Long ago, I blogged about what I thought I would miss when I left New York. I was seldom right.
I don't miss the Sunday New York Times. I don't miss Yankee Stadium. I don't miss the Haven Coalition.
I do miss the grandeur and the beauty of New York. I do miss my old job - it was easier, it paid better and it left me more time to myself. And I do miss seeing my mother more frequently, for shorter periods of time.
I didn't know iced coffee wasn't readily available at every street corner here, so I didn't know I'd miss it.
But did I ever imagine the thing I miss most would be an hour of commercial television? I want my "Baseball Tonight"!!
Baseball Tonight is a baseball-only highlights show on ESPN. It doesn't always have insightful analysis - in fact, it's been considerably dumbed down for the last couple of years. I didn't watch it every night, because sometimes it was on during the game. (Stupid!) But I could lie on the couch and watch highlights from all the games of both leagues, and get caught up on the streaks, the winners, the losers, the trade rumours, and all the baseball scuttlebutt.
Everything I used to get from BBTN is available elsewhere, scattered about in different forms. But the form is what I loved. With SportsCentre, I have to sit through the Other Sports, with baseball getting 15 minutes of the hour, at best. Video highlights at mlb.com are very limited. Reading all the baseball news is alright, but come on, it's a sport, you want to watch it more than read about it, and it somehow doesn't sink in the same way.
Like iced coffee last autumn, I tried not to think about BBTN in April and May. But man, it is almost the All Star Break! I am underinformed and out of touch.
It seems like we get a million channels on our digital cable, including all the American networks that I never watch. But no ESPN. Rogers SportsNet carries the Sunday night game (the "ESPN game") and TSN has the Canadian version of SportsCenter (which I call Sports Sentry), but no ESPN, and no BBTN.
Free Iced Americano to the first person to solve this one for me.
2 comments:
Years ago, I read an interview with African-American refugee in Cuba, Assata Shakur, where she told the interviewer that she didn't realize until she was in Cuba how tired she was of the constant struggle in the United States, political struggle and economic struggle. She felt unexpectedly relieved at not living in an environment where she constantly had to be fighting and organizing against injustice, even though she thrived on political activism while she was in the US. I'm wondering if something similar might explain your not missing the Haven Coalition.
Dean, that is very astute of you. It explains it 100%.
The emotion I experience above all others, about having left the US, is relief. I say it all the time.
Maybe like Shakur, I thrived on the high-stakes political activism of groups like Haven. Even though it was frustrating work, it was also exhilarating, and I loved feeling that I was making a difference.
Yet now, thinking about the effort I put into work like that, it seems more exhausting than anything else. I'm deeply relieved not to be doing it anymore.
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