The End of 2006

The year 2006 was an extremely turbulent and (in many ways) unusual year, both world wide and personally. It might have actually been the weirdest year I have ever experienced, and it is at least in the front running with 2001 and 2002, when the world was in a complete state of shock and bewilderment over 9/11. I can't seem to decide which year takes the cake, and maybe they are all tied.

Firstly, on the world wide front I was made aware of something around 1 AM on Friday night when I turned on the television incidentally to CNN: Sadaam Hussein had been executed. This was something that I felt was long overdue, but would never happen; at least not promptly. I don't know how this will affect the insane situation in Iraq, but I imagine it will help in some way. How could it not? If anything could take the wind out of the insurgents sails I'd imagine it would be the death of their leader at the hands of their enemies...or maybe this will just incense them more, and they'll commit more stupid and pointless acts, like blowing up cars and things like that.

There are countless other world topics I could go into right now, but it's New Years Eve and I'm too excited to sit here and write for an extended period of time, so I will advance now to the personal upheavals that I've experienced this year...

I promptly left the world of competitive basketball after starting the season with a college team. It was time for me to stop, because the competitive fire that I'd embraced and even fought against for most of my life just dissipated, and the amazing amount of fun and self-confidence that I got from playing the sport that I love quickly went with it. I'm not exactly sure what made this all happen, but I think that someday I will know the answer; right now, the only way that I can really state it is that I had been concentrating way too much of my life on it for about as long as I can remember, and it had made me a worse person. It was kind of like an addiction or something of that nature, I guess. Since retiring I have become a lot less tense, and maybe even more happy. I only fear that I might start to miss it too much, and then I'll be in quite the predicament, but for now I'm no longer sleeping with Spalding, and I'm moving onto some different things that I haven't really given myself a lot of time to previously experience.

I could go into lots of other personal changes...college, independence, nonconformity, maturity, shit like that, but I imagine that isn't something that you want to read. Maybe all of this was something that you didn't want to read, and if so, I don't really know what to say. Sorry for wasting your time, I suppose. I know this isn't great, but I just needed something to break the ice for this thing. Hopefully I'll get better as I go on, and I will go on.