What I learned about the Super Bowl without watching the Super Bowl

I don’t watch football. Neither does my husband. Last week, he asked me who was playing in the Super Bowl, and I was profoundly proud of myself that I came up with the team names. I didn’t know what city the Patriots came from, but still, I came up with both names. Kudos for me. We had to look it up on google to make sure I was right. That’s the house I live in.

I have joked about a facebook sports filter. On big game nights, my news feed explodes with information about how the local sports team is doing. Half the time, I can name the sport. People who update their facebook status once a week or less suddenly behave as if facebook is twitter. Every emotion. Every play. They care enough to share.

I don’t care. At all.

I considered setting Tivo to record the Super Bowl so I could watch the commercials and the half time show and, you know, fast forward through all of the tedious football. But I didn’t. Instead, I watched last night’s Saturday Night Live and then Californication.

(Side note… I don’t know what color my parachute is, but I want to figure out what color lets me be a writer on Californication.)

I still feel like I was part of it. Facebook. Twitter. Here is what I learned about the Super Bowl from social media, without watching it at all:

It was a hell of a game.

The Giants won. Some people were pissed or sad. Some people were psyched. Lots of people hated both teams and were only watching for the commercials.

Some good commercials were: Samsung, Chevy, Clydesdales, Doritos.

The Ferris Bueller commercial met with mixed reviews. People loved it, but felt like sell-outs for loving it.

Something Clint Eastwood did made people cry.

There is some guy named Eli, and he is Peyton Manning’s little brother, and apparently he does not wear a mouth guard. I am particularly proud of this one, since I would only have been 50-50 on naming Peyton Manning’s sport (although I have heard his name, and would have known he was an athlete of some sort).

Madonna. She’s old but she looks hot. She wants more drag queen impersonators, so she went very sparkly and very gay and wore boots that looked uncomfortable. Did I mention that she looks hot for her age? Oh, and apparently her lip syncing was atrocious.

Madonna did something involving world peace, and a lot of people made Miss America jokes.

Oh, also Madonna was somehow seen as responding to Lady Gaga, even though Lady Gaga is clearly standing on Madonna’s padded perverted shoulders.

LMFAO did something at half time. Most of my friends (admittedly a select group) would have taken more LMFAO and less of everyone else.

Cee Lo made an appearance, but didn’t do anything of note, unlike his butchering of Imagine on New Year’s Eve. All press is good press. Unless you butcher a John Lennon song.

At some point, Betty White appeared, but no one told me what she did. They all just typed, “Betty White!” She is beloved merely for existing.

The Coke commercials sucked.

There was an ad about a fat dog.

Tom Brady has nothing to do with the Brady Bunch, and apparently has a distinctive chin that resembles the naked butt of one of my friend’s kids.

David Beckham did something noteworthy, including, but not necessarily limited to appearing in his underwear.

So there you have it. The Super Bowl XLVI as viewed through my social network. And yes, I used Google News to give me the Roman Numeral.

Like me, like me, please like me

I have been thrilled with the response to this blog so far. I didn’t know what to expect, but I have gotten heartfelt messages from a bunch of you saying that you relate to the things I am putting out there. I hope that by talking about stuff that is not always easy to talk about, we can all feel less alone and be more real with each other. I originally started the blog because of popular demand in response to my “funny catastrophe” posts on facebook, but it seems that the serious topics are the ones that are connecting in this medium. That’s fine with me, because the pressure to be funny on cue is incredibly difficult. I honestly don’t know how comedians do it. But I can be real on cue.

So now that I have spent a few weeks figuring out what I want to say, it’s time for me to start growing this blog to reach people who don’t already know and love me. So I made a facebook page for it. That way, if one of you posts a link to the blog on your facebook wall, friends who like it can also follow me on facebook. To those of you who have already posted links, I say thank you thank you thank you. You are inspiring me to move forward and make this blog more than just a place for me to get my writing ya-yas.

The process of creating the facebook page involved asking all of my friends to please “like me.” So yeah, that’s fun. As of this writing, 29 people like me. Of note, my husband does not yet like me. Neither do my brothers. Maybe if my husband believed that I didn’t move the new thermostat in my fit of cleaning for company, he would like me. But he does think I moved it, even though I TOTALLY DIDN’T. And even if I did, which I didn’t, it didn’t belong on the top of the entertainment center in the first place. Aaaanyway, asking people to like me is pretty much an action designed to make me as insane as possible. Self-promotion is already at odds with my natural tendency to self-deprecate, and then putting it in terms of “like” rather than a less loaded word like “follow” triggers all of my social weirdness.

Most people who have only known me for a few years are surprised to learn that I was super shy when I was younger, and that I still have a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of social anxiety. Among the other crap I learned in grad school, wire mothers and whatnot, I also learned how to fake social ease. I learned to schmooze and network and speak in public. But I still hate all of those things. I want to hide in the corner with the 3 people I already know and talk about easy things and be completely myself.

So now my challenge with this blog is to come out of that corner and be completely myself with everyone else. To be open and exposed in public, not knowing whether anyone will like it. Whether anyone will like ME. Here’s hoping I can at least get my husband on board.


P.S. If you haven’t already, please like me on facebook. Here ya go. Click “like” right here.