It is better to have loved and lost..."

I was a fool when i had a good girl to date. I was very foolish.

I will leave it at that.

I must say that im not sure if I will ever know what it is like to find "that person". I know what it is like to find someone that you can settle for. I know what it is like to be rejected. I know what it is like to like someone that doesnt like you back. I know what it is like to have someone like you when you dont like them.

I dont believe love exists in japan. Not romantic love. At least in my situation. It seems "love" is a decision based on wiether my life will improve should i choose to be with you. If that improvement is not quantifiable, then there is no love. Maybe im being a skeptical 33 yr old. But in my eyes, peoples dating choices almost exclusively are determined by improvement in "social status".

I just remember being younger and believing that "love" was this incredible, supernatural entity. And uncontrollable force that could conquer anything.

and it is, but not romantic love. Love for the fellow human being.

I substitute my need for love with a woman with love for kids. I pour it into basketball and teaching now.

But there was a time when i loved a particular person in a way they i cant quantify with words. It consumed me. And now that i dont really talk to her anymore and i can step back from it and see objectively, it was both a very good thing and a very bad thing.

When i was in that relationship, i needed people. I needed her. I was dependent. I had a weak spot. That was the bad part. The part that i couldnt control. Now without that dependency, i am truely independent and self-sufficient. I have surpised myself with how i can deal with Christmases and Birthdays alone.

It doesnt hurt anymore and i know that means i am getting stronger.

Heartbreak does that to you. Of course in this situation, it may have in fact been my own recklessness as a young man that costed me someone who was one very near and dear to me.

We must take life as it comes and make the best of what it is. Enjoy today, value those people that are most important to you and remember the feelings of others first.

words of wisdom from a single 33 year old man.

What id like for Christmas.

Id like my mother's stuffing and sweet potato pie.
Id like to see Barry Sanders playing football again.
Id like to hear my mother cooking Christmas dinner early in the morning.
Id like to get a Christmas present from someone in my family.
Id like all the troops in the Middle east to come home.
Id like to feel love from my family.
Id like to be in naive love again.
Id like to see the NBA go back to calling travelling and carrying again.
Id like to see my mother sitting on the coach in her jogging suit drinking egg nog.
Id like to get presents without feeling like i owe anyone.
Id like someone to know what I want or need for a present.
Id like to cuddle by the fireplace.
Id like my gifts to be appreciated for thoughtfulness and not price.
Id like to forget having my heart broken.
Id like every child in the world to know happiness for just a day.
Id like my family to fix the rifts that time and incident have caused.
Id like to spend a lot of time with my brother.

Id like to have a place to call "home".

Its interesting when you dont have a place like that anymore. No place to call home. It changes you. It makes you hard. It makes you put up with less garbage from family. I miss home.

Learning to live without "home" has been the challenge of my life. Its like an uprooted plant floating in the sea. you have the roots to plant yourself into good soil, but the soil that you were planted in to grow in the beginning is no where to be found. as a plant, you have to adapt to floating in the currents of the world, or die.

I have to forget Thankgiving and I have to forget Christmas. Forget what they were. What they meant to me. How much i loved them.

I am getting closer to that, yet everytime around this time of year, i cant help but remember how good it felt being at Lacksbur Terrace and Coach House Dr. on those special days.

Dreams pass in time. Just a little bit longer and i will forget. I try hard everyday to remember how much i loved them less, and forget how good i felt on those days more.

Or continue to wait for a love that will remind me all over again.

Solitude.

Id have to say, for the greater part of my time in Japan, i had great difficulty adjusting to the sheer amount of time i spent alone. Sundays in particular were relatively lonely days as no work, no basketball practice and that most people use that day for family. Now that i have had more time, i am not only getting to where i can handle the time alone, but i am starting to enjoy it...without alcohol.

I admit, i have my issues with alcohol. I have my mental battles. Im sure im not the only one, nor do i feel like a victim. But i also noticed that no one really took the time to notice my difficulty and that of course sent be into further solitude. Now that i have had a chance to get to where i enjoy the solitude, i find it hard to go the other way. I can be around people and enjoy myself, but more and more i find that after about an hour or so of it, i want to go back to being alone.

I dont see anything wrong with it either. Its all about the path that we walk. If i had some from a very strong loving, interconnected family, i would be more needy of the connections that family brings. Instead, i come from a family they is "connected by the family title". What that really means is that in my family, it is very easy for people to go a month without talking to a certain family member. Im not saying that is good or bad, it just is the case. Even moreso, it is hard to go back to being a super close interconnected family after years of such a situation.

In other words, my adjustment to enjoying solitude has been a necessary evolution for me. You must adapt to survive. I have adapted and i like the way i have adapted. i dont like the idea of being fake to have many people like me. I by nature am grumpy about alot of things. First of which, life without my mother being here for the holidays. about being short. about how people deal with me and my blackness. About the rarety of communication from family. about the country my home is becoming. about the garbage that surrounds us on tv and on the radio. about the lies i read in the news on a daily basis. about people not caring about things bigger than trivial garbage like fashion, music, tv shows and blackberries. about people turning on president Obama after a year. The list is long.

Im just a person who doesnt want to have to hide my dissatisfaction. I want to be free to express my displeasure at people hating on Pres. Obama, even if it costs me "friendship". My freedom to express my opinion is much more important to me than is having friends call me all day all week asking me to do stuff. And so i spend time in solitude...

...working on how i should think about myself, about people, about the world. Thinking about what i can do. How i can control my feelings.

I assure everyone, i was not alone in creating this "monster". It took years of struggling alone without help. It took many moments of private sadness. It took people walking away from me when i needed them most. It took heartbreak and repeated rejection.

So now at 33, what happens? I really like the person i have become. Very guarded. Very aware. Very caring. Less sensitive of how people think about or view me. Very independent. and mostly, very comfortable with who i am.

Time in Japan has be a great teacher for me. I was like a gullable, naive catepillar coming here and i have opened up into a "butterfly" very secure in who he is, what he chooses to do, and how much (or little) he wants from grown people.

I feel it is my mission in life to teach children that they should not be LIKE the adults they know, but be BETTER more complete adults. Adults that tell the truth, that dont cheat on their mates,that are considerate of others, that judge by character and not height or skin color, that arent bullies, that believe hard work and not cunning is the way to success, that even the down and out deserve sympathy and understanding...because goodness knows, these are not things they learn from watching the adults running the world now.

Fall tourney 3rd place.

Kasuya gun runner up 2007
Chikuzen tourney appreance 2007
7th grade tourney champs 2008
Kasuya gun fall tourney 3rd place 2009

As hard as I am on myself, i must say I am semi-pleased looking at my accomplishments in my first 3 years of coaching basketball. Semi-pleased.

So we were able to finish in third place after pushing the best team in Kasuya gun to a semi-close 10 point game. Its amazing. The longer i coach, the more harshly i critique myself. And ofcourse, the more i learn about how to do the job. There are i think 3 elements to coaching at this level. 1) Team atmosphere 2) Recruitment 3) Motivation.

Team atmosphere is the correct balance of disipline and fun. I see some coaches go overboard with their hard disipline at the middle school level. You can only yell so much I think, to be effective at the level. To much yelling has kids scared to make plays and makes the either 1) tune you out or 2) play too stiff. I constantly remind myself that my job is not so much to win games as it is to develop talent. At this level, talent almost always beats stategy.

Recruiting WITHIN THE SCHOOL is important. I dont agree with kids commuting more than an hour to go to school. But getting kids involved with the club is very important. Good example. One game this past weekend was a game against a team of all 7th graders who had play on the same junior basketball team for at least 3 years. Their play was very seemless and surely they will be a force to deal with down the road. On our side, 3 kids that played junior basketball together were in the game with a 8th grader who moved from Kagoshima who had never played basketball until a year ago and a 7th grader who first picked up a basketball some 5 months ago.

It was a close game, which we won, but what i think was most important about this was that the 3 kids with skill had to learn to evolve their game to include the less experienced players. And the less experienced players had to understand how important their defense was. With them all working together, it gave a new group of kids the chance to enjoy the euphoria of basketball, even having limited skill. This was possible only by an open, friendly recruiting approach. The Kasuya Higashi program went from 15+ in 2006 to 14 in 2007 to 9 in 2008. I knew last year that a bad recruiting year would all but end the basketball program, so i let the kids do something very creative at the school recuritment assembaly.

I wish i could have seen it, but certainly it was very funny. One kid tied on a blindfold and made a free throw. One kid hit (or tried to hit) a three from near half court. One kid crossed over 2 kids who pretended they broke their ankles. Whatever they did, it got 11 kids into the basketball club. And thus, a new group of kids enter the basketball stage. As i watch schools stuggle with numbers, i have to remind myself that even though these kids are new to basketball, I have kids available to teach. That is a wonderful feeling.

Motivating kids isnt as hard as it may seem. Honestly, disiplining kids isnt either. They have to understand 1) the coach knows more than they do 2) the coach is looking out for their best interests 3) the coach has the same goal as the kids, to win. When kids figure this out, it all but eliminates the need to yell. Kids have to understand how beautiful it is, how good it feels to be able to count on someone else to have your back. They have to know why defense is most important. I find the key to this is give kids opportunities to succeed.

I wasnt really given a chance to succeed in high school. Im not sure why things went as they did, but my problem in school was my desire to be a good passer/playmaker and not being willing to shoot the ball. I needed a coach that would run a play for me in the first quarter so i could see the ball go in. A coach that would tell me/order me to shoot a shot. What it got was benched on a team that lost alot without having a true chance to see if i could do it at a high level.

So now, when i see a kid struggling with defense, i understand that i can motivate him several ways as opposed to just writing him of. My job is to get the most out of the kids that i have. I am getting better at doing that.

Did i mention that of the 6 games ; 2 seeding games( 1 win and 1 lost to the eventual number 2 team) and 4 tourney games (2 must win games on the first day, then loss in the semifinal to the eventual number 1 team and winning the consulation game) where all played without the starting point guard and 6/7th man? I hope it was a lesson to them that the team moved forward without them.

Good month. could have been better, ill give it a B-.

Now I gotta go back to breaking these kids down again.