Day 2,193

I have in the past compared my library clerking to how Messi plays soccer. It was self aggrandizing to compare myself in that manner to the greatest soccer player who has ever, er, kicked a ball. But because the context of working at a library is so wildly different than playing soccer it was also comically self effacing. After all, if one scores one goal and makes seven brilliant passes in a soccer game, one has, in the course of maybe five minutes, contributed enough to the team that one can now spend the other 85 minutes walking around looking faintly interested and still cumulatively be the best player in the game. On the other hand if one has a few deeply helpful interactions with library patrons and then fixes some out of the way shelving errors, one has contributed so much in 30 minutes that if they spend the other seven and a half hours wandering around eating yogurt and offering amusing comments to their co-workers then those comments better be supremely fucking amusing.

Much as I like to dream it, even I can't be that amusing. Nothing is that amusing. 

To have any hope at all I'd better be at something more like a 1:3 work:yogurt eating ratio, and then I still have to be pretty funny or at least pleasantly distracting to keep in the upper tiers of clerking.

But this is just the recap. I am not here to talk about how I am like Messi at work. Rather, I would today like to tell you instead all about what soccer player I write blog posts like. 

I write blog posts like Arturo Vidal plays soccer.

Alas only a tiny percentage of my audience here knows about Arturo Vidal. So I will explain:

In second and third grade all of us kids played soccer in the big lower field at Chaparral Elementary School. There were few rules and little organization. The skill level was quite low as well. Simply put it was two masses of small kids running madly at the ball wherever it happened to be and trying their hardest to kick it.

Arturo Vidal is one of the greatest soccer players, one of the greatest athletes in the world. This above is not really what he does. But it is very much in the spirit of it. He is like the God of second grade soccer players, so good at it that he has risen to near the top of his sport, where he tends to be a little underrated.

I would love to write essays like Messi plays soccer, writing things from out of nowhere that are so dazzling people just read them over and over, ensorcelled. But it is not so. The ball is rolled out into the Internet and like a man possessed I simply go running at it pell-mell, no plan, as fast as I humanly can. And as soon as I get near it I leap for it, sliding in at risk to my life and limb, and I miss, or not. But if I miss I get up and run again, absurd, tireless, convinced. And the moment my foot hits the ball, well...

that's the essay for the day.

Until the next day, for ten thousand days in a row.