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

I'm watching the game in the waiting room last night of the radiologist last night, and for all my talk about how I wish everything in the world was open 24/7, it's admittedly creepy to be at the doctor at 10:00 at night. (And it should be noted that there is nothing is wrong with me, and that I'm just getting a clean bill of health pre-surgery.)

I ask the receptionist if, since I'm the only weirdo waiting for an MRI at 10pm, if she could change the channel from NY1 to the Yes Network, and she obliges, and it was kinda hilarious actually. I don't know why, but usually the only person I'm seeing do this routine is a disgruntled bartender, who wants nothing less than to wait on a patron who isn't ordering a beer, but rather requesting for him to drop everything, find the channel changer, figure out how to use it, figure out which tv it controls, and then subsequently annoy half the bar when whatever Olympic event abruptly shuts off in favor of a regular season Yankee game.

The receptionist was a more civilized version of this.

Suffice to say that I tuned in just in time for things to get pretty exciting. The Yankees kept making us all think that the game was within their reach, it was frustrating beyond the telling of it. This is what it must feel like to play golf, I think. Not that I would know since I don't play golf. But it seems to incense people more than relax them (much like dating, another thing I don't know much about). And that's how it felt watching last night's game.

NYY gets on the board first with a 2-run ding from a Z-packer. (Not too shabby a showing as of late, Not Endy. Not too bad at all.)

WAHOO! This is OUR. GAME. Yeah. VENGEANCE IS OURS, VERLANDER. (Seasame Street was brought to you today by the letter V. Btw, Sesame Street was really grooming us for a rich future of freebasing.)

Except, no vengeance. No. Cabrera hit a homerun and I'm gonna have to recall the words of any number of Twins managers who insisted upon the illegality of Mariano Rivera. Miguel Cabrera--same thing goes for you.

4th, 5th, 6th innings go by. More of the same run-manufacturing crap from Cabrera, Peralta, and Dirks. We get it. You're like the rest of the well-oiled machinery in Detroit. (Oooh, I like that! Has anyone ever made that joke before? Dibs.)

7th inning, Sneach doubles in a run. Good. That's what we're paying you for. Sort of. I don't know what we're paying you for, actually. Your legs? Your sneakiness? Pretty much anything is up for grabs except slugging, yeah? Whatever, good work, Sneach. On..doing something productive.

5-3 game and ooooh we're in striking distance! Here come the Yankees!

Dirks. Go to hell. He gets another hit, and he's like that guy in high school that you forget about until he's the class valedictorian.

6-3 in the 8th, which is about when I arrived at the radiologist haunted house.

There was actually another person in the waiting room, who was clearly pissed off about waiting. And the thing about people like that is that the only thing that pisses them off more than waiting is seeing other people in the same predicament and NOT being perturbed by it. As if my fixation on the game was sending messages to the doctors like, "Hey, we're all good here! Take your time back there, because we're very much breezily entertained!"

She kept glaring at me, and every so often would remind that she "was here first."

I was thisclose to instructing her the radiologists take people based on ascending height. If the game wasn't weirdly getting exciting, I would have had some fun with it.

This is straight up Pollina Dad genes at work. He played someone at pool last year who he had heard liked to go by "The Last Ninja."

Which meant that as soon as my dad meets him, he says, "Hey, I'm Tom. People around here know me as the Last Ninja."

The guy went white, as my dad tells it. "Nonononon, I'M the last ninja!"

"Hmm. Well, I don't think so, buddy. Are you sure you're not the Penultimate Ninja? That's probably it."

Penultimate Ninjas aside, the game became one of those quasi-aggravating endeavors where you can't help but spill over with excitement over the prospect of a rally. A 2-out rally, at that!

Tex pops up to start the inning. Ugh. "The Yankees are down to their last 2 outs, now." Thanks. Sesame Street was also brought to you by the number we can count.

Then Z-Pack gets on base. Swish came to the plate batting 3 for 3 on the day, and struck out, so we'll let it slide but begrudgingly so. 2 outs. Bleak. You sort of made moves to shut off the tv, but not really, because how cool would it be if they miraculously came back!

Z-Pack #1 works the count, gets on base.

Sneach does his job again. His ill-defined job, but he does it quite well. SCORE! OMG are we really in this?

R-Mart steps up, we groan but hope. He doubles in a run, I'm not even kidding. And after that happened, I know you had to be thinking. ok if HE can get on, the stars are aligned in our favor. No way the Yanks waste a rare R-Mart onbase presence, yeah?

And it's GRANDY up. It's poetic! Because he used to play on the Tigers, and because he struck out 1210 times in the game prior, so this is a PERFECT OPPORTUNITY for everything to go GREAT.

I'm not kidding, but that's when they were ready to see me and stick my head in a giant magnetic tube.

So I missed Granderson pop out to end the game. And waste the mini-comeback. I missed the Yankees lose again. But the whole time I was in the obscenely loud machine, trying desperately to keep my head still, I was thinking about what might have happened in the game. I had a good 15 minutes of purgatory before I reemerged and discovered what had actually transpired.

So I learned 2 things: ignorance is not bliss. It's loud and makes you antsy. Also, misery doesn't love company, because the other woman in the waiting room wanted me for dead. She hated company.

Actually, I learned some other things, maybe not as applicable to other areas of life outside of this recap, but for documentation purposes:

Jim Leyland acts like my dad every time any of his daughters does anything. When I learned "Spinning Song" on the piano and he made me play it for everyone who stepped foot into the house, and he'd say stuff like, "No one in the history of ever has ever been able to play this song like this. No one. Ever." Similarly, there's Leyland on Cabrera: "I've never seen anything like him. I've been in this game for 50 years, and I've never seen opposite-field power like Miguel Cabrera. Never. Anybody." Anybody? NO. NO ONE.

Girardi is pretty quick to agree though, even though his own line-up isn't exactly slouch-ridden either. He calls Prince-Cabrera the best 3-4 in the game. Well, you know, Joe. You COULD have that, too. If you had stopped using Arod as 4, and used real power hitters in teh 3-4 spots. Semantics.

Hughes, not so hot. Porcello, decent, but since the Tigers are sucking helium balloons or something, they have him writing his Cy Young acceptance speech. Tasting the playoffs, etc etc.

You know what though? I like Porcello. Because his name has a lot of the same letters as my last name (turned into my mom in the last 20 seconds apparently), and because of this (annnd I turned back into myself again.)

There you have it. Let's not dwell on it. Instead, let's do Latin translations.

Caput tuum in ano est. Auferre.