An odd thought occurred to this very-out-of-shape gamer today. Maybe it's all the NCAA 06 I've been playing lately. Maybe I'm anxious for the kickoff to the real college football season. Maybe I really miss weighing the same amount as I did in college. Maybe I just miss having inordinate amounts of free time and having many friends who also had nothing better to do.

I really miss playing touch football in the schoolyard.

Back when I was in junior high, my friends and I would play touch football almost every weekend. We'd all ride our bikes over to one of two different school playgrounds and just take over the field. Make no mistake--we were all really terrible. None of us ever played (or even tried out, I imagine) for our high school team. Only one of us played for the junior high team. We were just 10-14 dopey sports dorks who enjoyed tossing a football around (not very far), catching the ball (sometimes), and running (slowly) for touchdowns. It was even more amusing on the few occasions that a pretty girl or two from school would happen to walk past as we were playing. We'd all try really hard to look cool, but then end up looking even dumber in the process.

But the point is that none of us had anything better to do on the weekends, and even on the weekdays if it was summertime. So it was a very easy thing to ring up two friends, and tell each of them to call two people and have them all show up at the schoolyard at a moment's notice. Now that we're old, everyone our age has jobs/marriages/house chores/adult stuff to take care of. There's no such thing as 10-12 friends who all have nothing to do all at the same time. Today I don't think I even have 10-12 friends to get a proper game of touch football going. At least, not 10-12 who'd actually be interested in you know, going OUTSIDE and playing. These days it's even impossible to round up enough to run 3 on 3 basketball on a whim. We have to Evite this kind of s**t weeks in advance, try to figure out a central location for everyone to meet at, hope no one injures themself in the meantime/has car trouble that day/gets paged into work/gets guilt-tripped into flaking out by wife or gf/whatever and cross our fingers for a game to happen.

Things are so much easier when you're a kid. I guess it didn't seem that way at the time, but with the perspective of time and experience and of course the jading effect of age...most adolescent concerns are really quite trivial. I'm not so old (yet) that I don't remember what it felt like at the time. Your problems as a pre-teen/teenager seem at the time like the entire weight of the world. Depressed because of unrequited love for some silly girl . Drama between friends who are in a tiff over something stupid. A subject in school that's difficult. The pressure of cliques and fitting in. It was so "overwhelming" then. When you get to about 20 or so (or whenever it is you personally start paying your own rent/mortgage and car payments) that's when you realize all those petty concerns were entirely retarded. Then again, most of us still waste time in our twenties wrestling with very similar drama and issues. So who am I to judge?

Err yea what was the point of this again? I got lost in a tangent there. Oh yes, touch football. At least for today, I miss playing it. Maybe it's better I'm not playing it anymore though. In the shape I'm in now, I might tear an ACL or something.