Easter weekend typically means a mass exodus from campus. By the time I awoke this morning, my roommate, most of my friends, and my girlfriend were all out of town…and my family was still very much scattered across the country. It looked like I was going to be in charge of my own fun tonight.

I went strolling down high street in the afternoon, and stumbled across a bookstore/coffeeshop place that I had been meaning to check out. On a lark, I walked inside, poked around for a bit, bought a book (How Soccer Explains the World for 6 bucks. I both enjoy soccer *and* the world, so I figured it was a pretty solid investment), read for a little bit on one of their comfy couches, and then decided to head back home. On my way out, I noticed a poster on the door, advertising the release party for a book called “The Good Things About America”. I had never been to any kind of poetry or prose reading event before, and my alternative plans for the evening involved drinking all the Gatoraid in my fridge and playing NBA Live 08 all night…so I decided I’d come back in a few hours and check it out.

I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive about the whole thing. Despite being a writer, I’m not really the most “literary” figure in my family (that title goes to my younger sister, who is rapidly becoming a renowned poet in Madison, Wisconsin). I write mostly political commentary, non-fiction and sportswriting. I haven’t really attempted a poem since 8th grade (I wrote a 3 page epic poem called The Great Panda Problem, detailing a group of Panda’s escape from the Zoo, and subsequent takeover of the world. It won “best poem” that year. I decided to retire at the top of my game). Am I even allowed to go to things like this?

My feelings of nervousness didn’t really go away when I first walked in to the coffeeshop. People were wearing fedoras, chuck taylors and double breasted shirts. I looked down to see what I was wearing. I had a blue t-shirt that said COLLEGE (a la Animal House), and brown flip flops. I had gotten my hair cut that day, and still had the gel in my hair. I stuck out like a white guy at Live at the Apollo. What killed me is that I actually own a fedora. I wanted to shout “No, this isn’t what it looks like. I’m really one of you people! Let me get my hat and we can talk about books!”

But was I?

The room quickly filled up, and I found myself sitting in a group of hipsters. The reading began with a few songs from a stripped down rock band. People were in the crowd were laughing and chatting with each other during the songs. I got the impression that most people here knew each other from somewhere else…somewhere else in this scene, which made me feel a little more self conscious. I vaguely entertained thoughts of leaving, but I would have had to crawl over 20 people to get to the door, and dammit, I walked all this way to hear some poems about America.

After a few songs, the band left the makeshift stage, and a tall fellow stepped up the mic. He introduced himself as the editor of the book. He told us that in his travels, he’d hear lots of poets writing about America, but usually in the context of America sucking. Our president is stupid, our foreign policy is unjust, we’re killing the planet, blah blah blah. Quite frankly, it was starting to bring him down. Sure, America has lots of problems, but why do we only have to write about the bad stuff? He called up some of his fellow poets from across the country, asked them to write about the *good* things, and published the book.

As somebody who writes about politics regularly, and also hangs out in a fairly left-leaning crowd most of the time, I think its critical to read stuff like this sometimes. Writing about politics (or even paying attention to politics) can be a major drag sometimes…people can be self-serving and corrupt….it can bring out the most banal and disappointing aspects of our personalities. It can be scary and hateful and sad and make you question why you even bother.

And then you remember…its because I Really Like America. I would even go so far as to say America kicks ass.

Many of the poets featured in the book journeyed to Columbus for the reading…some from Boston, New York, Oklahoma, and others. They talked about families, love, their hometowns,Elections and Heroes, their favorite cities, and the American Experience. My heart filled with pride.

Many of the poems (and the poets) were exceptionally witty and smart, and I found myself laughing and joking with my seatmates. I felt myself becoming a little more comfortable after every poem, after every story, and after every mutually enjoyed pun. One poet, after reading, crumpled up his manuscript into a ball, and tossed it into the crowd. Audience members fought for it like fans might jostle for a foul ball at a baseball game. I couldn’t help but smile. Maybe these are my people after all. I left the reading without any shred of self-consciousness.

The readers were far more diverse than my initial “poet” stereotype had allowed for. There was an older gentleman from southern ohio who read stories from his dark (but also oddly hilarious) book about a fictional town in Ross County. There was a woman who lived in ultra-conservative Oklahoma, whose mother kept a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama in her kitchen (after the last 8 years…I just need to see his face every morning she said. Apparently she hasn’t been able to find a cardboard Michelle yet). Folks from all over the country, from all different backgrounds and with different life experiences read and shared.

I ended up buying the book, making it the first poetry book to grace my bookshelf. I walked out of the reading feeling completely refreshed and rejuvenated. I am prob. not able to write like they can. My writing is like bread, and their poems, like an expensive wine. Its perfectly fine to write bread….after all, everybody eats bread. But Jesus was on to something when he said that man cannot live on bread alone. Sometimes you need a sip of something more complicated to refresh your pallet.

One of my creative writing professors joked that when she taught her creative non fiction class in the spring, everybody wrote essays on sex. When she taught it in the winter, everybody wrote about death.

Not knowing this beforehand, I stupidly took her class during the winter. She wasn’t kidding.

I can certainly understand why. Its easy for death to be on the mind during a Columbus Winter, when you drudge around everywhere surrounded by dead plants, and students so cold they perhaps wished they were dead.

But my mind continued to linger on the subject even after the sun began to make special guest appearances, and the temperatures began to flirt with the 50s. Two of my friends at my old school recently lost their fathers, my church congregation lost a member, and my father’s birthday was quickly approaching. My dad died in September of 2006.

I can still remember most of the funeral. The church was at full capacity, packed with friends, family, and dozens of people who I didn’t know at all. I was completely emotionally overwhelmed. I hadn’t begun to make sense of my grief, and only just barely wrapped my head around the magnitude of the situation. To make matters more confusing, I was in the middle of my LDS mission…so there I was, nametag and all, trying to maintain some facade of emotional stoicism.

Nobody really knows what to say at a funeral, but everybody wants to help. I remember scores of well intentioned people coming up to me, giving me hugs, and saying it’ll be okay.

I didn’t know it at the time, but now I’m pretty convinced that just isn’t true. When you lose a parent, especially when you’re still young, I’m not sure its ever okay.

Sure, the intensity of the situation wanes over time. I no longer have the urge to cry whenever Van Morrison starts playing on the radio. I’m able to watch a baseball game without falling apart, even if the Yankees are playing (I still hate ‘em though. Sorry dad). I think I’m naturally a pretty upbeat guy, and this tragedy hasn’t changed that.

But I think the word “okay” seems to imply some sort of return to a previous, injury free state, and that is impossible. I think about my dad nearly every day, and I’m finding that I miss him in new, powerful ways the older I get. My dad will never see me graduate college, never saw me land my first “grown up” job, and won’t see my wedding (or for that matter, even meet anybody I date). He never got to hold Miles, who would have been his first Grandbaby. These are new, powerful hurts that didn’t occur to me when I was a confused nametag-totting 19 year old, but I’m starting to understand now.

I don’t just miss my dad because he will be absent for the rest of my life milestones. My dad was an artist, and the very genesis of my creative ability. I developed a passion for blues and soul music from rummaging through his CD collection. His was a voracious reader, a poet and a writer. I am only now just starting to understand a tiny bit of what he knew. I would give anything to have a few more min with him, if only to discuss music and writing. I didn’t publish my first piece until April of 2007. He never saw it.

It isn’t just sorrow and loss that I feel now though. Death has a way of fundamentally rearranging your priorities and perspective. Death is a crushing reminder of our own fragile mortality. We’re not indestructible, not even when we’re teenagers and know everything. It is a reminder that life is too short to hate, to hold grudges, to remain heartbroken or to be bitter ( and life is also too short to *not* experience those things, because that’s what makes us alive). We don’t want our last interaction with a loved one to be negative.

It can be difficult to reconcile everything. The bleeding may stop, and the cut may heal, but I think I’ll always have a little scar somewhere. I think that’s how it goes. As time goes on, I guess you just learn to reconcile those painful longing feelings with the right perspective. I’ll always miss my old man, and there may be times when I might really need him…but life is too short to be permanently attached to a memory (and one that is likely distorted). My dad certainly wouldn’t want me to mope forever…he’d want me to be happy (and if he saw me moping, he’d prob call me a stinkin’ alcoholic and fart really loud to try and snap me out of it. Larry, Curly and Moe had nothing on my old man)

So you keep struggling with that, and move on from there. Somedays are easier than others…but I don’t think its ever, 100% “Okay”.

Not even in the spring.

This website has been updated sporadically lately for two main reasons. One is that I’m crazy busy with some TFA related projects (see my sister blog, somedayallblogs.wordpress.com). The other reason is that I’ve been working on some longer writing projects. Here is one story that I thought maybe you guys might enjoy, about my bus trip to Washington DC to blog about the Obama Inauguration for a small Ohio Newspaper. Enjoy

The instructions on my ticket confirmation email seemed simple enough. Please bring your photo ID, your email confirmation number, and please get to the Greyhound Station 1 hour before your bus departs. My plan was then to get on my bus, take a nap, read a book, jam to my iPod, and before I knew it, I would be at Union Station in Washington DC. Easy.

But alas, things are not always so simple. I suspect there is quite a bit they don’t tell you about Greyhound Bus journeys.

First, customer service isn’t exactly a priority. Me and my girlfriend (D) arrived at the station for our bus trip at 3:30 AM, and noticed the station was almost completely empty. Apparently, demand for the 4:30 bus from Columbus to DC on a Monday was sparse. Seeing that I was the only one in line at the ticket counter, I walked right up to the front, thinking that I would simply exchange my confirmation number and ID for my tickets, as per the instructions in my email. The Ticket Lady was engaged in a rather lively discussion with a security guard and a bus driver, punctuated by the occasional aaaaaaw shiiiit, and aw no she’s didn’t! I politely coughed to show that I, a customer, needed to be served. The Ticket Lady looked up at me, glared, and continued her conversation.

I turned around and gave my girlfriend a confused look. Was this the right ticket counter? Was it closed? We couldn’t see any sign that would indicate that, and the email did tell us to come to the station at such an ungodly hour. The Ticket Lady apparently noticed, and turned to me. “Sir. I notice you’re getting a little antsy. I am talking right now. Please wait your turn.” She said all of this as if the bus driver was a paying customer, waiting to check his duffel bag and head to Chicago. She then turned back to her friends and said just loud enough for me to hear; can you believe these kids? What are they doing here so goddamned early?[1] I shrugged and sat down by my backpack. I guess this is why Greyhound wanted us to get here so early.

After an uncomfortably long wait, we eventually got our tickets, and sat down next to the door to wait for our bus. “I’m so excited for this trip. Are you excited yet?” D asked me. I had every reason to be. I had managed to talk the editors of my local newspaper to take me off the high school sports beat, and let me cover the inauguration of Barack Obama. Me and D had both worked for the Obama campaign, and the idea of physically witnessing the culmination of our efforts was very thrilling indeed. D had also not been to DC since she was in 8^th grade, and I used to live there, so in addition to witnessing history, I could go visit old college friends and show my girlfriend around what I considered to be my second hometown.

But it was still before 4 AM, and I have a hard time being really excited for anything before 4 AM. “It hasn’t sunk in yet. Ask me if I’m excited once we get to Wheeling” I said. Wheeling was the first stopover on the way to DC. We would then change buses in Pittsburgh, and makes stops in Hagerstown and Baltimore before the end of our journey. I slouched on my little bench, and tried to get a little bit of sleep before our bus was scheduled to arrive in a half hour.

Only the bus didn’t get there in a half hour. Our bus, without apology or explanation, rolled into the stop a fashionable hour and a half late. That’s just another one of the things they don’t tell you.

I tried to nap a little more once I finally got on the bus, but my seat made that pretty much impossible. Greyhound managed to construct a seat that’s uncomfortable, no matter how you sit in it. I tried reclining the chair, kicking my legs into the aisle, scrunching up in a ball, and hundreds of other positions over the course of our journey, but nothing worked. Just when I thought I was comfortable enough to take a quick nap, I’d notice that my right leg and half of my butt had fallen asleep. At least this time I was traveling with a friend. On my previous Greyhound journey, my seat mate was Jabba the Hut, who spilled into my seat, pinning me against the window with a wall of jiggling fat.

D didn’t seem to have any trouble falling asleep though, and was only just waking up when the bus rolled into the lonely downtown of Wheeling West Virginia. It was still pretty dark outside and downtown Wheeling wasn’t exactly aglow with skyscrapers and flashing neon. I’m not even sure if it was aglow from street lamps. “Where are we?” she asked me.

“I think we’re in Wheeling. I guess we’re just going to stop for a second, and then head to Pittsburgh.”

“Are you excited yet?”

I yawned and stretched. “Not yet. Ask me when we get to Pittsburgh”.

Truthfully, it wasn’t just my inability to catch a decent nap that was preventing the excitement from kicking in. We were still over an hour behind schedule, and we were supposed to change buses in Pittsburgh. If we missed that connection, there was no telling how long we’d be stuck there, maybe even an entire day. I was supposed to file a story “on my journey to DC” by 7 PM, and that would prove difficult to do if I didn’t actually arrive in DC before 7. I silently hoped that our connecting bus was late as well.

Our bus driver must have somehow heard my silent pleas. While D slept, and I turned to my iPod as a distraction from my worries, our bus thundered along the highway at speeds not even close to legal. Most buses stay in the righthand land and cruise close to the speed limit, but we darted around traffic as if we were a motorcycle, not a gigantic passenger bus. By some sort of miracle, we pulled into the bus station 15 minutes before we were scheduled to change buses. The driver got on the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, you are many things. You are Black, White, Young, Old, Man and Woman…..but you are no longer late”. I could have hugged him.

The Bus station in Pittsburgh was very different than the Columbus station. Columbus isn’t much of a Greyhound hub, so their station is small and sparse, with a few dirty benches, some dingy overpriced vending machines, and old video games that nobody wants to play. Pittsburgh is apparently a major hub for all the entire east coast. If you’re in the midwest and you want to bus to the East Coast, you have to pass through the Pittsburgh Greyhound station. It had more than twice the number of gates as the last station, and everything looked new and clean. In addition to the typical vending machine fare, this station had flatscreen TV’s showing CNN and ESPN, and what looked to be a mini restaurant/convenience store. It was about time for a late breakfast, and there were probably some things we could pick up for our trip, so D and I stashed our packs by our gate, and went to explore the store.

The back corner of the mini mart was labeled “The Greyhound Grill”, which advertised your typical burgers and pizza fare, along with hot breakfasts. After inspecting the menu, I decided that some pancakes would taste delicious, and stepped up to place my order. Only nobody was there. I peaked over the counter, waited some more, and then shuffled around the Grill area uncomfortably.

A voice from across the mini mart had the answer. “Oh, they don’t open that until 12:30 I think” said a greyhound employee. “You can only buy the prepackaged foods here at the minimart”

“If you don’t open until 12:30, why are you selling breakfast foods? Why is there no sign?” I really had my heart set on some pancakes. The picture looked so inviting.

“I don’t know. I’m just the cashier lady.” We sighed, bought some four dollar muffins (that only provided maybe a dollar fifty of hunger relief), and went to board our next bus, which was set to take us across Pennsylvania, into Maryland, and finally Washington DC.

It was light for the first time, so I finally got a chance to glimpse at some of my fellow passengers. Like my previous Greyhound adventures, it looked like we had quite the cast of characters. I could see a man trying to sell little American flags to everybody on the bus. “Please help me out here guys. I’m going to the Inauguration and this is how I’m going to pay for my ticket back” (We didn’t buy any). I saw a few people that looked like college students, a few ambiguously sketchy folks, and dozens of people wearing Obama buttons or paraphernalia (including two people that were wearing way too much Obama paraphernalia. I couldn’t tell what color their coat was supposed to be, it was so covered in buttons). At the time, I didn’t really have a reason to be particularly interested in any of my fellow passengers. I made a quick phone call, then decided to flip through the book I was reading.

Apparently, the seats are not the only part of the bus that had less than stellar craftsmanship. I looked up from my book to discover that our bus was no longer humming along a highway in Pennsylvania, but was sitting in a mall parking lot. My fellow passengers were exchanging worried looks, so I started to get worried. The bus driver got up to the intercom and started to talk.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it appears we have a small problem with this doodad here in the engine system, and now our brakes aren’t working so well. We’ll have a replacement bus coming to pick you up in about an hour or so. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for riding Greyhound. Actually, I have no idea what he said, because the bus intercom system hadn’t been updated since the Carter administration, so it came out like the teacher’s voice in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Regardless, we now had an unexpected pit stop in Monroeville Pennsylvania.

According to my extensive research[2], Monroeville is a suburb of Pittsburgh, with a population of roughly 30,000. Apparently it had been quite the prosperous little town back when coal and steel were huge industries, but from my window, all I could see were vacant strip malls and fast food joints. That’s okay, because I didn’t buy a bus ticket to go see the sights and sounds of Western Pennsylvania…and after sitting in that bus for 4 and a half hours already with nothing to eat but a crappy, overpriced muffin, I was ready for some fast food.

The new bus wasn’t coming for at least an hour, so a few of us passengers walked a few blocks to a Panera to grab some lunch. I grabbed a seat next to a window, and spread my notebooks and paperwork across the table, next to my delicious turkey sandwich. If I was going to be stuck here for a few more hours, I might as well get some work done. I tried to write down a few notes from the trip so far, to maybe use in one of my newspaper articles, but my thoughts kept drifting to our bus situation. I kept checking the window every few seconds; to make sure that the new bus hadn’t arrived yet. This absolutely drove D crazy.

“Are you seriously checking again? It’s been what, 7 minutes?” she asked more than once.

I couldn’t help it. What if we were left here? I needed to think of some sort of contingency plan. Perhaps that’s another thing they don’t tell you about Greyhound buses, I mused to myself. Always think of a backup plan.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to employ any of my poorly hatched doomsday backup plans. Maybe fifteen minutes after I walked out of Panera, another Greyhound rolled up next to ours in the Monroeville Mall parking lot, ready for the next leg of our journey.

I didn’t think it was possible for a bus to be even more dilapidated and uncomfortable than the one we took to Pittsburgh, but our replacement vehicle managed to break all the records. The “new” bus was a little bit smaller, but managed to cram in four more seats. This made anything resembling foot room nothing but a vicious rumor. There was some sort of fan built in right above my seat, making an obnoxious WRRRRRRR sound the rest of the trip. It was maybe 35 degrees outside, and the bus certainly wasn’t warm, so the fan didn’t seem to serve any purpose besides annoying me. Customer satisfaction is clearly a priority of the Greyhound Bus Company.

I don’t think I was the only passenger who noticed the less than stellar condition of our new steed. Before we could pull out of the mall parking lot, one of the passengers in the front stood up and said something to the bus driver that I couldn’t hear. Then he stood up in the front of the bus and asked us to bow our heads, because he was going to pray.

“Dear Lord, we thank you for watching over us and blessing us every day. We ask that you pour out your blessings onto our bus driver, and this bus, that we might safely and quickly arrive in DC to see the inauguration of our new President. Amen”. A few passengers let out scattered “amens”, and the man went back to his seat.

Despite being a religious person myself, I’m normally a little uncomfortable with public community prayers like this…but not then. The way this trip was going, we needed all the help we could get in order to get to DC on time, and if that meant publicly asking The Big Man to watch over us, I could live with that.

The bus was also filthy. My seat was dotted with what looked like fossilized Cheetos. The floor hadn’t been cleaned in ages, making your shoes stick to the floor with every step. It was like walking in some sort of tar pit, or maybe a movie theater. The windows still had the residue of dead bugs (did they leave them there to set an example for other bugs?). I swept as much trash off of my chair as I could, pulled out my book, and tried to find some semblance of normalcy for the rest of the trip.

This proved difficult to do, because I was starting to see that some of our fellow passengers on the trip were anything but normal. Greyhound passengers typically fall into two groups: college students/people who cannot afford plane tickets, and people who don’t stand a chance of passing the required security checkpoints on airplanes[3]. I was maybe 15 the first time I ever rode on a Greyhound, and on that short trip between Columbus and Cleveland, my fellow passengers tried to sell me drugs no less than three times[4]. Nobody tried to sell drugs on this trip, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have a few characters on the bus.

Perhaps the most interesting of my fellow travelers was “The Baby Lady”. The Baby Lady seemed normal enough. She was maybe a few years older than me, and had the most adorable, outgoing little baby boy, who would make faces at some of the other passengers and laugh. I taught the kid how to drum on one of the bus seats, much to the chagrin of some of the other passengers. On a long trip through the doldrums of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, The Baby Lady’s baby was a welcome diversion.

But then somewhere outside of Monroeville, The Baby Lady decided she wanted to take a nap. She curled up as best she could in the terrible bus seat, passed her baby to two random passengers next to her, and went to sleep. She slept through half of Pennsylvania, and her laughing child slowly made the rounds along the side of the bus. I don’t profess to have any great paternal instincts, but after watching a child get passed along a Greyhound bus like a teenager crowd surfing at a rock concert, something deep within me stirred. I don’t know much about raising children, but this cannot be right. I turned and looked at my girlfriend, who appeared to be having the same reaction. After watching another group of passengers try to feed the baby some of those fossilized Cheetos, I wanted to leap out of my seat, grab the kid, and find the nearest Social Services Agent. I hope that poor kid had all of his shots.

The bus rolled past Breezewood[5], and into Maryland, and I started looking for new ways to entertain myself. I had finished my book, my iPod was low on batteries, and my girlfriend had managed to defy all known laws of Physics, and had fallen asleep. I had an article due only a few hours after we were scheduled to arrive in DC, and I noticed that my notebook had precious little in the way of actual, usable notes [6]. I overheard a few people talking about the upcoming inauguration, so I decided to introduce myself, and join the conversations.

It turns out that many of my fellow travelers were quite interesting, and not just in the drug trafficking/reckless child endangerment sort of way. More than half of the bus passengers were headed to the inauguration, and all of them had a story. One woman flew in from England, without an inauguration ticket, and knowing that she had to be back in England in three days. This baffled many of her fellow passengers. Most of us could understand why an American would want to travel to see Obama (after all, that’s what most of us were doing), but Obama wasn’t even her president! When faced with these questions, the lady would just smile, and said that even foreigners can appreciate the major history. “Electing somebody like Obama is a victory for us all” she said.

Another passenger was a law student from Kansas, who had been on buses for two straight days, having weathered another bus breakdown in Missouri. Despite having to endure 24 hours of bus, he was in good spirits, and never complained once.

Perhaps the most interesting to me were two travelers a few rows up from me. They were about my age, and were from Fresno California. They had been on Greyhound buses for three straight days, and were going to make that same journey home the day after the inauguration. I thought that international conventions prevented this sort of thing from happening. I incredulously asked them why they would want to come so far, and spend so much time in so uncomfortable a setting. They just grinned, and held up a copy of that day’s USA Today. The headline read “JUST FOR THE FEELING OF BEING THERE”. I smiled, nodded, and made that my lead for my first article.

I met a few other passengers on the bus. Sometimes I spoke, or asked questions, but mostly I listened and took notes. I didn’t tell anybody I was a journalist, I just stepped back, and let other people tell their stories that they were so eager to share. Maybe that’s something that Greyhound ought to play up a little more. Ride Greyhound, come back with a story. That’s something they certainly didn’t tell me about.

After one last hiccup (a huge traffic jam on Interstate 95), we finally arrived at Union Station in Washington DC. We were only about two and a half hours late, which isn’t actually all that bad, if my other Greyhound trips are any indication. [7] It was starting to get dark, but we still had plenty of time to walk to the nearest Metro stop, and head to a friend’s apartment, where I could file my story on the journey and appease my hungry editors.

My confirmation email was pretty simple. It told me to arrive at the station in Columbus at 3:30 AM, and to bring my email and confirmation number. The email told me that a bus would take me to Pittsburgh, and then to Washington DC, and it left a number I could call in case I needed a refund. That was it. Nobody said anything about the optional customer service, or how arrival times were merely fluid suggestions, not rigid schedules. Nobody told me I would leave the bus trip with a notebook full of stories either. [8] I guess there is quite a bit they don’t tell you about Greyhound buses.

Today I emailed my boss with my new work schedule for spring quarter. I do this every 10 weeks or so, and it typically isn’t a very big deal. This email was very different, because at the end, it said May 22nd (aprox) will be my last day at the office. As you know, I have accepted a teaching position with Teach For America, and will be moving to New Orleans shortly after graduation. I’ll give you more details as the date gets closer.

Shortly, Outlook cheeringly announced that my boss had responded to me. She told me how happy she was for me, and how much the office would miss me. She then helpfully pointed out that I did not, in fact, study education in college. My professional background is in government service and writing. I don’t know anybody in the whole state of Louisiana, and never mentioned wanting to continue my studies there. So why then, she wondered, am I picking up my life and moving to New Orleans to teach elementary school?

This is a perfectly reasonable question, and one that deserves a better answer than the three sentence burst I typed out when I first got my acceptance letter. Before I can begin to answer that question though, let me tell you a story.

I’m not much of a crier. In the past 5 years or so, I think I’ve only cried three times. Once when my father passed away, once on my LDS Mission (I came pretty close in the 2007 ALCS though. No, I don’t want to talk about it. JD Drew can go to Hell, and CC Sabathia has man boobs).

I don’t think I’ve really talked about the other time I cried. It was early in my freshman year at American University. I was sitting at my desk, watching TV when CNN cut away to a new breaking news story. A hurricane unlike any in recent memory had just hit New Orleans. Whole neighborhoods were being washed off the face of the earth. I remembered reading about Hurricane Andrew (I was too young to actually remember it), and the destruction I was seeing on TV made those pictures I saw in National Geographic look like puddles after a rainstorm. The devastation was truly shocking…but it didn’t really hit me right then. I felt the appropriate amount of Liberal College Student Guilt, and then went on with my life.

But the story didn’t go away. After the storm stopped, all hell broke loose. The Superdome, once a symbol of American Commercial Greatness, was now a cesspool of filth. People were looting, families were trapped in toxic, washed out homes, and the impotence of the Federal Government was naked and on display to all the world. This was more than just a storm. The old band-aid covering many of our country’s social ills washed away too.

It finally hit me a few days after the initial hurricane. I was sitting all alone in the TDR, American’s dining hall, with my bagel, juice, and Washington Post. I read article after article detailing the suffering and chaos of the city….how the 9th Ward, home of some of the poorest inhabitants, had almost been wiped off the map. How local, state and federal aide agencies had failed in nearly every way. How developers were openly debating not to rebuild the city at all. It crushed me. I looked around to make sure nobody could see me, and let some teardrops fall all over my Post, turning Eugene Robinson’s picture into a big, pulpy mess.

Why did that impact me so strongly? I had never been to New Orleans, (I actually still haven’t been to New Orleans) but I felt a strong emotional connection to the city. I was a jazz and blues musician, and New Orleans is the capital of jazz. Not only that, but from what I had read, New Orleans valued and protected the Weird and the Unique. They sometimes played trombones at funerals! For a guy growing up in a Mormon household in blasé Columbus, New Orleans seemed to represent everything I wanted as a 19 year old. It became an almost rallying cry with some of my musician friends. One of these days man…we’re going to find us some fedoras, grab some gumbo, and head down to Naw’lins for a while. It just felt like my kind of town.

Now, it was under several feet of water, and starting to rot. It may have never been the place I had idealized in my head, but now I could see that with my own eyes. It wasn’t going to be the same again.

When I was filling out where I wanted to work for Teach For America, I tried to take a pretty analytical approach. My sister,her husband and newborn nephew now live near San Jose California, and I wanted in-state CA residence for possible grab school, so I selected the Bay Area. I used to live in Washington DC and loved it, so I put down DC. My mother lives in Madison, so I put down nearby Chicago, etc etc. With one exception, I based my preferences on things like proximity to family/loved ones, whether that state had a public university I wanted to attend, how familiar I was with the city, etc.

That exception was New Orleans. Teach For America apparently has a great need for teachers in the Greater New Orleans area, and that region was mentioned specifically in a lot of the literature they sent me. Every time I read it, I couldn’t help but think back to how I felt sitting in that cafeteria, reading. If I really believed in the ideals of TFA, and the capacity for good teachers to change people’s situations for the better, then I felt like I needed to put my money were my mouth was. Nobody needed help more than Naw’lins. I circled that bubble too.

I am very aware of what the challenges of that decision will be. I was lucky to attend a very good public school, and I understand that where I am going will be different in virtually every way. I understand, perhaps even a little bit better than some of my TFA peers, the limitations of my own abilities, and the sting of disappointment. This will unquestionably be the hardest thing I have ever done. It keeps me up at night sometimes.

And I know that those challenges extend far beyond what happens in my classroom. I know two people in New Orleans right now, and both are with TFA. My family members will literarily be in every opposite corner of the country. My Girlfriend’s friends have helpfully pointed out that my girlfriend does *not* live in New Orleans (approx. 912.07 miles, or a 16 hour drive away actually. Not that I checked or anything). I guess that’s what Skype and airplanes are for.

The challenges and hardships are daunting already, but that doesn’t make the goal unreachable, or a foolish endeavor. Teaching now gives me the chance to perform a critical service to children who badly need help, and in a city that I’ve wanted to love for years. I’ll be right in the heart of the biggest social science laboratories in history. I’ll be doing real, meaningful work that fits into my ideals and worldview at 22. How many other people get a chance to say that? It’s an adventure. It’s a blessing.

I didn’t write all of this back to my boss, but it’s why I’m going.

I feel like I’ve been beating a dead horse a little bit here. Over the last few days, I think I’ve written 4 articles, and close to 3,000 words on my brief trip back to DC for the Obama inauguration. I’ve been looking through my notesbooks that I kept on the trip though, and I think there are still a few things I would like to flesh out, now that the pressures of deadlines and stylistic rules have passed.

Or at least I think so, because my notebooks are nearly incomprehensible, even to me. When I’m writing on deadline, my I frantically take notes, with little regard to things like “finishing thoughts”. I kind of take the “House” approach, where I frantically throw sentence fragments up on the whiteboard, bounce them around people around me, and see what sticks. Sometimes this works out pretty well…other times, like when I’m covering sports stories, I sit down at the computer, frantically turn through 11 pages of notes, and go “What the hell does G 42—+8 3-11 HIT mean? Was I taking notes of a Battleship game??”

A few of them still make sense. The words “Just for the feeling of being here” are circled and underlined, which kinda became the thesis of my first piece. Other fragments never really made it into the articles.

One was a circle that said Greyhound: Pass The Baby. I’ve done a fair amount of traveling these past few years, and since I don’t often have the money (or the foresight) to fly, I end up taking a lot of Greyhound buses. I don’t know how many of you have experience on those wonderful buses, but those of you who have know what I mean when I say you always meet characters. I’ve had folks try to sell me drugs in Milwaukee, heard prophesies on the end of the world in Pittsburgh, and sat next to many an Amish guy on the route from Columbus to Cleveland

(funny aside. last time I road with Amish guys, I caught them playing the Deer Hunter video game at the Columbus bus station. They were really getting into it too…high fiving each other and yelling. It was the funniest thing I ever saw, since these same guys had been glaring at me something fierce when I had the audacity to send text messages in front of them on the way back.)

Anyways, this trip to DC was no different. We had a woman sitting in front of us who had the most adorable little baby boy. He was quite the ham, and was entertaining everybody sitting around him (I tried to teach him how to drum on the seat). Sometime after we passed Pittsburgh, the woman fell asleep, and passed her baby around to other passengers on the bus to hold. Total strangers! Random Greyhound people were bouncing him around, trying to feed him cheezy poofs, etc, while I just sat there, horrified.

The other note that I didn’t really get a chance to write more about just said “Homecoming?” Washington DC will always be a special place to me. Its where I first became independent, first became intellectually aware, and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, last March, where I wrote my first facebook note, and had the audacity to think that *maybe* I could be a writer.

The first time I was in DC, I joked that I thought the Potomac was full of Root Beer. Now, sitting on those steps, I could see it was filled with ice. My transfer from American to OSU was ugly and hard, and I used to tell everybody that I still considered myself a DC guy. But every time I go back, despite always loving it, my over-romanticism becomes more apparent. Its taken me a few years, but now I finally feel that Columbus is my home. DC is a place that I visit (with a grin plastered to my face the whole time), and I’m okay with that. The homecoming wasn’t so much when I stepped out at Union Station…it was when I went back to High St.

So, another 1,000 words later, I think I’m ready to finally put this story too bed. There will be new adventures, new political beats to break, and its time for me to move on to them. My only regret is that I still can’t spell inauguration right on the first try.

I closed my eyes this morning for a second, and had a rather unpleasant flashback. I was back in my freshman Geometry class, struggling through axioms, proofs, and dejectedly looking at my latest test, awash in angry red ink. 68%. I remember looking up at Mr.Bright and asked the question that would be burned into the minds of future liberal arts students everywhere. “Seriously, Mr.Bright, when am I ever going to USE this?”

And here was my answer…on the Praxis test. Why high school math problems were on my elementary school content Praxis exam, I’ll never know…but they were there, sending me into a mental tailspin, as I searched the deep recesses of my brain for facts that probably were never there to begin with.

Everybody told me not to worry much about the test. “Its just Elementary School content stuff…you’re about to graduate college right? No sweat”…so I didn’t sweat. But when those first two math problems were questions that I vaguely remembered from my SAT, I my fear that I had outkicked my coverage with this whole Teach For America business came back out to the forefront.

I had hoped I was done with this whole standardized test stuff by now. I’ve been celebrating after every one I’ve taken now, sure that it would be the last time I would be told to “put my no.2 pencils down”, but alas, they keep throwing more at me. I thought the SAT was the last one, then I had to take that again, then the LSAT, and now the Praxis…and I’m hearing rumors that there will be more Praxis tests in my future. I’m lucky that I tend to do fairly well on these tests, but I wouldn’t say that I don’t “sweat” them…mostly because I think I peaked academically in 8th grade.

I wonder what a “no sweat” test would look like. Maybe if we got rid of all the “arcane math problems” and “graph reading” questions, and changed the categories to something like…

Geeky Political Trivia
Bruce Springsteen
The NBA
Great Moments in Ohio Sports Curse History
Terrible Puns

and the Essay Question: Sarah Palin is giving a press conference today. In a facebook note between 600-1,000 words, make as many jokes as you possibly can.

Would I pass that no problem? You Betcha.

Luckily for me, the first two math questions were the exception, and the rest of my 120 question exam focused on things I actually know. I’m pretty confident that my results will show that I know enough about fractions and basic American history to be trusted in front of 3rd graders.

More importantly though, I know how to answer when some smaralec asks “when are we going to use this?”

Coming back to visit my family in Madison has reminded me of some of the things that I miss…having free laundry less than an hour away, emergency food rations, my little sister’s hipness and jokes, etc. It also brought to my attention one thing that I absolutely do NOT miss…and thats our stupid family dog Sammy.

I never wanted the dog in the first place. We had cats a few times, and that was okay, because cats are cute, and more importantly, poop in the same place (hopefully, where you tell it to poop). If you don’t want to go for a walk at 2 AM, thats cool, the cat doesn’t want to either. In fact, the cat would like to claw your face at the very suggestion. However, my dad was dead set on having a canine companion, and my mother tragically capitulated. My Dad did an okay job with taking care of him, but now we’re stuck with him (well, more accurately, my mom is stuck with him. Succkaaaaaaaa!)

Sammy may be cute, but only spending a few moments with him reminded me of every reason why I couldn’t stand his company. He has no respect for things like personal space (I missed too Sammy, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to try and french kiss me. I’m not that kind of guy), or personal property (My church shoes are not chew toys!). He jumps on my mom’s couches, barks at every rodent and bird that invades our airspace, and apparently terrorizes the neighbors. His delinquency has gotten so bad, that my mom felt she needed to get outside help. She went out and hired a dog trainer, who stopped by the house last night.  

Anyways, apparently, when the dog is “bad”, the proper thing to do is stand up and yell BAAAHG at him. The louder and more guttural…the better. Apparently, I undermined the whole process terribly when I burst out laughing in the middle of the trainer’s 4th BAAAAHG or so. My little sister’s heart really isn’t in it either. When the dog gets on the couch, she can only muster a “baah”, before snuggling up with him. I’m having some trouble with it too. Who can feel like a tough guy making angry sheep sounds at something that looks like a poodle?

After a rousing bout of BAAAHGing at the guy, I took him out for a walk to the local bike path, so he could stretch his legs and use the bathroom. The walk is only a few blocks, but I feel like it tells me virtually everything I need to know about Madison.

First, Madison is cold….not cold like Columbus, or your freezer, or your ex-girlfriend. I’m talking a level of cold that few have ever experienced. Within a few instants of stepping outside with the dog, I felt a strange constricting sensation in my nose. Apparently, my nose hairs had frozen, and my ears and the rest of my exposed skin weren’t far behind. For my sake, I hope Sammy didn’t need to read a newspaper or anything before we went, or I’d become a human Popsicle.

We struggled through the 17+ inches of snow that had been dumped on us the night before to get to the bike path…I was struggling because I don’t own any boots, and Sammy was hurting even more, because he might not be 17 inches tall. Every snow drift was a mountain that required him to launch himself into the air like a pole vaulter. I almost felt bad for him…I’d be poorly behaved too I guess if I had to climb a mountain every time I wanted to take a leak in the winter.

Finally, we get to the bike path, where I can let the little guy run amok for a while, sniffing every patch of yellow snow, and adding his own masterstrokes. I got out my phone and tried to call my girlfriend, only to discover that I barely get one bar of service here in the frozen tundra. Coupled with the nasty winter winds, this lead to me only understanding every other word….the whole thing could have made a wonderful commercial.. (waitwait, did you just say you rented some porn movies with Ben??…..Who’s Ben?!?!? Hello??)

While I was focusing all of my energies on my poor phone…I neglected to notice that stupid Sammy had managed to wrap my legs completely with his leash…and was now about to break into a dead sprint. He took off, I slipped on a patch of ice, and just like that, flew 4 feet into the air and smashed into the snow, with my cell phone skittering down the path. I could barely make out some frantic sounds from the phone (No no, I said FOREIGN films with Jen! Hello? Can you hear me?!) before it cut out. Curse you Verizon Networks, Curse you Sammy, and Curse you Al Gore!! Where is your global warming when I need it?

Dragging me out into the tundra, where I’m certain to catch pneumonia or other tragic illnesses isn’t enough huh? Eating my shoes and my old playstation games wasn’t good enough for you? Now you have to rob me of my dignity, cell phone minutes, and part of my right hip?

BAAAAAAGH! BAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Maybe I just wasn’t putting my heart into it.

I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut these past few weeks, and I couldn’t seem to figure out why. Maybe I’m still suffering from some sort of post-Obama hangover. Maybe my reservoir of sarcasm, which I previously thought was bottomless, has unexpectedly gone temporarily dry. Maybe I’m reading the wrong books. All I know is that I hadn’t written any funny (or really…anything of consequence that wasn’t for school) in weeks, and I needed to do something to shake things up. When all other creative muses failed, I went back to the old standby, exercise.

This isn’t really new. About half of these little notes over the last several months were conceived when I was slapping pavement somewhere. Because of all that running, my shoes are now very much physically falling apart. My heels are starting to look like dog’s tongues in the summer, flapping off the rest of the shoe in the wind. They provide almost no support, so I feel like Zydrunas Ilgauskas after playing back to back games in the morning.

I typically run with an iPod, in an effort to forget how many laps I’ve done, or how tired I am. At first, this system worked out great, but I’ve logged so many miles with it that I’ve developed an unfortunate habit of mouthing the words to the music. Now, if I’m running by myself, or if I’m listening to some instrumental music, its no biggie. But every once in a while, I stop paying attention to the music, only to think crap…I hope I wasn’t mouthing the words to Sexual Healing to that old woman I passed two miles ago. (aaaaand that’s why I can’t run on Lane Ave. anymore).

That wouldn’t be my first awkward running moment. I was running just about every day when I was living in DC last spring. One day, when the temperature finally started to heat up, I decided to go for a jog along the Potomac River without a shirt. The Potomac isn’t the cleanest river in some parts, and I remember absentmindedly scratching my back whenever I ran around a bend that attracted a lot of bugs. About 3 miles in, as I was making my return to my apartment, a fellow jogger came up behind me, gave me a big high five, and yelled “YEEAAAH BOY!”

It took me a few seconds before I understood what the heck he was talking about. At first, I kind of wanted to run up and explain myself. “no no, see, I haven’t actually had a date in three months. I was just itchy. It’s not what you think. Honest”….but you know what? I didn’t. Let him think he wants. (I put a shirt on after that though).

I never really developed that kind of relationship with other forms of exercise though, like weight training. Not that I haven’t tried. This idea of actually, you know, getting in shape has kind of been that green light at the end of the bay for me. The ritual happens about every year. In the winter, I’ll look at myself in the mirror, become a little disgusted, and declare that this time, no, I’m being totally serious here, I will get in shape. I will grow a muscle or two. I won’t run for the sake of running, I will try and run fast. I will stick to a totally sweet routine for maybe a month and then I will pretty much go back to what I was already doing.

Last year, I even kicked it up a notch. I got suckered into buying one of those plastic tubs of protein powder (in my defense, it did come with a free T-shirt, which means one more day I don’t have to do laundry. It says MAX MUSCLE on it, and I wear it around the apartment when I feel like being ironic).

At any rate, now seemed like just as good a time as any to get up and fail at getting in shape, so I decided that instead of running along the Olentangy, I ought to go down to the RPAC, Ohio State’s gigantic gym, to try and get the ol’ endorphins flowin/sculpt my guns (were you able to read that sentence without laughing? Cause I sure wasn’t able to type it with a straight face).

The RPAC is not just any university gym…it is truly a modern marvel, a wonder to behold. To provide a sense of reference to my non-Ohio State friends, picture the size of American University. The RPAC is roughly that big. It is over 4 stories of basketball courts, treadmill after treadmill, and a dizzying array of weightlifting devices that extends as far as the eye can see. Like the Amazon is the only home of millions of unique specifies of plants and animals, I suspect the RPAC is the only place on earth where certain kinds of exercise equipment lives. If you told me there is a pool in the basement JUST for Underwater Hockey, I would believe you.

I only know how to safely operate a tiny fraction of the machines in the RPAC. I hoped to do a quick rotation of those machines, hit the rowing machine for a few min, and then run back to my apartment without breaking anything important.

I sit down at one of the chest-press machines, turn up the ol’ ipod, and get to work. Naturally, no sooner do I start, than what looks like two guys from the OSU Defensive Line sit down on the machines next to me, and proceed to set their weights so large they require scientific notation. We exchange glances. They smirk a little. I smile weakly, and proceeded to struggle lifting up my body weight. Whatever. I bet I have a higher SAT score.

This process continues, as I move about the floor. I sit down at a machine, and Atlas/Dallas Lauderdale/Chuck Norris slides in next to me and silently judges. I tried to play it cool, as I did maybe my 6^th bicep curl, I looked to the guy next to me and grunted 1001…1002..1003..ARGH and set the weight down. The guy looks over at me.

“Hey. I don’t know if you were listening, but I did over 1000. Its boring, but you know, its part of my life”.

Nothing. Nobody in the RPAC had seen Anchorman. Screw you guys, I’m running some laps and going home.

And so the cycle continues I guess….I’m sure I’ll stick with it for a few more weeks, and then break will come, and I’ll get distracted, go to Taco Bell, and all my work will be lost. Oh well. At least I think I snapped out of one funk.

I have quite a love/hate relationship with Ohio State. Their administration drives me crazy…because the school’s population is roughly that of Alaska, it takes forever to get anything done (do you have any idea how many Matt Brown’s there are??). Its often not very academically rigorous, and I’m stuck taking tons of general education classes that have nothing to do with what I want to study (I’m sorry, you can’t study Journalism this quarter, because your political science degree requires you to take Geological Sciences and Spanish).

However, for a few weekends in the fall, none of that matters….because there is nothing like a football Saturday in Columbus. This Saturday would be extra special, as the #3 Penn St was coming to town for a rare night game at the ol’ Horseshoe.

While some folks in our neighborhood started..ahem…”pregaming

Jumping around from city to city so much has made a lot of things difficult for me, like finding enough guys for a friendly game of pick up football. So, when my roommate asked me to play on intramural football team, I jumped at the chance, without knowing any important details.

…like knowing the name of the team, for example. IM sport team names are a great opportunity for a good joke…and our squad squandered the chance. No joke, I am now a part of the “Columbus Clap” (Catch it!). I feel like this might have been kinda funny say, in middle school…but did I really just pay 12 bucks for a T-shirt that has an STD on the front, and my name on the back? Is that what I have to do to make friends in this town?

Oh well. Whats a little public humiliation between friends right? Thats what college is all about!

Anyways, after a few haphazard practices (which basically consisted of us throwing around a football for 40 min, and then getting slurpees at 7/11), we had our first game on Sunday. It was…an experience.

Before I begin the tragic tale of the Columbus Clap, let me tell you a little bit about my own personal athletic history. The Good Lord has blessed me with a few talents, but it does not appear that athletic ability was one of them….or “luck” in general, now that I think about it. I played baseball for several years on habitual losing teams (and ended with a career batting average somewhere south of .200), and because I was about 135 pounds when I graduated high school, football and basketball were completely out of the question. Instead, I was the king of the marching band, and proud of it.

But nothing sums up the totality of my life playing sports like my ill fated foray into competitive swimming.

At my mother’s urging, I joined a summer swim team in high school. Our community pool resembled a pond (or perhaps an open sewer) much more than a swimming pool…it didn’t have chlorine, it was a pale green color, and animals still lived in it. Never has a swim team enjoyed a greater “home pool advantage”, then when we faced some of the yuppie country club swim teams.

Me (to the guys in the other lanes) “Yeah, don’t worry. We’ve only seen 3 snakes today”

Anyways, I braved these harsh conditions, and over the course of the season, improved from “utter and biblical suckitude” to “marginally respectable” in the 100 backstroke. This was enough to get me into a “playoff” swim meet. All of my friends, teammates, and everybody else would be there, to watch me try to not get in last.

Now, because of my crappiness, I never bothered to do things that real, competitive swimmers do to get an edge…like shave all my body hair, or wear a speedo. Those extra 4 seconds never mattered enough to me, so why sacrifice my pride? This practice continued all the way until that fateful swim meet.

We can all see where this is going can’t we?

I was near the front of my heat, but right after I kicked out of that flip turn into the final 25, disaster struck. I was backstroking like a madman, but my swim trunks decided to chill out by the wall. I swam out of my trunks. In the playoffs. DOING THE BACKSTROKE. No matter what else happens to me in life…no matter how many heartbreaks, no matter how many disappointments, no matter how many times the Cleveland Indians effing blow it…(JOSE EFFING MESA!!!)…nothing that bad could ever happen to me again.

So yeah. I don’t have good luck with sports. Keep that in mind here as I tell the rest of the story.

Hardship struck our little band of ragtags early, when two of our players couldn’t play for mysterious reasons. That left us down to 6…and IM football is a 7 on 7 game. We were worried for a little while, but when we saw that our opponent was ‘The Evan’s Scholars”, we relaxed a little bit. We were going against a team of honor’s college kids. How bad could it be?

We had NO idea. First, the Evans team had at least 15 players on it…enough for a completely seperate offense and defense. They had their own uniforms, their own plays, and many looked like they actually played some serious football in high school. We had two kids on our team who played in HS…and along with a few Madden wizards, some marching band kids, and a high school football journalist. We were screwed.

Evans scored on their very first play from scrimmage…a simple 10 yard pass play over the middle, followed by 5 of us missing tackles. It didn’t get any easier from there. We threw more passes to the other team than our own. Only one of us had cleats, so we all slipped on our butts in the wet grass. We got tired after 20 min, and were run over up and down the field. With just a few min left in the first half, we were down 26-0, and had no prospects of changing that.

Our goal quickly changed from “win the game”, to “lets at least score a touchdown”, to “uh, lets get to that 20 yard line over there”. Our library of trick plays that I had  researched (from the “Statue of Liberity” to the “Annexation of Puerto Rico”), went completely out the window. We’d go back to the huddle, and have a conversation similar to this”

So, whats the play? HB pass? Trips right? Post?

….

Eff it. Lets throw it downfield.

Somehow, we got a little bit lucky, and found ourselves a mere 5 yards from scoring a touchdown, and restoring the game to quasi-respectability, with a min left. In those 4 plays, we somehow managed to do everything wrong that was possible…dropped passes, blown routes, falling our on butt trying to cut a corner, and committing penalties that we weren’t even sure were real (What the hell is illegal touching?? We’re the Columbus Clap, not the Columbus Larry Craigs). We couldn’t score, and went into halftime down 26-0.

The second half wasn’t any better. Being a sportswriter at heart, I tried to keep a few stats in my head, and they weren’t pretty. Evans scored on nearly every possession. We threw at least 7 interceptions, and I’m pretty sure we got most of our first downs on penalties. At least our stupid name would lead to good headlines, once we get our butt kicked again (Evans Scholar’s beat bad case of the Clap, Page 4).

We ended up losing 56-6. Our bodies hurt from flinging ourselves all over the field in vain. We had no chance at victory, and unless we bring in some ringers, Tuesday doesn’t look so good either.

But I still had fun. Thats what these are all about right? Playing football and making some friends?

But I’m warning you guys. If you don’t get your crap together by week 3, I’m demanding a trade. I hear team “Thats What She Said” is looking for a Running Back/Sportswriter….