watching federer-nadal installment umpteen while running on the treadmill today, i was struck once again by how all of us are wrecked by the bell curve. in any field, just by the nature of the distribution of anything, there are going to be one or two people who are so far out in front they're going to be practically untouchable. and sure, you can be good, but you're still going to be there in what we fondly know as the human morass, while year after year those same people, the ones who are operating on a different plane altogether because of good genes and how statistics works, those people are going to swoop in and take all the glory.

i advise you not to think about this too hard, because it's extraordinarily depressing.