0 comments on my sanity Listening to: Silence
Mood: Tired
Oh man, it is finally the end of term... I feel rather like I have been being pulled along behind a boat with the water trying to close over my head for the last six weeks or so, just because of various conspiring circumstances like swimming and parent-teacher interviews managing to be in the same 3 week period. (why do they do that? Why? Trying to make up all the damn classes during the day and then having to stay until 8 or 9pm to get all your prep done? not fun.)
We still have the fun fun fun Grade 1 summer camp on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and a further two working days after that because the school just loves us that much, but there will be no kids (apart from the Grade 1s, obviously). Just to make the summer camp extra fun, there's a hugeass typhoon coming in this weekend. Hear me laugh, oh ha ha ha.
So to celebrate the shiny happy end of term, Jess and I went to a Softbank Hawks game last night.
Last time I went, I was stuck way up in the rafters of the Yahoo Dome and so i could barely see the darn baseball. We were completely cut off from the awesome crowd and it was basically little better than watching it on tv, in fact worse because the chairs were uncomfortable.
This time we were right mixed in with all the other people who had snuck out of work early to make the 6pm start of the first innings and we got steadily drunker, learned the claps and let off screaming penis-balloons with them as the evening wore on.
So while I was sitting there, pleasantly buzzed on chuhais, clapping absently with the mickey-mouse-hands cheerleader, I suddenly realised that shit, I was there with possibly tens of thousands of other people (the Yahoo Dome seats 48,000 but it wasn't full yesterday...) and yeah sure some of them were Rakuten Golden Eagles fans, but that's still a heck of a lot of people, and everyone was clapping along in the same way.
It occurred to me that that kind of sporting event, baseball, football, whatever, is a sort of replacement for those community gatherings we would have had where the entire family would come out and dance around the bonfire with drums and singing and food and just have a damn good time. I can't quite pinpoint what I mean but it seems to me that the rhythm part of it is important in some way. There's nothing in most peoples' daily lives where they do that kind of thing. I go around tapping my feet to things all the time, but I don't do it along with ten thousand other people.
Karaoke and concerts are similar, because let's face it there isn't anything quite so amazing as screaming along the lyrics to "Love in an Elevator" with the entirety of Wembley Stadium who are all as out of their minds with euphoria as you are.
Maybe it's a very personal thing- I have never before felt moved to tears listening to my CD of Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, but when I went to see Queen live... well I cried like a little girl when the stadium sang the final lines.
Am I just getting crowd hysteria, or is this a primal human thing? Any Anthropologists or whatever out there who'd like to enlighten me?
July 13, 2007 at 5:06 p.m.