Alex. Some people call you A-Rod but to me, you've always been Alex. We both know that A-Rod is more of a legendary character than the real man. A-Rod is the guy who gets manicures and has his hair cut and highlighted every 10 days. He's the guy who goes on jaunts with Madonna and relaxes in his multi-million dollar apartment in New York City.

Alex. You're the guy who cried when he left his Mom for the first time. You're the dude who had to beg your now ex-wife to give you a chance. You're the kid who stepped on the field a rookie shortstop and who left it just a few votes away from being the youngest MVP ever. You stepped on that field and you changed baseball. You were fresh-faced and innocent. You were the future of the game. But I wonder, when you look in the mirror, do you still see this?



I doubt it. I think you see A-Rod, the person you want to be but the person you are not. The person you never can be, because the person you are is that kid who cried when it was time to go out on your own. You were out of your comfort zone, afraid of what everyone was going to say about you. You were unsure of yourself and you still are. I'm sure the doubts creep in all the time - why else did your ex-wife suggest you should see a psychiatrist?

And I bet when whoever propositioned you with performance enhancing drugs that you were almost relieved, maybe even happy that they could be the thing that pushed you over the edge and made it easier for you to be who everyone else thought you were. I get that you were young and stupid, but what really made you do it is that fact that you're the most insecure human being on the planet.

I know what it's like to demand perfection at every second from yourself, and I know that it can be exhausting. I've never been in the public eye but I bet it can make a perfectionist go crazy. And I bet that when you read or heard that first little bit of scrutiny that it nearly drove you over the edge and drove you to the point where you felt that you had to use. You had to make it stop.

In that time, you stopped being Alex and you became A-Rod, the larger than life persona that swallows a guy like you right up. Yeah, you went out there and you crushed the ball and you crushed whatever doubts the sports writers and fans and nay sayers had. You weren't a choker. You weren't "The Cooler." But the one thing you could never crush were your own doubts in yourself.

I can totally see and understand why you did it. Does that make it all right? No. Am I completely and utterly disappointed in you? Yes. The worst part of all of this is that I actually thought you got a bad rap and that people were way too hard on you. I wanted to like you. But after the womanizing, the lying, the cheating and the disregard for the sport that made you every penny you have, I don't think that you can do anything to ever make me and other people like me feel anything for you but disgust.

The only thing I can say to you know is know thyself, because I don't think you have any inkling of who you really are. If you did, you would have remained as that shining example of who a baseball player should be. If you did, you wouldn't have cheated and you would have earned the title of Home Run King. Now, you're going to be just another player involved in the steroid era, just another guy who could have been great, just another guy who has an asterisk next to his name.

My thesis project for grad school is a fictional feminist western. This was one of those ideas that just kind of zapped me at the right moment, right about when I was panicking about having to write a novel. I played around with some other ideas too but I ended up coming back to this one.

Part of writing is reading and for my project, I had to find books that relate to my story. One of my professors suggested the story True Grit by Charles Portis, and I'd be lying if I wasn't disappointed to learn that my idea had already been kind of done before. When I first picked up the book I was nervous because I was afraid the stories were going to be similar. Thankfully, they aren't even close.

Fourteen year old Mattie Ross decides she's going to go after Tom Chaney, the man who shot down her father. Mattie sets off on her own to track him down, and her shrewd business sense as well as her street smarts prove to serve her well on her journey of revenge.

Portis' style is simple and direct, a writing style that I admire and try to emulate. There are no digressions, fluffy scenes or smart sounding words in this book, only a straight forward story that is basically fast paced and gets right to the point. This story is told in the first person point of view so it would be easy to allow the character to get a little self indulgent, and thankfully, Mattie never is.

My only disappointment with this story is that it's not as feminist as I expected. I thought Mattie, even though very young, was going to be the one leading the charge and going out on her own to get even with Chaney. This isn't the case at all. Mostly, her traveling partners Rooster Cogburn and LeBeouf are the ones who make short work of anyone who crosses their path. Mattie does get in a few shots but mainly, she's in the way. I had hoped that she was going to be a real lady haymaker.

Other than that, this book was a blast to read. Between Mattie's smart little quips and observations, there are plenty of moments that will make a reader smile. It's relatively short too and I finished it in a few sittings. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much so I definitely think it's worth reading.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown is an alarming true account of what happened to the Native Indians between 1860 and 1890. Written in 1970, it is the definitive source for the real truth behind what Manifest Destiny actually meant.

Brown pieced together battles through extensive research at The Library of Congress. This is not the type of account you might read in a fifth grade textbook with Indians graciously sitting down to a meal with the pilgrims. This is the hard, gritty truth of what the pilgrims' journey to The New World did to the original Americans.

Honestly, I was shocked by what I read. I knew that our forefathers basically stole land from the Indians, but I never realized how brutal and evil their machinations were. For me, it was disheartening to learn that not only did they steal their land, but they also stole the very essence of who the Natives were and are.

Years of promises became lies when the American government failed to deliver the rations and ammunition they used as a bargaining tool when moving them to the Indian Frontier. The lands the Indians were forced to live on could barely support vegetation and the water sources were tainted, making it nearly impossible for the Indians to live up to the quality of life they had come to know. There were no buffalo to hunt. They couldn't defend themselves against bullets with bows and arrows. Their horses were weak because they couldn't feed properly.

This was not only the case for the Cherokee, the Choctaw and the other eastern Indians who were forced off of their land through the Indian Removal Act, but this also greatly affected the Apaches, the Cheyennes, the Araphos and the rest of the western Indians.

The saddest part of all of this is that the Indians were very willing to be friendly even after they had been lied to repeatedly. They were always ready to forgive Sharp Knife (Andrew Jackson) and Great Father (Abraham Lincoln) for everything they had forced upon them. They wanted to share the land and be friends with the whites. But that would never be, and the lies would continue for 30 years.

All of the friction and anger culminated at Wounded Knee where the Indians made their last stand for freedom. They were nearly obliterated. The dead were left, frozen in grotesque shapes in the snow. Brown ends the book with a scene in an Episcopal church that was turned into a makeshift hospital. It was Christmas time and the church was decorated with evergreens, and above the altar it read, "Peace on Earth, Goodwill To Men."

The book is definitely painful and difficult to read, especially because Brown doesn't spare any detail. We get it all, we get to see a sliver of the anguish these men and women felt when they were forced from their homes and had their new homes burned to the ground. We get a glimpse of what it might have been like to watch our innocent children be killed, how it might have felt to see our women raped and our bravest warriors killed. We see how sad it must have been to see the greatest among us grow weary and give up.

And we see exactly why these things are mentioned in school and why children are led to believe that Indians and whites were friends. The reality is that those 30 years are a legacy that no one wants to be reminded of, but thankfully Dee Brown, of Native American descent herself had the courage to write this book. These are things that should not be forgotten.

Over the weekend my husband and I went shopping, because with the failing economy comes a lot of amazing sales and good prices on normally expensive stuff. We were actually looking for bathroom furniture since our mirrored medicine cabinet fell off the wall and storage has become an issue.

We went to JCPenney, a very underrated store. They didn't have any bathroom furniture out on the floor, but we noticed a lot of good deals in the men's clothing department. My husband took a spin through the aisles and around the racks and found some nice things at insanely good prices. The week before I bought 6 pieces of clothes there for $55. Nice.

He decided he wanted to look at the jeans, so as we were walking over I heard "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega. A few seconds later, this wonderful, wonderful man walks by singing, "Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do," right in line with Suzanne. It was glorious.

My husband thought he didn't seem to be the type to burst into song in front of a bunch of people. He was wearing a Steelers hat and jacket (hell yeah!), a t-shirt and some jeans, and he had a pretty sweet moustache. I don't know what about that outfit might mean that he wasn't a Suzanne Vega fan, but I'm so glad he was. He made my day.

Let me start by saying that I haven't had the desire to see a movie so badly since Rambo came out, so I was completely geeked when I learned that The Wrestler would be playing at a local theater. Mickey Rourke is one of my favorite actors and in this film he's coupled with one of my all time favorite things - wrestling.

As a kid, my older brother and I wouldn't miss the weekly installment of craziness happening in the World Wrestling Federation. Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, The Junkyard Dog and Randy "The Macho Man" Savage, among others, were the height of entertainment for me. In the late 80s it didn't get much better than the male soap opera that played out every Saturday morning. It was fun, frivolous entertainment and I loved every second of it. Needless to say, I was psyched out of my mind to see this movie.

Unfortunately, it ended up leaving me angry and wanting more.

The story follows Randy "The Ram" Robinson 2o years after wrestling had reached its peak. He's living in a trailer and working in a supermarket but on the weekends, he's still the king of the ring at V.F.W.'s and high school gyms. In the first five minutes we see him rocking out to 80s music in his van with an action figure of The Ram planted on the dash and staring longingly at a collage of pictures of himself from his heyday. And it was in the first five minutes when I knew exactly where the movie was headed - nowhere.


See, we know that Randy misses who he used to be and what his life was like. That's the whole thrust of the movie and the director makes sure that we never forget it. Every 10 seconds we're reminded that this guy isn't a star like he was in the 80s. The audience is treated like they have a combination of A.D.D. and amnesia. The script was redundant, with the characters explaining multiple times that they're old, broken down, not who they used to be, not who they want to be, and not where they want to be in life.

Another serious gripe that I had was the audience had very few opportunities to let the seriousness of what Randy was experiencing set in. It would flip from Randy being utterly defeated to in your face nudity in a blink. I swear that when they were cutting and editing the film, the editor decided that they had to have a scene in the strip joint where Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) worked every 10 minutes. Most of the scenes were pointless and didn't advance the story at all, except to inform us that Cassidy was getting old.

Some of the best scenes involved no speaking at all, like Randy putting on his glasses, taking his hearing aid out before entering a room and the look on his face when waiting for his daughter, a relationship they failed to allow proper time to develop.



I also had the feeling that to the screenwriter and director, the lives that wrestlers live is pathetic and a joke. I didn't feel any sympathy for these men who pumped themselves full of drugs and God only knows what else to entertain us. Are they losers, or are they entertainers? Are they pathetic, or are they people who were basically used in order for someone else to make a nice profit? Is following your dream and having a passion so great that you are willing to sacrifice yourself for it absolutely lame? Apparently, the screenwriter and director thought so.

I've never seen anything so simultaneously horrible and wonderful at the same time. Mickey Rourke made this film, and without him it probably wouldn't have had a hundreth of the attention that it got. Some people complained that it didn't get enough love with Oscar nominations, but after watching the movie I can honestly say that it should be happy with whatever nods it got. The writing was cliched and silly, the story was predictable and never reached the swell that it should've and the characters had no choices.

Rourke really did shine a turd with this one and should take home a statue for Best Actor. Hopefully the people at the Academy were able to sit through it long enough to see what a brilliant job he really did.

After a crazy month, I'm finally back and ready to make some posts again. Some things I have planned are a review of Hamlet 2, a blog about my very first NBA game, some reviews of video games as well as updates on the progress of my novel.

That's right. This semester we're to start drafting our thesis, and since I'm in a Creative Writing curriculum, that means it's the drafting of a novel. As part of this, we're expected to read 20+ books as well as analyze them for craft and story technique. I'll be posting those analyses here as well.

My novel is going to be a feminist western set in the 1850s, so I'll be reading some history books as well as some great westerns, along with some Native American stories as well. One of the main characters in the book is an Indian ex-newspaper writer for The Phoenix, which was and still is the Cherokee nation's newspaper. The first book I'm reading is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, which chronicles the painful stories of the Native Americans who lived on the American frontier in the 1850s and beyond. So far, it's a been a very difficult read, not because of the writing but because of the subject matter. A full review will follow soon.

Why yes Chris, I think I do.



I found this little gem on Best Week Ever and thought I'd share. Seriously one of the most epic videos of all time and my goodness, is this song catchy. I hate to admit it, but yeah. I watched the video one time and I can't get the song out of my head.

Dude plays a sparkly green guitar and when he takes his shirt off, we're blinded by the light emanating from his soul. He's over the top and ridiculous. How can I not love this person? My life was empty before his presence.

I'm going to track down this album and review it. I am amazed. It's about time someone with real talent was given a shot at stardom.

2009 is going to be your year, Chris Dane Owens!