A Wake for Young Souls

Hey all, this has nothing to do with our team, or ultimate frisbee, even, but I felt really compelled to write this. Don't you fret, once I get the time to finish it, I will be posting the Texas Throwdown preview. But yeah, don't go out of your way to read this or anything. In any case.

If you know anything about me, you will know that I am an extremely emotional person. "The four right chords can make me cry" (points for the reference), and "A Lion in the House" gets me bawling every time. I cry reading Sports Illustrated. I read something in the D.I. this afternoon at lunch that made me all but burst out into tears. Unfortunately for me, I'm a news junkie, and sad news sells. I really like reading newspapers from all around the U.S., and today I found some time after class to start reading over on the West Coast. This article was in the Seattle P.I. last Thursday.

A lot of you remember playing UW and have read about Sarah Plants. I read this article, and it really, really saddened me. After a year or so of playing, I consider myself a member of the ultimate community. It angers me when I read about people stealing other people's things on RSD, and it tears my heart out when I read about tragedies like this happening to other teams. Sarah was a lot like you and me. She had conditioning practices, like you and me. She and her teammates probably had inside jokes, like you and me. She wanted to go to Nationals, like you and me. She loved Ultimate, like you and me. It's always a real wake up call; you don't get used to hearing this kind of news.

The line that got me most was this one: "It's not about grandeur, it's about the people around you and the next family event." That's how I see life. I don't drive a Mercedes Benz, and I don't need one, because the times I've had in my car are absolutely ridiculous. How many people do you ever see on Fullerton Ave., with every window wide open in sub-zero temperature screaming Phantom Planet's "California" at the top of their lungs? I don't live in a mansion in the hills, but that little house on 25th St. is my home, always. I don't have a lot of money, but I don't really need all that much to have fun. Paying $3 for a gyro and fries on Tuesday nights will let you see Mary drip sauce all down her front in erratic patterns. Paying a few dollars among a few people will get you case upon case of Icehouse at Loyola, and then you and your best friends can stay up until 5am playing guitar and listening to music and sitting on a four-story window ledge, talking and laughing. $3 will get you a Maxwell Street polish and fries, and you can sit on my front steps as the sun goes down, talking about driving cross country to California and camping in the national parks of Utah. I don't have a huge list of friends, but I know that the ones I do have I can count on, always. This is evident, because I have friends who will pick up my phone calls at all hours of the night when I am wasted and delirious and sobbing like a janky mess. I have friends who will drive hours and hours to come watch me run a marathon and cheer me on for a minute or two. I have friends who will talk with me until 3 in the morning even when they have to get up in a few hours. I have friends who will lay in the middle of Bicentennial Park's ice rink with me, "Eternal Sunshine"-style, when I'm depressed and listening to Dashboard Confessional.

I remember my first "real" tournament last year. It was Blue Ridge Blowout, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go. It didn't seem like a lot of other rookies were going, and I didn't want to be the only one going. I also had a lot of school stuff to do, and I was still sort of on the fence about staying on the team or quitting. I happened to mention to my mom in a conversation once that I wasn't sure if I wanted to go, and she told me to go. It totally threw me off because my mom is usually a very conservative, cards-tight-to-the-vest type of person, and I would have expected her to tell me to focus on school or something. But she said to me, how many of my friends were going to be able to say that they traveled to North Carolina in the middle of a semester? How many people in CU were going to have a real tan in November? She told me that this type of opportunity didn't come around all too often, and she told me to just go out and experience it. And I did, and I fell in love.

I know a lot about wasted young lives.
The cousin that I loved like a brother died when I was twelve. His best friend was driving drunk and flipped the car over a few times. He came out with a broken arm. My cousin died on the spot. I had a friend who played basketball, and she was really good at it. She even got a full-ride scholarship to a big-time program. On the day of her high school graduation, she drove herself over to the school, and she took a left-hand turn head-on into a semi-truck. No one was drunk, no one was high, no one was asleep. This senior in high school used to talk to me occasionally, even though I was a loser 8th grader. He was a nice, warm person who I always saw joking around with his friends. One day he decided to step out in front of a train. This kid who was a year younger than me in high school took his girlfriend to work last spring. He kissed her goodbye and no one saw him again. They found his body in the Cal Sag Channel on his mother's birthday. A few years back, this kid I thought was a complete tool in high school started to date this girl who was a diagnosed nymphomaniac. They were both really fucked up people, in the realest sense of the word, but they loved each other and saved each other. One day, they were both hanging out in his basement, and he went upstairs to get something. When he came back downstairs, she was hanging from the ceiling. I met this guy at a summer program I went to a while back. Last year, he and his friends were out at a bar, and his friend got into a fight with someone else. He tried to help his friend out and get the guy off him, and he was stabbed and bled to death. My best friend died when I was 14 years old. She and I got involved with the wrong people and the wrong interests when we were way too young. We thought we were invincible and too fuckin' cool. We were neither, actually. The night before I left for Purdue, she put too much powder in her nose and too much of that needle in her arm. She died on the Fourth of July. I never said goodbye.

My life is not extraordinary. I grew up in the heart of Chicago, IL, and I had the extraordinary pleasure of waking up every morning to the sight of my beautiful skyline. I skinned my knees riding bikes and got bruised up playing ball with the boys. I lost big basketball games, and came in second in a lot of races. I watched Bulls and Bears games on TV with my dad, and went to Sox games in the summers with my mom. The best friends I had then are still my best friends now. I've fallen in love a few times, and I've had my heart broken a few times. I am the daughter of one immigrant and one war refugee, and the sister of an autistic girl. I am a part of an amazing team that I hope to go to Nationals with, and I wouldn't trade my life for anything.

Especially after what happened at Northern Illinois last week, I am reminded on a daily basis that life is short. You never know what's going to happen to you or the people you love. Life waits for no one. I recognize the danger in taking too much onto your plate because you want to experience everything at once, but don't let that hold you back, in anything. Laugh a little too loudly. Take a little longer on that walk through the Quad. Smile at someone you don't know. Watch that eleven thousandth re-run of Tila Tequila with your roommates instead of doing homework. Go out and love, completely, with all of your heart. The worst that could happen is that you get your heart broken. Whatever. Tell your friends and family you love them, and don't give them any reason to doubt it. Know how blessed you are to be with your friends, happy, traveling to sweet places to play ultimate. And most of all, love your life, completely.


"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it."
- W. Somerset Maugham