"It's great to be young and a Yankee."

April 18, 2012

Alright, so the past 8 hours have been all sorts of wrong.

It started (I think) when I got home from work and ate dinner.

(That's as far back as I'm going to retrace my steps, for simplicity purposes. But along the same lines, I have always been curious about the concept of making something from "scratch." When you say that, how organic do you need to be? Like if you make pizza from scratch, does that mean you have to had grown the tomatos to make the sauce? Or does it mean you just can't have ordered a pie..? I'm so nervous about ever saying I made anything from scratch for fear of someone asking me these types of questions.)

So I get home and eat dinner. And surround myself with multiple media apparati so that I can do work while having an eye and/or eat on both the Yankee game and the Rangers (of the NY persuasion) games. This in it of itself was difficult, since a) I'm distracted by dust basically and b) both my vision and my hearing are horrendous so relying on them to independently function is a tall order.

But I was giving it the old college try, and then I started to feel the dreaded pangs of my mysterious allergy rearing its ugly (and masked) head. I ate china food, by the way. For the House diagnosticians reading this. Anyways, it was an odd manifestation of the allergy since I didn't get bowling ball bumps on my eyelids and lips as I normally do. But I got crazy itchy in my palms and feet and head.

Which was annoying, at worst, really.

It was my throat started swelling that I "lost time." Ugh, obviously I'm okay now, but it was a nightmare. I literally couldn't breathe and for some reason

I didn't grab the epipen (mostly because I'm not entirely sure what the parameters for usage it. Kinda like when I got trapped in an elevator for almost 2 hours last year, and when they finally got me out, they asked why I never sounded the emergency button, and I said I didn't think being in a elevator consistuted a real emergency. Everything's relative.)

Bleaaah I'm getting chills just thinking it. It was like I wasn't even there. Or me. (Benadryl was the Chevy Player of the Game, btw.) When my hands just started itching and getting swollen, I was still cognizant of the games but within a half hour, I felt like I was in one of those movie scenes that take place in a club, and you get the drunk person's perspective of everything. Shaky and wavy and disoriented and spinning.

And speaking of medicine, Ima have to pick this up when I wake up because I feel like I'm being even more incoherent than usual and I'm officially nodding off and having to erase whatever gibberish I see that I wrote, upon snapping awake.

Til then...

Ok, I'm awake, albeit still groggy. Wish I couldve stayed awake to do it. It was such a weird slice of time that I wished I could have captured it in real time.

In retrospect this makes sense to me. But I think that would be the tipping point in my insanity case, if someone turned on the computer and googled Yankees and got a feed of me doing a live video blog analysis of the game, while smack in the middle of going into anaphylactic shock.

("Well, I've said it before, Suzyn. You just can't predict respiratory arrest!")

There is one thing about the anaphylactic stuff that came with the handful of other times its happened to me. And that's "an impending sense of doom."

(I love how this is like a clinically recognized boileplate symptom. I mean, there are special names for people whose pee smells like maple syrup, but they haven't landed on a name for "an imepdning sense of doom." Which just is wildly ironic since I can't hear that line without having an impending sense of not doom so much as of being an extra in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or soemthing.)

I think I had doom because I had zero idea what was going on. The Rangers were all over the place and losing their lead. The Yanks never even HAD a lead. And all of this is couched in the panic that was setting in when I realized my throat was closing up.

It sucked though, because even after the medicine kicked in and oxygen had replaced doom, it was just kind of unsettling and isolating. Like you just got date raped by beef Lo Mein.

And I as poured myself onto the couch and tried to not skip a beat with the games, I became more anxious about the games than the solitude. 

Nothing made sense. Even when the game started, it was weirding me out. 4-0 within the first nanosecond of the game?  The M&M bros did work. If they remade a boy version of a Black Swan, it would be M&M to represent all that is light and pure, and then McGuire and Canseco will star opposite, all that is sinister and corrupt. BALL-et, get it?

But then the Yankees acted like they were being tasked with pulling 4 blocks out of a Jenga tower rather tasked with finding 4 runners to cross home. Because they just shrugged and answered in the bottom of 1st with a 3-run single from Swisher.

The Twins tacked on another run off Burrough's single, and Gardenhire is so happy because he is one of those managers who's so obviously a card-carrying memeber of the We're-So-F'n-Annoyed-The Yankees-Are-So-Good sect. The poor Twinks are like these blokes. And the Yankees are this (in the minds of teh scrappy good hearted midwesterner Twinkies, anyway.)

The Yanks at home are 34-9 against the boys from Minny. Despite the Yanks best efforts to demoralize them for the millionth time (the 35th), the Twinks staved off what looked to be an inevitable walk off.

The Yanks never had the lead though, and the box score really makes it look like there should be a lot more runs than there are. Combined 24 hits. Both starters only went to 5/6 innings, before being pulled from the game to hand it over to the pen.

Huroda gave up a tons of hits. But he had a really excuse, according to Girardi: his sinker was showing no sign of sink, on account of him not getting any sleep last night. Oh! Okay then! If I had known this was allowed to absolve you of mistakes at work, I'd sleep even less than I already do.

"Oohh, sorry I presented an idea for an ad, tha looks like something you'd draw with your left hand. I just didn't at all last night beause the Yankees have their west coast series now so I didn't sleep at all."

But today, the Twinks were homecoming queens, they bested the A Team.

Did we see it coming? Normally, I'd say no. How can you possibly think the Yanks are going to do anything other than win, after Jeter comes in a rocks one out of the park to bring the Yanks within 1 run? Against their favorite team to do walk-off stuff against, no less.

Also, it didn't help that the EXACT same time this was going down was when the NYR were just getting started with OT. Losing a 2-0 lead, letting the Senators tie the series at 2-2.

Doom-allergy-doom-NYY lose-NYR lose-gloom.

Twins manager line of the game: "I think [Morneau] and [Mauer] would like to move these fences to our ballpark back home. This is a good-hitting ballpark. To see the smile on his face and see him rooting for his teammates, that's big. That's why you manage."

Do these thoughts necessarily go together? Also, what kind of teammate roots AGAINST his fellow teammates? I think Gardenhire may be setting his bar a little low.

GGBG got hurt on his acrobat catch 2 nights ago, which sucks.

Sterling, you may remember, botched the Yanks' first win-warble. That wasnt an auspicious start to the season, but we shrugged it off. Two nights ago, he sounded downright tearful. Last night, this was basically what Yankee fans heard in the bottom of the 9th, hopeful as Jeter had swung the momentum our way, Tex is the tying run at the plate:

"Here's the pitch...and he..DRIVES ONE to left field, it's going back! That's a hard hit..BACK, BACK..and uh, gone?! Oh. No, it's in foul territory. OH, no it's fair! Ohhhh, it was caught. So..ball game over, then."

I swear I'm not kidding.

That's all I got. Apologies for the density of the post. The good news is that I actually have a very palpable sense of impending greatness for tonight. Seriously. Whatever the opposite of gloom is. It's going to drench the evening in victories across the board.

(Well, victories for the Yankees, softball team, and Ohyob. I should have been more specific, since it's only 50% across the board. 50% will lose across the board.)