MARINARA SAUCE

First of all, Twitter is lame. Blogger fer life. Actually, Twitter is kind of cool, just not my thing with . Second of all, there are some songs that summon this kind of sublime sad-happiness inside of me. It's a difficult feeling to describe; it kind of feels like spring, but saying goodbye to someone for a long time. Does that make any sense? One of these song's is De La Soul's "Eye Know."

BRAINTICKETS

Dudes... I want those Topsiders.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS A MASQUERADE

Doug Glanville, one of the most educated men to ever hit over .300 in a season, is a guest blogger for the New York Times whose musings I occasionally read during the season. Today, he offered a refreshingly empathetic take on the A-Rod steroid scandal. Glanville played with A-Rod for a season, actually shared the locker next to him, and he portrays A-Rod as a fundamentally solid dude who is also -- as any player in his magnitude of spotlight has the right to be -- monumentally self-conscious, constantly flummoxed by his inability to define the A-Rod narrative in the mind of the media and fans. A-Rod's a hard worker, but somewhere along the line he lost control of his image. Protests rage from the borderline homophobic -- lip gloss, really? -- to the frustrated boos Yankee fans shower down on him every time A-Rod strikes out with a runner in scoring position.

But we know this. We know everyone loves Jeter despite never being the stats machine that A-Rod has been. And the Grand Canyon-sized disconnect between A-Rod's numbers and his public image has always been his saving grace. But the baseball kingdom is a fantasyland where media and fans have surprisingly little room for nuance. The pressure to succeed in America encourages cheating in nearly every facet of society -- look at how many students take performance-enhancing drugs to succeed in school, or how many financial institutions we now know have cut corners in the name of success. Both of these things hurt people on all sizes of scales. But in athletic pursuits, we like our records as clean as possible, no asterisks allowed, despite the fact that they exist in a complete vacuum.

I have sympathy for A-Rod. Dude was not that much older than me when he began making hundreds of millions of dollars and was declared the greatest player in baseball. And he took drugs for two years of what will likely be something approaching a 20-year career. Forget his work ethic, and above all his natural talent: the toxicity of people's hatreds towards A-Rod lacked any real focus before this incident, and now it will conveniently and singularly center upon it.