constant crises

one of the those strange things that you can only ponder after 11pm on a weekday, but i wonder why i never got into sportswriting. or sports writing. when i was a freshman in college, i was deadset on taking some time to figure out what program i wanted to major in. my first quarter i took math, ihum (humanities course), econ 1, and a class called 'the jet engine' because it sounded fucking sweet. a pretty good start to "being open-minded about my major," yeah? yet somewhere along the line, i swerved sharply technical and ended up with a degree in computer systems engineering. it's true, i did enjoy a large amount of the CSE coursework (notably computer architecture, digital design, and the HCI business), but i don't think i've ever gotten over that feeling that maybe i just fell into CSE because it was "easy". not easy in a logistical sense, but easy in a personal and mental sense. i just finished reading a beautiful old piece by gay talese called 'The Silent Season of a Hero' in this collection The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. originally printed in esquire, the magazine piece is a short peep into the world of joe dimaggio, post-baseball, including his love for marilyn monroe. it's very subtle and it's a great bit about a famously-private man, showing so much with a careful frugality of words. emotions evoked: admiration and jealousy (of talese) at the same time. and i guess i don't have much more to say beyond, "i sort of wish i had written something so good that it had that kind of impact on someone else." and why couldn't i have gotten into writing about sports? after all, do any of these sportswriters love the games more than i do? probably not. did they learn how to conjugate verbs better than me? probably not. i'm not disappointed by the path i chose, but i just wonder why these thoughts never crossed my mind when i was 17 and spending 30 hours a week reading about, watching, and playing sports. strange, isn't it...