It was a cold, damp April afternoon — the kind that settles slowly into your body, chilling you to the bone. The sky was a mottled gray, and I was standing in the muddy grass, face to face with the enemy. He leveled his eyes at me; I stared right back at him, as if to say, Carlos, you’re going down.

Yes, that would be the associate editor of this newspaper. No, it wasn’t a bizarre new kind of editing wherein the editor and writer mud-wrestle over grammar disagreements, although I could get behind that idea. It was intramural softball, and last Monday I found myself in the strange situation of playing against the Cornell Dairy Sluggers (an athletics official made a typo).

I was on the Kitsch Magazine team. Imagine the match-up: a small features magazine facing off against a newspaper that could draw its team from over 200 members, including a sports board. Plus, they had Per Ostman, and that guy’s like eight feet tall. My five-foot-two self was understandably intimidated.

But somehow we won. Somehow, despite the fact that our opponents were a hard-boiled conglomeration of athletes and Mexicans while we were a ragtag team of English majors and gay men, despite the fact that our team shirts were an oh-so-intimidating shade of baby blue, despite the fact that at one point we had two runners on third base at the same time, we won. It was like an after-school special.
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