From Joel McHale to U.S. attorney Jenny Durkan to chef Tom Douglas, local notables from fields of all sorts give Nicole Brodeur their Super Bowl plans and predictions
This gives me conflicted feelings. I hate the way that parents force their own hopes and dreams onto their children. But I love that they tell the kids to stop being babies and toughen up. I hate the way we force kids to play a sport they may not even like. But I love the way that we reward hard work and whiners ride the bench. It's a complicated show.
That postgame interview immediately changed the story of Super Bowl XLVII from "Will Peyton Manning win a championship and then retire?" or "Is the game going to get snowed out?" to "RICHARD SHERMAN RICHARD SHERMAN RICHARD SHERMAN." It is amazing what 10 seconds of television can do.
I'd suggest this is nothing but a positive thing. Sherman is a thrilling athlete and fascinating human being, one who has been bracingly honest about everything in the sport, from performance-enhancing drugs, to the practice of running up the score and the delight in taunting Tom Brady. It's odd that the media often lines up against him, because after what he did to Skip Bayless on "First Take" last year, we should all consider him our best friend.
Ikea THINKS about everything. It's a gateleg table. Which I pronounced crazy, but it turns out it's just "Gate Leg". Because the legs swing out to make the table change size. How do people find these difficult to put together? It's just a big Lego.
This is a middle school. The stands were packed by the Girl's Basketball program, the Band program, the Leadership program, and the high school basketball program coming down to support. And they played stuff like this:
My entire notion of a video game as a child was to "beat" them. That means the goal was simply to make it through the game alive. These people entirely changed what winning means. Now they race through the games as fast as they can. There's now no way to "win" you just play and do the best you can.
The community that evolves out of this is really great. Three guys swapped tips for speed runs through Ninja Gaiden, I game where I never even sniffed the ending as a child. They beat the whole thing in 13 minutes, which was about 10 seconds off world record pace. And the main goal was for one of them to get the best time possible. They are genuinely cheering for each other to do something amazing.
Glitches and bugs are unintentional things that the game designers never intended. These speed runners have taken the game as it is, not as it should be, and incorporate those glitches as an essential part of their speed runs. Understanding all of the tiny details and treating these glitches as opportunities are key to achieving the best time.
There are some games on this list that I had when I was a kid. So it's nice to revisit some old favorites while watching someone play it much better than I ever could.
And just in case you need an (unrelated) pick-me-up:
After college, as my friends left Michigan for better opportunities, I was determined to help fix this broken, chaotic city by building my own home in the middle of it. I was 23 years old.
This is the best answer I've ever heard to the question, "Why do sports matter?"
"Sports are a part of the human condition and so they must matter. Every society invents games and competitions. Or at least tests of strength, speed, or skill. And so since that competitive drive is a part of being a human, then it must be an important part of being alive."
This National Championship Game was not a life or death struggle. Let's all keep sportball games in perspective. But, holy smokes, that was great.
When I went to school there in the early 2000's, we had a quarterback named Chris Rix. He was a nice human being but was put in a situation where he struggled mightily. He found a way to consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. His legacy has tainted every sporting event since. Each game turns into a "Guillotine Game", when I know we'll lose, but I don't know when or how.
To win this National Championship Game, in this fashion, is still almost impossible to comprehend. And I just watched it happen.
My phone BLEW UP at the end of the game, because people knew that was my team. For better or worse, Florida State is a part of me and I am a part of it.
Now, in the afterglow, I've been watching ESPN rehash the game over and over. And I still have trouble believing it happened.
Here are some ideas to interior decorate that don't seem dumb. The Museum of Flight is half off as long as the Seahawks stay in the playoffs. And the have an Amelia Earhart exhibit right now. Hooray for football and feminists!! Pair tools for mindful living with New Year's resolutions you can keep. This Year Collection is like a "best of" for your favorite podcasts! I recommend Too Beautiful To Live and Uhh Yeah Dude. But they also have This American Life and the Adam Carolla Show. Get into it!
There's a blog called Pop Candy, written by Whitney Matheson that writes about (expectedly) pop culture. She's a big believer in comic books, or graphic novels if you want to be a snob about it. The first comic I remember ordering from Amazon was "Y: The Last Man", about what would happen to the last man on Earth. It turns out Amazonian tribes would hunt him down to kill him, the government would send out secret agents to control him, and he would participate in a globespanning adventure with his new pet monkey, Ampersand to find his (ex)girlfriend. Needless to say, it's a great read. They've been trying to make a movie out of it for years with no success.
From there, I got into Fables. Another concept that Hollywood has tried to harness with Tv shows like "Once Upon A Time" or "Grimm". It's about fables like Snow White or the Big Bad Wolf who have been kicked out of their homeworlds by "The Adversary". Now, they all live in a magically protected building in Manahattan. The first volume concerns a murder mystery that you can actually solve long before the characters if you really pay attention.
And then I was completely in on comic books. I started Sandman, a classic by Neil Gaiman about the lord of dreams. I read Watchmen and other great one-offs like Dark Knight Returns and Maus.
For all of the movies they've made out of comics, I've never read one before they made movie until now. Captain America: Winter Soldier will be coming to you local multiplex this spring. After reading the book, I'm not sure how they're going to do it. Now I'm going to be that guy sitting in the theater saying, "Black Widow wasn't in the book. This is all wrong!"
This is a disorganized, rambling, and unedited list of thoughts heading into 2014:
I'd like to start writing here more often. When I committed to one post per day, I always read the news, I stayed updated on what kinds of events were coming up in the city. I read the newspaper and social media FAR more often than I do now. It wasn't the posting of news and events, but the searching that really helped me stay plugged in to happenings and events that I would enjoy. If I do start blogging more often, I feel locked in to the once per day due to the name of the blog. But I suppose I could just change the name again. It's not like my millions of readers would be missing out.
Here's the other thing. Pictures. Oh my goodness do I stink at pictures. Not only do I stink at knowing what is picture-worthy, but I also stink at finding tasteful ways to take pictures. Selfies are completly out. That's just not my kind of thing. They feel so limiting. You're committed to one perspective and the same type of framing in EVERY photo. I would want photos that showed a little more thought an effort, but the alternative is not having photos at all. An example from today, we played Takenoko and Lost Cities at the Beverdige Place in West Seattle. We had a great time. There are no photos. Wouldn't it have been nice to have a picture to remember that carefree afternoon?
There are also no pictures of me on the internet. I honestly don't think I've been in a photo in the last four months. (Just checked Bookface. I'm a liar. There's a photo from the Storm game in September.)
(Are selfies EVER flattering?)
(And why are my eyes closed in every F@#%ing picture!)
And this blog helps me take more pictures in general, which means a better chance of a picture of me. Wow, that sounds conceited, but it's true. My friends are not big photographers, so if I don't do it, I don't think it's going to happen. Here's one thing that's strange, I'm not sure there are any pictures of me wearing a suit. I go to functions where I wear a suit, but I don't have any pictures. Maybe I should just go on a photoshoot around the city, where I change into fourteen different outfits in one day?
Nothing good ever happens on Bookface. I don't care about DAILY updates on your dogs, cats, children or "vaca". (Do you really say that word "Vay-cay"? Seriously?). To be clear, the people, things, and events in your life are great, but I'll hear about them when we talk face to face. If we never talk face to face, that should be all you need to know. And why the heck don't we talk face to face?
That's more of a problem for me because no one from college lives out here. So there are four/five years of my life where I didn't meet people my age who share my sensibilities. That's the story of my life. When I started Boy Scouts, my entire den quit within a year. I was put in a group with people older or younger than myself. Most other people I know who are my age now have kids or a dog. Which means they can't do anything ever.
In the last few years, I've picked a yearly skill to learn. One year it was snowboarding, One year it was golf. It strikes me that I don't really practice the skills I had before. I'm decent at the trumpet. And I'm pretty good at tennis. But I don't do these activities often because I'm busy trying to learn new skills that I'm not good at. I told my students the other day that I've definitely lost brain cells since starting my teaching job. Which must be true. I say the same thing 5 times a day, and then repeat all of it the next year. (To any teachers reading this, yes I vary the instruction method to best meet the cognitive and emotional development of the individual learners. I passed National Boards, so I can spout educational B.S. with the best of them.) Anyway, I haven't picked a skill this year. I'm leaning towards guitar, though I've been picking away at that for a few years. I can play this song:
Which may or may not qualify me as a guitar player. It probably doesn't. I used to think being able to play "Classical Gas" would make me feel like a guitar player. But that's a hard song:
He's only playing one guitar there. Maybe I need to lower my expectations.
It's time to get over my aversion to birthdays and special occasions. I think I struggle with drawing attention to myself. Which is probably why I write on this unread blog rather than on the internet. This blog is like the worst LiveJournal ever, isn't it? Part of me feels like I should start planning get-togethers, but it feels like I would have to get really good at using Bookface or email. Which might just be a necessary evil. I'd like to go to Add-A-Ball now that they've finally added a women's restroom. And that probably tells you everything you need to know about that arcade.
When I was in college, I wanted to get into cooking. Food Network was always on TV and Rachel Ray or Alton Brown cookbooks were go to presents from my family. College was the ABSOLUTE worst time to try and cook. First, I didn't have a car to go to the store and get ingredients, which turned every shopping trip into a goddamn odyssey. Have you ever tried to shop with someone who had a completely different grocery list? It take FOREVER! Plus, you're stuck going at odd times of the day, when both your schedules are free, which means Club Publix is wall to wall shoppers.
On a related note, I can't smell the food as I'm cooking it, (I'M SMELLBLIND!) so sometimes I'm unaware that everything I'm cooking smells like fish. And furthermore, my cooking audience has always included extremely "picky eaters". As a recovering "picky eater" myself, I'm of two minds about new foods.
-Of course we should try new food. There was a time in out lives when we'd never tried the foods we now love the most.
-I don't need to try a ghost pepper to know that it would reduce me to a quivering ball of tears and pain.
Picky eaters are not a great audience to practice your new cooking. My roommates in college were picky, my roommates after college were picky, and now I live in the middle of all these businesses that will cook food for me on demand. They only want a little money in return? WELL WORTH IT!!
The fact that I'm thinking about it probably means that I should try and cook. Like with everything new I learn, I just have to be ok, with starting from scratch and progressing slowly. I could start with one meal a week. And provide you with a overly detailed explanation of how I followed someone else's recipe. >thinking< That would provide me with a way to track my progress and learn from my mistakes. Maybe I should do exactly that.
My kitchen is criminally underused. I don't even own official plates. At some point, I just bought paper plates and thought, "good enough". I'm AWARE this is probably not a very mature thing to do. But who are you to tell me what to do? I'm an ADULT, gosh darn it!
I also keep toying with the idea of revamping my wardrobe. My only hangup there is that I don't feel like I could wear a suit to work. I would feel incredibly overdressed and it doesn't seem very practical. I used to wear dress shirts and ties and I didn't feel like I could move around the room to work with the kids. I still have quite a collection of ties from my student teaching experience.
Running as grown on me over the last few years. My main barrier to athletics has been finding other people who want to go outside and play. As a child, my brother and I had a bin in the garage and we had all manner of sports equipment at our disposal (one of the benefits of having a father who teaches P.E.). In college, we played IM. And I played soccer for a few years until the rest of the team started to quit (due to babies and injuries).
Running doesn't require anyone else, which is the best and worst part about it. I've read a few different ideas about how to add the team aspect back into what is basically the most solitary sport on the planet. Maybe I need to get into the adventure/obstacle racing. For a split second, I worried about becoming "bro-ey" but I think that train left the station long ago. Board games and comic books won't suddenly stop being awesome.
Computer coding is another skill I'd like to learn. CodeAcademy is great, and I probably just need to gut it out before I can make something really cool. They did already teach me how to make a very basic "Choose Your Own Adventure" text-based game. So I'm basically Bill Gates already.
And I'd like to read more. And watch more movies. And play more games. And play more sports. And learn new things. And go to more happy hours. And keep most things the same but also radically change everything else.
Do I like all of the things that I'll ever like in my life? I mean, am I going to discover some new passion at this point in my life? I really hope so.
I like my job, my apartment is cozy and in a good neighborhood, and I have a car that will take me anywhere at anytime. I can't remember the last time I was bored.
