it hurts the wallet, but the fact that I can’t sleep some nights when my roommate isn’t there (she wasn’t there during the B&E either) or that every time I walk out to my car I half expect the window to be smashed in is the real crime. It’s probably better for my safety that I’m hyper paranoid about checking locks and alarms before bed, but I shouldn’t have to feel that way.

Youth is all about indestructibility. When I was a kid I never broke a bone and I was never seriously ill. I guess Eric had a bike stolen once, but that didn’t really affect me because it happened in the backyard and everyone knows those things are exposed to whomever. As an adult these walls are crumbling. I’m more aware of the fragility of even a fit human body. I’ve suffered lasting injuries. My safe spaces aren’t necessarily safe. It reads like naïvety, but the truth is I’ve just always been really lucky. The trick now is to live more carefully, but without letting fear prevent me from doing things I want to do.

(Photo Courtesy DJOtaku)

It doesn’t get much worse than running into an ex unprepared. I’m being hyperbolic, of course, but it is easily one of my least favorite things. There’s always that awkward period of smalltalk and catching up to do and you’re always thinking, “Man, I wish I’d picked a better shirt to wear today.” I mean, ultimately it shouldn’t matter, right? Yet whenever I do I usually end up feeling dopey and kicking myself for not being cooler.

There’s no way I’m alone in this. I mean, everyone wants to look and be their coolest in front of people who can no longer have them. It’s pretty much human nature. “Look at the mistake you made. You could have had this.”

So it sucks when you’re at an early-season ballgame with your friends and you run into a girl you briefly dated, especially when she’s wearing that shirt that made you dig her in the first place AND your new girlfriend is absent. My brain just couldn’t wrap itself around not caring, so it bugged me for the rest of the game, heck, the rest of the week.

Then there’s the other kind of unexpected encounter. The kind where everything is planned out and no surprises are on the table, but you end up shocked at the end anyway. A good friend of mine that I was way into for something around three years (anyone who knows me well probably knows who this is) came home for spring break and, like always, we set up a time to hang out and catch up. Pretty routine stuff, except it was all different.

I’ve been in long relationships that took forever to get over and I’ve been in short, brief flings that burned bright and burned out, but the one weird thing about both for me is that they always seem to end the same way. One day she means a lot to me and I can’t stop thinking about her and the next…it’s like it never happened. It’s also the kind of thing that you can’t really judge until you’re around the person. I thought I was over it plenty a time until I saw her and realized I wasn’t.

This time it was different. I saw her and the rose-colored glasses were gone. Some of the little things I thought were cute before ceased to be. I didn’t have that sinking, weird feeling in my stomach. In a way it was sad, but it was also super liberating. I felt better about myself than I had in a long time. All I could think when I went to bed that night was, “I’m free.”

It wasn't on this day at Nats Park, but this is my favorite picture of the walk up to Nats Park.

Back in July or August of last year, during the last softball game of the season, I was chasing a ground ball just beyond my reach in right field. I overextended, lost my balance, and came crashing down on my left arm with all my momentum. I quickly propped myself back onto my feet with my left arm hanging rather limply, picked up the ball, and fired it as best I could into the infield. Nothing felt broken, but my arm was sore as hell. When I stepped up to the plate I could barely lift the bat to height, but, despite that, I was able to drop a ball down the middle and put a single in the scorebook. I thought nothing of the injury, figuring it would pass.

Summer, fall, winter…they all came and went and the arm never recovered. My left arm handled neither weight nor medium range of motion well. Softball season was approaching and I decided I would start conditioning myself a bit. I attempted to get some push-ups in, but I nearly broke my nose as my left arm gave out mid-push-up. I finally thought, “Well I guess I can’t avoid getting this looked at any longer…”

I don’t know if it’s a pride thing or a procrastination thing or what. I mean, I’m certainly not afraid of the doctor. I’m rarely sick and I actually enjoy being told about what may or may not be wrong with me so that I can proactively take care of it…except for my arm. There’s no way you can call anything about my process proactive.

Maybe my procrastination stems from never having sustained any kind of long term injury. I’ve never broken a bone nor have I ever gone to the hospital for anything short of the accident that resulted in the scar on my head. Nevertheless, I needed to do something about my arm.

As best they could tell, one of my muscles had tightened from the injury and my shoulder had steadily lost strength and range from disuse. I was prescribed physical therapy, which I was actually kind of excited about. Turns out that I was stoked for precisely the right reason. See, physical therapy, at least for an injury as minor as mine, is a lot like what I imagine having a personal trainer is like. Someone who knows what they’re doing writes up a workout plan for you and you carry it out, despite your discomfort. I quickly developed a rapport with my trainers and therapists and the two sessions per week became my favorite parts of my work routine.

I’m the kind of guy who likes to do things right if he’s gonna do them at all. Not having any real knowledge about exercise regimens, especially considering the wealth of conflicting information out there, is probably the biggest deterrent to me actually working out. The beauty of the PT regimen is that these guys ostensibly know what they’re doing and I get to cede that responsibility and just go with the flow.

My arm became much improved after just about three months of sessions. I don’t think I’ll ever have the natural, loose range of motion that my right arm has always enjoyed, but at least I can do everything I used to do before just as well, from catching a baseball to the butterfly stroke.

Ideally I'd be lifting more than this, but you get the idea. (Picture courtesy DJOtaku)

Is there any worse time to be a month into a relationship than February? Less time than that and you can both laugh it off as unimportant. I mean, you barely even know each other, amiright?! More time than that and you’ve already established some rhythms. You’re working more as a unit and you have some idea where this is going or if it’s gonna last.

Of course that completely discounts one very important fact about the relevant parties. Our birthdays are just under a year apart. 361 days, to be exact. What day is more important than your birthday? It’s far too early to know what the perfect birthday present might be. I stress out about that kind of thing enough with my friends and family, but this is much worse! Go too big or too wrong…

Do you know how hard it is to find a St. Valentine’s Day card that doesn’t have the word “love” written on it? I think I tore through the card section of at least three stores just to find the card that precisely expressed the not-insignificant, but not-too-overbearing degree of “love” I had for Tiffany. Snoopy and Woodstock saved my ass with their generally non-verbal exchanges.

All this pressure, but for what? Is it even worth talking about how unfair, arbitrary, and corporate St. Valentine’s Day is? I mean, the birthday thing, at least that’s somewhat meaningful, right?

Although you might not believe it based on the frequency of romantic failure mentioned on this site, I do actually know what I’m doing, so things went well through the entire month. We played it pretty cool by treating each other to birthday dinners and, for 14 Feb, a card, roses, and dinner. It felt right, but man was that an unfair way to start a relationship.

This always makes me chuckle (Picture courtesy mareodomo)

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before in this space, but I was not a frequent concert attendee prior to my undergraduate degree. It’s partly not living in a major hub in high school, part a disdain for live music that I have since lost, and part a sense of urgency as I feel myself aging.

A concert is a weird beast, really. I’ve probably attended more in 2011 alone than most people get around to in their entire lives. Don’t get me wrong, live music is still a huge thing, but I wonder if the ubiquity of Youtube and easy, pervasive access to music has dulled people’s enthusiasm for blowing out their eardrums in large, sweaty groups of people.

You may recall that I received some bad news at an Anamanaguchi concert back in March of 2010. This is a story of the rise and fall of The Concert Curse (cue spooky music).

See, two similar events are easily dismissible as a coincidence, but three? That’s hitting pattern territory. Eric touched upon it in the comments of my April Smith post in last year’s Fukubukuro. A superstitious man would stop going to concerts while dating. I was not a superstitious man in early January.

Anamanaguchi was, coincidentally, in town yet again. I’d been dating Danni for about a month and things seemed to be just peachy. She was super into me, but I guess I had glossed over the fact that she was just re-entering the dating game after a broken engagement the year before. Danni was cool and she dug video games and was receptive to chiptunes so we decided to hit up the Black Cat with David and Kendra and catch Anamanaguchi doing their thing.

Pete, Ary, Luke, and James delivered in a set that was much stronger than the one we caught at Sonar and the night was awesome. Everyone had fun. Everything seemed like it was fine. Two days later Danni broke up with me. She said she felt trapped and like she was in too deep. Meeting my little brother was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It made her freak that things were moving too fast and getting too serious. I jokingly blamed David, but he and I both knew that it was something more insidious: concerts

Of course this all turned out to be a blessing anyway. The end of my relationship with Danni opened me up to dating Tiffany, who things were going well with, except…two concerts were coming up within three days of each other with a date sandwiched in between. Could my budding relationship handle that kind of mojo?

I frantically laid out the impending crisis to my visiting friend Liana in a night that I rather embarrassingly spent lamenting the woes of my love life rather than enjoying hanging out with my friend. That very night we were at an embarrassing half-concert at a Cornell event, but the real deal was that coming Monday. Min and I were set to go to Philadelphia to see Jonathan Coulton. Surely the melancholic songwriter would curse my relationship and doom me to loneliness yet again!

No. Not this time. The curse was somehow lifted. Perhaps I had confused it by cramming three (really 2.5) concerts into one month and it had forgotten to ruin my relationship. Maybe there never was a curse. Sure, sometimes I get a small tingling at the back of my neck when I’m about to attend a show, but all I know is that I’m free.