Rained in

It is raining. Outside, the sky is drippy and gray and the cobblestones are glistening and the cars are beady. The light is kind of pretty, on the other hand... but I still don't want to leave my room.

Nice contrast to the picture above, right?

Often, when it rains, I think of other places I've lived. I think about Portland, and I think about the Dominican Republic, and I think about what the weather is like in those places. Then my thoughts stretch and I remember other things from these homes.

Today, I'm thinking about Portland and how incredible it is, the same way I have been thinking about Portland over the past few weeks. I've come across a few quotes that especially bring this home. For example, Anthony Bourdain, who says in the introduction of the Pacific Northwest episode of his show, "No Reservations": "I know what the Pacific Northwest is about. It’s about… OBSESSION."

When I heard that, I thought... Ah. Yes. I then told my friend Joy, who looked at me and ticked off her fingers as she listed, "food, coffee, baseball, books, languages... yes."

Which links in nicely with what my friend Anand said about some Portlanders he has met at his new school, Full Sail, in Florida. According to him, we Portlanders are all the same, and all we think/talk about is "Coffee... food... coffee... tea.... food... Bob Schneider... food..."

Rain is, of course, a well-known Portland characteristic. I should be more used to it. I am more used to it, I think then some of the other people I know here... like the ones from Florida and Kenya and such. But I deal with it.

Although lately, it reminds me of Haarlemse Honkbalweek, and a thought I had during one of the numerous rainouts.

I was watching the pathetically small grounds crew attempting to prepare the field after a 5 minute shower led to a 40-minute postponement because the field was so thoroughly soaked, and remembering the way I had once become quiet interested in the job baseball groundskeepers do. I think it started in Seattle, where the grounds crew dropped their rakes and hoses halfway through tidying up the field in-between innings and performed an entire, elaborate dance routine for the entertainment of the crowd.

That's when I realized that actually, a career in baseball groundskeeping might not be such a bad way to go. I could work at Fenway Park, and see every home game for free. I could probably even get to know a lot of the players. I was looking for a career option that could in some way include baseball.

And so, when it came time to begin looking at colleges, I adapted a baseball strategy. I began by looking through a college book at every college in the state of Massachusetts. I highlighted the schools that had a wide range of majors including cultural studies, particularly of the Latin American or Slavic varieties, literature and comparative literature, linguistics, French, Spanish, Czech, or Creative Writing and English.

I went a step further and also earmarked the schools that offered programs in soil technology and agriculture.

Unsurprisingly, few schools actually had some combination of the Humanities courses I listed first and the science courses I mentioned second. So I shed the grounds keeping dream (which wasn't too hard to part with) and ended up studying literature and linguistics at the Roosevelt Academy in the Netherlands (with a detour through the Dominican Republic).

Surprisingly, this has only furthered my baseball education. I've seen baseball all over the world: in the U.S., I've seen everything from A-ball to the big leagues in California, the Midwest, Boston, and the Pacific Northwest (I've seen the only major and most minor league teams from my home region). In the Dominican Republic, I saw pick-up games, warm-ups at the Chicago White Sox Dominican facility (pictured), and watched the Dominican team from the Dominican Republic in the inaugural baseball classic. I saw Las Grandes Ligas from an entirely different perspective - teams favored due to the number of Dominicans on the roster rather than any geographical affiliation. And now, in Nederland, I've seen a bit of honkbal.

Which brings me back to Honkbalweek.

To be a groundskeeper in the Netherlands! The awful weather of Honkbalweek 2008 brought back those groundskeeping aspirations. What a challenge to "keep ground" here! Imagine attempting to shorten rain postponements in a country as wet as this one. Here, where baseball is so obscure compared to other major sports, where fields don't have tarps that cover the entire infield, but only the basepaths... what room for improvement!

I am definitely re-adding "groundskeeper" to an ongoing list I have, entitled "Jobs & Activities & Callings that I Am Interested In."