breaking news in both baseball and football

OMG YOU GUYS, THE SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES.

And they did it faster than necessary, which I think was very nice of them and also allowed all the grown-ups to go out and enjoy Halloween, so that was good.

But now that means baseball is OVER. Until, I think, spring training, which happens in the spring and is like spring cleaning but with less whacking of the rugs. I'm kidding. Nobody takes their rugs outside and hits them with sticks anymore. That's just something people did in old books I read when I was a kid. Nowadays, they use the sticks of wood to hit balls and people get really excited about it.

Thank goodness one sport has temporarily ended, though, because all of the other sports are going strong. If I'm to judge from some very reliable sports news that I get from my friend Tami, it appears that tennis is happening. I happen to know from my own self that tennis is where the pretty people go to play sports. I have talked with enough women (not Tami, specifically, gosh) who watch tennis to be moderately sure that men's tennis is women's porn. That's only because they haven't come up with a reality show in which men clean the house, but, still.

So there's tennis, and then my boyfriend said something about basketball starting up. I said, haven't we already been to a basketball game?, the one where we met all your friends from basketball?, and he was like, no, that was a hockey game. In my defense, we were in a fancy box that was way in the sky, and also I wasn't watching.

By the way, I apparently misquote people all the time, so you should know that if anyone mentioned in this blog is wrong about something, it's probably because I wasn't paying the degree of attention that I should have been.

And then there's FOOTBALL, which is STILL GOING, and apparently will be happening every hour of every day until the Superbowl, which I know for a FACT takes place in either January or February, and is written in Roman numerals. I honestly don't understand how people manage to find the time to watch football. I can't find the time to watch Castle, which is on for one hour per week, most weeks, and while I have yet to look up the actual hours of football broadcast, I know that it happens more than there are hours in the day because of something I have heard of called simul-casting.

I try to pay attention to one hour of football per week, for parity with my other TV-watching, and so I paid attention to bits of the Northwestern game in between naps. This weekend they played another N-team and the good N-team (purple) was winning for most of the game but then at the absolute last SECOND, the bad N-team (red) won, which I can only assume was insanely thrilling for all of the red-N-folks but moderately devastating for the purple-N-folks.

You're going to learn a lot about Northwestern if you read this blog, because that's where my boyfriend went to school. He's not particularly passionate about professional football except for the fantasy football, which is another topic altogether, and which we will save for next time.

sports as a flirtation technique

Let's be up-front about something. If you're a girl and you don't like sports, it's possible you have used this to your advantage in the past, as a flirtation technique.
Where this technique falls down is that it's a very short-term play. (Look at that! That's a sporting reference!)

Anyway, the first time I go to watch a football game with a boy and let on my complete lack of knowledge, it's ADORABLE. He gets to be manly and In Charge and mansplain things to me and I get to widen my eyes and focus on the color scheme.

**sidebar: all of the teams with bad colors (see: the state of Oregon) should probably remember that there are people for whom the only thing that team has going for it is the color scheme. That's why Northwestern is ALWAYS going to beat the University of Oregon. I'm not actually sure if they play each other, but a) the side of the stadium in purple looks WAY less crazy than the side in yellow and green and b) Wildcats vs. Ducks is a no-brainer. Ducks can't really beat anybody up, and that's what wildcats do, essentially, for a living.**

But the SECOND time I go to watch a football game with a boy, he is going to expect that I have retained some of that knowledge. Whether or not I could have, I chose not to, because I'd rather use that space in my brain for napping. Somewhere about Game 7 (this is not a World Series reference because I'm using football as my example: stay with me), this stops being cute and becomes infuriating for the boy.

If you're a serial dater, then, this method works wonders. If you, like me, prefer to lock into a long-term relationship, you're going to either need to find a boy who doesn't like sports (and take it from me, that is a win only if he hasn't replaced "sports" with "computer games" as an obsession) or else a boy who doesn't care that your mind is like Teflon when it comes to sports knowledge.

Luckily, I seem to have found one.