Simplify

South by Southwest ended early Sunday morning. The skinny jeans and ironic mullet jokes had all been made, although at some point we – the rest of us – all started to wonder if the mullets were still ironic or if the hipsters started to think to themselves, “Hey, this doesn’t look half bad.” Ironic or not, they’re quite mistaken. And as for the skinny jeans, quite frankly, on a lot of people – guys and girls – this is a trend that is simply uncalled for. Plus, I heard one girl talking about how the next trend in women’s fashion is going to be high-waisted pants, and I can’t help but wonder if the designers have overlooked an important consideration: Wouldn’t this seriously impact the Return On Investment on a lot of young women’s tattoos?

Unfortunately for me, four days in a row of the lifestyle – music non-stop from noon til 2am – left me with a hangover that devolved into a severe window-rattling cough that’s laid me out for a couple of days, and subsequently a mountain of work to catch up on this weekend. Not today though, because on top of that, my laptop was acting up again, and I decided to just get a new one. Too much going on these days not to have a reliable machine. So today I started setting up my new system while listening to the Cubs beat the Giants in another spring training game. There’s no point stressing when there’s only one thing you can do at a time anyway, and one thing before the next, so you just sit down and do it and try to make the best of it at the same time.

My old laptop was named Estragon, after a character from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. For that matter, the new one is Estragon’s counterpart, Vladimir. I realize this is a rather ridiculous computer naming system, and moreover that it’s exceedingly strange to even have a computer naming system. On the other hand, in a bizarre turn of events, I once had success charming a blonde from Oklahoma owing to Estragon. She was an aspiring actress – not all that uncommon in Austin – working in marketing – again, rather common – and seemed to like me enough as we talked. When we got to talking theater though, and she brought up Beckett, and I was all like, “You’re not going to believe this, but I actually named my laptop Estragon...” and she got all wide-eyed in disbelief, well then she definitely liked me. My roommate thinks this has to be the lamest pickup maneuver in the history of romantic encounters, and he’s probably right, but then again, what maneuver isn’t kind of lame? And it wasn’t like I planned on ever using Estragon like that – it just sort of happened, and I rolled with it.

Meanwhile, as I finish getting Vladimir ready so I can put in a long day reading casebooks tomorrow, the Cubs are cruising in the late innings. Ronny Cedeno has hit a homerun and Kerry Wood logged a solid inning. Things look generally positive. Plus, Mark Prior seems to be pitching like a pitcher again they say, so who knows? Only a little more than a week and things will start to happen for real.

Yep, before we know it opening day will arrive. The days are getting longer, and it won’t be long now at all. I’ve been too busy to pay attention to the chatter lately, so I’m not sure what other people are saying, but I’m guessing most of us are feeling pretty optimistic. And not just Cub-fan optimistic, but rather a genuine, sincere optimism owing to rational evaluation of talent. The Cubs look to be pretty darn good, it seems to me.

There isn’t too much else to say at this point. I mean, there’s plenty of griping to do about UnderArmour and DirecTV and TribCo and whomever else, but I don’t have it in me right now. The last few days of spring training are a time for every fan to begin to focus on what it is we’re all in this for in the first place: the graceful game of baseball.

I read a philosophical tidbit on the side of a drink cup from an Austin restaurant called Zen last week courtesy Henry David Thoreau: “Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, Simplify.” Intrigued, I decided to look up the full passage, which comes from his book Walden:

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

Seems about right. We’re no happier trying to balance a hundred things so we might as well let the chaff float away. Time to simplify. Sounds like a decent way to balance out the spring, narrowing down to those few things that really need attention, and let the rest worry about itself.

Starting with fitting in the early-season Cubs games, and going from there.