Monument(al) Presidtial Address

I have been suffering from the creeping death all week and in no condition to address anyone about anything. Here is all I have to offer in ways of advise to avoid whatever I had:

- Don’t snort gin up your nose – ever
- Don’t play beer pong with people who recently had swine flu
- Don’t drool on yourself as you sleep on the plane – your neighbor may poison you
- If you’ve done any or all of the above, don’t recover by drinking for 7 hours at the X

Avoid the clap (and me next week),
Harlan

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Monement(al) Presidential Address

So last week, at some point between games, someone asked me what color one of the DC Star teams was. Now, having only been to one prior week and no events, I had no idea. It just so happened that last year’s Monument president, Carly, was standing right there. She seized this opportunity and jabbed at me with a “Shouldn’t you know that? Nice job, president…” She then made some comment about how I was a terrible president and had everyone else do my work. I agreed. Still, I felt a need to respond, and figured there was no better venue than the rarely read GMOT. So here we go, a tale of two presidents:

I figure it is best to start off with the first thing anyone notices about a person; the physical. Carly is a girl. I am a boy. Carly is short. I am not short. Carly is very skinny. I am not very skinny. In fact, I think Carly is probably less than half my weight. Carly wears a clean uniform to each game. I wear a dirt stained wife beater and an 11 year old hat that should have been burned in 2001. So who wins this battle; the small, somewhat delicate person who wears clean clothes or the bigger, more durable person in the dirty white trash clothes? The answer is simple; me. Why? Please see the first comparison of this paragraph.

So let’s move on to actual presidential duties. The first of these is something everyone agrees is important, and that is communication. Carly sent emails to the league about things. They were long and detailed emails that I seldom read. This resulted in me not knowing a lot of stuff, because in addition to being long and detailed, they contained information about stuff. Last week I asked someone how to send league-wide emails because I didn’t know how to do this. You may have noticed I have not yet exercised this knowledge. Instead, I have a distribution list of captains somewhere in gmail that I dig up and occasionally use to send them stuff. By occasionally, I mean twice. I do, however, write a jackass GMOT column that 3 people read, which has nothing to do with actual kickball events or information. We’ll call this one a push and move on.

Let’s next go to preseason preparation. At our first board meeting (held at a bar on a Sunday afternoon of course), when I explained that I didn’t know what I was doing and asked previous board members what I was supposed to do, pretty much the response to most questions was “I don’t know. Carly did that, but I think talk to the WAKA rep.” This leads me to believe that Carly did a lot of stuff. I took a different approach and spent all my time on the road and delegated to my board. My message was simple: do whatever you think is right and I will take the blame if it goes wrong. I fear Andy nearly had a panic attack and I had an obscenity-laden voicemail from Amy when I was fishing in Kansas about the hell that trying to make this all work was, but I think I made the right choice. You see, if, for some reason, the league had to progress without my presidential guidance, we now have a number of qualified individuals to handle things. I think this is advantage me.

How about game-day preparation? Carly seemed to always have a schedule, know who was playing whom, who each team was by shirt color and reffing assignments. On the first day of the season I had to call Andy to have him print a schedule for me. I now have a black and white one in my bag so I don’t know which teams are which colors. I have asked them all several times, but seem to stop paying attention as soon as I ask and never hear the answer. However, I did come up with a field numbering system that is pretty cool. Once again, we will call this a push.

Well, at this point I am ahead 2-0 with 2 pushes, meaning Carly would have to win 3 categories to beat me. Now, I can only think of two more categories, and one of those is ability to yell loud, and I’ve got her there, so there is no need to continue the comparison and humiliate her. So, Carly, next time you think my work as president has been questionable at best, I urge you to take a look back at this list and reconsider. (Of course, that will rely on someone reading this and then caring enough to relay what I wrote, which will likely not happen.)

Avoid the clap, (oh yeah, this too – “Avoid the clap” is way better than “XOXO”, Carly’s send off)

Harlan

Monument(al) Presidential Address

I was out of town last week and we had the week before that off, so I have very little kickball in my mind to talk about.  Thus, I will talk about what I do know and think about often; drinking.

As the league co-president and friend of the Exchange and its staff, I have some simple guidelines I would like to put forth for the league.  Not to mention I think it is wise to instruct some of the younger and newer members of the league on the best ways to survive Sundays.

1) Don’t be a dick..  Yeah, throwing cups is a natural part of any sport, and flip cup is no exception.  Hell, I have thrown many a cup and been in a number of cup wars.  But let’s not forget that the Exchange has a reputation to uphold, so pick your cups up after you’ve winged them at the opposing flip cup team in a display of bad sportsmanship.

2) When you get drunk and want to hear your favorite song on the juke box, run it by a friend first.  Sure, maybe your song will be a hit and everyone will be glad you put Kelly Clarkson’s newest hit on the box, but there is a chance your song sucks, and people are bloody tired of hearing Don’t Stop Believing.

3) When it comes time to make out with that special blurry someone, either go up the street, make it a quick one in the bathroom, or announce it so we all know it is coming and can watch and cheer.  It is kind of creepy to be sitting there and then you look over your shoulder and see two people in awkwardly fitting shirts getting after it on the patio, or walking by it on your way to the bathroom.

4) If you are going to incorporate funny rules into flip cup, like racing or spinning or whatnot (I have not seen this yet this year, but it is early), make sure you are at a table where you are not in other people’s way.  This is really a safety precaution for everyone.  I don’t want to see any collisions between someone bolting in front of the Exchange door and an innocent victim on his/her way back from doing shots with Chris.

5) Speaking of shots, they are fun.  I encourage them.  But practice moderation.  Limit your shots to 3 before it is dark outside.  It is getting later in the year and the sun goes down earlier and I think this is a goal that can be easily attained.  This ensures you will not look like the biggest ass at the bar when people still remember things, which is what we all strive for, really.  Now, half way through the late NFL game, it is open season and ask Chris for as many Welsh Dragons as you fancy.  (In actuality, if you know what a Welsh Dragon is, you fancy zero of them).

So there you have it, my advice/recommendations/requests for making this league as successful as possible.  These are not laws and offenders will not be punished, but really, it is a matter of manners and preserving self respect.

Avoid the clap,

Harlan

Monument(al) Presidential Address

Well, it wasn’t easy, but we made it. After much wrangling, we finally successfully merged Star and Monument, got a schedule put together, got shirts figured out, got bar issues resolved and pulled off a pretty non-chaotic first week. As one of the presidents and figureheads of the amalgamated division, I would like to take the majority of the credit for this. I would like to, but, unfortunately I cannot. I did virtually nothing to make this happen. While everyone was stressing to get these issues resolved, I was on the road in places like Kansas, where the internet has not yet been discovered, rendering me useless. So, in this first message to the league, I would like to give props to everyone on both boards for all their hard work, along with both WAKA reps for making this come together somewhat seamlessly and ensuring our Sundays are not a disappointment this fall.

As one of the longer-standing members of Monument, I am personally excited about the introduction of the new Star blood into our Sunday adventures. I had an opportunity to talk to a few Star folks and they seem like good people who will add a lot the merged division (not like those ass bags from Chase who crashed our bar last Sunday). The Star folks were not at all demanding or irritable at the fields when things started a touch slow, and they appeared to be a lot of fun at the bar, though I had limited interactions with them because I am a bad president.

So what can we expect this season? Well from what I saw on Sunday, or, I should say, what I remember seeing on Sunday, we can expect a fair number of people calling in sick on Mondays (just like the good old days), a continuous growth of comfort and familiarity between members of each league (and I mean this in a lot of senses), a balance of some kind between Star’s intensity on the flip cup tables and Monument’s intensity on the kickball field, and my continued overuse of parenthesis (as evidenced in this sentence/paragraph/column).

As I wrote this I realized that, with the number of new players to Monument and the introduction of Star to the division, there are likely many folks who have no idea who I am and why someone so irresponsible would be president of the division. Well, first, you can identify me as the jackass in the wife beater and the dirty white hat sweating profusely as I sits playing chandeliers with my team, Playground Menaces (discontinued leafy green shirts), foregoing the traditional flip cup because, well, because that’s what we have been doing for years. I ascended to the presidency of DCMD with no board experience, low ambition, a reputation for being anti-social, and ambivalence only because nobody else wanted to get yelled at when things went wrong. That’s my resume, so, as you can see, Monument chose wisely…

Avoid the clap,

Harlan