And Somehow I Now Feel Let Down

It was a very good game, but not transcendent like the last three. It went the way very good games usually do; both teams kept fighting, but a small lead in the last two minutes has a way of becoming an inevitability, as the desperate measures required to cut into that lead with limited time inevitably fail more often than they succeed, which compounds the problem, which is how a five point game turns into a ten-point loss. As a Celtic fan I'm happy, but as a basketball fan this wasn't nearly the chest-tightening brain-scrambling emotion-effervescing experience the series deserved as a final act. Still one of the greatest series of all time and probably the best I've personally seen.

Side note: whenever possible, the production staff for sporting events like to come up with cutesy names for their informational bubbles, playing off the names of athletes or their teams. Tonight there was a statistical bubble entitled: "Bull-iant Play," or something like that, with the heavily forced pun on "Bull-iant" for "Brilliant." I instantly thought that there was a much better pun they left on the table, for virtue of being less forced: "E-Bull-ient Play," which actually would be spelled exactly like the word being evoked, but then I realized that 85% of the viewing audience would have no fucking idea what "ebullient" meant.

Incidentally

One of my dad's favorite memories of watching basketball - and he's a lifelong basketball fan, much more so than any other sport - is of watching Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals, considered by many the greatest NBA game of all time. A triple overtime Finals game! And for him, of course, involving the Celtics. But the real value of the game for him is that my mother, who never cared about sports other than the occasional Olympic event and international soccer (rooting for Portugal and Brazil), was sort of waiting for the game to finish, and then became amazed that the game hadn't finished, and by the end was in rapt astonishment that both teams could just keep going, struggling on into the night, refusing to give up. In the end she was moved.

Now, the unhappy truth about sports is that most of the serious reasons sports fans would give you for loving sports and for the importance of watching sports (aside from trivial things like "because it's fun" and "it's a safe place for me to express irrationally tribal and xenophobic feelings") are usually not true. Most of the time sporting events aren't beautiful or inspiring or moving. But, as Bill Simmons wrote in one of his columns on the current Celtics-Bulls series, sports fans keep watching because you can never know when a transcendent moment will occur. You can't predict when greatness will reveal itself.

So. I was incredibly happy when the Celtics won the NBA Finals last year, and their series against the Lakers was a very good and exciting series, played by two teams that were very very good teams, near-great teams. But for all the reasons that people will write paeans to the transcendence of sport, that series doesn't exist in the same galaxy as this one. Neither team in this series is remotely as "good" a team as the ones that played in the 2008 NBA Finals. Neither team in this series is going to make this year's Finals. Whichever teams wins this series may well lose the conference semifinals and will certainly lose the conference finals. But: it is, as a basketball and a sports fan, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sporting events I've ever seen in my life. It's thrilling, not simply because it's exciting but because I am thrilled, in my heart, to watch it. I have no idea what will happen tonight: perhaps it'll be a dull blowout, or perhaps one or both of these teams will finally remember what it's like to play badly. But right now two slightly-better-than-mediocre teams are playing at the absolute peak of their abilities, and bringing out the absolute best in each other, and it's beautiful. I can't promise that tonight's game will be nearly as good as the ones before it, but if you have any suspicion in your heart that you could enjoy watching a basketball game, I suggest you at least check out the fourth quarter to see what's going on.

Somebody wrote (I've read so much coverage of this series!) that in a way what makes it so compelling is laughably simple: both teams just keep making shots. In the end of a close game, somebody always misses a bunch of shots, but in this series both teams keep making shots until the final second. Which is to say: of course, basketball is just a game, and in this case a game played by wealthy men, for no stakes other than the ability to have pride for winning a game played by wealthy men before they go on to lose at the game to other wealthy men. But let's recognize that in that limited and trivial setting, there is no quit in these men. They are not giving up. They do not look at the score, and the time left, and hang their heads, and submit to what appears inevitable; they go out and do their work and set screens for Ray Allen and Ben Gordon to hit impossible shots. Absolutely impossible shots.

Dominance can be impressive: Russell and Chamberlain, Magic and Bird, Jordan, even the impressive defensive dominance of last year's championship Celtics team, the individual and at times invincible dominance of LeBron James. True dominance is a rare and therefore cherished quality for the sports fan to observe, but true dominance almost always prevents moments like this. If somebody someday asks me why sports could be worth watching, I'd cue up the fourth quarters and overtimes of games 1-3 and 4-6 of this stupid first-round basketball series and show them. Because I'm moved, and if I weren't so intentionally deadened to so much around me, I'd be inspired, because these silly men go out and play their silly game and will not lie down and say "enough". I'm, truly, awed.

...OK...

So despite not being, as far as I can tell, physically ill (has swine flu gone stealth?), and despite knowing that depression can cause you to sleep more - so, like, I'm always depressed, but I'm not always depressed depressed, and right now I'm not depressed, just perpetually peevish - I slept a lot last night.

And by a lot I mean, I got home at 5:15, at 5:30 I lay down (clothed) on my bed and opened a book, and woke up at 7:15. At 7:30 I decided "fuck it," forewent dinner, and just went to bed. A couple of times through the night I woke up and decided to just keep sleeping. (Which by itself is notable; when I wake up, I almost always really wake up, and can't get back to sleep for an hour or two.) Which led to my finally getting out of bed at 10:00 this morning.

So, I think I just slept, including the brief periods of consciousness, for about 16 hours.

I guess I've been running myself harder than I thought.

Oh, Hi There

Been busy personally, professionally, mentally ... I've had the next two films in my final Lynchathon push in the apartment for a week and haven't watched either one. I'm basically working, coming home, going to the gym, watching basketball, staying up way too late to take advantage of my having gone to the gym, and then doing it all again and again and again.

Some brief thoughts:

Bulls-Celtics has got to be the best NBA playoff series ever in which neither team had a remote possibility of even making it to the NBA finals. It's astoundingly good and entertaining. There will be a seventh game. In the six games so far, there have been two single overtime games, one double overtime game, and one triple overtime game. There have never been so many overtime periods, or games with overtimes, in a playoff series before. I of course want the Celtics to win, and I'm not sure I can even bear to watch game 7 because of it (though of course I almost certainly will) but I almost don't care who wins the series, I just want to watch as much of it as I can. As weird as it sounds, right now these teams are both playing ridiculously good basketball considering that they're somehow overmatched against each other; the Bulls simply don't have the talent and skills (YET - get back to me in a year or two) to hang with the Celtics, but the Celtics are too injured and thin on the bench to be able to hang with the Bulls. I just watched a triple overtime game and then spent five minutes on the phone with my dad detailing my theories about whether or not a player's foot was on the three point line when he made a clutch shot. (My answer: it wasn't when he began taking the shot, but it was when he finished taking it.)

Also of some currency; there was just a training session and test for a lot of the staff working for my employers on a specific facet of what we do. The test was admittedly, by its designers, intended to be easy and passable, and the training session was geared specifically towards the knowledge necessary to pass the test. (Important clarification: I'm, for these purposes, on the QC team [three people], which had to take the test, because we have to be able to QC the work performed by the actual frontline staff [about twenty-five people, more or less].) The person running the training program told me that I had the high score. Apparently a bunch of the frontline staff did poorly on the test. Like, a bunch of them. Now:

I've gotten very good, for a variety of reasons, at reflexively deflecting apparent high achievement on my part when compared to subpar achievement from others; I'm quite facile at finding flaws in methodology and process and explaining away other people's poor performance. Partly because while I'm intellectually confident, I don't think I'm conceited; partly because I don't want people to think I'm conceited; partly because I think some of my deflections are accurate; partly because I honestly believe that a lot of what people perceive as evidence of my intelligence isn't actually evidence of my intelligence. It's evidence of my ability to notice, absorb, and retain much more information across a much broader spectrum of topics than the average person. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if curiosity and strong memory were highly correlated with other traits that I consider more authentically "intelligence," because that's a cluster of skills that complement each other well, but I think I'm smart because I can rapidly assimilate new information that's not just factual but procedural or argumentative, I can perceive different angles from which to view a problem, I'm good at disassembling arguments [better at that than creating them, which is why I hoped to become the poor man's Sidney Morgenbesser], and a bunch of other things, some of which I only notice by comparison to other people, like - in the training session for this test - how frustrated and confused a lot of people seemed to be by having a process they understood in one context presented to them in another context. The point being that people who don't know me that well think I'm intelligent because I know who John Jay was, whereas I don't understand why everyone else who took U.S. History in high school [which is to say: everyone] doesn't remember who John Jay was, since he certainly came up once or twice.

ANYWAY the point being that I can see a whole bunch of reasons why my getting the high score despite first attempting to learn the necessary information a couple of weeks before the test, while people who'd been actually doing the job for years performed poorly, isn't actually a valid indication of our relative ability to perform the task at hand in a real world situation. I've thought of lots of them. Because frankly it's sort of frightening that I should have done better on the test than someone who's had that job for thirteen years. I actually didn't want to be the high score on the test; I wanted to do very well, for a variety of reasons, but I really wanted for entirely selfless reasons to have a score that looked good but wasn't as good as the scores achieved by people who'd been performing the relevant tasks for thirteen years. It's, honestly, kind of scary to contemplate, because those are the people who are actually doing the work, and have been considered competent (well, there are issues there, but) to do the work for years, in some cases. But here we are. (By the way: I scored a 92, so it's not like I rocked the shit out of it. I've actually got a good guess as to what questions I missed and what questions the experienced employees missed; I bet I missed a few of the questions that required knowing all the many details of abstract policy - who qualifies for what deduction - that I could only partially stuff into my head because some of them are honestly so freaking arbitrary, while they missed the complex and crafty calculations stuff that I found easy because all I had to do was follow the damn direections.) Sigh.