Southern Times, Girls and Sports

If Terrell Owens had came to the movie night that yours truly was in charge of at the apartment complex that he lives in, more than likely he would have never asked for a bag of popcorn.

Last night as our student goverment organization began a week devoted to diversity by watching the criticially acclaimed “Crash”, I decided to try my hand at popping popcorn for the guests that were coming in.

“Are you sure know what you’re doing?”, our student body president, which at a time was for better or worse my neighbor asked.

“It’s quite easy,” I replied, “You just read the directions on the machine.”

After pouring the butter and corn into the popper and waiting ten minutes for something to pop, the only thing that came out of my wait for popcorn was a single kernel.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” they asked again.

“Yeah,” I again replied.

What our student body president and vice-president didn’t realize until much later on that something was in fact wrong with the machine.

“Ryne,” they said, “we thought you said you knew what you were doing.”

Apparently, and this goes back to the fact that both the president and vice-president knew what they were doing, not like Bush and Cheney, the popcorn popped and we all went on with our lives.

Tuesday afternoon while watching the basketball team practice in North Highland Park, I said to one of my professors that this school year, instead of being a flirt, I’m going to be on my best behavior and focus on getting out of college and on with my life.

“You just mentioned that you weren’t going to talk about girls this year,” he said, “and you did.”

“That doesn’t count,” I said.

With two days to go until the beginning of the volleyball season in which I’ll be the public address announcer for the team, everything I set out to do this school year is in so many words got thrown out the window when I ran into one of the new players Wednesday afternoon.

“You one of my Myspace friends,” I said to her, “I’m pretty certain because I sent a message to you on there during the summer.”

“I am?” the girl asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Well since you’re going to be doing the announcing for volleyball, then we’re going to have to be friends.”

Indeed and in the meantime, I’m going to have to think long and hard about what I had planned to do when school started.

Uh……………………….I don’t think so.

A year ago while I was on a trip with my then-church to Atlanta, I ran into a girl that at the time was a Georgia Peach.

She was attractive, well-read, and had goals other than trying to be in the next T.I. video, she was trying to finish her degree up at nearby Kennesaw State while I for the most part was taking a break from school and working in the hot-ass sun at the University of Memphis.

After exchanging numbers and heading home to Memphis, I expected to hear from her when instead I had to wait until the end of 2007 to meet another Georgia Peach during a trip with the basketball team to Reinhardt College in Waleska that doubled as a manager for the basketball team.

Unlike what happened with the first peach, the girl, with the help of a good friend of mine, became one of my 574 and counting friends on Facebook.

And while nothing close to a smoke signal has been sent my way from neither Georgia Peach, we enter a third Georgia Peach, this time from Savannah that is a mixture of sweet and spicy (think that girl from the new Doritios commercials) and actually likes Gym Class Heroes, one of my favorite bands along with any Judd Apatow movies.

And unlike many of the girls I’ve met on Mocospace, the knockoff Myspace site that my roommate got me on back in the middle of the month, she actually can hold a meaningful conversation that doesn’t bring up the topic of sex, although in some cases I don’t mind talking about it because I’m a guy, but from the looks of things, she’s certified as a Georgia Peach.

Just wish I could get her up here to Memphis.

A long time ago, when I was filling out a survey on Facebook, I was asked about my favorite memory from my 23 years on this earth, which would be the summers of 1995, 1997, 2002, and 2006.

But if memory serves me correct, the summers from those four years I mentioned are memorable because well, there was a lot of adventures and unique people I met.

With this being less than a month before time runs out on what has been for the most part another great and quick summer vacation for me, I figured that I could take some time to think back at some of my favorite moments from summers gone by.

“The Cheesecake Chronicles”” (Last summer after being let go by the University of Memphis before the Fourth of July, I ended up working for a month with the Tennessee Cheesecake Company of Nashville, Tennessee as a demo guy in a Costco located on Winchester and Hacks Cross Road near the world headquarters of Federal Express. Best thing about it was the fact that there was a cute girl who worked at the Walgreens across the parking lot from the Costco.)

“Hey, Pumpkin!!!” (In the summers of 2004 and 2006 as well as the summer of 2007, when I worked at the University of Memphis, my friend Erica made it a habit of calling me “Pumpkin”, a nickname that I to this day have disdain for because I hardly wear orange. But as I think about it, a really hot girl calling you a nickname you hate with a passion is better than a 300-pound fullback saying it.)

“The Shot Heard ‘Round Whitehaven” (In 2002, while living in the Whitehaven section of Memphis, I hit a mighty blast of a home run that cleared everything and landed on the second floor of an apartment unit in left-center. The following day a Coke bottle was placed at where the ball landed and disappeared when the old court was demolished in 2004. The following year, I hit one even further, this time over one of the tall trees in left and onto a walkway.)

“Food Not Bombs” (During the two years I worked at Porter Leath, I volunteered on Saturday afternoons at Food Not Bombs during the summer. Apparently, towards the end of my stay at Porter-Leath, my boss had a problem with me doing that after seeing my picture in a story for the Memphis Flyer on them.)

“One Magicial, Cute, and Chocolately Summer” (In 132 years of baseball in Memphis, there was never any backstory anywhere in the category as the one I had with a very chocolate and cute girl during the summer of 2006. Of course, nothing major never happened between us, but it sure was something that no one down at the corner of South Third and Union will never forget, even if I used that experience to write a measley book.)

In the last twenty years, I have made countless trips to Nashville, Tennessee, nineteen of them in a span of two decades for various reasons ranging from my job with as student assistant coach with the basketball team to going to Opryland with my late grandmother three weeks after my grandfather died one summer when I was a kid.

But while trips to Tennessee’s captiol city has been for me, for the most part mundane and routine because instead of having fun and getting haplessly drunk like I normally do when I have cash to spend on alcohol, it’s for business purposes.

While that has been the case for my physical presence in Nashville over the years, on your favorite social networking sites, it’s almost as if I pay taxes in Davidson County instead of Memphis because nearly half of the girls that are friends of mine on Myspace or Facebook are from Middle Tennessee, including a vast majority from the Nashville area. In fact, from 2005 to 2007, I regularly talked to a girl (pictured below) who went to Vanderbilt University that just so happen relocated to Memphis, which is something I never understood when I talked to her for the first time in months three months ago.

Unfortunately, in the three years that we did talk, two of those years I made trips to Nashville and had a plan to hang out with her only to see something go wrong before I made the trek up Interstate 40, including my trip with my former church in 2006 on the same night that the Cardinals won their first World Series in 24 years.

I had promised to call the girl when I came into Williamson County, only to realize that instead of taking the number she gave me the night before while we talked on Yahoo!, I ended up leaving the number in Memphis and tried futile attempts to remember the number during my three days there in Nashville.

Long story short, I never got a chance to see the girl up close and personal (she graduated in May of 2007 from Vanderbilt) and didn’t make a trip back to Nashville until November of last year right after taking the student assistant basketball coaching position when my school faced Fisk University before Thanksgiving.

And unlike what happened in 2005 and 2006, there was no searching for the girl, just another mundane trip for professional purposes and a woodshed beating by my school over a team that truly isn’t that good.

Recently with the help of my roommate, I joined a Myspace-type social networking site known as Mocospace, and just like it has always been with me over the past four years, I’ve decided to scoop up as many Middle Tennesssee hotties as I can, including a couple of girls from Nashville, one of whom looks a little like Keyshia Cole and lives near TSU.

And up north on Interstate 24, another girl that I talked to regularly four years ago and I are back talking again, leaving me to question what she said to me the other night.

“You’re a playa,” she said.

Yeah………..with the ladies in Middle Tennessee.