Team Spirit

I don’t know whether it was my upbringing or my genes, but I’ve just never really gotten into team spirit. I can play on a team, participate in a team’s activities, and even earnestly collaborate with my teammates toward a mutually beneficial goal. But ask me to root, root root for the home team, and you can bet I’m going to be yawning in between asking why I should bother.

I remember being in a freshman high school assembly and being taught about how to show my school spirit. Three hundred of us were coaxed and cajoled into screaming at certain cues, and a good number of the kids really seemed to get into it. But a contingent of senior classmen was there, and even despite their smaller numbers, they were louder. Oh noes, we had to beat them, how could we let them beat us??!!

I distinctly remember thinking “but what’s the point,” to myself as I stood in the bleachers with my comrades. Yes, yes, the seniors were louder, but how did it matter? What if they did love our school more, what then? What was the point of school spirit? Did it get me better grades, less homework, or out of school an extra period early? How did my allegiance to something I had no part in choosing for myself benefit me at all? Was I really supposed to be bloated with school pride just because it was the one I went to, and not based on its merits?

This internal dialogue has echoed in my thoughts time and again, and has informed many of my decisions. Religion, military service, and any significant sort of plebian nationalism have all been considered and dismissed. Autonomically doing as god says without personally talking to it, sacrificing my life for an economic system, and accepting the poor choices of my government without comment seem like foolish and dangerous paths to choose. Especially when the merits are dubious, at best.

But faced with these same choices, so many people still seem particularly eager to show their school spirit. Sometimes I feel like I’m still standing next to them in our high school auditorium looking at them, shaking my head, and wondering “why?”

Sad Song

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a sad song. Sometimes I need the minor key because nothing else interlocks with my reality. My body chemistry. The little aches and pains.

And sometimes, when I hear a song that is sad, I feel like I hear the words. No, not the words - that’s not it. I feel the meaning. The way the hurt collects in the throat and in the heart, constricting them - tingling sour in the corners of the jaw and fluttering in the tummy like nervousness. Nervousness and loss.

Sometimes I’d like to write a sad song too, just so someone would hear it. And maybe the right person would hear it, someone who heard the story I was really telling. They could lie on their bed or sit in their cubicle and let a single tear drop because they realized someone else felt the same hurt.

And we’d never meet and it wouldn’t matter. Because that little truth would rescue us both.