Sunday, February 7, 2010

SUPER BOWL TIME!!!! FINALLY DONE TYPING!!!!

This week we had baseball tryouts. Everyone was excited but also nervous about it. On Monday the field was dry and good so we did defensive evaluations. He hit fly balls to the outfielders and had them throw to second once, third twice, and home twice. They had a radar gun on them to see how fast they could throw and evaluated their throws accuracy. I was at third and got very bored standing there watching them throw. Eventually my couch, Couch Nicholson, went to infield evaluations. He told us the way he runs infield tryouts is that he starts off just hitting ground balls to everyone so they can get into the rhythm and n to evaluate them yet so they can just practice. I enjoyed this part because it was relaxed and just baseball practice. Eventually he moved everyone to shortstop, which is a position between the third basemen and second base. He had each person walk up, tell him their name, and then take four ground balls. There was one groundball that was hit right at the player, one which was a forehand ball, one backhand, and finally one short ball. I liked watching everyone take groundballs because you could see how nervous they were. This was all we did for Monday and after it we went home. Tuesday it rained a lot over night so all we did was hitting evaluations and running. During the hitting evaluations you could warm up on the tee. The tee is a pole that you can adjust to hold a ball up for you to hit. It is really a training device to work on your swing and form. After the tee you go to soft toss. In soft toss you partner up and while one person hits the other tosses a ball up for them to hit. I rather hate soft toss and prefer taking BP, short for batting practice. This is where a person throws a ball to you while behind a net. It is more fun and enjoyable than soft toss. I enjoy the tee but get bored with it really quickly. Due to so many people trying out the couches broke up hitting time slots and the seniors and juniors hit first. When I was evaluated, I did really good and the couches liked my hitting power. After I was done, I went home and changed into sweat pants for the running.

The running for tryouts was running the Gladiator trail. This is cross country running where you start at the tennis courts, run down the right side of school, run to the front and follow the side walk thought the front parking area, down a hill onto a greenway, and finally end up back at the tennis courts. It is around 1.13 miles and has a muddy hill we had to run down. One kid fell down it and personally it was hilarious. I ran it in 8:16 minuets and the last person ran it around ten minuets. On Wednesday we were suppose to have a scrimmage but couldn’t use the field due to rain. So they evaluated the pitchers and catchers while everyone else hanged around and hit in the cages. It was rather boring after a while. I did not get evaluated so I was rather relaxed the whole time and watched the pitchers and talked about who was really bad and who was really good. Thursday morning they posted the cuts for the teams and I made it. Some annoying juniors who have really bad attitudes got cut and a lot of us were really happy about that. We had a meeting after school for the players who made it and the couch told me to stay after. I was nervous but he told me I was on Varsity but I am also going to play JV as well. So basically I made both teams. I am going to be soooo busy playing both schedules. We had practice Saturday morning and Friday afternoon. Friday we ran a mile and then we were free to go so that was not to bad. Saturday we had practice on the field while the freshmen tried out for the freshmen team. It started to hail and we were freezing. Eventually our couches told us to hit for a little while and then go home and warm up. I was so ready to go back to our warm locker room and change. We are using a personal locker room where only baseball players can go in which is really nice.

In class we are finally finishing up essays that we started in like October, or was it November. All I know is we started a really long time ago. My essay is about society using death to manipulate others to change into something that is more preferable by the manipulator. I used The Scarlet Letter, Salvation, Forever War, The Pirates, and other stories to back up my main idea. I also used Dead Man Walking to show the reader how even today’s modern society in which we live, people use the fear of death to manipulate members of our society. It was rather interesting how I could link modern day based literature to literature based in history and show the relationships between them. The manipulation through the fear of death has only changed through new tactics to create it. Literature shows manipulation based on the fear of death being present all over the world ranging from Iraq, to the Caribbean, England, and even in the United States present day. In class we also read and learned about close reading skills. Some of the techniques in the literature piece were interesting to learn about but others were more bogus. If a person needs to do all of this work while reading a story, he or she needs to focus more on enjoying the story instead of analyzing it. I believe a reader needs to enjoy a book and not focus on small things that the author could supposedly put in to represent something. I personally believe that authors tend to just right a story and readers make up things around representations that are supposedly present in the novels. Maybe that red umbrella in the story that supposedly represents something by being red is actually there just because the author wrote it as a red umbrella.

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