Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

Forgive me for I have sinned.  It has been 1 year and 1 month since I last dyed my hair.  But today, I had it all dyed evenly black.  Yes, I had dyed it black the last time (1 year and 1 month ago), but it has been fading ever since.  In fact, it had faded within a month – the blond streaks have been peeking through as brown slash red “highlights” to the faded black hair for over a year.  My natural hair colour is a cross between black and really dark brown, so the outgrowth with the fading black hair dye has looked natural.  And it’s not that I disliked it that I dyed it.  It really, quite simply, was the unevenness of the colour.  As I mentioned in Neuroses, unevenness makes me crazy.  And even though I hate spending money and fear that an investment in my looks reflects insecurity, I knew that it would be really satisfying when I finally treated myself to making my hair colour uniform.  Oh, I was right.  It is substantially better than going on any of the vacations I’ve dreamt up but never got to take (partly for the evenness issue, but actually also because of the cost).

It is always difficult when you have a decision to make, and competing convictions apply.  Our action/inaction reflects our confusion.  (I waited 1 year and 1 month before making myself look neat.)  Hopefully, in the end, we will have represented ourselves and our confusion honestly.   That is all we can aim for.

I am a die-hard Raptor fan.  I have been since 2002 – the first year that I ever attentively watched NBA Basketball.  The only reason that I did when I did was because it was the first year that it didn’t interfere with school.  High school and elementary school terms don’t end until June, so I always missed NBA Playoffs.  May 2002 marked the end of my first year of University, and I didn’t have any summer courses, so I was free after my last exam.  (I still distinctly remember the exams I had to write at the end of that term.  One was a philosophy course on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and I wrote it in Varsity Stadium.  The others were for PHY140Y1Y, MAT157Y1Y and MAT240H1S.)

So that year, I got caught up in the Raptors’ greatest win streak which was led by Antonio Davis, the drive to the playoffs, and the battle against Jerry Stackhouse and the Pistons in the series that changed my life forever.  We had lost Carter to a knee injury just prior to the All-Star break.  We went into that break well over 500, and came back to lose 12 straight games.  It was looking hopeless until Davis, as our Co-Captain, led the team to win 12 of the next 14, putting us in 7th place in the East going into playoffs.  We faced Ben & Jerry without Carter, but did a decent job.  I still remember the dying seconds of the final game we played.  We were down by 3, 10 seconds on the clock, Chris Childs hurriedly dribbles the ball and just as he crosses the timeline, blind to the wide-open better 3-point shooter, Dell Curry, he threw up a wild half-court shot that had no chance of making it so it wasn’t surprising when it didn’t.  We lost our possession.  The clock ran out.  It was over.  Raptors lose.  Raptors lose.  Raptors lose.

There were a lot of reasons why I fell in love with them when I did besides the fact that I had the time to.  I loved the roster.  The hearts of Antonio Davis (ok, no scoffs here – he was great back then), Alvin Williams, Mo Pete (Morris Peterson), and JYD (Jerome Williams) won me over.  I’m happy knowing that Alvin and JYD are back and part of the organization.

The subsequent years saw some of the worst NBA play, team losses due to injury, win records, and trades, but there was always effort.  Where they lacked in talent, they made up in character.  Some say that moral wins don’t count, but I say they do.  I need to.  I’ve always felt as though Raptors’ ball was an analogy for my life.