Other sports

Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

My cup of tea

November 5, 2016 by 0 Comments

I’ve been in Romania almost a month and haven’t had a single cup of tea yet. Well actually that’s not quite true. I’ve had the odd herbal or fruit infusion, with ‘odd’ being the operative word, but not a single cup of NBT: normal bloody tea. But today I was in Auchan, a large French-owned supermarket, and I found a packet of Earl Grey with a picture of Big Ben on the box. Hooray! I haven’t had a cup yet because I haven’t been given access to the kitchen yet, but give it time. (I know, when in Romania and all that, but a cuppa is a fairly basic human need.)

The marketing manager at the “promising” language school asked me what I do in my spare time. I mentioned tennis. He said he played too, and added that he was “really good”. I said that in that case he’d probably thrash me. He then said that he was carrying some excess weight. Then he talked about learning English. “I didn’t learn much because the teachers were poor. I was the best in my class though, and always got ten out of ten of course.” He said Timișoara had much more to offer culturally than either Bucharest or Sibiu, and of course he was born in Timișoara. He described my Romanian as “very poor” before upgrading it to just “poor” on the evidence of about ten words in total. If you multiply his ego by about twenty you get…

Donald Trump. The US election is just four days away, and as I’ve said before, Trump could easily become president. Only it’s even more likely now. FiveThirtyEight are saying he has a 35% chance of victory. The odds and the map are changing all the time as new polls come in, and it feels more relevant to me than on previous occasions because I’ve actually been to America. (It’s 14 months since I was there. Campaigning had already begun. The whole process is a disgraceful waste of time and money.) I see both North Carolina and Florida have flipped from pale blue to pale pink in the last few minutes. Trump is still behind Clinton by about three points in the national polling average, but (1) that gap could close before Tuesday, (2) even if it doesn’t, there could be a modest polling error, and (3) he could conceivably lose the popular vote by a point or more and still win the election; the Electoral College favours him. So in other words, it’s on a knife-edge. I wonder if their estimation of Clinton’s chances – roughly two out of three – is a touch on the high side. If you’re 4-3 up in a set of tennis, you’ll win about two out of three times. (I’m assuming here that you have a 50:50 chance of winning each point whether serving or not – a reasonable assumption for me, but not for, say, a Wellington regional player, and certainly not for the marketing manager of that language school before he put on those extra kilos.) But imagine you’ve been 4-1 up and have lost the last two games. Momentum is against you; the trend is not your friend; your opponent, like Trump, has the wind in his sails. I think that’s the situation Clinton is in.
My cousin, who I met in upstate New York last year, is contemplating leaving the country if (in his words) the idiot wins.

The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years (!), and even then they almost let it get away. By all accounts Game 7 was one of the great baseball games and the Cubs’ win one of the great moments in baseball (maybe American sport in general, but my knowledge of the other three major American sports verges on non-existent).

The markets in Timișoara are fantastic (I’ll talk about them in another post) but the one in Oradea, near the fortress where I stayed, still wins.

Life :) - My big plan - Other sports

Shut that door!

August 9, 2016 by 0 Comments

Before I flew down south I emailed my boss asking for a year’s unpaid leave. Today I got the big NO and on balance I’m glad. My dad always says I should never shut doors, and normally I agree with him, but you know what, I really do want to shut the door on this long chapter of my life. I want to shut the door on nothing happening being the best thing that can happen. I want to shut the door on bluffing and guessing and prevaricating and procrastinating. I want to shut the door on getting through every day in pure survival mode. I want to slam the goddamn door on feeling that I’m a failure and being ashamed of who I am.

My boss would have been fine with the unpaid leave – he seems to like me for some reason – but senior management didn’t approve it. Really I haven’t been performing or looking like I fit in for some months and that’s why my leave wasn’t approved – they wouldn’t want me back. And heck, if I’m going to bloody Romania, I’m not exactly screaming that I want to be there. I’m trying to imagine how the conversation between my boss and his manager two levels above (grandboss? and therefore my great-grandboss?) actually went. Nothing like my boss told me it did, I’m sure.

Today was a shit of a day at work. I felt so depressed, just as I did for much of the long weekend in spite of the beautiful winter scenery and of course seeing my parents who are so good to me. I think I’ll need to take another day off work to knock some items off my to-do list. At least my English lesson tonight went well. I helped him with his CV and we talked about school. He lived in a village and didn’t receive any formal state education after the age of eight. His wife’s experience was quite different: she went to school into her teens and learnt some English.

This morning Natalie Rooney of Timaru won New Zealand’s first medal of these Olympics, a silver in one of the shooting events.

Life :) - Other sports

The Mendoza Line

July 30, 2016 by 0 Comments

Most of the time when you watch baseball it feels like nothing is happening. That’s because it’s hard to hit a baseball travelling at 90 mph or more. You haven’t got a plank to hit it with like you do in cricket, and unlike in cricket, when you do hit the ball (unless you hit it into foul territory but let’s not complicate things here), you have to run 90 feet to first base without being tagged or caught, either of which means you’re out. And if you rack up three strikes, which usually occur as a result of not hitting the ball, you’re out too. In short, due to the shape of the bat and the structure of the game, baseball is stacked heavily against the batter. An average Major League batter will get on base safely only about 26% of the time (this headline statistic in baseball is written as a decimal, .260, and pronounced “two-sixty”). Anything over .300 means you’re pretty handy with a bat in your hand; above .320 and you’re a superstar. Of course for somebody to outperform the overall average, someone else needs to underperform, and someone who did consistently underperform went by the name of Mario Mendoza. The bespectacled Mendoza was an effective defensive player in the late seventies but not too great with the bat. For a few seasons his average hovered around the .200 mark, and when some wag said to another player in the midst of a form slump, “you’ll be sinking below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful”, the name caught on. The Mendoza Line was (and still is) the threshold separating the mediocre batters from the truly awful. The other significance of the line is that once you drop below it you’re so bad at batting that the rest of your game can’t possibly make up for it. Mendoza finished his career with a .215 average but by that stage the name, meaning a .200 average, had stuck.

The term Mendoza Line is still used in the US, in baseball and in other contexts, such as politics and box-office takings. It can come into play even when there’s isn’t a number involved. When I recently read about the term I thought about my work history. In my insurance work, some of my colleagues weren’t all that nice, and failure to connect with them was in some ways understandable and acceptable. In my current job the people are much more pleasant, yet I still can’t build connections in a way that will help me progress there. If I can’t manage it in this job, I’ll probably never manage it in any team environment anywhere. I’ve now dipped below the line which I’ve spent so much time trying to stay above. It’s about time I put my bat away and played something else.

I should say that I do get on with my work colleagues, at least those in my immediate vicinity, just as I get on with most people. That’s a big part of how I’ve managed to get jobs and not get fired. But building a relationship is something rather different. (I’d say I did build a relationship with the woman I met in Auckland recently. Her and maybe my current carpool mate, and that’s it.)

Yesterday I saw a Pokémon figure in the shape of a pig on my colleague’s phone. I asked if it was a Porkemon. I also had my last performance review with the company. Maybe it was my last anywhere.

Life :) - Other sports

It’s not just me

May 3, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Sunday my flatmate invited me to see The Big Lebowski at one of his Meetup groups. I went along purely to see the film – I had no interest in dressing up in a Jeff Lebowski bathrobe or doing anything remotely social. I’m not sure the film quite deserves its cult status but it’s clever in many ways and is certainly worth seeing. But afterwards people discussed the movie (I just wanted to go home) and my flatmate became political and controversial and strident, as he does, and then I realised something. Look at their faces. You’re pissing other people off here. It’s not just me.

I’d come to just about tolerate my flatmate, mainly because he said he’d be out by the end of May. Without that light at the end of the tunnel, it’s likely I’d be in a pretty bad way by now. But at the weekend I thought, shit, I’ve had enough of this. I really want you out of the picture. And what if you decide not to leave?

And that’s exactly the problem. He’s always in the picture, front and centre, commentating on and making his opinions known about just about everything he sees and does, and wanting to involve me in the process. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would find this tiresome.

Then yesterday something happened. Someone in Liberia had offered him a job. He was booking his flights to New York where he’ll spend a month before going to Africa. He commentated on the online booking process for a good half-hour – “no I don’t want to book a luxury hotel”, “why on earth would I want to buy travel insurance from you?” and so on and so forth. His commentary was music to my ears. He leaves the country on 8th June and will move out, I hope, two weeks earlier. Then I can get on with my life again.

Yes, Leicester City really are the Premier League champions. That’s just staggering. The upper reaches of British football are so money-driven, and such a closed shop, that something like this is pure fantasy. But it’s real and I have no idea how. The format of the Premier League makes it extremely hard to fluke. Any of football’s cup competitions are flukeable. A baseball World Series certainly is. Even a grand slam in tennis is flukeable to a degree. But the Premier League? Leicester must actually have been very very good. How they got to be so good with such limited resources is a happy mystery.

Talking of baseball, the Red Sox have won seven of their last eight games including a three-game sweep of the Yankees and have a narrow lead at the top of their division, but there’s an awful long way to go. Gosh I’d love to go back to Fenway some time – that was awesome.