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.

JUNGLE ROCK

One thing about going to a liberal arts school with a reputation like mine is that people often showcase these eccentricities that they--correctly--assume nobody will really question. I do some goofy stuff myself, sure, but something happened yesterday that was so counfounding it just completely breached my tolerance barrier for weird campus behavior. I was on my way to a fencing class, just listening to music and minding my business. A tall-ish dude is walks out of his dorm and begins in my direction. Just as we reach the moment where we would otherwise pass by each other, he literally jumps up into the air right in front of me and sticks out his tongue. He lands, shoots this weird look into no particular direction and keeps on walking.

I was baffled by the act, and even kind of angry that someone would think it was OK to do that to someone they didn't know, so I took off my headphones and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was trying to catch a snowflake on his tongue but missed. I didn't quite know what to say to that. He wasn't trying to weird me out, he just wanted a stupid snowflake, and didn't understand why I thought it was odd to do something like that to a stranger. All I could I do was get off a half-assed sarcastic response to the effect of, "Oh, I guess I had my headphones on so I didn't hear you warn me."

GO DUMB

Hey, look. It's me and my bro for life/DJ buddy Gabe shakin' our faces.

Labs

Good news. Carleton's bi-weekly paper of campus culture, the arts and beyond, The Carl, is now online. Unlike last year's failed experiment, we decided on using a WordPress blog rather than the free College Publisher software. Although College Publisher was a potentially powerful piece of software for us, I think the collective editorial decision was that we are first and foremost a print publication. So the blog gives us the opportunity to stay in touch with our readers in between publishing dates, but most importantly as as a convenient way to host PDFs of all our issues. Maybe not as convinent as being able to click on articles on the old website, but you do get to see the layouts, which is kind of nice. So, yeah: http://www.carlmagazine.com. Check it out, even though we're still using the ugly, default template.

Holy shit, this girl has been talking to herself in the CMC for the past hour. It's just me and her here, and she's been talking to herself the entire time. She sounds very scared.

Not Everyone Was Selected

I played baseball for a long time when I was kid, about 10 years. For better or worse, I was never quite good enough to have any expectations on my shoulders. I had a consistent mitt, but once the bottom of the pitching barrel had left Little League for more fruitful endeavors, odds were against me getting a solid hit. I got a lot of "take" signals from coaches; I was not the guy you wanted up with the bases loaded.

But my play on any given day had little to do with my mental state. I lacked confidence at the plate because I was a bad hitter, not the other way around. I didn't have streaks. So I can't pretend to get in the head of a player like Carlos Delgado, whose prowess at the plate the past few months has been nothing short of legendary. And it's all confidence. David Wright and José Reyes have been the same players all season--good players. But for Delgado, his brain switched gears sometime this summer and he suddenly became a player he hadn't been in half a decade. What else could explain this transformation but confidence, a sudden belief that, "Hey, I can knock the shit out this ball," and then doing it again and again.

Now consider the Mets bullpen. On any given day, when Jerry Manual pulls his starter, these guys are expected to blow the game. There were a few weeks this second half where they performed brilliantly, but it wasn't long enough to overcome the narrative that they collectively suck as a bullpen. They singlehandedly undermine the work of a team that has played their heart out for three months, but is again at the precipice of sitting on the sidelines for another post-season.

This has to be in their heads. Maybe it wasn't inititally, but now it is. And worse than being in the their heads, it's in the heads of the opposing teams that innings six through nine are a different game, practically batting practice. And if I'm honest with myself, that's why I don't see the Mets, if they make the playoffs, going very far. When the relief pitchers get in the game, do they have any confidence whatsoever that they are going to bring the team out of it a W? Can they shut down a Cubs or Phillies team in the seventh inning who is confident, by way of having done it before, that they can erase deficits greater than a grand slam? They haven't proven it, and well, there's no more time to prove it. We can reasonably expect them to blow it again.

The Mets have a playoff caliber team. They deserve to be there. But there is nothing, nothing more excruciating than watching your team play winning baseball only to be undercut by a bullpen that has all the confidence of a bewildered 10-year-old right fielder pulled in to pitch because a Little League coach is obliged to rest all of his best pitchers. Regardless of the Mets' fortunes this season, get a new fucking bullpen, please.