I swear to you, this is a post about Brazil.

Pre-amble:  This post is not funny.  I started to write a post about Brazil, and the initial analogy I chose took me in a very different direction from that which I originally intended.  As it turns out, this post is barely about soccer.  Skip it if you're here for the funny.

I promise, I won't mind.





For the majority of my high school career, I was fairly convinced I was headed to an art school for college.  I took drawing, painting, design, textiles, ceramics, jewelry and photography.  I was fairly good at all the classes, nothing to write home about, but definitely a decent artist.  Photography was probably my strongest suit, to the point that, when I applied to the University of Kansas, I listed Photography as my intended major.

But this isn't a story about what changed in college; this is a story about unwarranted jealousy and hate.

Over three years of high school art, I ended up taking a lot of classes with the same girl.  She and I had known each other since the seventh grade, but we only became close when we got to high school.  We bonded over the things that are incredibly important to a fifteen year old:  music, movies and feeling uncool.  Seeing her again on the first day of freshman year, it was like one of those high school movies where the shy girl takes off her glasses and lets her hair out of the pony tail.

She was a phenomenal artist, the kind of girl who was accurately sketching things from memory at age three.  Art was always more work for me than it was for her.  Hands down, she was more talented at drawing and painting, but I was okay with it.  I had always excelled in the classes that required more hard-work than deftness or skill, but as time wore on, she destroyed me in those, as well.

Everything she tried, she knocked out of the park.  In our first ceramics class, she was throwing pots with the advanced students by the second month, while I was still struggling to slip and score the sides on my pieced-together, geometric designs.  It got to the point where I was staying after school to keep up with her, taking projects home and working on them in front of the TV until 4:00 AM.

It was only a matter of time before I started resenting her talent.  Halfway through our Junior year, something just went off in my brain, and I flat out decided I hated her.  A full blown, secret vendetta kind of hate.  A writing in my journal every night kind of hate.  A Shakespearean kind of hate.  We stopped hanging out on the weekends, and even though we still sat next to each other in class every day, it was obvious something was different.

Senior year, I withdrew from her altogether.  We were in a few of the same classes and clubs, but we didn't really talk.  I focused on my photography, took a few other art classes, but mostly gave up trying.  I took them because they were easy credits, not because I wanted to create.  She was just so much better than me at everything.  I couldn't deal with it anymore.

I don't think I saw her for an an entire year after we got our diplomas.  Over the summer between my high school graduation and the beginning of school, the Fine Arts department at KU cut it's photo program, and I ended up being forced to enroll as an English major, the second choice I listed on my application.

I haven't drawn or painted in nine years.

WHY I HATE YOUR TEAM - BRAZIL EDITION

Dear Brazil:

It wasn't my friend's fault that I hated her, but for a long time, I did.

I've had the exact same experience with you, Brazil.  You're just so talented.  And it's a preternatural talent.  It's like you're not even trying.  It's hard to not get discouraged by it, Samba Boys.  Look at the US and then look back at yourself.  It's really, really hard.

I hate you.  It's not because of anything you've done or deserve.  It doesn't matter.  I don't know how to stop feeling like I do.

-ZGS