I don’t see the appeal in sports. Especially baseball. Why is/was this America’s favorite pastime? Watching a baseball game was one of the most boring things I’ve ever done in my life. I decided to watch a game once; it was a classic Yankees vs. Red Sox match, and there was a lot of hype about it. So I decided to tune in, just to see what all the commotion was about. I am not lying when I tell you that I have had more fun watching rice cook. (The bubbles are pretty exciting.) Don’t get me wrong, I respect the people who are really good at it, but I just don’t understand why it is so captivating, baseball and sports in general.

I could also be really biased. Let me tell you a couple of stories from my childhood that could have shaped my distaste for athletics.

A while back, some of the neighborhood kids and I would get together and play games quite often. One day, the game was football, and we were playing at the friend-who-has-a-massive-chocolate-lab’s house. (For this story to make sense, you must know that I was terrified of dogs. I never saw dogs as “man’s best friend,” but instead as “vicious four-legged beasts that can tackle me and rip my face off.” Honestly, I would not walk past a house that did not have an electric dog fence because I was so terrified.) We started playing, and I tried pushing the image of their gigantic dog out of my head. The ball went back and forth, and at one point I caught it. I was so caught up in the moment that I did not notice that the dog came outside. While I was running with the ball towards the endzone, I looked back to see if anyone was close to tackling me. I expected to see humans chasing me, but I instead saw Samson the Beast bounding towards me. In panic, I dropped the ball and started running in the opposite direction, only to end up getting tackled anyway. After the dog was finally pulled off of me, I sprinted home and locked the door to my room, refusing to come out for 2 days.

There was another time when we were playing soccer, thankfully at the home of a friend who didn’t own a dog. No one really ever passed to me because I wasn’t good. At all. In fact, during this particular game, no one felt the need to cover me, because they knew I wasn’t going to get passed to. Unfortunately for me and my teammates, the new kid in the neighborhood did not know about my lack of skill and decided to pass me the ball. I panicked at first but calmed down enough to start dribbling the ball towards the goal, staring down at the ground the entire time. I felt good about myself; I had made it ten feet without messing up. I looked up to see how much farther I needed to go. Due my complete lack of grace and elegance, my feet stumbled over the ball, which ended up between my feet causing me to trip over and fall face first into the grass. I got up with a mouthful of grass and a dirt-caked face and ran back home and locked the door to my room, refusing to come out for two days.

The last story I will tell you, out of my endless collection of stories, is a basketball one. To save your time, I’ll make this story short. We were at school playing basketball, I shot the ball, it hit the rim, it bounced back, hit my face and gave me a bloody nose. I ran inside to the bathroom and locked a stall door, refusing to come out until recess was over.

Now I spend my time doing much less dangerous activities such as reading, knitting, and writing about my life. Even today, I try my best to avoid sporting as much as possible, and I am content with that.