Uh-oh, it’s midway through the regular season and at 8-6, IU men’s basketball is looking underwhelming. You’re frustrated, dissatisfied and if it weren’t for the $100 you sank into a pair of candy stripe pants, you might swear off watching the Hoosiers entirely.
[Related: IU men’s basketball suffers eighth straight loss to in-state rival Purdue]
Fortunately, there are plenty of skills that will come quite easily to IU fans. Here’s a sample of pastimes to occupy your attention between shouting matches with the television screen.
Gardening
Be sure to give your sapling ample sunlight and air. If you force it to grow in the looming shadow of the past several decades or smother it with unrelenting hype, even the sweetest fruit will taste sour compared to your expectations.
You can try using a wooden stake to make the vines develop how you want them, but sometimes you just have to accept that one year’s crop might form slightly differently from your preference.
Birdwatching
You may feel you’ve been staring at the same nest with no real upward movement. None of the promising eggs are hatching, and you definitely haven’t seen anything take flight.
It’s important to appreciate the robins and sparrows even if you have a bald eagle-or-bust mentality.
Whether it’s Trayce Jackson Davis soaring to the rim or Al Durham gliding through the lane en route to a graceful layup, mother nature always offers spectacle if you look hard enough and remain patient.
Solving Rubik’s Cubes
All too often, perfecting one facet of a game plan comes at the cost of another. If the Hoosiers lock down on defense, the hoop shrinks to the size of a needle’s eye on offense. If they shoot well, their opponents rain 3-pointers like men in a Weather Girls song.
A Rubiks Cube is an endless cycle of rotating edges, and it seems like all I hear about IU is how it’s right on the verge of turning a corner.
Cooking
It’s as simple as some smudged instructions in your grandmother's 1987 cookbook— a few cups of talent, a transcendent leader and a few pinches of luck. Or does that say a few pounds of luck? Whatever, it doesn’t matter.
Surely, recreating the recipe for success couldn’t be that difficult.
After all, Bob Knight did it three times from 1976-87, and all it took was one of the most decorated coaches in college basketball history regularly intimidating, berating and occasionally strangling his players.
[Related: The General comes home]
Fostering a rabid pitbull
Even if the Hoosiers don’t take first place at the Westminster Dog Show, it would be nice to see them not roll over against the Big Ten’s better teams.
Yes, this is a relatively young program, but obedience training is for weaklings and Pac-12 schools.
All your neighbors own huge German shepherds and mastiffs, and IU’s ranked conference opponents have the bite to accompany their bark.
If you can’t run with the big dogs, what’s the point of competing?
Mountaineering, ideally without a harness
You still keep a framed picture of when you summited the Matterhorn all those years ago. Ever since, any trek up the hillside feels totally lackluster.
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s futile to try. After all, even Tom Crean stooped in the dale of the National Invitational Tournament before reaching a plateau at the sweet sixteen.
If your definition of a valley is going .500 in the country’s toughest conference while navigating an unprecedented pandemic, then perhaps you need a higher vantage point to get some perspective.
Juggling literal chainsaws
Why, oh why would anybody choose to do this, you ask?
In case you haven’t noticed, humans are sort of obsessed with doing things that offer a single really cool outcome and about a thousand miserable ones.
[Related: OPINION: IU men’s basketball needs to rethink how it does laundry]
Much like the NCAA tournament, this hobby will almost certainly result in pain and humiliation. A lone lucky soul can make it through unscathed, but for everybody else it’s just a matter of how many clean tosses you can get in before swift and sudden dismemberment.
