League of Their Own (at least that was my favorite)

To look at me now you wouldn't find it hard to believe that I don't really watch a ton of sports. I basically don't pay attention to much that doesn't have to do with me. Since I look like a flailing retard playing sports this isn't a stretch. What you may not know is that I love baseball. Ok maybe not love, but it's the one sport I can semi-play and understand. America's past time was the first sport my brother played, and really one of the few things I remember us doing as a family growing up. Dad was president of one of the little leagues for a few years and when Nolan Ryan's minor league team came to Round Rock we were instrumental in helping the effort to get it in there. So what?

This morning I'm sitting watching "Rookie of the Year" one of the many, many baseball movies we watched growing up. We were weaned on these under-dog type stories. I'm not sure if they were for all of us or for Ben, so that he would become the next Babe Ruth. My favorite two movies were "The Babe" with John Goodman, "Sandlot" that featured the dorky kid who couldn't play but was accepted anyway (yeah, we can see why I liked that one) and a "League of Their Own (I must have had an early affinity for fag hags and lezzies). All of these movies showed their characters to be flawed, human, stoppable. Against all they knew that could stop them they kept going, perservering. 

These movies did a lot. They bonded us to our dad and for all I know are the reason Ben became the Rudy of Texas A&M. They also taught us to perservere. Dad always says "I may have been an asshole, but you can do it on your own. You can survive." That's true. We did learn to survive and keep going no matter what. The three is us are survivors in the best sense of the word. In our search for perfection and out of neccesity we've battled out demons and won. Each of us has had trouble with eating disorders in one form or another. We have all had to support ourselves since we turned 18, and we were pretty much doing most of that in high school anyway. None of us moved back home, like our cousins and I'm sure we could probably kick everyone's ass blindfolded. That or die trying. We are truly in a league of our own. I'm not sure if that's always a good thing. The three of us tend to piss a lot of people off and be misunderstood. Just like Dad. So it seems that what these movies did to us the most was make us want to make him proud. Look for his approval. Reach for perfection. Whether or not he meant it to be that way, it is what it is. Everyone can be extraordinary, most of us are in our own way. Not everyone gets a movie made.