What I Know About Football

For most of my life, my attitude toward football has been indifference mixed with a little disdain. I had no interest in understanding its rules; it looked barbaric and chaotic. Men in suits commenting on the plays. Men on the sidelines calling the plays. Men on the field chasing and tackling each other. Men in bars and on couches cheering. Men men men men men. The only women you really see or hear about are the egregiously underpaid cheerleaders and the wives and girlfriends who make headlines when a player gets suspended for beating them.

In spite of this, I have always made a habit of watching the Super Bowl, and sometimes even hosting a viewing party. But that's only because I like spectacle and taco dip. The halftime show is always a shitshow for one reason or another (wardrobe malfunctions! left shark!) and the ads are usually amusing. And let's be real, I will jump on any excuse to entertain -- I love throwing parties. Oscar parties, election night parties, and sure, even Super Bowl parties. When it comes to parties, I don't discriminate. I never cared about the actual outcome of a Super Bowl game -- I would just randomly pick a team to root for, and be only mildly disappointed if they lost.

But as Elphaba in Wicked would say, something has changed within me. Something is not the same.

I sort of like watching football now. (I am actually watching the Broncos/Steelers game as I write this. Go Broncos!)

I know. It's crazy. But I live in Wisconsin, the state with the most notoriously rabid and devoted NFL fan base. Inevitably, I started watching more games -- purely for social purposes. Everyone knows when the Packers are playing. And when there's a game, the streets in Eau Claire are like a ghost down, eerily deserted. Because literally nearly everyone is glued to their TVs. Bars that don't serve food regularly have free food on game days -- crockpots of deliciousness, hot dishes galore, lemon and lime jello shots at the ready. 

The more I saw, the more I had to (somewhat begrudgingly) respect the complexity of the game. Because it really is complex. And the athleticism is astounding. It doesn't hurt that Aaron Rodgers is easy on the eyes AND the king of Hail Mary passes. Seriously. So for the first time in my life, I actually self-identify as a fan of a professional sports team. I am a Cheesehead. And I am proud. I am seriously considering buying Packer paraphernalia.

Now I would like to show off some of the things I have learned, mostly from watching with people who have been watching football their entire lives. Every game I feel like I learn something new!

1. It is important to "protect the pocket." I think this refers to keeping the quarterback from getting sacked before he can throw the ball. The pocket "collapsing" is bad for the offense. I think.

2. A football team is really like several teams! There are the offense guys and the defense guys, and the special teams guys like kickers. I JUST LEARNED THIS!  I had no idea the quarterback didn't play the whole game. Mind. Blown.

3. People talk a lot about "the line of scrimmage." Important shit goes on there. I'm not sure exactly what. Regardless, "scrimmage" is a fun word to say. Also fun: "blitz."  

4. Penalties can be declined. I find this a little confusing, to be honest -- in other sports, I'm pretty sure fouls are fouls.

5. Time outs are not just breaks -- they are strategic ways to slow down the game and are often reserved for the final minutes. But the clock also stops during a time out, so I'm not sure how that works. Maybe it can break the other team's momentum? I just know that if a team still has all their time outs toward the end of the game, and they are losing, it's good that they have those time outs. For some reason.

6. There are tricks! I just learned about fake punts, when the punt team (another team!) comes on the field, but then instead of punting, the QB runs a play. They fake out the other team, and it's sneaky.

7. Everyone is guilty of holding, but the goal is to not get called on it. And which way your body is facing can mean the difference between getting busted for pass interference and....no pass interference.

8. Fumbles are exactly what they sound like. Adrian Peterson fumbles a lot, which is a bummer for Vikings fans.

9. Onside kicks are rarely successful but are exciting to watch.

10. Calling a time out right before a field goal is called "icing the kicker" so he might get psyched out and miss. It's kind of mean, in my opinion. Dude's been waiting to whole game to do his thing, so just let him, alright?

I'm really impressed with my knowledge. But not as impressed as I am with Aaron Rodgers's arm.


 

On Hating Eau Claire (and Elephants)

The railroad crossing on Starr Avenue in Eau Claire will always remind me of the night I came close to driving at full speed into a moving train.

 
It was the night of the day when I discovered that the person I loved and wanted to spend my life with, who the previous week had been helping me recover from a major surgery, had cheated on me. Had been messaging strangers online and on at least one occasion, fucked one. I thought the pain I felt would surely kill me; the train was just a way to expedite things. As I sat in my car, contemplating (how fast would I need to be going to ensure instant death? Should I unbuckle my seatbelt?) the point became moot – the train finished crossing and I was still breathing. The urge to annihilate myself temporarily abated. I continued on to my destination – the regional two-gate airport to pick up my best friend who had gotten on a plane to be with me after receiving my distressed phone call.

Every time I drive to the airport, I have to cross those tracks. It’s a strange sensation to be living through something, right in the thick of it, and still have a sense of how you will view it in hindsight. I still live in Eau Claire, but I already know I will look back on this period (two years and counting) as incredibly difficult. A time when I cried more days than I didn’t, struggled to get out of bed, and tried my best to downplay my misery for my few local friends who were, on the whole, happy and healthy. I can say without a doubt that this trauma has and will continue to transform me in ways I can’t yet articulate. I can only hope some of the changes are positive. Like, maybe I will get a good poem or two out of it. Or maybe if I find myself in a similar situation again, I’ll be better equipped to handle it and won’t consider death by train.

I wasn’t miserable when I first moved to Eau Claire. I had a stable teaching job with good benefits. For the first time, I had an office. I was able to afford a one-bedroom apartment as opposed to a cramped studio. And within three months of moving here, I fell in love. The kind of love that announces itself as major right away. Our feelings for each other were so intense that we even had an inside joke that involved elephants – we knew it would be silly to say “I love you” after only knowing each other a few weeks, but we acknowledged that it felt like an elephant in the room because the feelings were so clear, so palpable. So we sent each other pictures of elephants and signed e-mails “I elephant you.” One day I came home from work to find a necklace with an elephant charm hanging from my mailbox. After we started actually saying “I love you,” elephant ephemera continued to be a gift theme—I brought him back a stuffed elephant from Mexico, and he gave me a black-and-white scarf with an elephant print and earrings carved in the shape of elephants for my birthday.

Now when I see elephants, I want to punch something.

When our relationship abruptly ended, a strange transference occurred that has made living here very difficult: I find that my rage and hurt is now directed at Eau Claire itself, the setting of my most ill-fated love affair (to date, at least). The city feels somehow complicit, like an accessory or co-conspirator. It’s the scene of the crime and no matter what I do, the faint chalk outline of a body (my body) resurfaces, refuses to fade. Everywhere we went, and even places we didn’t go but might have, feels toxic, tainted, ominous. Needless to say, the campus where we both work is a minefield – I could run into him literally at any time. Whenever I see his car in the parking lot, I have to resist the urge to key it. 

I know this could have happened anywhere – but it happened here. Would I have found happiness in Eau Claire without meeting him? I’m not sure. It’s possible I still would have found much to dislike about the culture of an upper Midwestern college town. But we’ll never know -- unfortunately I'll always associate Eau Claire with this experience; it'll always be the place that broke my spirit to the point where I became almost unrecognizable to myself, where I flirted with oblivion. It holds the distinction of being both where I have been most happy and most miserable in my adult life. Obviously, I hope that I will achieve a new zenith of happiness (perhaps not tied to a romantic relationship. Hey, there's a novel idea!). When that happens, maybe I will be able to appreciate some of the good things I found here, the friends I made, the not-horrible moments. I hope so -- but I don't see that happening until I live elsewhere and can use physical distance to help me achieve emotional distance. From him, and from here. 

(Forgive the self-indulgence of this post. I know that in light of all the things going on geo-politically and domestically, it's rather silly to whine about a boy hurting my feelings. But this is a personal blog, and not The New York Times, so I hope an occasional post that looks solely inward is forgivable.)

A Poem For Autumn

The English department at UW-Eau Claire is lucky enough to count Max Garland, Wisconsin's Poet Laureate among our current faculty. Max is an incredibly talented poet (obviously) and also one of the nicest people I have ever met. The choir I recently joined, The Master Singers, commissioned Max to write a poem for our composer-in-residence to set to music for our upcoming Fall concert. It's just starting to feel like autumn here so I thought I would post it. It's beautiful and if you want to hear it set to music (with a gorgeous cello accompaniment), come to our concert on October 12!

October Song

Show me the changing light on the river
And I’ll show you a portrait of time
Its blessings and burdens and blurring of borders
Between what’s yours and what’s mine

High in the arc of the waning season
The wild ragged flocks wind their way
By reckonings older than roadmap or reason
Moonlight, starlight, the land’s old sway.

Pay attention to this, cries the moon
How time pares the light away soon
Though deep in the sky, constellations and I
Will tend to the darkness’s wounds.

Rapids are the water wanting to sing
Wind is how cottonwoods earn their wings
Intimations of snow in the field’s afterglow
Tell more of what’s coming than we want to know

There’s wealth in the mill and the market
And a singular wealth of mind
There’s a wealth of gold in the tamarack
That the lucky among us may find

For the silos wearing sunsets like crowns
And the oak leaves changing ruby to rust
For the marshes on the outskirts of castaway towns
This is a song for the fugitive dust
A song for the fugitive dust

Reporting from America's Dairyland

The other night, when I couldn't sleep, I spent over an hour just reading old posts on this blog. I reached two conclusions: 1) I'm a pretty funny lady. There were things I had written and totally forgotten about that made me LOL.  2) I really should try to blog more - as in, once a week, minimum. So in that spirit, here's a post I started writing six months ago and abandoned -- a rumination on my new life in the upper Midwest. Now it's finished (and updated to reflect that I have now been here - gasp! - a year).

This is the state flag of Wisconsin. Seeing as I have now been a resident of Wisconsin for over a year, I thought I should take a look at the flag. According to Wikipedia, it is not highly regarded in terms of design when compared with other state flags (oh snap!). Our motto is "Forward" -- simple, direct. The state seal pictured on the flag "emphasizes mining and shipping." And yes, that's a little badger on top of the coat of arms. Cute!

It still seems incredibly bizarre that I live in Wisconsin, to both me and my non-Wisconsin friends and family. But here are five things I have figured out in the one year I have lived here:

1. "Wisconsin nice"

People here are really nice. Like, crazy nice. They always give you the benefit of the the doubt. Total strangers will offer you a ride at a bar if you're too drunk to drive (I have witnessed this, not been the drunk person, Mom). People will help you dig your car out of a snow bank. The locals take great pride in their kindness, especially in comparison to their neighbors to the west, Minnesotans, whom they claim are fake nice. I don't know a lot of Minnesotans, so I can't really comment.

2.The unofficial state condiment is Ranch.

Where I come from, Ranch is just a salad dressing. But lo, people dip everything in Ranch here! French fries, sandwiches, chips, their children (well, okay, maybe not that last one). Pretty much anything can be a vehicle for Ranch delivery. Cheese curds dipped in Ranch are especially tasty. Fried cheese dipped in Ranch: It doesn't get much more Wisconsin than that. 

3. The water here is delicious!

I have no idea why this is, but the tap water here is sooooo good. It doesn't have any weird flavors, no metal/mineral/chemical notes. It's crisp and cold (well, probably because the pipes are super cold) and tastes really pure.

4. Beware the Hodag

Wisconsin has its very own cryptid: the Hodag, a mythical (?) lizard beast that lives in Rhinelander. Here is a statue of the menacing creature:

The Hodag is now my second favorite folkloric creature, second of course to the chupacabra. Apparently the Hodag is not so much vicious as mischievous, presumed responsible for golf balls that are never recovered, interfering with local fishermen, and other mild recreational annoyances. See, even the state's monster is Wisconsin nice!

5. The summers are as lovely as the winters are brutal

When it finally began to warm up and all the inches upon inches of snow began to melt, I truly felt that I had survived something epic and terrible. This summer, in terms of weather, has been as intensely wonderful as the winter was intensely horrid. Glorious, sunny high-70s days, enough rain to keep everything verdant and some exciting thunderstorms, very mild humidity. Temps dropping low enough at night to turn off the A/C and just open the windows. Now that I know what's coming winter-wise, I understand why people try to soak up every last drop of summer. I'm in serious denial about Labor Day weekend, otherwise known as this weekend, otherwise known as the end of summer. 

As I embark on Year Two in Eau Claire, it feels both familiar and strange. Sort of like home, but also, due to some recent major life ruptures, a foreign and potentially scary place. But I still love my job, I've made some solid friends, and hey, I just joined a semi-professional choir, so I'll be singing again and meeting some new folks. I'm not in the same place I was when I rhapsodized last December, but hopefully I'll get to that state of relative contentment again soon. As my homegirl Florence says, it's always darkest before the dawn.