About the World Cup.

The World Cup officially begins tomorrow, Friday, June 11. It hasn't been going on for a few weeks or even for the last few months. Everything up till now has been preparations for the 32 teams already qualified.
I write this because I live in the United States, it's my adopted country and I feel practically American in every sense of the word, except that I'm not. Here, it's not uncommon to have to constantly somehow adorably justify your love of the game to casual fans who only 'like' soccer when the World Cup comes around every 4 years. The rest of the time they could give two craps about the sport. That or the US doesn't make it out of group play and they go back to, 'why we shouldn't play this sport in the first place'.
It's annoying to a degree because it's incessant but otherwise it's a necessary evil.
I was born in South America (Uruguay) and soccer is in our DNA, though I didn't know this until I returned to my country of birth when I was 12. I knew as a child I wasn't American but I felt as though I was because I was too young to remember my origins, I had no relevant memories of my country except for my parents who spoke spanish to us and kept traditions alive we had no clues about.
I wasn't athletic but my first sport was softball, despite my dad's efforts to get me to embrace soccer. I couldn't even play softball, I was just trying to get on a team and get a t-shirt. I had no clue what it meant or how it was played it was just important to me to be on a team of some sort.
So when I was 12 and returned to my country for the next 4 years, I personally discovered 'futbol' (soccer) and the athlete within me because the sport and the atmosphere of the sport was so full of life and energy, I had to have it!
It wasn't a passing phase but a newly discovered way of life. Sure, some of the emotions seemed extreme at first but then I realized how much influence the sport had on the country and the world itself. Not just my country but my neighbors, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, etc. The rest of the world too. Except of course, the US.
Since that year (1976), I have been transfused with soccer and it's taken on the importance of another limb to me and I realize to billions of others as well, except for most Americans.
When I returned to the states in 1980, it took me a while to grasp this concept but I already knew Americans knew jack about soccer so I estimated it would take a generation or two to drop the ignorant hatred for the sport I so dearly loved.
I mean some of the things I've heard said about soccer, not just in social settings but on TV as well, would shock and call for the head of whoever spoke these words had they been racially motivated. In other words, we had become so PC about everything except for soccer!
You couldn't say anything that might offend a particular race, group or gender, but soccer has never had that buffer or protection barrier.
So forgive me if every four years when the World Cup rolls around I don't have a chip on my shoulder.
It's not just bandwagon stuff either but how everyone steps forward and spouts how much they know about the sport and yet are always just covering the basics as if they're explaining nuclear physics in laymen's terms.
Suddenly, the jerseys come out and everyone embraces their ancestral past. No one is American anymore, everyone's part Italian or Greek, or even half Brazilian.
This is the necessary evil.
I won't compare the civil rights movement, or genocide to soccer struggling for acceptance and due respect but that statement should highlight the frustrations I've endured for the better part of my adult life.
Soccer, screw it, Football (no, not the American version), is a global sport. It's basically simple to understand. Any sport has it's confusing rules but it's really no where near as complicated as every so-called American sport. In any team sport the object is to score more points than your opponent. Soccer doesn't award points for every goal scored like American football does. You score one goal, you get one goal. Not one point! If at the end of the game you have 2 goals to their 1, you win. It's that simple.
imagine if baseball gave points for runs. Sacrilege! So why is soccer held to a different standard?
Enjoy the WORLD Cup (that's right, WORLD!). Just be honest with yourself, you like it, you just don't want to admit it.

NIKE WRITE THE FUTURE - FULL LENGTH VERSION

Buy my shirts. There, I said it.

Here's my first stab at Iron Man.
That's me in the suit promoting Iron Man 2.

Blocked? And other worries...

I just started this blog in the hopes of staying relevant in a way other than Facebook when last week I found that my employer is now blocking blog sites. They claim that employees are using company time to update their blog status and therefore they have the right to block any site with 'blog' on it.
Well they're right. They have every right to block it. It's their equipment and their time.
Honestly though I don't see this stopping me from doing my work. How different is this from taking a 10 minute break to stretch your legs or an hour for lunch?
I'm currently updating this from my desk but all my work is finished. What do I do until I get something else?
Just after the economy nosedived last year I needed to take a real job because freelancing wasn't getting me too far and the bills weren't slowing down or understanding of my plight. I realize millions of Americans were going through the same thing I was at the time but this is my blog, so this is my story.
I'm not going to type where I worked because it embarrasses me, it wasn't illegal or tawdry just way below my career level. I'd always thought that somewhere along the way the freelancing gig was going to dry up at some point and I knew I'd have to take a job somewhere stacking boxes. Well, that day had arrived and I had to see if I was all talk or if I was going to do as I said I would. "I'll do whatever it takes to generate income, short of downright criminal acts."
I had gone from being my own boss, dictating my own time to someone who was waiting for his wife to get home so I could get to work and start my shift. I applied at several places, never even considering my profession as an artist as an option. The few places I looked into that were remotely close to what I had been doing were crappy publishers/print shops and almost all of them didn't even have an answering machine!
I wasn't turning my nose at any of them, there just wasn't any hiring going on.
So I had to turn to a real regular job. Minimum pay etc, etc.
I find myself writing about this a lot. It's a huge adjustment in my life and sometimes I pretend I'm 15 years into the future and look back at this time and chuckle about how I was able to make it out alive and not lose everything along the way.
My point is that, at this crappy job, which I did for a good 4-5 months and made just over $3,000.00, my supervisors were always checking that you were on time, not abusing your break time, basically ball busting me every chance they got! They had rules against texting while working which made sense because the job required direct customer interaction (mostly the younger employees were at fault with that one) and that was fine, because of the nature of the job. If I were a customer and the person attending to my needs was more into useless texting, I wouldn't give that place my business either.
But here?!
BTW. This blog post took me more than 45 minutes to type cause people kept coming by and disturbing me. And yet I still haven't had work to do. Sometimes I feel like I should grab a broom and do something then I remind myself, I have an education and I get my job done when I have a job to do.

Just found the Blogosphere and man is it full!!

Every time I look up a cool artist or something relevant I find they have a blog. I always axe myself, how do you do that and how do I get one? Well, now I know. Assuming everything goes well, I should have a blog site where the FBI and others can eavesdrop on me. I realize I may have just alerted Homeland Security with just the mere injection of those 3 little letters but it's ok, cause I'm just being a smart aleck. Really.

On this blog you'll see pics of me, maybe my family (I believe everyone should have a say in what you do with their photos) and regular rants about what I feel, is wrong with this planet. More specifically, the people who run things and also others who just, run around.

As a time capsule of sorts I will add text to this intro so anyone who reads it can 'feel' when I started this blog. I'm WAYYY behind on this, I'm not even on Twitter (I don't want to. I'm avoiding going there).

In the news currently there's a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico (that's what happens when you relocate the cast of Jersey Shore to Florida for Season 2). Also someone tried to cause mayhem in Times Square recently and they've just been caught (again, just being a smart-ass, no relation here). Personally, I'm 45 and actively going through my mid-life crisis.

So without further ado, on with the show!!