Yes, I do still exist

To those of you who need a daily infusion of blogs to entertain them at work, I'm sorry for not updating. I have a somewhat legitimate excuse, though, in that my computer was broken. For that matter, it's still broken, but I am on the laptop in the front room. Hopefully my computer will be fixed soon, because I'm running out of books to read.

I've thought of a great many things to post in the time since my last one (way back near Thanksgiving? Sheesh!), so not it's time to see if I can remember any of them.

I did write up a post of the things I hate about Thanksgiving, but I really don't want to find it right now, so we'll see if I can give you the Reader's Digest version. I don't think that we as a country need to turn our slothfulness into a national holiday. The reason behind Thanksgiving is a good one, but what it has turned into is a holiday celebrating all the laziness of American by eating a huge dinner and following it up with doing nothing for four days except watching football and eating leftovers. Of course, I try to do the opposite, cramming in a football and frisbee game, but still, that's not what most people are doing. Also, I don't like getting beat over the head with the idea that I need to be thankful. Yes, I'm very aware of how nice my life is, and I'm thankful for it. But I don't want to have to talk about all the things I'm thankful for. Nor do I want to go around the table and list two things I'm thankful for, which has somehow become a Jennings family tradition for Thanksgiving. Thanks, but no.

Okay, got that out of my system.

So high school soccer is in full swing, and I'm loving it. It's one of the major reasons that winter is my favorite season (along with snowboarding, of course). We just had the Garces Tournament, where I was paid $45 dollars a game for games that consisted of two 30 minutes halves and a 10 minute halftime. Not bad, not bad at all.

I am reminded of the differences between volleyball and soccer as I'm bored while reffing a JV game. I told Chris that the differences are much like the differences between Plato and Aristotle. So here I shall explain (skip if you'd like).

In volleyball, every point matters. The game can be broken down into individual elements of points. Generally, the first team to 25 points wins the game, so each individual point is very important. You have to look at each serve, each hit, each spike, to see how the game is going to end up. You see the overall game through those individual points.

In soccer, you can't look at individual kicks and passes to see the whole game. There is so much of the game that would be lost if you only looked at what the ball does - much of the game is the positioning of players away from the ball. You have to look at plays, runs, attacks, and counter-attacks, to get a sense of how the game is going.

So in volleyball the individual things are very important. Each time a player hits the ball they have the potential to greatly impact the game, and mistakes (even minor ones like a mis-hit) are costly. This is not true in soccer. An individual can make a mistake like a bad pass, and the whole team can recover so there is no real impact on the game. In fact, this is expected. You cannot look at any individual play (or even a smallish group of plays) in soccer and know how the game will end up.

So, now onto the philosophy. Plato and Aristotle talked about universals and particulars. Universals are, well, universal things, or the essence of things, and particulars are individual things that we experience in the world. Like a chair would be a particular and the idea of a chair would be the universal. It's much easier to imagine universals as things like beauty and truth, but they are also things like desk and chair.

So, for Plato, universals are all that's important, and exist on their own. Particulars are reflected instances of the Form that they draw from. It's much more complicated than that, but just keep in mind that universals are important and all that's truly real. For Aristotle, universals are in the particulars, and do not exist outside of the elements that are seen in the particulars. So, how does this relate to volleyball and soccer?

In volleyball, you can look at individual points (particulars) and see the universal (the game or match). How each point plays out will tell you how the game will play out. If one team makes mistakes in hitting or setting the ball while the other team doesn't, you know who's going to lose, because you can see the game in how each particular is played out. Every particular (point, or even so far as hit) matters. This isn't so in soccer. Sure, you can look at lots of touches, passes, shots and figure out if there's a better team, but that is not necessarily going to tell you what the game is going to look like. Every particular doesn't matter, and a coach isn't going to yell at players for making a few mistakes (unless the coach is Leslie O'Conner). Instead, you have to look at overall strategy and knowledge of the game to see who is going to win. In volleyball, you can look at who hits, blocks, spikes, and serves better to know who is going to win. In soccer, it's who understands where and when to run, and how to beat the other team strategically that will tell you who wins, not necessarily who can pass, trap, and shoot better.

So there it is, a very lengthy and useless explanation of why soccer is like Plato and volleyball is like Aristotle. And one of the reasons that I like soccer better than volleyball (there are about a thousand others which I can list if you'd like to know).

Maybe I'll try to post the rest of the things I've thought of tomorrow, but then again, maybe not.