2025-26 UCLA Bruins Women
101 · 2026-04-06 · medium
Nothing happens without desire. While I was away working in Italy, which was six weeks and also an eternity ago, I found a pristine hardcover first edition of Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics at a small bookstore in Milan's Zone 7. I just finished reading it on Saturday afternoon. Most of the cosmicomics go like this: first, the author presents a classic scientific hypothesis – on evolution, relativity, chaos, quantum mechanics, cybernetics or something else – and then our humble narrator Qfwfq offers his own biographical account as validating proof, whether or not the theory is true. Ah yes, I remember it well. I now own a full English translation; nobody's bothered to compend all 34 scattered cosmicomics in the author's own native language, but this volume puts the entire history of everything in roughly the proper order. Qfwfq is there at the start of the universe, as a miniscule hydrogen atom, and also at the end of it, as a bridge-and-tunnel salaryman with marital problems. In Calvino's cosmos, the human soul and mind emerge first out of the limitless void, gender isn't a necessary construct until forms become physical, and you can extrapolate from that whatever you'd care to. Desire, the universe's fundamental propulsive force, tends toward a future of union and propagation and multiplication, but it can also point backwards too. Every single cell contains within it a faint memory of its distant origin, a pre-ancient era where there were no binary oppositions, no complicated misunderstandings, when everything was simple and unitary and made perfect sense. Can we ever get back there? Could we, if we tried? I am observing her now, on a Sunday in early April, as I try desperately to make sense of her. Fourteen months and also an eternity ago, she would watch the women's basketball team from her alma mater play two times per week, sometimes three. I would watch the games along with her; she called the players by their first names, and she would even talk to them through the screen. This team was much better than the ones from her own college days, back in the early aughts; they won 23 games in a row and 34 in total. And then, in the national semifinals, they lost by 34 points to the eventual champions. Something snapped, imperceptibly; her shattered heart healed in a much different shape. Last November, when the 2025-26 college basketball season started, she focused on other things instead. While I was away working in Italy, instead of basketball games, she spent her evenings watching slop on Netflix or Crunchyroll or whatever, it's not really much of my business. So this weekend, when UCLA stormed through the Women's Final Four, it was like that song in A Chorus Line (1985). Last year, she'd made plans to fly to Tampa until work intervened; this year, with the games a five-hour drive away in Phoenix, she made the excuse that gas is six dollars nowadays and, besides, it's 115 degrees out. Instead of pregame hype, she ignored her laundry pile and scrolled The RealReal, which is yet another thing that human men are never meant to understand. In the title game against South Carolina, with the Bruins up by 33 in the third quarter, she switched over to SportsNet LA (she would watch the confetti celebration later, she said) and displayed more happy emotions about the Dodgers coming back from five runs down to beat the Nationals in Game 9 of 162 than for a real actual National Championship... by way of a thumping 28-point victory, no less. I've written before, a long time ago, about how sports ecstasy is directly proportional to emotional investment. I know all about how that stuff works. But it occurs to me now that the sun has traveled around the earth – or vice versa – eleven times since we first met, and I understand her even less than I did back then. "When you're young," – Qfwfq muttered, waiting for Dorothy outside the psychoanalyst's office – "all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock: pulp, damp and happy."