https://theundefeated.com/features/matthew-cherry-moved-from-the-practice-squad-in-the-nfl-to-first-string-in-hollywood/

And for what it’s worth, we’ve never seen Cherry like this before either. He’s in the zone. And there doesn’t appear to be a slowdown anytime soon. “It just literally felt like all these 10-plus years of being in L.A. and struggling, and living out of my car at some point, all these things you would do just to stay in L.A., stay in the game … if you could just stay here long enough, you might be able to make it,” he said. He did that as a high school football player trying to get a college scholarship. He found it when he was struggling in the NFL and knew he needed to pivot. And now, he’s figured it out in Hollywood. That early life lesson was key. “It really is an athlete thing,” he said. “I would even go back further to that first time I picked up a baseball glove and put it on the wrong hand. Being able to see progress is something as an athlete that’s probably been the most important thing. Knowing that if you work hard enough, if you just stick it out long enough, you’ll get your shot. “And then when you get your shot, you gotta take it. Or you have to go back to the bench. And that’s just always been a thing that’s been with me. I never felt like I had any opportunities that were just given to me. I’ve always had to create my own opportunity or give my own look or try to figure it out myself. And I just think, luckily it’s worked so far. And I think that’s the biggest thing about being an athlete, is being able to set a goal and knowing if you work hard enough, you can reach that goal for sure.”

http://www.ghibli.jp/works/ponyo/

https://www.tor.com/2020/09/01/never-say-you-cant-survive-twelve-ways-to-keep-the-fun-of-writing-alive/

https://www.mlbshop.com/chicago-white-sox/mens-chicago-white-sox-majestic-alternate-cream/black-cooperstown-cool-base-replica-team-jersey/t-14778601+p-1384269757535+z-9-788513103

"well the whole west coast is kinda wearin' it right now." -dallas braden explaining gametime smoke in seattle

Personally, I spent years holding out for a certain kind of guy. My target demographic was mostly just reasonably attractive men who were more confident than I was. I wanted to be set at ease by someone else’s self-assured behavior. I wanted to be wildly attracted straight out of the gate. I wanted to be slightly ignored. I wanted a reason to work hard. I liked hard work! I liked running after someone who was superior! As the youngest child in a family of smart, aloof humans, that felt like home to me. But being noticed by someone who seemed as uncertain as I was? That felt uncomfortable and unwelcome. When a guy actually appeared invested in what I thought of him, that was like being lost on Mars. What am I supposed to do now? I felt self-conscious and put on the spot. There was no hard work to busy myself with! My attraction would dry up around all that freezing red dust. It all seems so simple now. I chased the same thing in friends; I went for aloof, too-cool types and ignored anyone who was actually paying attention to me and listening closely. I wanted to follow people around, cracking jokes, inserting insights, launching into extended monologues occasionally. It wasn’t really about being present and connecting so much as feeling half-invisible but useful. I put pressure on my friends, but I couldn’t withstand the slightest bit of pressure myself. I’m bringing friendships into this because I think a lot of women put off tackling any friendship problems until they’ve sewed up their primary love relationship. And typically, a lot of the confusion and bewilderment that’s ruling your love life also dominates your friendships. But to be clear, the goal isn’t necessarily to change what you (instinctively, impulsively, or even dysfunctionally) desire. The goal is to understand and sometimes accept what appeals to you and why it appeals to you, and then to make a little more space to investigate, to remain open to new varietals of human being. That doesn’t mean fighting your truest desires. It means opening your heart to a wider range of humans, not just because that’s a noble goal and it makes your life more interesting, but because it will help to transform you into a less rigid person. Being rigid doesn’t just affect how you view other people. Being rigid affects how you view and define yourself. You can occupy a rigid, unforgiving space for the sake of fun, or comfort, or creativity. I endorse that practice wholeheartedly. I love hating people, places, and things for fun and profit. But it’s important to stretch and grow, too. It’s important to reach past what you naturally love, what you were born loving. It’s important to open your eyes to the full range of human experience. It’s important to really hear people when they talk instead of letting your panic or distaste or disinterest color over everything. You don’t want to block out 99 percent of humans you meet. You want to see them clearly. ... Everyone needs time to get there. I think it’s great that human beings have the freedom to be asexual or anything else under the sun that feels right to them. That’s how it should be. We should all be able to describe our experiences and our needs to others without feeling judged for what we are. But I also think that our hypersexual, fast-speed culture turns people off for a very good reason. It turns people off to the point where they think they must be permanently turned off, they must not have any desire in the first place. And I just want to advocate for desire. As an overthinker who lives in her head most of the time, I want to say that desire takes time. Passion is sneaky. It’s a slow-growing vine. And panic and fear are drought conditions for that vine. Pressure sends that vine to Mars and plants it in the cold red dust. When you can take possession of your own timeline and take up space with your authentic self, everything changes. When you show up and assert yourself instead of struggling to impress, when you say exactly what you think instead of saying what you think someone wants to hear, when you gather information instead of monitoring other people’s reactions to you, the climate shifts dramatically. You are transported from the high desert to a cool, fertile coastal plain. Patience and compassion — for yourself and others — fertilize your vine. See for yourself. When there are no looming questions of “What next?” and “Right or wrong?” and “Is he about to make a move?” and “How do I seem?,” you can just tune in to another human being. You can take in the small things: The way he giggles at his own bad joke. The way he pulls on his lower lip when he’s thinking things over. When you’re calm, time slows down. You have time to think your own thoughts: What does he long for? What does he wish were different? What if we weren’t here, what if we were lying on our backs on a warm rock by the ocean, what if we were wandering through an open field? What strange and winding thoughts and feelings would unravel in the sunshine, over the course of an open-ended afternoon, if we were relaxed, if we could feel the full promise of the moment, if we could share in the glory and sadness and longing of a late afternoon in late summer? Your body needs time. Your mind needs time. Without time, feelings harden into panic. Your primary job right now is to slow down enough to wait for your most genuine self to arrive. Do you deserve so much time? You do. Will anyone be patient and wait? They will. Will you be able to see the value in the ones who can slow down, and be patient, and wait? That part is up to you. But don’t blame yourself if you can’t feel anything at first. Keep experimenting. Enjoy those long morning hours, watering the soil without expectation. Try to enjoy the wait so much that eventually, you can hardly remember what it is you’re waiting for.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/ask-polly-do-i-self-sabotage-when-it-comes-to-dating.html

The point is: The feeling part of this is good. Your desires are good. So what you want to be careful NOT to do is smother all those feelings under a giant blanket of shame. Because shame won’t just blot out all of your desire, it will also repeat the core message that desire itself makes you a filthy piece of shit. Now maybe that’s just my former-Catholic, very married, very moralistic self-hating core talking, but I don’t think so. My suspicion, based on what I’ve observed in real life, experienced for myself, and read in countless letters from strangers, is that human beings blame themselves for being regular animals with needs and ideas and imaginations. We blame ourselves repeatedly and excessively, and all of that punitive self-flogging leads us off a steep cliff of shame. We end up flattened like Wile E. Coyote and then we cannot function or connect with others. When you see people shouting on TV, and they’re not standing up for justice of any kind beyond the freedom to do whatever the fuck they want and feel comfy about it? That’s some buried self-hatred and shame and flattened coyote bullshit right there. So let’s not kick up your shame if we can help it. Let’s take the desires and the imagination and the longing and the fun and try to slowly but surely coax them out of the tight grip of your mind, which keeps telling you, over and over again, like a prayer, like a mantra, that these things belong to this particular (partially imaginary!) man, and when you give up on him, you give up on your desire, your imagination, your longing, your fun, AND — MOST IMPORTANTLY! — your protection from all of the heavy shit in your life that you don’t want to face. You don’t have to face everything at once, remember. It’s not all or nothing! You can be good to yourself and take your time. ... And also — significantly! — a real person doesn’t shield you from the reality of a global pandemic, mixed with your struggles to write stuff you don’t hate. A real person makes you sit with those realities because a real person can’t fix that shit for you. All a real person can do is listen and support you and make irritating suggestions that will never fucking work because he’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t know shit about writing. A real person is not a ladder to the heavens the same way an imaginary crush is. A real person brings you back to yourself — the one person you don’t want to see or think about or feel right now. ... What you need instead is to conjure your own bluster around who you are and what you want from this life. You have to start thinking carefully about the things that you bring to the table with your writing. What do you do well? What do you have that’s special? That’s something all writers have to figure out and remind themselves of constantly. The word “special” is used very loosely and broadly here. Most of the time what’s special doesn’t sound that special to the person who owns it. I always want my skills and talents to be rare and exotic, but I’d say most of my writing talent can be reduced to some very ordinary traits: I’m compulsively honest and I like working hard. That’s it. Not that magical. If you want to get a little more specific, you might add “enjoys ripping herself a new asshole in front of an audience.” Most talents have dysfunctional or disordered roots. We overcompensate, adapt, navigate, obsess, swerve, dodge, and voilà! We develop into humans with bizarre proclivities and skill sets. What makes you who you are? What makes you a weirdo? What do you do well? What do you love the most? ... Please notice that your crush doesn’t help that much on the writing front. As long as you’re living in some realm of comparison and approval-seeking, where you “get” his shiny life by becoming GOOD ENOUGH FOR HIM, that’s all very fraught and it mostly works against your creative process. Crushes can make you very self-conscious about who you are, so a lot your writing will end up feeling a little performative — good for some genres, bad for others. What you need, more than anything else, is to BE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOURSELF. That means you stop trying to mold yourself into a worthy shape. You just do what you do well without measuring it against what other people do or searching for a pat on the head from some charismatic, withholding source. You work hard to please yourself. You value your own instincts and opinions about your work. ... Right now, people across this broken land of ours are cultivating obsessions of all stripes. A lot of people are lonely and longing for a rich, full life, the kind of life that’s not easily cultivated in the middle of a global pandemic. The main thing I want to impress upon you is that your path begins with a return to your own measurement system, your private values, your secret desires, your relationship to yourself. You have to stop imagining yourself through your crush’s eyes and start to see yourself clearly, through your own eyes, without judgment. You have to learn to emboss your raw materials with elaborate, imaginative designs of your own making. That doesn’t mean aiming for grandiosity, necessarily. It’s just a creative way of aiming for YOU. Compared to obsessing about some charismatic man far away, that probably sounds pretty dull. We are so surrounded by ourselves right now. What I mean is, you have to dare to accept everything you have onboard, and work with it. When you’re blocked as a writer, nine times out of ten you’re aiming for shortcuts. You’re trying to churn out some preapproved, charming CONTENT while ignoring your emotional state and your reigning preoccupations. But when you try to navigate around a big, vulnerable, honest piece of who you are, you block your gifts. You aren’t really communicating with the page. It’s almost like lying to a therapist: What’s the point? It’s time to face yourself. That doesn’t have to be drudgery. Because you own the fun that you found with this crush, don’t you? That’s why he likes you in the first place. You’re weird and charming and funny and full of ideas. You don’t need him to be those things. Find yourself on the page. Let the ugly, rejected, sullen, escapist parts of you in, too (you can always edit them out later, lol). Accept who you are. Make peace with your longing, without forcing it into the hot, airless jar of this crush. Sit with your loneliness until it smoothly transitions into a satisfying form of solitude. Honor your full, complicated, wild self — even here, in this dusty room, even now, at this excruciating time. Have compassion for your burning desires. Use them to cultivate your sunshine.

https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/ask-polly-help-my-pandemic-crush-feels-so-real.html

https://www.gq.com/story/how-do-you-write-about-people-when-you-cant-be-near-them