To divertirse or not

One of my favorite words in the Spanish language is "divertido", which essentially means to have fun. For example, "quiero hacer algo divertido", I want to do something fun. But what I love most about this word is that it looks like the word divert in English, which to me is the true essence of the word: "Let's do something to divert our attention from the mundaneness of our daily existence by doing something out of the ordinary."

For the last several Thursday evenings I have had the opportunity to spend time playing softball with some work colleagues. I'll be the first to admit that we are not very good-- just imagine a bunch of librarians playing softball. Yeah. Exactly. However you would never know we were such horrible softball players. We treated each game with such a naivete that even though we pretty much got slaughtered each game, we still had so much fun. For those of us teammates who are knowledgeable of the game or who have played it before, we recognized our limitations but we nevertheless felt excited to play regardless of the final score. We never let our horrible-ness, as it were, divert our attention from the game itself.

Even with that said I spent many a sleepless Thursday night thinking about every single misplay I made over and over until I fell asleep: "If I had only reacted quicker to that groundball" or "If I had only gotten a hit with RISP." Stupid crap like that while laying in bed. Ad infinitum. Over and over again, until my tiredness took over. I wish my mind would not work like that at times.

As bad as this may sound, tonight I would rather to divert my attention directly to my misplays again, over and over again than to think about the horrible news I got late this afternoon. I want to divert my mind away from some of the most completely devastating news anyone could receive. I will not divulge the nature of the news here but it is as devastating as can get.

I do not foresee many things 'divertido' going on here for a while, but I do hope to have a few thing around to divert me from the harsh reality of the aforementioned news.