I’ve always enjoyed variety.

When I was young, I loved trying all different kinds of food and sampling various hobbies to see if they struck a chord. My family and I traveled all over the country on vacations, and sometimes out of America as well. My life was filled with a spectrum of activities from art to sports to music to video games.

I was confirmed as an adult in the Catholic Church when I was 15 years old.

Baptized as a baby, I had always believed in God. There was never a time when I didn’t. But receiving Confirmation demanded even more profundity from a teenager who was already profound.

Over the course of my life, I’ve learned that the one true test of any kind of love is time.

Everyone, including myself, says the word “forever” when they’re in it. We think our relationship will survive all of the highs and lows, fights and times when we’re apart. We think that it’s impossible to feel any less and that we’ll always feel that way. We shout our love from the rooftops for all to hear. We think that we’ve finally found the love we’ve been looking for our whole lives.

Relationships are like base-running.

Yes, I know baseball season is over, but many recent events have reaffirmed how important it is to make choices that you want, not what anyone else wants. And it sparked yet another Kim Hartman baseball-life analogy.

The Phillies lost the 2009 World Series last night. I watched the whole game, from the first to final painful pitch. It brought me back to 1993, when Mitch Williams gave up the Series-winning homerun to Joe Carter. The experience was just as heart-breaking as it was when I was 10 years old.

Growing up near Philadelphia, I had first started following the Phillies at 6 years old. I continued to track the team throughout elementary school and beyond. Box scores, players, stats and stories.

So I had a three-hour phone conversation with one of my best friends from college the other day. For anyone who knows me, long phone conversations are by no means a rarity for Kim Hartman …

Baseball season is underway. And for those of you who don’t know me well, that means that my life now has been altered to accommodate the sport.

I’ve come to realize that baseball is more than a passion with me. It’s an addiction. From April to October, my days are spent glued to the TV watching baseball, obsessively tracking my fantasy baseball teams, attending baseball games, reading baseball news, buying baseball cards and playing MLB The Show on my Playstation. My cravings to hit the batting cages even arise more frequently.

Recently, it has come to my attention that many of my single friends — from Flagler or Tucson — have been romantically frustrated.
Having engaged in numerous conversations about the definition of true love and how …

It made my week. That the Eagles game was aired in Arizona this past Sunday.

Not only that it was aired, but that I got to see them win against the Steelers. Buoy-yah! Strangely enough, their punter Sav Rocca came up big and really made a difference in the game.

The only downfall of getting to see my team play was that I exhausted myself screaming in both elation and frustration, and my throat hurt the rest of the night. I had forgotten about the physical impact that watching the Eagles had on me. But oddly, I loved it at the same time.