Hello fellow Mets fans and welcome to another exciting edition of Friday Baseball here on Raising the Apple! This Friday ends a particularly busy week for me work-wise, one that has left me with very little spare time to devote to any of my myriad of hobbies and interests, let alone this journal which has been woefully un-updated as of late.
This recent lack of time and increased focus on work and my familial duties has gotten me thinking about just how I tend to manage my free time and what my energy gets devoted to when I am not working or parenting or husbanding. Fortunately my wife and children are the things I love most in this life, so I always make sure to spend a good deal of time with them, and Kate shares many of my adult interests, such as baseball and certain other cultural touchstones such as books, plays, movies, and television. Thus we get to pursue a lot of our shared interests together, and what remains is the same for most people I suspect: the niche interests of the individual.
My particular problem is that unlike a lot of people I know, I have a lot of niches that I am interested in. Too many in fact. Lately I’ve been feeling as if I am afflicted with a sort of anti-OCD, or maybe just a different flavor of it. I’m never able to devote myself to a particular interest and give it all the attention it requires or deserves. Instead I go through periods of obsession where one hobby will rise above the rest and acquire the lion’s share of my time, but even then I’m still tinkering with all the others and often not completing something within the primary one.
Writing has always been my biggest challenge. I love to write, I have since I was a child and first learned to do so, but I have never dedicated myself to it, and my skills have suffered for it. (As you well know) And ever since having children I have yet to complete any project that I have started. I created this journal primarily as a writing project for myself and the self-imposed deadlines and brevity of the individual posts helped maintained my focus for a time, but now I have found myself falling behind in periods of work/life busyness and the number of half-written unpublished posts in my blog’s console grows by the day.
I’ve often longed for the sort of obsessive focus that so many dedicated people have with their own hobbies and interests, especially true writers. I’ve written comic scripts and completed and published graphic novels before, but have never completed a work of prose – my fondest desire. I love to brew beer, and while I am content with doing so mainly for myself and perhaps a few friends, I always seem to run out and fail to keep my own personal pipeline flowing. I have always been a voracious reader, and while I still can easily finish a book a week, there are so many unread novels on my shelves and so many more in the unorganized wish lists I keep in my head.
And then there is baseball. A big part of me wants to watch every inning of every game. It’s the completist in me, a trait I picked up in the comic book collecting days of my youth. And I do manage to watch a lot of baseball. It would be no exaggeration to say that Kate and I see at least part of maybe 90-95% of every regular season game. Sometimes it’s just on in the background as we talk or go about some late-night housework. Other times we’re quite focused on it.
When I undertook the task of creating and maintaining this very journal, I felt like I was committing to something at long last, but now I find myself in the same quagmire I often find myself in, attempting to juggle too many balls, and juggle them well. But in this case I think that the problem, or at least part of it, can also be the solution.
I envisioned Raising the Apple as a journal wherein I would discuss all of the different aspects of my life within the context of my fandom for the Mets and baseball, and I still hold to that original premise – only with some slight relaxations of the unwritten rules I had subconsciously imposed upon myself.
Baseball is a game that has a way of interweaving itself with the lives of those that love it. It can be the thing itself, a game or moment etched in one’s memory, or a trigger of the thing – like the Dodgers game I watched at midnight while waiting to go to the hospital to deliver Lily. And with that taken into consideration, I’ve decided to go where the breeze takes me and write whatever baseball brings to my mind. Because maybe the only way to focus on so many smaller things is to find ways to combine them into something larger. I don’t know how it will turn out honestly, but it never does hurt to try.
