October Blues...

No, not the name of a bad Hollywood-esque baseball movie (or even the lamentings of a fan whose baseball team fails repeatedly in the postseason) but the general sentiment that I always seem to experience around this time of year. Part of this is because of an association of this time of year with past events. Part of this is because the end of the baseball season (even if it's a season that I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to...like this one) seems to bring a finality to the joys of summer. Part of this is the routine that's been driving my life since early August really seems to take it's toll on me at this time of year. Everything is just kindof...blah...

In spite of all this moodiness things are, relatively speaking, going well, or at least as well as expected. School is school and, no matter what, it always seems to move forward. The freshman are plowing their way through the Middle Ages, complete with all the requisite discussions of the failings of the Crusades and the pus-filled boils associated with the Black Death. The sad thing is that I can already identify a good seven or eight students who will likely be out of the program by the end of the year, if not by the end of the semester. The juniors have hit the wall...as they always do this time of year. The IB reality has fully set in with massive amounts of work expected of them between now and the end of the semester. The esoteric ramblings of their TOK instructor combined with the vague and somewhat inane vernacular of the appropriate IB rubrics are sometimes just too much for them to handle. To make matters worse their attention (and mine) is being drawn to a variety of other co-curricular activities such as counselor visits, ACT and SAT testing, various community service responsibilities, etc., etc. There's no way that, as a high school student, I could've or would've done what they've undertaken.

In what might be viewed as more important matters, the Seahawks suck. A bad year looks to be getting worse by the week as injuries and a lack of execution have crippled the team. My hope then turns to the Oilers...but they've now lost five straight after starting the season an impressive 4-0. It amazes (yet does not surprise me) that this team simply cannot score goals. Chemistry doesn't happen overnight and all the new faces are still trying to mesh within the team. Watch any given shift throughout a game and you can tell that, while the strategy and scheme is there, the execution simply isn't. The familiarity with the tendencies of linemates just isn't there yet. The good news is that the current seven game road trip (which began last night with a dreadful 3-1 loss to Nashville...a team that shouldn't even exist) is their longest of the year. Let's hope the boys can get through this road trip and pull in enough points along the way to keep themselves in the Northwest division race. If they can, the seventeen home games in December and January might put them in a position to guarantee a postseason spot.

Still...even though hockey is back...blah...