The Summer Baseball Consumed My Life

My peak in athleticism, relative to my peers, was when I was 12. I was on the Blue Devils baseball team in Knik Little League and we were on fire. We were the best team in the league and it was very rare that we were beaten. I think we may have had 2 losses that entire season. I was one of the main pitchers and I also played short-stop, 1st base and 3rd base. This was one of the most memorable summers of my life.

I had two pitches in my repertoire: a 2 seam fast ball and a weird changeup/breaking ball pitch. That change-up fooled all kinds of hitters. I thought it was so great whenever the batter swung and the ball would drop down to home-plate at the last second, striking the batter out. I thought I was a hot-shot with that pitch. Then one day we were up against the Green Berets (I think) and Erik was up to bat. The team as a whole wasn't amazing, but Erik was great. He was one of the best home-run hitters in the league, but I still thought I'd be able to strike him out with his huge strike zone. I got two strikes on him, one he missed and the other he fouled deep in right field. That worried me a little bit, but I was ahead in the count, so I thought I'd try to get him with my change-up. The pitch was always best when it looked like it would be a strike, but dropped to the dirt. But this time I messed up. I threw it high, letting it drop right to the middle of his strike zone. Erik had seen the pitch before against his team mates and he was too good of a hitter to just get ahead of it and miss it. He watched it drop like it always does and gave it a hard whack. It was a high fly ball right over my head. I knew it was bad as soon as he hit it, and sure enough, it was a home run. A humbling experience for me.

We ended up winning the league championship later on in the season and when we won we all ran out to the mound jumping and laughing like we had just won the World Series. We had the best coach in the league and we were pretty sure all along that we could win the championship because he did such a good job coaching us. Bob Jones was his name. I always remember that he always told the other coach to call for the coin toss at the beginning of every game and he never ever ever lost. The regular season was fun and all, but 5 of us still had the All-Star season to come and things started to get serious.

I have a hard time remembering who our coaches were, but I think it was Coach Spink, Travis' dad, and maybe ole' Coach Bob helped out too...can't remember. We bumped it up to 2 practices every day for the next week as we prepared for the district tournament, which was to be held at our ball park. I honestly don't remember much from this part of the tournament. Seems like we were really confident that we would win this series because we had watched the other teams and they weren't all that great. Sure enough, we won the district championship and it was a Round-Robin tournament, so it was pretty anti-climactic.

After district, comes state, so we started getting ready to go to Fairbanks for the state tournament. I couldn't believe this was happening because there was talk among the parents about the possibility of us winning the state championship and going immediately from Fairbanks to California. We were so excited but started to finally get nervous. My mom bought me a bag to put all my soap and tooth paste and stuff in and bought me some sandals too. She told me that I'd probably have to shower with other boys if we made it to California and she didn't want me to get athlete's foot and sandals would help prevent that. We flew to Fairbanks, and once again I felt like a hot-shot. I had never flown to Fairbanks. It's just a 7 hour drive, so I always drove it, but the league paid for us to fly up there, so I felt like a celebrity.

We made it to Fairbanks and met the families who would keep us at their house. The family who kept us at our house was great. They came to our games and cheered us on. And let me tell you, their daughter was cute! She was a year younger than me I think, but boy was she cute. Oh and they had a trampoline and there's nothing more fun than a trampoline. I remember staying up late at the house watching a 21 inning Mariners game while practicing our golf putting on the little green they had in the basement. They had a Haro mountain bike in the basement and I thought it was the coolest bike ever.

There were 3 teams there: Knik (us), Fairbanks, and Ketchikan. We watched the other two teams play and after that game we were thankful that we played Fairbanks first. They were pretty bad and Ketchikan had an amazing team. They were all taller than us and their pitchers were FAST! Ketchikan seems like they always win the little league state championships in Alaska, so we were a bit afraid of them. Well our first game, like I said, was against the Fairbanks team and we whooped them. Pretty sure we won by like 10 runs and I got to pitch that game. I only let in maybe 1 or 2 runs for the whole game and had a sweet home run (I still have the home run ball from that game). This was one of the coolest games I had ever played because I was interviewed by a Fairbanks newspaper. I really felt like a celebrity. I thought for sure that girl at our house would fall in love with me after my performance that game. She didn't.

I can't remember much about the 2 games we had against Ketchikan, but we lost both. We were behind by no more than 4 runs in the second game and my team had given up before the last inning. One thing I love about baseball is that there's no time limit and it's possible to come back from any gap in the very last inning. I still had hope we could win, but many of my teammates threw in their towels.

We flew back to Anchorage and were horribly disappointed, but it was still one of the best summers ever.

Concerning the famous hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha

This is a drawing I did of a statue of Don Quixote that my friend Cynthia gave me from her trip to Spain.

Some People:

Don Quixote's that guy who ran into a bunch of windmills thinking they were giants right? Yeah... that's the guy.

Yep Wishbone (the old PBS show) got it right. He's the guy who ran into the windmills. Normally I am very pleased with the summary Wishbone does of books, but not Don Quixote. Sorry.

Oh he's the guy that the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha is about right? Yeah... that's him too.

Whoever did that musical should be forced to do something horribly unpleasant for making that musical.

Enough ranting. Don Quixote is a cool guy. If you know me very well, then you know that Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes is my favorite book. I'm secretly obsessed with the book and not many people realize it. It is a hilarious book with really cool insight into the character of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote is a crazy old man who was obsessed with chivalry books, so much that he believed they were all real. He dedicated his life to a life of chivalry, living as a knight going from town to town, righting the wrongs that he encountered. He is absolutely ridiculous (and his squire Sancho is even more ridiculous).

What I love about Don Quixote that really impresses me is how ridiculous he looks to everyone around him, but how ridiculously good he is to those he feels have been wronged. Everybody thinks he's stupid for running around in armor and a washpan as his helmet, but he is so honorable and kind. He protects servants from their abusive masters and he even treats the ugliest girl in town as a princess. He spends so much time dreaming of his beautiful Dulcinea, forcing his foes to swear that she is the most beautiful maiden in Spain. He also had this scrawny old donkey, whom he called Rocinante and spoke of the animal like it was a great stallion. Poor thing had to carry him across Spain.

Don Quixote dedicated his life to defending the weak and beautifying the ugly. Good guy. You should read the book, but please promise me not to watch the musical!

How The World Could Be

Pain indicates that life has potential for meaning: I'm reading a book by Donald Miller called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and Miller made this statement after reflecting on a story of a Nazi who saw all the pain the Jews were put through.

The world was once gray, flat, and inanimate. The world had nothing pretty and nothing ugly either. No stories to tell about the painful adventures climbers had climbing Denali. No wedding celebration or baby shower celebrating a beautiful covenant or a new life. We never saw a sunset or caught a glimpse of a 4 mile high mountain from hundreds of miles away. Nobody ever discovered the theory of gravity or cared what happened when you sent electrons through a double slit.

The good thing about this world was that we would never worry about being hurt. No one ever put their trust in someone, so there was no way to be betrayed. No one ever loved anyone, so there could never be heartbreak. No one ever had aspirations to raise money by selling text books to give the money to people who were in pain. Why would anyone think of this anyways since there was no earthquake and there was no genocide? No one expected the father to love his family and stay committed to them for his lifetime. Nobody ever lived an entire life in depression. They had no chance to encourage a friend who struggled with the same pain they felt.

I could never claim that I've lived a painful life but the pain I have felt and seen and the joy have felt and seen indicates to me that life has meaning.

Just admit it...You know the trumpet is the best

Ask any serious trumpet player and they will undoubtedly tell you that the trumpet is the best instrument ever. This is one of those band stereotypes that are totally true! Maybe some day I'll write about band stereotypes like how goofy trombone players are and how much percussion likes making ears bleed, but that'll be another day. Or maybe not, cuz there's not much to it. I'm here to tell you why trumpets are, in fact, the best.

I've used this trumpet since I was in 6th grade, so, like 12 years. It is my favorite instrument I own just because I've had it so long and I'm secretively proud that it's a Yamaha beginner's trumpet that I still used through college (Don't tell anyone). I would have bought a new trumpet if I had $1,000 lying around that I wasn't already using for survival in the deep woods of the Anchorage suburbs. I'm going to try to tell you a few stories that I have shared with this trumpet over the years to show you why the trumpet is so great.

In eighth grade I was a hot-shot, er I thought I was. I was in the Gruening Middle School Jazz Band and, let me tell you, we were good. We mastered classics like chatanooga choo-choo, La Bamba, In the Mood, and other such songs that I thought were the coolest jazz ever 'til I realized they're all not that amazing. Anyways, one day we got to skip class for half the day and go around to the elementary schools and show them our skills. I was certain they all thought we were amazing musicians and they all wanted to be just like us when they grew up. Some 5 little kids at Birchwood elementary shouted out to me when I was walking next to them, "Trumpets Rock!" This confirms the first fundamental of the trumpet's coolness: Everyone knows the trumpet rocks!

I never really understood the trumpet until I was a sophomore in high school in the jazz band at 6:30 in the morning (an hour of the morning a high schooler would only be conscious for for the sake of jazz). Good ole' Boysen told me, "Jon, you need to just play louder and don't give a crap whether the notes are right or not. So get your dad to let you in the church and play in the auditorium so you have to work hard to fill up the room with sound." Of course I never did this because no trumpet player would ever accept help from a trombone player (or anyone really). Don't tell anyone, but I started playing louder. I sucked as much air into my lungs that they could hold and just blared that trumpet. I finally started to get better and realized that trumpet parts are very often designed to just blare out notes really loud and it's not that big of a deal if it's wrong. This confirmed the second fundamental of the trumpet's coolness: Trumpets know how to play loud and it's essential for surviving

So back to the whole playing jazz at 6:30 in the morning. I woke up every day during the last 2 years of high school at 5:45 in the morning so I could play jazz. I wasn't really a morning person and my dad knew it, so one day on the ride to school he asked me why I was willing to wake up at 5:45 for jazz band. I told him that it was the only thing keeping me sane in high school. Honestly, I didn't like most of the people at my school and with my business in taking all honors classes and playing sports every year, the only refuge I had was band. Science and math classes were cool and I had a very small group of friends that I liked outside of band, but band was the only class I ever went to, looking forward to seeing the people. Maybe I'll explain why I didn't like the people at my high school (and why I feel bad about it now) some time later. All that said, band and being able to play jazz trumpet kept me sane through high school. Therefore: Playing the trumpet keeps one sane.

Now, possibly the only legitimate reason the trumpet is cool is because of it's simplicity (which it also shares with the tuba, trombone, and baritone). It is 3 buttons for goodness sake. Pianos have like 66, Saxes, Clarinets, Flutes, Oboes, Bassoons all have a bunch of buttons too. It's like a fixie. The simplicity is just beautiful. Why make the instrument have billions of buttons when your body has the ability to control a significant portion of pitch. On a fixie, you just have to have the ability to ride at different cadences if you want to ride at different speeds. On a trumpet, your lips just need to get tighter or looser if you want to make adjustments to pitch (you can also make all kinds of tones by adjusting your mouth in other ways too). So, The simplicity of the trumpet (and other brass) is beautiful.

That's probably enough for now. Most of the reasons I gave aren't actual reasons and you could easily destroy me in a debate about it. I just like the trumpet and you should too.

Shadow

Yesterday I was waiting for the bus in Golden and it was 9:30PM. It was dark and cars were passing every minute or so. The bus was supposed to get there by 9:19, so I was starting to get impatient and started pacing. I'm not much of a pacer, but that was the best thing I could think of doing at the moment. I noticed the shadow of the bus stop sign moving whenever a car would pass. The headlights were shining on the sign and the shadow would move along the bench. In my pacing I started walking along the shadow and wondered, if I know the speed of the shadow, can I calculated how fast the car is moving? Nope. Can't do it.

I was so disappointed, but i realized why I couldn't do the calculation. The shadow is just a projection from a moving light source, past the sign, onto the bench. The shadow doesn't contain every piece of information that the light source and object contains. There's always a loss of information for a projection. Like if you saw two shadows of people with identical head shapes, but different noses, you'd never be able to figure out who had the bigger nose. It's sad, I know. And even if you had an infinite number of shadows, you'd know who had the bigger nose, but wouldn't know if either person had eyeballs, unless they had particularly bulgy eye balls. So projections are cool, but they always have a loss of information.

Thecool thing is that the more projections you have, the more information you have. That's why 2 eyes are better than one. Two different perspectives or projections allow you to have depth perception. And if we had 2 more eyeballs on our hands, then we'd have even better depth perception. We only have depth perception for things that are moderately close, because when you're looking at Russia from Palin's backyard, the picture in one eyeball is about the same as the picture in the other eyeball. The eyeball separation is so close compared to the long distance that it doesn't really make a difference. It's basically two copies of the same picture.

In calculus, a derivative is a loss of information (like a projection) and an integral is an increase of information (like an antiprojection (whatever that is)). So it goes to show that an integral is way cooler than a derivative for this reason:

• A derivative is an old fashioned overhead projector that your high school literature teacher used to tell you that The Great Gatsby is the best book ever.
• An integral is the hologram that your high school physics teacher used to set-in-stone that physics is so much cooler than any other subject.

'nough said.

So now you know that I like physics and math, but don't really like The Great Gatsby...One of the things that I passionately dislike. Sorry for the extremely nerdy post.

Introduction

My favorite coffee cup. It’s my favorite because I like the tall, but wide shape, the rooster, the lip, and the fact that the inside is colored.

I’m about to start a new life. Since I was 4 years old, my life has been nothing but school (That’s 19 years now) and I’m finally done…for good. I have no job lined up, but thankfully the school paid me way more than I needed for my living situation during grad school, so I was able to save up a LOT of money to just live off of once I’m done with school. I have no job lined up, just a place to live for as long as I can keep paying rent.
In light of my lack of job, being fully aware that I’m going to be bored beyond my imagination, I put together some things that I want to do every week so I can at least look back on my time being unemployed and say I accomplished something. One of my plans is to write a blog, at least 2

entries per week. If you like my writing, then get mad at me when I start slacking. If you hate my writing then send me a note thanking me for quitting to spout out word after word of nonsense. I don’t have a plan for the subject of this blog, but I’ll let you know when I decide…maybe. It’ll probably have something to do with Physics, Bikes, God, Coffee, Baseball, Romance, My Hatred for Computers, How Delicious Food Is, Mountains, Living in Denver, Music, My Favorite Books, or My Passion for Online Flash Games.

Hopefully I don’t bore you to death.

P.S. My name is Jon Banks. I’m almost not a Mines student anymore who used to study physics. I live in Denver. I do stuff that I do and passionately don’t care about things I don’t care about.

Thoughts for the night 'bout the adventure that pursued

-Weird, the bus is at least 10 min late or was over 10min early...

-I'll try out the new bike route that I planned on google maps

-I sure hope google maps is right...

-Nope, google maps wasn't right...NREL likes their high security driveway...

-Oh crap! There's a man wearing minimal clothing standing at his doorway, staring at me...I should turn around...

-I sure hope my memory of the route doesn't fail me...

-Ugh, now that I thoroughly explored this neighborhood I realize my memory failed me...but it's back!

-Please God, let Denver West Pkwy turn into 20th...

-Thank you, God!

-Google Maps should really have an elevation graph that goes with your directions cuz I wasn't expecting this steep hill...

-Ok, turn right on Garrison...

-Oh wait, I haven't been watching for Garrison...

-Aaaah why are there 6 streets in a row that start with the letter G?!

-Missed Garrison...hmm what's the next road that would go all the way through?...

-Oh oh there's Carr! that one goes pretty far. I'll turn here...

-Blast you 6th avenue!!!!!

-Oh, good ole' 10th avenue...

-Darn, 10th stops at some country club...Oh wait, there's a bike detour that goes along a creepy side walk...

-I hope I don't get murdered on this creepy side walk with 6 foot bushes on either side...

-Please God, Please God, Please God, Please God, Please God, Please God...

-Thank you, God. Thank you, God...Hmm I should probably thank God as many times as I said Please, God...

-10th is a dirty road...why do they have to use so much sand in the winter and not sweep it all up?...

-Aah Sheridan, I'm tired of this adventure. Time to bite the bullet and ride down the bumpy sidewalk to 1st...

-Never!!! This adventure's not done!!! I still have yet to see if 10th makes it all the way to Knox! Forget Sheridan...

-Aah, Money Gram place. Such a sweet familiar sight...

-Oh, I the longer I've been riding, the more these thoughts have actually been me talking out loud...Oh well...

-6th Avenue, my arch nemesis!!!! I've defeated you this time...

-Aah, sweet Irving Street...

-I should write down all my thoughts I had while riding here before I forget them all...

-I should write something saying, "In anticipation of all you people who are going to comment, 'Jon, you could have called me and I'dve (best contraction ever!) given you a ride,' I'm glad I rode my bike home. It was an adventure."

-I think I might just work from home tomorrow since it's 12:27...

-I should go to bed...

Check out the sweet route I took