Lazio is so depressing these days, I have no idea what the future of the club even holds-- Lotito has absolutely driven it into the ground. Here is the latest in a long litany of problems, in this case it has to do with myriad of the young players fleeing our youth academy over a period of years. And I don't blame them, they have a zero percent chance of making it in the first team. The only Primavera kids I can even really remember coming through were Keita and Cataldi, and they are both over thirty now.
Just look at what's going on with Floriani Mussolini! He's a super talented twenty-two year-old, with two consecutive successful stints in Serie B on loan, at a position of extraordinary need for us. What's more, Lotito and Fabiani have been mismanaging the quotas for how many non-youth, non-home grown players we can have-- so we keep banging up against that limit. And what am I hearing? That we're going to sell Mussolini. I would say it's because of the name, but it's such a pattern with us mismanaging the youth sector, I doubt that has much or anything to do with it.
Beyond that, what happened to all of the "Ok we can't buy players, but the good news is that we're going to trim that squad right on down to twenty players for Sarri and to help with the books!" talk? I don't care how we get rid of players like Basic and Hysaj-- just make it happen for Pete's sake! Offer to sell them for peanuts! Offer to pay half of their wages for a season to whomever buys them! Just get rid of them and save us some desperately needed cash! It's not rocket science. I remember this problem with Makinwa, aka Maki-Pizza like fifteen years ago, and nothing has changed!
If we didn't have Maurizio Sarri as coach right now, I'd say we were headed for Serie B or even worse over the next couple of years. This is the kind of catastrophic, clown-show management I remember clubs like Palermo having right before they fell into oblivion.
In other news, I can barely manage my anxiety at the moment. I have an in-person job interview tomorrow for a role I'd really like to land, so that puts a lot of pressure on me. And then I serve at the altar again on Sunday, which-- completely unlike lectoring or being sacristan, both of which came naturally to me-- I am really struggling to get to grips with. When I check my watch after Mass, I routinely find that I'd been getting notifications that my heart rate was reaching 140 beats-per-minute while up there, which is borderline panic-attack territory. In turn that's causing my memory to blank, which in turn is causing me to make mistakes.
Last Saturday I literally lost the page in the book because my hands were shaking so much, forcing Father to fish for it again in front of the entire congregation. I know "everyone makes mistakes!", yada yada and all the rest-- but none of that advice has ever helped me, since I already know it rationally. I've spent more than two years in cognitive behavior therapy, and essentially got nothing out of it. It sucks to be such an anxious person, I've been that way since I was probably three years-old-- as long as I can remember. I think it's brain dysfunction of some kind-- like a chemical imbalance, especially since these issues run in my family going back multiple generations.
Anyhow, today I'm going to do final preparations for the interview tomorrow and hopefully just chill and play some "Cyberpunk 2077" on Switch 2 tonight, after picking my daughter up from work. I'll plow through what I have to do in my usual way: with determination, diligence, and organization.