When Judge Sotomayor, Hispanic, born in Puerto Rico, was about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, I was more interested in her love life. She lives alone now. After her divorce (she married young), she fell in love with dapper Peter White, a building contractor and by 1998, they were engaged, living together, wedding postponed until after her Senate confirmation [to the Court of Appeals]. Her speech at that time:

“Peter,” she said, turning to her fiancé, “you have made me a whole person, filling not just the voids of emptiness that existed before you, but making me a better, a more loving and a more generous person.”

“Many of my closest friends,” she added, “forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.”

White helped her slip into a black appellate robe.

Two years later, she gave a party for his 50th birthday. They’d just redone their apartment. Less than two years later, Peter left her, bought a small boat, married a woman, an acquaintance of the judge and fourteen years her junior.

Bought a boat? Gimme a break.

Nietzsche asks, Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude.

This quote makes me think of Albert Pujols, born in the Dominican Republic, professional first baseman and designated hitter for the Los Angeles Angels.

Baseball.

America’s past time.

Pujols’ family emigrated to the U.S. when he was sixteen.

“Pujols . . . really does take 'em one game at a time, one at-bat at a time, one pitch at a time . . . Questions are beside the point. Talk is beside the point. The point for Albert Pujols is to hit the ball hard. Everything else is just noise,” Joe Posnanski wrote in Sports Illustrated.

This didn't make him fun to approach after a game, even a two-home run game. But it was part of what made him the best baseball player on earth at the time. And it made him likely to have many more two-homer games, even if he wasn’t a home-run hitter. He avoided reporters. When he did talk to them, he didn’t answer their questions.

He just kept going to bat.

All this makes me think of a sweet flick Juno, screenplay written by Diablo Cody. Cody’s mother is of Italian descent and her father, of German descent. Diablo divorced once and married again.

Juno is a sweet flick about a sixteen-year-old who makes love once with her boyfriend, her initiation into sex with only the motive of love, and she gets pregnant. She decides to have the baby and give it away to a couple that really wants a baby. She says she’s ill-equipped to raise a baby. She is a wise, sharp-tongued, witty and oddly sweet character. Sweet in her sharpness. The movie is about her decision, how she chooses to find the right parents for her baby. It's also about this: When she’s had the baby, her boyfriend comes to the hospital in his running clothes and gets in the bed and lies down and holds her.

When all goes wrong, how to set things right?

One bat at a time.

What do you call a player who strikes out two out of three times?

A hall of famer.

Let Sotomayor be the judge.