Dotty Parker

a girl thing, maybe

I went to a hockey game tonight with BellyRub, Erotica, BrilliantEditor, Dr.Dad, and PTAMom. I always have a hard time paying attention to sporting events of any kind. It's no help when they're live. I still don't really feel like working so hard at figuring out where the desired projectile lives. I don't care much about the history of the statistics or whose number was retired or any of that junk. Sometimes I care about personalities of individuals, but I suspect I'm much more interesting to myself than any sweaty, testosterone filled, safety padded stink bomb could possibly be. I'm simply fascinating and am very rarely a stink bomb who is sweaty and testosterone filled and safety padded. So I'm head and shoulders above any athlete as far as conversation goes. I'm a veritable gold mine of conversation. I could be my own sports team.

But I stray from the topic at hand.

I've bought into the conventional wisdom that girls don't like sports so much. I've extended it to include this rule: if a girl is interested in sports, her brothers must also be interested in sports. It stands to reason, does it not?

Well, my darlings, I've found the exception that proves the rule. This evening Cornell was nearly scored upon by Mercyhurst. We're cheering for Cornell: BellyRub went to Mercyhurst for a semester of hellacious evil. He then transferred to Cornell via a series of calculated steps. Thus, we have collectively earned the right to cheer for Cornell.

Having an earned right doesn't mean that the ability was also transferred. Thus, there are times when cheer or groan worthy events go flying past me and I'm left entertaining myself watching other people's reactions.

Being a holiday weekend, there are many fewer students. We all had standing room tickets, but since the students weren't around, we took their seats and stood in them (students never sit down during the game, except in between periods). In front of me was a female student wearing a t-shirt with some indicator that she'd stood in line for a few years to acquire season tickets. This night, she had brought her younger brother.

I instantly recognized in his bespectacled, bemused, befuddled face the glaze of this thought: "So, are we going to talk or what?"

Ah, young man, I should have taken you aside. Perhaps I should have told you at the beginning of the game, that she will not be paying adequate attention to you. When you're looking at her, she will be watching the game. In the middle of your attempt to tell her how much it meant to you that she came home for Thanksgiving and then took you back to college to see the bigger world, she will turn away from you and look horrified that the fancy goal keeping man almost gave a point away to the opposing team.

You will never want to watch sports again.

Now, there are at least two interpretations to this witnessed event.

1. Life is unfair and painful to those among us who are not sensitive to the sport-game-thing.

2. Dotty has interpreted a single event seen from two rows away with no background of the people too completely and possibly incorrectly.

It's all up to you, really. But we can all agree, I think, that lots of people can be disillusioned by the false intimacy of a sporting event: if you're not a fan, you're all alone.

Boo hoo.

Posted by dotty at November 29, 2003 08:37 PM