Our busy season somewhat coincides with the football offseason, which is one of the reasons I love what I do.  However, to the detriment of the Tortilla Retort, my contributions become scarce due to time constraints.  I’ve been traveling some, and we’re on a mission to execute some initiatives that need to be done in order to make ourselves better.  This takes up the majority of my time.  I’ve been doing a psychological experiment on myself in that I haven’t watched TV in almost 2 weeks, outside of about 15 minutes of Animal Planet at lunch the other day.  You see, the remote broke while I was in Nashville last week, and since I didn’t watch any TV out there, I thought I would challenge myself to see how long I can go without a TV in lieu of getting a new remote.  We’re on about day 12 or 13 right now.  I popped up at 5:00 this morning wide awake with my Labrador as he routinely threw up the rocks he swallows from the previous day.  I’m that neighbor mowing his lawn at 6:30 on a Saturday morning.  My signicant other was out of town all week for work and has been back in town for 1 night.  She says it feels like Little House on the Prairie.  She doesn’t think she can make it past today (Day 2 for her).  I’ve avoided watching or reading any news outside of Barking Carnival, Double T Nation, and Red Raider Sports, although I do browse the front page of CNN every morning to assure the Irabians haven’t bombed us.  The only news I’ve relied on is word of mouth from people.  It’s been interesting what I’ve learned is going on in the world.  I had no idea some bill had passed to burn all guns until I visited Tennessee.   In case you haven’t heard, the government is planning on taking 50% of your paycheck.  I’ve survived all these disasters unscathed, outside of missing the memo on the 2 cent stamp hike and having a bunch of invoices returned to me.  All I’ve focused on is waking up every day and exerting as much energy as possible to make our little blossoming outfit better.  Nothing else.  Without TV, my work schedule is coordinated by the sun just like it should be.   It’s been awesome and an injection of much needed energy.  I’ll keep you in tune with how long the TV holdout goes and what else I learn between now and then.

I might not exactly wear it on my face, but I absolutely get my rocks off competing.  It’s a way to measure your skill level at a specific trade against others.  Doing something you enjoy is fun.  Doing something you enjoy and being able to beat someone else’s ass while doing it is even more fun.  I think that was always my attraction to football.  I didn’t like losing, but even when it happened, I still had fun just competing.  The thing I appreciate about football is that no one has or ever will play a perfect game at the individual level.  As a team, games will be regarded as perfect based around the tally of the scoreboard or stat sheet.  However, at the microlevel, a perfect game will never be played outside of maybe the kicker, which doesn’t count.  Considering this, it provides the opportunity for superior athletic ability to be neutralized by accurate anticipation.  I came to the conclusion that the game of football is simply about knowing where you needed to be before your competitor and beating him to that spot.  The offensive player has the advantage of knowing a predetermined area of where that spot will be, while the defensive player has the advantage of being able to move to that spot as early as he can figure it out.  Think about it.  If you knew where the tackle was going to be made before the ball was ever snapped, you could weigh 140 lbs and just go stand in that spot waiting patiently for someone to trip over you.  That’s why Bob Sanders is currently the football player I had admire the most on this planet.  It doesn’t matter whether he’s lined up as a safety, a linebacker, or a rush end.  He just knows where to be earlier than the guy assigned to block him and beats him to the spot.  Zach Thomas made a career knowing this as well.   With that in mind, I always felt anyone could be a good football player no matter the size, and the hardest dude I ever had to block was the only guy I ever lined up against who was smaller than me.  Unfortunately for most of us, physical limitations begin to play a factor in success as the level of competition increases.  We must move onto other things.

I think my competitive nature was something I picked up from my dad.  I always enjoyed watching him compete, and later in life, competing with and against him.  I’ve never been around anyone as focused as he was.  I basically followed him around for the first 20 years of my life and served as a sounding board for a wide variety of interests over the years.  It wasn’t so much that I picked up a competitive nature by being around him, but that I learned how to compete.   He always said, “You can’t worry about what everyone else is doing,  just go out and control the things you can.”  He never competed against anyone else, only himself.  We never worried about how fast we did something, only that we did it right every time.   “You’ll get faster,” he would say.  There was always room to get better and consistent repetition yielded optimal results.  It’s amazing how much more thinking I’ve done without TV.  I didn’t really watch a lot of TV this time of year to begin with, but a couple extra hours a night spent trying to plan the next day or jotting down thoughts has seemed more fulfilling than a season of Lost.  During this time, I’ve thought back a lot about how to compete and notice I find a way to burn more daylight efficiently than I have in the past.   I hope this explains my extended abscence, but it sure makes the offseason go by fast.  I’ll try to get some help around here while I’m busy, so we can keep this thing humming.