The Feel Goods
The world isn’t the prettiest place right now. Seems like every day, a big piece of grim news hits us smack in the face. Still, it’s the little things we find that can draw out a smile. I like to find mine each day, to go alongside the bigger ones — family, love and friendship — The trifecta that I can never take for granted and am currently blessed with.
Today, I’m going to write about a few of these little things that made me feel good of late. Hopefully, it puts you on a quest to seek out your little things.
The Grand Tour — Season 5
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are three blokes (fully intentional British slang), great friends, getting paid obscene amounts of money to do what they love, which is driving epic cars and doing ludicrous things for our viewing pleasure. In other words, a lot of people’s perfect job.
After seeing their absolutely radiating, borderline idiotic faces while crashing cars across Scandinavia you can tell they are completely aware of winning the job lottery and loving every second of it, milking it for all it’s worth. Watching that show has to make you happy because we should all be so lucky. It feels like a proper time to note that this bit of the blog wasn’t paid for or sponsored by The Grand Tour or Amazon. Unfortunately.
Spida Cavs
Alas Knicks, Donovan Mitchell (aka Spida because he moves like one, I guess) got traded to a smaller market team with a full intention of playing out his contract there. This is good for the NBA. Listen, to support teams in small markets, we need fans. Fans need hope and good players to cheer for. It’s that simple. Otherwise we can just watch the Celtics and Lakers battle it out for 82 games, which is boring and not financially viable. Besides, it’s always good when the little guy wins one.
A player of his All NBA caliber, age and character seldom becomes available for trade — and even when it happens, behind the scenes shenanigans and player control usually means teams like the Cavs don’t stand much chance of getting him, let alone keeping him on the roster for an extended period of time.
But these aren’t just any Lebronless Cavs. These are Evan Mobley, Jarret Allen, Darius Garland, Caris LeVert Cavs, sprinkled with a little bit of Love and Rubio, looking to make some serious noise. And Mitchell is a Cavs fan looking to stick it to Danny Ainge. Buckle up Cleveland, it’s gonna be fun.
Tennis the Menace
After a 3 year hiatus, I am back to playing tennis with one of my best friends. We jokingly call it ghetto tennis, because we grew up in the post-war outskirts of Zagreb (always a friendly suburban neighborhood) and because the court is an absolute concrete death trap. We always stop by for coffee later, like proper ghetto tennis stars would. “One double latte, please. To celebrate all his double faults!”
While I do enjoy watching tennis on TV, I was never that good of a player. Pretty average. We both are. But tennis with him is one of those things I enjoy immensely, and I can’t pinpoint exactly why.
Is it the fact we cheer on each other when either of us wins a brilliant point, the fact we’re both on a similar level so it’s competitive without being annoying or that we still have so much room to grow as players that each set sees us progressing with our play? Maybe it’s the pure joy of smashing a green ball over the net in the sunshine or the coffee after where we shoot the shit? I don’t know. I do know that tennis is super entertaining in good company.
The One Doing the Driving
Holy shit, I’ve started driving. Me. By that I mean, I’ve started learning how to drive with an instructor in a driving school. I definitely don’t mean underage me going AWOL and driving my friend’s Vespa downtown license free. Never happened.
As an avid proponent of not having a car, as well as being a contradiction since paragraph six of this blog, I’m finding that I actually very much enjoy driving. The better I get, the more I enjoy it. Funny thing that. You spend most of your life refusing to do a thing you then find appealing.
At 37. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, I’m definitely late to the party. Be that as it may, doing it this late means I get to appreciate it more. There’s also a certain amount of growth that comes from doing something you simply refused to do just because you were stubborn.
Truth bomb. I realized that not driving was never about my principles as it was about me being lazy and finding immature excuses not to do it. Once I admitted that and started, not only did I find driving relaxing and fun, but that personal growth feels nice — much to do with the people around me, too. Aaaaand we slid back to the end of the first paragraph.
In truth, regardless of the little things, that’s where you always want to end up.
