To basketball or not to basketball, that is the question

I just played about 2.5 hours of basketball today and my body is done. I wanted to do some "schoolwork" tonight but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen, all I'm good for now is reading some tech articles (ars technica, wired, cnet, slashdot, linux today, planet debian, planet gnome, p2p, digg, and so on). My RSS reader (liferea) has about 200 new articles for me that I have to go through each day, woohoo. Ok back to basketball, one average I spend about 6 hours a week on the basketball courts. This is something I have been consistent with for almost a year now. I really love playing basketball, so it provides me with motivation to sustain it so I'm gratefull for that because it keeps me active.

I started playing basketball when I was 13 years old back in 1995 when I first came to the US. In Haiti, we don't have electricity so kids usually play soccer for recreation no video games or cartoons. When I came to the US, we were poor (well still poor), so we did not have cable or video games so every afternoon my brother and I would go to the park and play basketball. From Monday to Saturday from like 4pm to like 8pm and like 6pm to 10pm as we got older. Then when I came to college I would try to play as much as possible. But around Junior year in college I got extremely busy, I was involved with 3 or 4 leadership position in student organizations, I was in a dance troupe so I stopped playing ball but I was still pretty active. As I got older, I started to devalue basketball until about a year ago when I gave a talk on work life balance to a group of new grad students. During that talk, I realized how important staying active was and how blessed I was to have basketball as my "antidrug, LOL", because I really enjoy doing it and it could be a great stress releiver.

So these I say to myself that I'm going to play three times a week no matter what. My good friend Girish, (he gets a lot of shoutouts in my blog because I bother him so much about stupid ideological stuff but he always listens and gives me advice, he says if something is important to you, you will do it no matter what and that stuck with me). So I play basketball for about 6 hours a week. I know that I am sacrificing something for it (probably my productivity in my PhD), but I am subjectively choosing to believe that it is for a greater good in the long run and that it is an overall benefit. Sometimes I do break that rule if I have a paper deadline, but overall I try not to miss. I also make sure that I go out on the weekends and dance because I love me some dancing and it's a lot of fun. Overall, these things make me happy and help me enjoy this PhD journey. I wake up everyday and I'm feel like my week is going to be ok as long as I get to play some ball and party on the weekend. But in the back of my mind I keep thinking, this is going to catch up to me one day, I guess that's true because there is no free lunch, ah well, bbbbbbooooooooooooommmmmmmmmm

btw, I never proofread these posts, proofreading is for suckas, and the internet does not forget they tell me, I guess I may be the sucka in the long run. Wow this is a long one but I think I'm getting better at this daily blog thing, I actually look forward to it I think.