How Things Should Go
Learning to manage, or tear up entirely, the tracing paper of expectation.
Expectation is lonely. It can skew intrusive or hostile in its aims. Anthropomorphized, I’d put it close to the Sundarbans tigers, man-eaters by habit, even preference, for reasons no scientist can settle on but range from the animals being hyper-aggressive due to constant discomfort for all the salt water they drink in the mangrove dense coastal plains, to becoming accustomed to the taste of humans for all the bodies that wash ashore from regional cyclones. As habit, it’s looking in the mirror too often. But plainly, and without being checked, it’s an isolating practice that tends to yield more of the same rather than the projected results.
I’m reminded of expectation’s lonely, self-defeating edge on all the occasions I grapple with it, am led to disappointment by it, coax myself out of its sinkhole and make a mental note to not be clawed, coaxed or swayed by it, only to forget and find myself there, again, not very long after.
I’m trying to get better about it.
I had a Big Interview get scrapped — a scheduling thing, not anyone’s fault — and though it was likely going to be brief, and its purpose was for promotion, it still presented proximity and time with someone I’d wanted those things with for a while, and I was going to make the most of it. When I got the news it was off, I’d already been unbalanced by two other bad, jarringly sad things in the span of of an evening. So maybe my sense of expectation was actually fine, and it was the rest of me slung low that made me well up because of the honestly commonplace cancellation.
I ran the bath. Sunk down in the hot water for over an hour reading The Last Summer in the City, absently tensing and relaxing my left shoulder against a muscle tweak or pulled nerve that’s been lingering all week. A book and water are transportive, especially when the book is as sad and off-handedly beautiful as Calligarich’s, and the water temperature is in contrast to whatever the natural world’s offering.
At some point my muscles loosened and so did the knot in my chest, at some point I clued into a high-pitched grumbling. I leaned over the high edge of the tub and saw an orange sprawl of fur pressed up against the outside tiling. Jeans was asleep on the bathmat. She comes in most of the times I take a bath but I never hear her until she passes out and starts snoring, a ridiculous sound that can range from that porcupine eating, to a bird, to an adult man, also snoring, and is in itself transportive. It’s hard to feel very bad with her blaring from some deep, untouchable sleep.
The parts of the NBA I like the least get caught up in expectation. The “generational talent” prophecy pressure and cannibalization of the Draft, a rookie’s first season, in general, in the sense that it can’t ever exist as-is, only as better or worse than expectation’s already preordained. The entire idea of who is or isn’t having a surprising season (the concept of surprise itself coopted by expectation), the inherent and deemed acceptable timeline for a superstar, the idea that plateaus, rough patches, lulls and dormant periods — the norm in day to day life — have no bearing game to game, week to week, certainly not month to month.
It isn’t the aspirational aspects of expectation I take issue with, which are probably the best reason to hold expectations at all. How else would you formalize the way forward to a goal, a place, or frame of mind you’ve never felt before, so have no blueprint for, without expectation as a buffer or shield, a way to talk yourself into new territory? It’s expectation as promise, inevitability, where the whole thing gets warped.
The idea that something is due to happen, or due to you directly. Like a stranger’s career or personal interests, and the way we talk about whether they are measuring up for us. But compared to what? Past examples, the strangers we did this with before? For rookies, abstract scouting reports put together without the burden of NBA minutes or their physical translation, or how a franchise might have no plan of what to do with them, no development structure in place.
The expectation of trades without considering the upheaval on the larger part of a person’s life, instead, what’s good for the cap sheet, what’s good for return, what’s good for the never-ending, cyclical implications on promise or, the expectations preemptively placed on the incoming player and the next season.
It’s probably why I fall so hard for underdogs, for the out-of-nowhere of them in their jarring, completely joyful rejection of expectation. That for a brief stretch the complete confidence in the machinery of expectation comes to a grinding halt, or altogether implodes, and the result is to sit up straighter, forced to see the burst or run in realtime instead of out from behind the perceptible tracing paper of How Things Should Go.
A story I’m working on, separate from the Big Interview, is going to feature the anticipated experience fans had of a game they wanted to go to because a favourite athlete is playing, and reconciling it with the end result, when that player ended up sitting out. I was reluctant to tweet out the request, or even the question, in the first place because at the heart of this is something I fundamentally don’t agree with, that paying a certain amount of money guarantees access in a vacuum unaffected by personal injury, ailments, life events, and now, a pandemic. But the replies, some of them scattered throughout this, were almost all understanding, if not entirely empathetic.
How hypocritical of me, the person writing about how much expectation can warp experience, to have impulsively tensed against responses that seemed certain.
The DMs I got were even more heartwarming.
Someone said they flew in early to Charlotte on a work trip so they could have the chance to support a rookie Jeremy Lin with the Warriors, not knowing that Lin was assigned to the team’s (then) D League arm prior to the game. Their silver lining? Getting to see a rookie Steph Curry from the 3rd row seats they’d sprung for, wearing their Lin jersey in a sea of teal.
Another person, a Sixers fan in Denver, had friends visiting from Sweden and took them to see Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons against the Nuggets. Both stars sat, the Sixers lost, but their Swedish friends went away thinking pretty highly of James Ennis. Somebody else recalled coming to Toronto from Calgary with the sole intention of seeing Kyle Lowry play, only to see the news run across a ticker at the airport that he was hurt. They came anyway. Every story was like that. A disappointment, delivered by total surprise, the begrudging choice to go along with the original decision, and coming away with either a better experience, deeper appreciation, or at least a funny story that they took in stride. Expectation, exploded, and shining facets of promise coming down in its wake.
The Big Interview, the first one, stayed scrapped, but a few days later I got an inquiry from a completely different place, asking if I was interested in speaking with the same person. It’s scheduled for next week. I’m holding it at a respectful arm’s length until it happens, the way you might deign to steer the outboard motor of a small, tin boat to the other side of a wide river in the Sundarbans if you saw a quick flash of orange through the reaching, dense fingers of the mangroves. You can’t help but hold your breath, your heart cranking up a little quicker, but you make sure your expectation shifts from future to present and sit up a little straighter to welcome the immediate world, pressing in on all sides.
Crazy timing that I got this great piece in my inbox today. A co-worker with season Blazer tickets had the opportunity to be on court briefly before the game tonight (Friday night) and get a T-shirt signed by Robert Covington. He knows I love RoCo so was gonna let me go in his place. I went to the laundromat last night to wash my Understand the Grind t-shirt to wear in honor of my more newly-beloved Blazer, Norman Powell. Around one or so I noticed several missed calls from my mom, who loves the Blazers, too. I got online and saw that RoCo and Norm had just been traded to the Clippers.
Expectations, nothing can raise you higher or bring you crashing down faster, depending on their outcome. Well written with input to bring a smile!