This is one of the most needed and anticipated Fridays I've had in some time. It's been a looooong week and I'm ready for a quiet night at home just cleaning and getting ready for Sunday, then watching some TV before bed and not having to get up particularly early tomorrow. We will have to get up to go into the City at some point, though Casey's going earlier than I am, but at least there's not a pressing need to rush.

There'll be a little of everything this weekend. After tonight's aforementioned chillin', there's the fun in the City tomorrow � which I also suppose I mentioned � and then, Sunday, the Super Bowl, with people coming over. Fun.

I was exhausted last night. I got home at 8:30, made a quesadilla and plopped myself onto the couch. I watched some taped TV, then the Nets game and nearly fell asleep on the couch. Sports Illustrated also had a fantastic article on a former Notre Dame football player who survived the Bataan Death March in the Phillippines during WWII.

On Ed Wednesday, Tom Wilson, who played Biff in the Back To The Future movies, guest starred as the father of a kid who gets bullied at Stuckeyville High. The amusing thing, though, was that back in Back To The Future II, when they went into the future and Wilson was all made up as the older Biff, they did a good job because today's Tom Wilson looks a lot like they imagined him to be in BTF II. In the movie, though, they made him a little heavier and a little balder, but otherwise, it was a good representation. He's going to be back on Ed, too.

Also on the show, Eli wore a hoodie with STUCKEY BOWL written across it in block letters, much like the vintage hoodies you see on all the hip kids. If they ever market them commercially, I'm all over that.

In my internet wanderings today as I try to keep up with all that's going down in the world, I had never heard of the Cheeky Girls until now. I found their "Touch My Bum" song online, and it's certainly in the line of "The Thong Song" as a dance tune with little redeeming musical value. They're just a couple of wacky Transylvanian sisters.

Anyway.

Watching the Nets game last night, it occured to me that I am pretty damn sure I don't ever want to be a sports beat writer. At least not for a team. I once thought I'd love that kind of a job � traveling with the team, getting to know the players on a level other than as a reporter, seeing the country, maybe the world.

But team beat writers are geeks. They're often out-of-shape, overweight nerds, sometimes single, with otherwise poor social skills who try to become buddies with the popular jocks to compensate for their lack of friends. To be sure, I don't know this for certain about beat writers, but having spent so much time with them over the past three years in various venues at various levels of baseball, mostly, they seem to fit that pattern, as if it were high school all over again.

During the Nets game, the cameras zoomed in to show a player for Golden State as he either checked in at the scorer's table to enter the game, or was over there chasing a loose ball or something. In those few seconds he was there, he joked (or a writer joked) with a couple of writers in the front row. Granted, they may have been team employees or something with laptops, but they certainly seemed like reporters to me. But the player made some comment, which might not have been the least bit funny, and the writers laughed like it was Robin Williams live (or it could've been hilarious, but that's not the point). I saw it one time in the visitors' clubhouse at Shea Stadium. Scott Rolen, then with the Phillies, had a crowd of reporters around his locker, and as I waited for Jimmy Rollins (who wouldn't speak to me), Rolen made some mild joke � and I'm sure he wasn't trying to crack people up � and the reporters burst into spontaneous cackling, sucking up to him. I certainly don't want to be one of those guys.

Don't get me wrong � I still want to write, and I'd still enjoy being a sports writer, but I'd rather do it in a feature writer/columnist kind of role. As a general assignment reporter, I'd go to different venues, see different teams. If it were for the right publication, I'd be known as a writer for ____, rather than as Dan ____. I'd like it that way.

Beat writers are too wrapped up in getting the scoop, beating their competitors to the story. They buddy up to the players in order to gain their confidence and get the story. I've learned over the past four years that I'm not that kind of guy. I can't be a cutthroat journalist out to get the story at (most) any cost. I'd prefer to be more of an essayist, to travel the world and take my time with my work. Writing features, you don't necessarily have to write it first, just differently, sometimes better. If five reporters all have the same access to a player, the one who writes the best feature will be the one who asks the right questions, not the one who schemes the best.

I'm just waiting for the day I win the lottery or come into money some other way and can quit my job, travel the world and write about what I see.