FYI

An iPad hurts a lot more than an iPhone when you drop it in your face.

Superstitions

You don’t have to be a fan of baseball to know that baseball players, and in turn their fans, are incredibly superstitious. We’re right along there with hockey, in that respect. Now that the World Series is over, I thought I’d share some of my superstitions this postseason!

Clothing
I wore the same shirt, pants, and bra during the last 7 games of the postseason. I wore the same jeans during the day, if I was at work or if I had to run errands on the weekend, and changed as soon as I got home (sometimes running into the apartment at 5:50pm screaming GAME CLOTHES GAME CLOTHES GAME CLOTHES GAME CLOTHES). I stopped wearing Giants clothes of any kind after Game 2 of the NLDS, and stopped wearing my Giants hats after Game 1 of the NLCS.

Beverages
Probably the most serious undertaking this postseason, and it started during the NLDS. During Game 1, we opened a magnum bottle of Barefoot merlot, and we scored 4 runs in one inning. We didn’t drink it during Game 2. We drank it during Game 3. And 4. And 5. We drank A LOT of wine this postseason, so Giants, my liver thanks you for taking down Detroit in four games. We never bought the wine ahead of time, but instead bought it on an as-needed basis. We averaged around two games per bottle, unless one game was extra stressful. We plan to do something epic with these bottles eventually because this much consumption of wine that ended with a World Series title deserves to be memorialized.

#RallyLiverFailure

#RallyThisIsEmbarrassing

Rally hair
No shaving. Guess what the first thing was I did after the Giants won last night?

Seating
I had to sit on the floor, in front of the couch. I moved to the other side of the coffee table on Saturday, when BFF’s mom came over to watch the game. She sat on the couch, directly behind my regular spot on the floor, so the space was still appropriately occupied.

Panda Pillow Pet
Panda Pillow Pet was with me from the middle of the NLCS until the final out last night. I cycled between tossing him in the air and hiding my face behind him during all of the games. When things unraveled last night, I had no idea what to do with PPP, so he just sat next to me and didn’t complain when I squeezed him during one of my 8,000 freak outs.

Panda Pillow Pet!

Twitter
I participated in the #Rally hash tags, changed my Twitter and Facebook pictures to correspond to each starting pitcher, and tweeted the same message around 15-20 minutes before the first pitch (Play hard, work hard, and HAVE FUN!!! #RallyWhatever #SFGiants). Shout out to all my new Twitter friends! That was one hell of a ride; have a fantastic winter! If you’d like to follow me, just click here.

#RallyEnchiladas
Like I mentioned in my previous post, we had chicken enchiladas before Vogelsong’s NLCS start and again before his WS start. Seemed to do the trick and seriously, who doesn’t love enchiladas?

I knocked on a lot of wood this month. I even knocked on a tree trunk Saturday when someone told me the Giants would sweep Detroit. BFF and I routinely put our fingers in our ears and LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU every time someone started mentioning statistics on TV. That’s something I’ve had since the regular season. I don’t want to see records or statistics. I firmly believe it’s detrimental.

We both refused to say anything like “if we win” or “when we win”. It was always “in case something good happens”. And that was always followed by knocking on wood. I’m telling you guys, we’re some superstitious mother effers. It seemed to work, so be sure we’ll be doing a lot of this next season, too!

Stay tuned for my next post in which I talk incoherently about our players and probably post a lot of pictures that I didn’t take.

That’s what’s up

Now that the 2012 season is over, I’m breaking my post season silence.

The San Francisco are the 2012 World Series Champions.

Holy crap, y’all.

I don’t even know where to begin this blog. My brain is full of so many emotions right now that I’m finding it difficult to sort through them all. I wanted to post after the NLDS. After the NLCS. Especially after the NLCS. Oh, friends. So many words to say.

NLDS

The post season made me nervous. I thought about the Diamondbacks last year and how they lost the NLDS. I thought about how I wasn’t ready for the Giants season to be over. I thought about a great many things, and then I did a lot of worrying. Like, massive amounts of it. After two dismal games at home, the boys flew to Cincinnati, where I was sure our asses would get handed to us in the third game. I didn’t want to be discouraged, but it was hard not to be. I remember @gggiants tweeting that we shouldn’t give up. I decided to hang my hat on his tweet.

Then Game 3 happened. The stories came out about Hunter Pence’s pre-game speech, about the passion he displayed when he expressed that he wasn’t ready to stop playing yet. That he wanted one more day with the best team he’s ever played with. We won that game. And the next one. And the next one.

It doesn’t get much better than that, right? Coming back from a 2-0 deficit to clinch the LDS?

NLCS

I assumed our momentum would take us strong into this series against the Cards. I assumed the scare in Cincinnati would be motivation enough for us to not get our backs against a wall again. Clearly the Giants like to prove me wrong. At this point the post season, we were becoming more superstitious. Despite being a big user of social media, I resisted the #RallyZito movement when it began circulating on Twitter the night after Lincecum’s rough outing in St. Louis. I’ve really come to respect and enjoy Barry Zito this season but #RallyZito? Really? He’s not even on Twitter.

But then…I went for it. Updated Twitter and Facebook with the same picture of Zito. Tweeted with the hash tag. I think most Giants fans will agree that Game 5 of the NLCS was the changing tide for the team. Zito’s performance topped with Lincecum’s uneffingbelievable performance seemed to ignite something in the team. It got out on Twitter after the game that Ryan Vogelsong eats chicken enchiladas the night before each start. And #RallyEnchiladas was born.

Funny story about that: I had planned, on Friday night (Zito’s game), that I was going to make chicken enchiladas. Because of the time difference, the game started right as I was getting off work and instead of taking all the time to go buy ingredients for enchiladas, I opted to go straight home and watch the game. We’d have enchiladas on Saturday night, for the game, if there was going to be one. I know, right? Scary awesome coincidence.

The final game of the NLCS is one of my favorite games of baseball I’ve seen. Between the unreal rain, the rainbows, the amazing plays on defense by the Giants, and then that final moment in the 9th inning when Marco Scutaro opened his arms, tilted his head back, looked toward the sky, and welcomed the deluge. I cannot think of a more perfect sports moment than that. It was like something out of a movie. Unreal. Unreal.

World Series

This is my first full year of being a Giants fan. First full where I went from the end of the last season to the final out of the next season, following everything I could about the team. Contract signings, trades, spring training, first pitch to final out. I can’t sum this feeling up accurately. Not right now. Not while I have a thousand things to think about and say and read and watch and rewatch.

But I want to say this about this team: you can’t buy this kind of chemistry. You can’t buy this kind of connection, this kind of bond. These guys love each other. You can tell by how they interact with one another, how they hug one another. How gently they cradle a weeping Sergio Romo in their arms, his face pressed to their shoulders. This team is my team. My very first, absolute favorite Giants team. I’ve been told every fan has one. That one team that you love, from beginning to end. And this team is it. The 2012 San Francisco Giants.

World Series Champions.

NL WEST CHAMPS BABY

That!

Is!

All!

Recovery

Trigger warning: mental illness, depression

Recovery is a strange thing. It doesn’t really seem to matter what it is you’re recovering from – an illness, injury, or loss – the process is more or less the same. I suppose the five stages of grief would apply in a lot of cases, possibly even mine. Anyone who has dealt with the five stages knows that the stages aren’t linear, they aren’t predictable, and you spend a lot of time repeating them. Eventually you come out on the other side, some other side, be it a good one or a bad one, and you learn to live a changed life.

In 2005, I was diagnosed with chronic depression. It was neither surprising nor pleasant to hear. Depression is something that has lurked around my life for a very long time. I have several definitive moments in my life that are filed under I Will Never Forget This Moment:

1. The hell of 8th grade – something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy
2. The day I was walking to work in college and realized I was depressed
3. The past three months (give or take)

Having dealt with depression for so long has made it a grim sort of companion for me. It is always nearby and it has, for a majority of my life, ebbed and flowed quite gently. Some drops were more difficult than others but they always ended and I could get back to some sort of even keel.

Then the even keel disappeared. Any semblance of balance and rationality left with it. Then my concentration exited the building. All of it, anything I had inside, was then replaced by a very dark fog. I began having panic attacks. I stopped cleaning. Stopped cooking. Stopped caring. I pushed through the week just to get to the weekend, and then I spent the weekend crying on the couch, wrapped in my blankets, and wondering how I’d get through another week.

I stopped sleeping. I went to bed very late, woke up very early. I became obsessive. I listened to the same song for hours on end, all day and all night, for a week. It began affecting every corner of my life. Every single corner.

There was a breaking point, as there almost always is with stuff like this. I am fortunate to be surrounded by supportive and kind people who understand, who help when they can. And then I decided, after another Saturday spent terrified and panicked and fragile on my couch, that I couldn’t do it anymore.

I needed help.

There are many, many layers to this story. Many chapters I could write, many things I could tell you about all of these journeys and experiences, but that’s not my intention for this blog or this blog post. (And seriously, it’s just way too…what’s the word? Depressing.)

The short version: my doctor prescribed me an anti-depressant and it’s working. I noticed a change within two days. I started humming one morning when I got to work. I was putting my things away and what? Why am I humming? Like, I don’t even want to stop! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS.

It was followed by quite possibly the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever had in my life (and THIS, my friends, is finally the point of this blog post). I didn’t hate writing anymore. In fact, I was kind of infatuated with it. Well, not so much the IT of writing but the IDEA of writing, and that’s huge. The tummy tickle happiness and freedom that I used to feel when I thought about writing came back. I don’t know when it left. I don’t know when I turned that corner. I do know that it was like someone had severed one of my limbs. My identity has been, for the longest time, tied up in writing.

I know, it’s weird that I’m that way. The audience who gets to see anything I write is handpicked and even then, you kind of have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. And then there’s that whole I rarely even write anymore, I’ve never had anything published, and I have very little desire to even TRY to get something published thing. Everyone has her process, amirite?

Ah, yes. Writing. Writing! I’ve missed it over the past however many years it has been missing from my life. The void is not completely filled in yet and there is still so much more I need to do in terms of myself and my writing (and a million other things), but there is a spark of hope. A tiny blip of light, like a single firefly in a giant field.

It’s the first step of Recovery. That’s what I’ve taken to calling the gentle breaking in of my atrophied writing muscles: Recovery. It started on Sunday with something horrible and elementary and a moment of sheer frustration where I wanted to throw my laptop out the window, but I took a deep breath, reminded myself that a lot of crappy gunk is going to come out first and that later, down the road a bit, better and cleaner things will appear.

So baby steps into Recovery. It all starts here.

A lesson in patience

It’s now tradition for BFF and I to spend a glorious weekend at AT&T Park, watching the Giants take on the Dodgers. It never fails to be intense and grueling, and as fun as the games are, there is one huge downside: 98% of the Dodgers fans I encounter are mean. There are a few that aren’t, that enjoy baseball and want to have fun watching their team win. But the other 98%? Mean.

We were late getting to the game on Friday but once we settled into our seats, it went pretty well. We rallied and won and it was awesome. Except for the people sitting a few rows back who, every time Lincecum was at the plate, yelled for Beckett to “hit him in the right arm”. Lincecum, in case you don’t know, throw right and bats left, which exposes his pitching arm to potential hits. There isn’t a lot of logic to this request of hitting Lincecum’s arm and hopefully injuring him to the point where he can’t pitch. I mean, I love Tim a lot and he’s one of my favorite pitchers, but have you seen him pitch this year?

Yesterday was more of the same, but this was calls to bean players just to end ABs. I’m not sure of their thought process. For instance, Scutaro got walked in one of the late innings and the girl behind us, who had been yelling BEAN HIM!!! for most of the AB, said, “Ugh. He should’ve just hit him.” Like…what? He would’ve ended up on base that way, too. I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS. She yelled BEAN HIM every time a Giant was in the batter’s box, no matter who it was. At the end of the game, she proudly announced that she hadn’t even had to boo any Giants fans during the game, so she was happy. Her father spent a good five minutes mocking our rally hats in the 9th inning, saying he didn’t have to look “doofy” to cheer for his team.

We’re not able to make today’s game because it has to be broadcast on ESPN, so the time was changed and we’re going to see DMB tonight. DMB. TONIGHT. OMG. But I’m kind of glad I don’t have to deal with potential Dodgers fan BS, and as BFF put it this morning, at DMB shows, you don’t lose. It is only win!

Also, the Giants have been taking early BP or something because on Labor Day, we only got to see the pitchers running sprints (and Clay Hensley running the warning track….for 15 minutes) and yesterday, we didn’t even get to see sprinting. I do have some pictures for you!

Monday, September 3

Madison and Javy

Javy signing autographs

Kontos practicing his delivery

Lovely day for baseball

Storm Troopers guarding the umps

Saturday, September 8

Willie Mays Plaza

Time Lord

His face though

Casilla

Hanley Ramirez

Matt & Buster

Sorry I’m not sorry

BEAT L.A.

Welcome to San Francisco, Hunter Pence!

I see that you found time before your flight to buy a Giants hat. Well done!