I Wish the World Cup Happened Every Year.

Photo: babasteve.

Okay, so my motives for soccer-watching aren’t exactly pure. My motives? Benny Feilhaber. Oguchi Onyewu. Carlos Bocanegra. Maurice Edu. And that’s just the Americans . . . Why is it that soccer players are so much hotter than normal people? Is it something in the Gatorade? Would we all be that attractive if we were that in shape? Or do I just have some kind of fetish for guys in shorts and knee socks? (Don’t answer that.)

My other friends have less base reasons for following the World Cup. My boyfriend lived in Germany for a while and picked up his football-watching habit there. Carson used to be a high school soccer star–I once asked him how good he was, and he said that he couldn’t tell me because he doesn’t brag–and is, to this day, the only American I know who watches soccer on a near-daily basis. And Josie–well, Josie just really likes screaming “GOOOOOOOOOOOAL!” at the top of her lungs.

July 11th will bring the third World Cup final I watch–I have, thanks to my knee-socks-and-shorts fetish, always attracted friends who are soccer fans and plan elaborate final parties–and it always bums me out that Americans are less than thrilled by soccer. That claim that soccer is boring? Patently false. Soccer is boring if you watch it the way we watch baseball or football: passively, paying more attention to your smack talk and Bud Light than to the game, focusing solely on the team’s opportunity to score. Americans don’t like soccer because it requires attention from us. You have watch soccer as if you were a player. You have to look ahead to scan the field for an open player, a gap in coverage, a defender rushing in. You have to predict. You have to engage.

Which isn’t to say that soccer is a sport free of flaws. I can still sympathize with a few particularly . . . American . . . complaints. The refereeing, even in an event as epic as the World Cup, is not up to our standards–we demand fairness in officiating beyond the point of reason, something that the World Cup refs are not prepared to offer. Even then, as the Armando Galarraga saga showed us earlier this month, we’re willing to forgive if the refs admit their culpability–but FIFA won’t even offer us that much, as the U.S.-Slovenia game made clear. Worse than bad calls, there’s that particularly nasty strain of racial tension among several of the European teams and their fans. And on a lighter note, the flopping–oh god, the flopping. What can get more un-American than the whiny, dive-filled finish of the Brazil/Cote d’Ivoire game? Man up, boys.

But for every terrible thing about the World Cup, there are at least two wonderful things:

• Vuvuzelas!
• It will teach you this difference between Algeria and Nigeria.
• You can actually cheer for the American team this year without being embarrassed.
• No commercials for a full 45 minutes! When will that ever again happen in the history of American television?
• Yellow cards. Red cards! Genius. We’ve started giving them out at the bar when people are behaving badly.
• It gives you another excuse to drink beer. Every day. In the morning, if you want.
• Did I mention that soccer players are hot?

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sports

June 23, 2010

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Yes to Whatever.

Photo: josh.liba

Eighty degrees and sunny, a light breeze, brilliantly blue skies . . . and I was spending my afternoon inside catching up on Lost. At least until Pete texted me: “Wanna hang out?”

“And do what?”
“Cruise around.”
“And what else?”
“Whatever. We could get some food later.”

I don’t consider myself a type A, but ever since I graduated from college, the idea of lost time obsesses me. I just can’t sit on the couch watching bullshit reality TV shows. If I’m sitting on the couch, I have to be watching some sort of Classic Movie or Serious TV Show that engages my brain or adds some kind of Value to my life. Or, if I’m watching bullshit reality TV, then I have to simultaneously be working out or cooking or cleaning or doing anything that has some sort of productive worth. The idea of “cruising around,” of “whatever”-ing, terrifies me. I always want to be doing something, learning something, experiencing something new.

But Pete is one of the few people I can actually do nothing with and not be bored. We’ve known each other since we were 16; he and I had one of those tumultuous adolescent connections that zipped from best buddies to enemies to friends with benefits and back, but the last three or four years have found us settling into the happy golden years of our friendship where we read each others’ minds and finish each others’ sentences like an old married couple. And I’m trying to be less uptight lately. So I said yes to cruising and yes to whatever.

When I was in high school, one of my cross-country teammates described her best friendship thus: “We’re so close, we can do even the most boring things together and still have fun. Sometimes we sit around and just read books–separate books, our own books–together, and it’s still more fun than if I just read my book by myself.” For whatever reason, I internalized this. Since then, that has been my marker of a good friendship. Someone is your real, true, good friend when you can just sit around and read books together.

Okay, so Pete and I have never, in our eleven years of friendship, read a book together. But on Wednesday, we did drive around the city on a beautiful, blasting  Band of Horses, and–in the interest of full disclosure–Taylor Swift. Curving along park-lined roads, checking out cute girls, pointing out every puppy that crossed our path. Telling stories, shit-talking each others’ World Cup teams. Shout-singing, “And when you’re fifteen, and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them!” and then laughing and laughing.

He won’t appreciate that I told you that last bit.
But I’m telling you anyway.

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buddies, friendship, pete b.

June 18, 2010

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Vistas

The view from our first hotel:

The view from our second hotel:

The view from our third hotel:

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adventures, travel

June 6, 2010

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Been Up To:

• At the beginning of the month, my boyfriend and I went up to Door County, Wisconsin, land of pretty lakes and cherry blossoms. We planned our trip perfectly: too early in the season for the usual influx of Illinois tourists, but late enough that most of the businesses had just opened. We spent our days wandering around state parks, reading the paper over coffee (his) and hot cocoa (mine), and drinking awesome IPAs with his buddy, who is the brewmaster at a microbrewery up there. Said beer-brewing buddy sent us home with two cases of porter and cherry wheat. Consider a party in the works.
• My sister Chelsea has spent the last five years in the wilderness of Indiana, specifically in a little town called West Lafayette. Saturday marked, at last, her exodus from that state with a degree in industrial engineering and a job offer in Illinois. We celebrated by taking photos at every Purdue landmark, eating dinner at a steakhouse (pasta for me!), and drinking green dragons at Harry’s Chocolate Shop. “What’s in a green dragon?” I asked, prior to going out. Chelsea shrugged, so I googled it: apparently, traditionally it’s cannabis-infused vodka. Google wouldn’t tell me what was in a Harry’s green dragon, but after imbibing, I’m pretty sure it’s just a Midori-and-sprite variation on the Long Island.

My sister is four years younger than I am, and more of her friends are married than mine are. Lately she’s been getting down on herself because she doesn’t have a serious boyfriend. My mother and I blame this entirely on Purdue. As we drove home along the road that borders the Wabash River for the last time, my mother breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank god she’s coming home to where normal people live,” she said.

• Last Monday, Ambrose, Carson and I day-tripped to Chicago. The purpose of this was two-fold: to visit Carson’s older brother, who lives there, and to make a trip to Wrigley Field. I grew up a Cubbies fan in Brewers territory with a Braves/White Sox fan for a dad. Needless to say, nobody I know will go to a game with me–my boyfriend, a Milwaukee die-hard, is particularly opposed to the idea–so when Ambrose and Carson offered, there’s no way I could turn them down. Prior to the game, we spent the better part of the afternoon wandering around the Art Institute, where I loved the landscape paintings, Carson hated Matisse, and Ambrose dedicated his time to searching out all the paintings with dicks in them. Note to self: never take Ambrose to an art museum again.

But all of these adventures are just warm-ups for May’s biggest adventure: I leave for the Virgin Islands in three days!

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a., adventures, ambrose, buddies, carson, chelsea, college, my mom

May 25, 2010

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Handlebars

Carson got a haircut.

“It looks good,” I said. “Do you like it?”

“I do,” he said. “It really brings out  my mustache.”

*

He looks basically like this now:

Josie said that he just needs one of these to complete the picture:

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carson

May 8, 2010

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Wake Up

Oh, May, I’m glad you’re finally here.

Spring and I have a tumultuous relationship. March is like my moody friend who continually makes awesome plans with me only to flake in the end. April is birthday month–mine, and what seems like half of my other friends’–which means a lot of parties but a lot of pressure, and little time or space to do anything but drink, sleep, work and recover. But May is when real life finally begins. After a winter of hiding out (“You need to do something other than go home and watch old movies,” my boyfriend told me last week), it finally seems safe to begin making plans again. Baseball games. Picnics. Beer-drinking on patios. That kind of thing. And all that seems kind of  blueberry-pie-and-fourth-of-July cheesy, but when I’ve spent an entire winter vacillating between the blues and the mean reds, sometimes a day spent at the zoo with a couple of my best friends, discussing what kind of bear we’d most like to be and playing frisbee on the zoo lawn is exactly what I need.

So today, in honor of May, my boyfriend and I started our morning with a trip to the farmer’s market. We crammed my shoulder bag full of asparagus and freshly baked bread, and he sipped coffee while we split a raspberry danish. After that, we went to the gardens where Ambrose works, where the trees are all in bloom. One step into the park and you’re hit over the head with the scent of lilac, lilacs in plummy purples and creamy whites and pale blue-violets. Ten yards farther and something else is flowering–an explosion of fuschia, baby pink buds sheathed in new green leaves, ivory petals brushed with the palest of watercolor corals. A walk through the woods, dinner at our favorite wood-fired pizza place.

I’m determined to make the most of this summer. Starting now.

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a., food, spring

May 1, 2010

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Life as Science Experiment

Photo by Vintage Collective.

“Self-experiments . . . are not clinical trials. The goal isn’t to figure out something about human beings generally but to discover something about yourself. Their validity may be narrow, but it is beautifully relevant. Generally, when we try to change, we simply thrash about: we improvise, guess, forget our results or change the conditions without even noticing the results. Errors are possible in self-tracking and self-experiment, of course. It is easy to mistake a transient effect for a permanent one, or miss some hidden factor that is influencing your data and confounding your conclusions. But once you start gathering data, recording the dates, toggling the conditions back and forth while keeping careful records of the outcome, you gain a tremendous advantage over the normal human practice of making no valid effort whatsoever.” – Gary Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life“

I liked this article, maybe because I related to it a little too much. I’m a list-maker. I have records of every book I’ve read or movie I’ve watched for years, lists of new things I’ve cooked, lists of shows I’ve been to, nearly every workout I’ve done since I started running twelve years ago. I started tracking most of these things when I was in high school. The internet has only fueled my obsession. In high school I kept the lists on yellow legal pads that got dusty and smeared over the years, and eventually I tossed them out or buried them in the back of my closet. Now, though, with the rise of tracking software that the ar mentions, I have years’ worth of neat and tidy charts over on listography.

I’m an experimenter and a tracker. My boyfriend and my friends have gotten used to it–the tendency I have to announce that I’m not drinking alcohol this month, or eating cheese, or allowing myself on the computer past midnight. Right now I’m smack in the middle of a no caffeine experiment. (Chocolate not included. I need some vices.) Theoretically, most of these experiments are about my mental health–when you have a brain that’s prone to anxiety, it helps to keep it on a tight leash. You track the changes you make; you measure the results. It gives me a sense of control in a world full of chaos to know, demonstrably, that daily exercise lowers my stress level, that more than two drinks a night increases my anxiety, that anything fewer than two cups of coffee surprisingly has no affect on my anxiety (but that cutting out caffeine makes my skin look great). But really, isn’t it just the same knack for over-analysis and over-worry that’s feeding both of these things–the anxiety and the experiments?

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anxiety, experiments

April 30, 2010

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In the Light

On Friday, Carson had an extra ticket to a show, so we went once he got off work. I repaid him by buying all his drinks at our grossest neighborhood dive bar, where we got drunk playing naked Photo Hunt. On Sunday, we went into recovery mode and sprawled on his sofa, watching Milk and eating German chocolate cake left over from his dad’s birthday. On Monday, the two of us and Marcus went hiking, four miles around the bluffs of a nearby lake–then kicked off a seven-hour drinking and eating extravaganza as soon as we were done. Last night, we dragged Dexter home from the bar and forced him to watch Lost with us from the beginning. At midnight, they sang “Happy Birthday” to me and force-fed me tres leches cake and bourbon.

I swear to god, I don’t have any other friends. But I don’t need any other friends.

Photo by landhere.

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buddies, carson

April 22, 2010

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The Hot Mix

Photo by Fe Ilya.

I could walk into the work kitchen blindfolded and still know who’s cooking, just based on what’s on the stereo. Indie rock, folk, or bluegrass? It’s Carson. William listens to whatever’s on NPR. Vince opts for the local “adult alternative” station that used to play good stuff but now only really plays John Mayer and dudes who sound like John Mayer. When Dexter’s alone, it’s hip-hop. But when Dexter and Josie work together, it’s always the Hot Mix.

The Hot Mix is our nickname for Dexter’s iPod, which he has painstakingly pruned to include only the songs that we love. The only ingredient necessary for a song’s placement on the Hot Mix is that it more or less demands that you sing along. Included:

• Jason Derulo – “Whatcha Say”:  Mostly Josie and I just love the fact that someone wrote a song about how he cheated on his girlfriend, but he “only meant well,” and it’s okay, because when he’s famous, he’ll make it up to her by buying her a lot of shoes or something. The added bonus here is that Josie’s last name bears a passing resemblance to “Derulo,” so we have adopted J.D.’s habit of singing in own name in all his songs, only we sing Josie’s.
• Wilson Phillips – “Hold On”: Yes, somebody has seen Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle a few dozen times.
• Billy Joel – “For the Longest Time.” We have an upcoming karaoke date with this song. Between the three of us, we can switch back and forth between the background and foreground parts seamlessly. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working in a bar, it’s that no one–no one–can resist singing this song when drunk.
• A cappella versions of various ’80s hits like “Africa” and “Take On Me.” “Take On Me” is especially hilarious because Josie immediately picked up on the fact that the background singers are singing “the flim flam, the tim tam,” and now she refuses to acknowledge any other words to the song but those.
• Copious Boyz II Men. “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” is our jam, dating back to the time I designated-drove everyone out to our coworker’s party in the boonies. Dex and Josie finished off the better part of a bottle of Jameson in less than an hour, and then “serenaded” me with this song on the way home. Dex only knew one line, so his serenade consisted of little more than shouting, “AND I’LL TAKE WITH ME THESE MEMORIES TO BE MY SUNSHINE AFTER THE RAIN” over and over again.

Thank God for the Hot Mix. Without it, we would never get through mornings like yesterday’s.

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dexter, josie, music, the bar, the cooks

April 10, 2010

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It Might as Well Be Spring

Photo by Peaches&Cream.

Went out drinking at our local cigar bar last night with Carson and his roommates. I don’t think he knows it yet, but Carson’s quickly becoming one of my best friends despite the fact that we only met six months ago. We stay up until all hours of the night while I force him to drink Scotch and tell me all his stories. On Sunday night I stayed at his house so long that when I drove home, his upstairs neighbor was leaving for her bakery job, and the newspaper carriers were out, tossing dailies to doorsteps.

Good cigars always smell like Spanish cedar. Ambrose and I discussed how much we love that smell. “If I were a tree, I’d be Spanish cedar,” he said.

“What tree would Marcus be?” I asked, gesturing to their third roommate. Ambrose works at our local botanical gardens. He knows his plants.

“Dogwood,” said Ambrose, and I laughed. Ambrose is so friendly and Carson is so sweet, but Marcus is the one roommate who I’m still at arm’s length with. He’s one of those hometown boys that I knew so many of in college: the stock frat boy who somehow never went Greek, nominally apolitical but probably conservative at heart, worships at the altar of Monday night football. “Dogwood” is not what comes to mind.

Ambrose ignored Marcus’s protests. “You’re tupelo,” he told me.

“What about Carson?” I asked.

Ambrose scrutinized Carson, took a few sips of his beer, and finally turned back to me.

“Carson?” he said finally. “Carson would be the Giving Tree.”

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ambrose, bars, buddies, carson

March 31, 2010

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