Scott, being Scott, reacted to my ribbing him via facebook about the Broncos' loss to Washington last week by proclaiming that he had in fact been rooting for the Colts the whole time. And even though I have my own terrible team to be miserable over, and even though I know Scott very well and this is just the sort of thing I would expect from him (which he himself correctly pointed out), something about that statement somehow hurts me, strikes at something that is at the metaphorical foundation of who I am.

I grew up with football. I have been to the Superdome twice, back when we were Saints fans when I was very small. That's what my Sundays consisted of, church and McDonalds with my grandparents and football-watching. In fact, of those three things, football is the only one that remains a constant in my life.

Abandoning my team now would be, to me, like abandoning a family member. Like ditching a husband. We have been together for well over a decade. There have been amazing seasons and there have been terrible seasons and there have been seasons that were exactly .500. Through thick and thin and average I have stuck with them. If the franchise moved or went under or undertook some other radical change that made it into something not fundamentally the Panthers, I would probably cry. I would mourn a loss, because whether it makes sense or not, part of me would die. The more I think about it, the more I understand why some Baltimore fans are still so bitter about the Colts disappearing in the middle of the night. How would you feel if your significant other suddenly ditched you for some boring Midwesterner, then periodically came back into town to flaunt their success in your face? Even though the Ravens do have a Super Bowl under their belt, it just isn't the same.

Football is also my one remaining point of contact with my dad. Whether I am at home or calling home, if it's just me and my dad, things get awkward fast. We have NOTHING in common, and we know it. But if Sportscenter is on, or if I call home in the middle of a game, we can salvage a scrap of conversation out of this fact. When he used to cart me to the South End gun club and then to my grandma's nearly every Friday night in high school, we avoided the uncomfortable silence during the half-hour car ride by listening to Howard Eskin on sports radio 610 and mocking the melodramatic Eagles fans who called in. We can't talk about ANYthing else, really- religion, politics, and even the family pets are contentious issues- but we can both agree that Eagles fans need to get a life.

I don't know exactly what it is about Scott's general ambivalence towards the Broncos unless they are doing fantastically well that irritates me like this. He has never claimed to be more than a casual fan. But for me the words 'casual' and 'fan' are mutually exclusive, at least in football. (I suppose I am a 'casual fan' of a handful of NBA teams, but if I am casual with the teams it is because I am fiercely loyal to certain players: see Hansbrough, Tyler; Lawson, Ty.)

I guess it's one thing not to take your own fandom seriously. I can forgive that. I can forgive Scott for most anything, seeing as how, in actual life, he is one of the most loyal people I have ever met. But he also refuses to take MY fandom seriously. I think that's what I don't like. His flippancy mocks me. He has the power to stop caring about Denver once they aren't playing well anymore, whereas I could never detach myself from the Panthers in such a way even if they pulled a Detroit and went 0-16.

So maybe it's just me being jealous of his unattachment, like a married person who finds they cannot deal with their single friends anymore.

In any case, if the score is a reliable indication, the Broncos are about to drop their 4th straight game. I hope he feels a twinge of SOMETHING on the other side of the world. Maybe then he'll understand a hundredth of what I feel every single week of the season. Love me, love my sport. They can't be separated.

You know why kids today are so screwed up?

There isn't awesome stuff like this on TV anymore.



Whatever happened to quality public kids' TV? I heard not too long ago that Reading Rainbow was getting cancelled. Nooooooo! Kids barely read anymore as it is, and without Reading Rainbow we're doomed!

Oh well. I guess the best we can do is hope one day for some DVDs of the greatness that was early 90s PBS.

Fair warning, this is going to be an open-ended emotional rant, with little point to it other than I need a shoulder to cry on and Scott is in China and no one else listens to me when I am like this. If you want to move along now, feel free.

I hate my life I hate my life I hate. my. life.

And I don't even have a good reason to hate it! That's the worst part. Whenever I get like this, however bad I feel gets compounded by how ungrateful I feel for feeling bad. Which probably makes no sense, but I am beyond the point of grammar-checking.

I can't even pinpoint exactly what it is. It isn't the small exam I have tomorrow, or the big paper due Thursday, or the other paper I have to write before break because there's no way it'll get done OVER break. It isn't the fact that my cousin keeps texting me wondering if we could go to this or that basketball game and I'm trying to get State tickets to surprise him with even though I know I won't be able to. It isn't that I hardly have any friends left and the ones I do have I see maybe once every two weeks if I'm really lucky and that's usually in passing, never for more than ten minutes. Maybe it's some combination of these things, but there isn't one specific item I can point to, say "this is what's wrong" and then eliminate it. It is generalized misery and I don't know what to do about it.

My mom brought up graduation and commencement earlier and was saying how afterwards they're going to have to move me out of here, which is true, and I don't know where I'm going to be going. Some of my friends have begun to question me directly, so hey, what are you gonna be doing with your life? Don't you think you oughta be thinking about that? As if I don't think about it every damn day! I do! Like somehow my inability to come up with an answer means there is something wrong with me. OH MY GOD NO I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH MYSELF YES I DO THINK ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME WILL YOU PLEASE. STOP. ASKING. Which brings me to the point I'm at now where I want to cry but I have no one to cry to so what's the point of even doing that?

Mostly I want to watch the college basketball tipoff marathon but I can't because I have too much work to do and I would feel bad for being so unproductive when I have a big paper to write today and tomorrow.

Because the only things I care about are utterly useless to the world and to myself! Because even my best friends couldn't give a damn about most of the things I follow. Because somehow, at THIS university of all places, I do not have one friend whose mission it also is to get into every basketball game no matter what. Hell, I only know two people who would go with me to a game if I asked them, and then only if they didn't have work or meetings or anything else going on. Which, in individual cases, I understand, but collectively I cannot see how I have made so few friends who care about Carolina Basketball here AT Carolina. It doesn't make any damn sense! And yet here I am, having gone to all 3 games so far alone, will have gone to 4 alone come next Monday. Went to every football game this year by myself - in fact, went to most of the football games of my undergraduate life by myself. How does this work? What part of the equation am I missing here?!

I am tired of school. I am tired of learning things I am never going to use again. The only thing that keeps me from quitting right now and becoming a freelance writer is a perfect and profound Simpsons quote: "No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you."


I don't want to do anything academic-related ever again but I don't see another option. I guess I could "take a semester off" but that would merely delay the inevitable, and one of the only things keeping me sane right now is the promise that Scott will be around next semester. And I'm sure that even that isn't going to live up to expectations, because nothing ever does. I'll see him maybe ten minutes out of the day and then in May he'll fly back to Colorado and I will never see him again and I'll live the rest of my life quietly miserable because I can't have the one thing I really want, just like everyone else.

I want to scream I DON'T WANT THIS, but I'm not sure what THIS is.

I wish I knew.

"You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, 'never try'." - Homer Simpson

I was talking on teh interwebs tonight to a guy I haven't heard from in years. His parents and my parents were friends when we were growing up and we saw each other probably at least once a week from the time I was born till around age 12 or so (he was/is three years older than I am).
His name is Raymond, as is his dad's and his grandfather's, so he's Raymond III. He goes by Ray these days, but when we were kids he was Raymie to me and my family. He's not Ray, his dad is Ray. When I called him Raymie he said "ewww, don't call me that" to which I naturally responded, why not? That's your name! No matter how old we get I will always consider him Raymie.
Conversely, when I was a baby, my parents frequently took me to the airport where they worked to show me off to their friends. Some of my earliest memories are in fact of these people whom I considered MY friends (and I think a big part of why I had trouble getting along with kids my own age is because I spent so much time around adults, but anyway). When I was still too young to remember, a woman named Alicia bestowed upon me the nickname of Boo-boo, because according to her I was like Yogi Bear's little sidekick as a toddler. No one outside of my parents really knows of the name anymore, but when I'm home my mom will still call me Boo, and I answer to that just as readily as to my actual name. Because it never escaped into general usage among my friends or other relatives it never caused me any embarrassment and I would never think of asking her to stop using it, because it would almost be unnatural at this point to ditch something we have both acknowledged without thinking for over 20 years.
Makes me think of times I was asked in middle and high school whether I had any nicknames. And I never thought I did, because I never considered Boo to be one. A nickname, I thought, was something you only used some of the time, whereas my mom almost NEVER calls me Sara- she just says Boo. To me, when I'm home, it basically IS my name.

Did you have any cutesy nicknames growing up? Do you still answer to them?

Carolina basketball games, even the contests in the beginning of the season that bigger schools like ours use to 'tune-up', are all glorious events. I know so many people who will give away their ticket because they don't want to sit in the upper level, or don't want to go alone, or just don't feel like showing up early for phase 3, et cetera. I respect that, but I will never understand it. I've been as close as the hardwood itself and I have been as far away as the upper level row X, and every experience has been a great one. Except that one loss to Maryland, which shouldn't have happened, and Tyler should NOT have been the one taking that last-second three, and we had to walk home uphill in the rain. That sucked. But the rest, oh, wonderful!

The Risers, though, are a different sort of animal. Freshman year they were miserable, because you had to line up according to ticket-number and it was all grossly unfair. But since they instituted phases, it's been much simpler. If you get a Phase 1 ticket, all you have to do is show up four or so hours beforehand and you'll be on television, guaranteed.

The deal is, though, you have to be willing to make some trade-offs. Being in the risers proper, which for me means being in the front row on that hallowed hardwood, means you'll be standing there well before the cheerleaders or the mascot or the band shows up- before the players even have a chance to warm up.



You can't have any food or drinks down there, and going up for anything means your spot will probably disappear, so you go without, all while jumping and shouting like a mad person during the game, during warmups before the game and sometimes even before that if a cameraman wants some pregame footage for ESPNU.

And you pretty much can't sit down, ever. The players get more sitting-time than the riser kids, even the good players.



The burden is on you to keep the noise level up, since the old people in the seats you'd like to have won't do a damn thing. You start the chants, you come up with the taunts. It helps when creative people show up. Last night, for example, some guys behind me started chanting "Suuuun Belt, Suuuun Belt" at FIU, then another one said "It's not that they're in the Sun Belt [conference], it's that they're BAD in the Sun Belt," which made it even better. When Isiah Thomas stopped near the section at halftime for a brief interview, the same guys chanted "Ma-gic, Ma-gic," then came back with "Dream-team, dream-team" when Isiah reappeared. He actually stopped and laughed at that one, and gave the guys credit. Hey, at least the man has a sense of humor. Lots of coaches don't.

Your feet are killing you afterwards. You're sweaty. You're hoarse. You get a nice shock from the freezing air once you leave and then you get to walk up a huuuge hill to get back to campus. You need another shower even though you took one six hours before, and you still have a ton of homework to do because you've been at the Dean Dome for the past six and a half hours.

And it's so worth it. And I'll be doing it again on Wednesday, and on Sunday if I'm lucky, and every other game that I can manage to get my hands on a phase 1 ticket, because there is nothing to compare to being ON THAT HARDWOOD, no matter how long you have to stand or how many errant basketballs you almost take to the face (because that is quite a hazard).



Nope. Wouldn't trade it, not for anything.