Why am I switching websites altogether? Why not just stick with MySpace? I mean, I have some history with that site (I think I 1st created my account in 2005), and I probably have 3 or 4 years of blogs in there as well. But it’s MySpace for Pete’s sake. Almost no one still has their MySpace. Everyone has switched over to Facebook or Twitter or something else entirely. I mean, Krissy and I are 2 of the only people I know who deleted their Facebook accounts, but we kept MySpace? How does that make any sense? MySpace is a virtual wasteland. At this point, it is almost entirely made up of musical acts, spam-bots, and people who just forgot their account existed. One time a few months ago I got bored, and I actually logged on to just **gasp** look at my friends’ pages. It was a pretty sad and pathetic experience…like if you went back to visit a house you used to live in, and when you got there the place was abandoned and falling apart…and there were hookers living in it…and dealing crack. The page layouts were dated, everyone’s info wasn’t current, no one’s pictures had changed in years, and most people hadn’t even logged in for over 2 or 3 months. To be honest, I couldn’t even remember what my page looked like, and when I saw it I asked myself, “What were you thinking?!?” For the last three years, I only logged on for 2 purposes: to check it in the rare once-every-6-months occurrence of someone actually leaving me a comment and to blog. Honestly, the only reasons I kept it at all were for nastolgia’s sake (same reason Krissy was keeping hers) and to write. Once I couldn’t get on it to post a blog every now and again, what was the point? I copy and pasted all of Krissy and my old messages back-and-forth to each from when we were still just dating (basically 21st century love letters), saved the pictures that I wanted that I knew I didn’t have already saved somewhere at home, and deleted my account. It’s time to start fresh. I give it like a few months before anyone even notices my page no longer exists.
How I wound up picking BlogSpot (or “Blogger” or “Google Blog”) for my new page is kind of funny actually. I was looking at Mark Titus’ “Club Trillion” blog, and I noticed that was what he was using. I already like a lot of Google’s stuff, I use Gmail as my main email account, and the way his page was set up was simple and effective…so I go to create an account, and apparently I already had one!! Whhhaaaa…??? Turns out back in May of 2008 I had created a Blogger account. I wrote 1, count ‘em, 1 post. I had titled the blog “Post-It Notes,” and my URL was http://kristinasboy4ever.blogspot.com. Wow…not only is “Post-It Notes” incredibly cheesy and not all that clever, but “kristinasboy4ever?” I mean, I’m all for giving shoutouts to my wifey, but that was pretty weak. And writing “forever” as “4ever”…my gosh, what was I thinking? Curiously, I glanced at how many times my page had been viewed in the 2+ years of its existence, and mercifully that number was “0.” So, I thought of maybe editing that existing blog, but seeing as how I had 1 post from May of 2008, I figured why not just start over. (Also, I now vaguely remember being blocked from MySpace at work before, only to have it get unblocked soon after…that must have been the reason for me creating that account.)
Anyway, I chose the name “B-Court All Star” as a kind of homage back to my college pickup basketball days. Back at the RAC at UMBC, there were (and still are) 3 courts on the recreational side of the building. They are all-purpose courts, but you can play full-length hoops games on all 3. We (as in the RAC regulars) nicknamed the 1st court the “A-Court” because that’s usually where the higher skill level, more competitive pickup games took place. The “B-Court,” which was the middle court, was a step down from there. The skill level and competition was still decent, and if the A-Court was too crowded you could probably still get a decent run on the B-Court, but if you were an A-Court player playing on the B-Court you were usually the best player there by far…hence the name “B-Court All Star.” (I know that if you have to explain a joke that probably means it’s not funny to begin with, but oh well…) Today, I still consider myself a B-Court All Star in a way…do with that what you will. The C-Court was a place that a good basketball player would never want to find themselves. Located at the far end of the building, it was usually filled with random people, like stray cats that had just wondered into a dark alley. Professors, kids wearing jeans and skater shoes, hipsters with their weird hipster girlfriends…it was a scary place. Sometimes, we would call the C-Court the “Asian Court” or the “Middle Eastern Court.” That probably sounds incredibly racist, but hear me out…sometimes, usually on a slow Friday night, a group of 10 to 15 Asian or Middle Eastern dudes would stroll into the RAC all at once and get a game going. These games were filled with tons of unintentional comedy, ranging from the incredibly bad level of play to the same guy wearing the same full-on Tracy McGrady outfit every week (the matching Houston Rockets jersey, shorts, T-Mac headband, socks, wristbands, and shoes). This isn’t to say that there aren’t any good basketball players who are Asian or Middle Eastern (or professors for that matter) because I knew plenty of really good players from all different backgrounds, but it was hard to miss these congregations of really bad basketball players.
There was always an interesting hierarchy to the RAC courts as well. My friends and I talked about the court dynamics because we were there all the time, and it was like observing animals in a zoo, but I think to everyone else the hierarchy was more of an unspoken code of the court. Generally, most players naturally gravitated to the courts of their appropriate skill level. Every once in awhile you would get an “outlier,” but for the most part people knew the natural order of things. Depending on how crowded it would get, sometimes a trickle-down effect would occur where the A-Court players would spill onto the B-Court, causing the true B-Court to be the C-Court, and then maybe the Asian Court would get bounced to the main gym…or if it wasn’t crowded the opposite would happen, and the Asian Court would become the B-Court, for example. This “phenomenon” is probably only remotely interesting to me and a small handful of people, but to us it was like sociology class in real life…and it also explains the story behind “B-Court All Star,” so there you go…
I’m dragging on, so I will end on what I think is an appropriate B-Court All Star topic. In the coed touch football league Krissy and I play in, the website for the league creates like this mock magazine cover with an action shot from the previous week’s games. We have been playing in this league for like 2 years, and no one from our team ever even being snapped in a picture before, but Krissy actually made the cover on the homepage. If that’s not B-Court All Star, then I’m not sure what is.
My baby’s going out for a pass there, but she looks like a safety breaking on a receiver as she’s about to take their head off! Talk about “utilizing strength!” And I love the fake bar code at the bottom…classic. Almost as good, but not quite, I had a picture in like the 20-pic slideshow they made for the week. Welcome to the gun show, everybody.
I would love to say that I sped around that dude and raced off to the end zone like Chris Johnson…but that would be a lie.
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