It's June &
i had started this post yesterday to distract myself from a meeting that was coming and that i was having multiple panic attacks about, but then the meeting happened (we had a prep meeting with people i trust that should’ve lasted like thirty minutes but they stayed with me for an hour and a half), and it was somehow both infuriating and underwhelming so i just did what i do best when i cannot handle a jumble of emotions inside of me without being extremely destructive to what i care about: i took a nap.
nap turned into the next day and, well, let’s try to pick this up again.
this is what i was on yesterday:
i watched this clip from the Chicago Sky vs. the Las Vegas Aces
source: Las Vegas Aces TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@lvaces)
and the joy in seeing two black women smiling, laughing at each other during a to be honest, kind of silly match-up (girl WHY is dana evans down there guarding candace parker’s skyscraper self?!!!) reminded me one of the reasons i love basketball, women’s basketball in general. seeing black women (often black queer women at that) be amazing at a sport i love and also kind of go through the whole spectrum of emotions (as they should be allowed) with the greatest fear of repercussion being the ref calling a technical instead of being on the receiving end of a gun or worse (i’d apologize that my mind always goes there, but it’s not like i made the map for it—we can thank school shootings and pretty much non-existent gun control within the United States for that) made me regret that ive lost almost a month of indulging in one of my favorite pasttimes, to like, work-sponsored depression and shit.
but when i played the video back a second time, this popped up in my head:
its never too late to love something again.
i’m 98% sure that’s from a tumblr post (probably at a later date i’ll talk about how tumblr was v important during The Therapy Years), and i’m glad it came back through when it did. i always see if i didn’t come in from jump, that it’s too late for me to start, but hasn’t that been proven wrong, even in my own life, over and over again?
first, i did reach out to my local team to get season tickets back in march. i’d been refreshing the WNBA season pass page, at least weekly, getting 404 errors and telling myself of course they’re not ready yet, we’re still in march madness.
then, when the page redirected to where you could buy tickets(!!!!), when i tried to put in my information, it just….wouldn’t let me? so i did something i only do for things i love: i reached out. maybe a month and a half later i got a response that i couldn’t buy season tickets, but maybe i could do singles, which just isn’t best for me because i know my anxious self and i will just let that single game pass me on by. at least with season tickets, there’s a chance i will delude myself long enough into believing im an “outside loving people” person to the point that i show up to at least 40% of the games.
its incredibly strange to me because i know these people were on my phone last year trying to get me to games and now that i want to, its not possible? but i’d gotten enough no’s in the past few months to just give up altogether.
then then, i tried to hold out for the WNBA league pass app but its time, its just time to put it down. i had it for the past two or three years and its just, not super helpful yet. The Athletic did a poll of whether or not college basketball players’ watched/modeled their games after WNBA players and among the reasons that’s closer to no than yes:
Multiple players cited their lack of viewership as a result of not having a League Pass and not knowing when games were happening or how to watch. “It’s hard to even find it sometimes,” one player said. Added another: “I feel like I would watch more if it was more accessible.” Multiple players said they only watched the playoffs, and they did so because those games were on a more obvious schedule and on ESPN’s main channels.
i’d log into the app and see that there were five games that day, and i could only have access to like, two, through the app even though one of the unavailable ones was in my state! and that’s one of the reasons I stopped trying to watch even though you used to be able to find me sitting underneath my dad’s desk in his office face barely two feet away from the little television screen when any and ALL WNBA games were on cable regularly(ish) like a decade (holy shit wait, two decades???) ago.
which is a long way of saying, i’ll be doing a little dive into finding the most reliable places to watch games this summer and if you have any suggestions on how to just take a calendar of games and input them into my regular calendar (that isnt the league pass) i’d appreciate it!
*there was something on policing i also had but i need to go ask yesterday pre-meeting TJ where that train of thought was going because today’s TJ is LOST
hope yall are well, hope good things find and stay with you soon.
xoxo gossip boi