West Virginia.

About a week ago, I got the idea that I wanted to go paragliding - this is when you run off mountains strapped to a fabric wing and let the wind carry you. Because I couldn't find Paragliding for Dummies on Amazon, I decided to actually take some lessons, so Han - my most foolish friend - and I drove 6 hours into West Virginia to meet Dwayne McCourt, the area's premier paragliding instructor.

Here are some thoughts from the trip:

West Virginia local cuisine is delicious.

But there are consequences.
Mountain biking is hard. There is more walking than biking.
Happy cows look like this.
Country humor.
Sketchy dudes are everywhere.
Paragliding is not easy.

24 Hours.

The poet Rilke said about a self-portrait, “He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there‘s another dog.” I’m not sure what it means - I’m guessing something about people who are less enthralled with themselves than I am - but it inspired me to go to Philadelphia by myself last week, as an experiment.

My hypothesis is that I’m in love with myself. And to prove that, I needed to spend time alone with myself.

It occurred to me that I have never been alone for a whole 24 hours. And I don’t even mean like cabin in the woods, my best friend is a squirrel, Ted Katzinsky kind of alone.

I just mean hang out by myself, sunrise to sunrise - no coworkers, no friends and lovers, no acquaintances casual or intimate.

So I packed my weekender - a giant green thing that’s seen its share of shenanigans - booked a nonrefundable hotel room, fought through snow, wind, fire, and orcs / hopped on the Chinatown bus, and spent the weekend in Philly.

Here are some of my reflections:

9 degrees is fucking cold.

Drinking alone in a gay bar is kind of sad.

Drinking alone in an Irish bar is kind of impossible. Someone inevitably talks to you.

Taking pictures of yourself is super hard.









Donovan McNabb is a controversial figure.

Overheard conversation on the bus: “Ohmygod, isn’t Fatosh weird? Like, he’s sooo indescribably weird! Like, he is so weird, I can’t even describe it.” I need to stop talking like that.

I have embarrassing taste in music. As I was getting into my seat on the bus to Philly, I drop my phone/mp3 player, the earphones yank loose, and the entire bus is regaled with Michael Buble. Embarrassing.

HBO is awesome. I had it in my hotel room, and I almost didn’t make it out the door after I checked in.

Chinatown buses are awesome. Only $30 bucks roundtrip to Philly!

Chinatown buses suck. They overbook their buses and are rude about it!

I'm a lot more timid when I don't have enablers around me.

I miss my buddies.

Selfish.

My good friend and fellow Indianapolis Colts fan – I’ll call her Burma – just informed me that she cannot watch the Colts vs. Ravens Divisional Round Playoffs this Saturday, because she has to attend a wedding that day.

The degree of narcissism required to schedule your wedding during the fourth most important event of the entire year – following my birthday, Superbowl, and Wrestlemania – appalls me down to the fingerprints at the end of my fingertips.

Before you say, “Whatever, bitch, people don't care that much about football,” let me hit you with a few numbers.

Let’s take the NY Jets vs. Cincinnati Bengals Wildcard game last Saturday. That game received 16.9 rating – which means that 16.9% of all households with televisions, not just the ones watching TV, were watching the game. This is in contrast with a typical Saturday. Without football, the highest rated show Saturday show is America's Most Wanted, which only gets about 1.5%, depending on who is being wanted.

If 17% of people with TVs, many whom wouldn't even be watching TV on a Saturday if there was no football, tuned into two mediocre, lucked-into-a-playoff-spot teams play, how many would you guess will tune into Colts vs. Ravens – an epic battle between the NFL’s best offense and its hardest hitting defense? Let’s conservatively estimate 25%.

And unless the engaged pair are Amish, we can assume that everyone at the wedding have TVs. Which means that a quarter of the attendees want to watch the game but can’t because of the nuptials. You wouldn’t have your wedding on Passover, and Jews represent a much smaller percentage of the population than football fans.

Some of you are saying, “But Carol, American Idol gets about the same ratings – does that mean people can’t schedule their weddings during that?” And my answer is in three parts.

1) American Idols is lame, so it’s different.

2) An NFL playoff game isn’t some show you can just TiVo and enjoy the contrived entertainment at your leisure. It is a play-by-play, second-by-second, realtime event, that happens only once a year and upon which everything hinges.

3) Unlike the popular shows on TV, NFL viewers cross demographics, and represent a true vivisection of the American population. The age, income, gender, race, and other indicators match our national averages. So unless your wedding guestlist consists mainly of teenage girls, you wouldn’t be selfish to have it when American Idol is on.

So, to the future Mr. and Mrs. You Suck – after your marriage inevitably fails due to your shared selfishness, have your next wedding during baseball season.

National Equality March.

Last Sunday, Erin, Helen, and I went to the National Equality March in honor of our friends Sue and Amanda who were renewing their vows the same day in Vermont.

Helen dragged me up at the ass-crack of dawn/10:30am. We had been at Grand Central this night before until the lights turned on, and I was having trouble looking at myself in the mirror.

Anyway, I managed to rally, and here are the highlights:

Best Poster: “I want to marry. All I need is a law and a man.”

Overheard Conversation:
“What did you do last night?”
“I went to the strip club.”
“Did you strip?”
“No, I didn’t feel like it.”

Most Ridiculously Dressed: Not the drag queens, not the fairies, not the leather-clad Bears - but Helen in her 4 inch-heeled boots and two giants bags. We did not get far.

Awkward Moment: when Erin asked a blind man to take a picture of us.

Holy-Shit-There-Is-A-God Moment: When a fucking rainbow appeared in the sky over us as we were waiting for the march to begin. It hadn’t rained. I need to go to church.

I Cried When: we walked past a soldier in uniform standing with his partner beside him. I bet if I asked, he could tell me something about having balls.

Runner-Up Posters:
“Jesus hung out with 12 guys and a prostitute. He is more like me than you.”
“I paid cash for your clunker, I refinanced your home, I bailed out your bank. I want equal rights!”
“Needed: Woman to marry gay foreign husband so he can stay.”
“Love is love, stupid!”

WTF Moment: walking past the pro-life people. I wasn’t aware that gay people were having a lot of unwanted pregnancies.

Pirates.

Somali pirates strike again - two skiffs fired on a French navy vessel after apparently mistaking it for a commercial boat.

One skiff fled, and the French ship pursued the second one in an hour-long chase.

Ok fine. So maybe the Somali pirates need some lessons in pirating, or like glasses.

But that's not the story. The story here is the appalling ineptitude of the French military.

Five pirates on a fucking skiff eluded the French navy vessel for an entire hour, while another skiff eluded them entirely.

In case you are wondering if a skiff isn't what you think it is, here is a picture:

(captured pirates on their skiff)

The fucking thing barely looks like it can float, much less elude this:
(La Somme, the French vessell that pursed above skiff for an hour)

Incredible.

Three Month Rule.

My buddy—let’s call him “Smorgasberg”—just got dumped because of his now ex-girlfriend’s Three Month Rule.

Basically, it takes three months of dating to find out if you are compatible/want the same things for the future. And if, after that time you find that you aren’t/don’t, then – break up.

Also called the I’m-Not-Wasting-My-Hotness-While-It-Lasts-On-This-Shit Rule. Not to be confused with No-Sex-For-The-First-Three-Months-Of-Dating-So-I-Know-You-Respect-Me Rule favored by prude women and pre-op transsexuals.

In Smorgasberg’s case, he wanted to go to China and dig in the dirt for bones, she did not. Three months passed—he still wants to go and she still does not.

So she dumped him. On his birthday. That is a woman who knows what she wants.
This is the fourth best reason to break up with someone—after domestic abuse, cheating, and boyfriend not wanting to watch awesome Adam Sandler movies (not in that order).

It is delightfully Machiavellian, and I think chicks everywhere need to adopt this rule. Because time is limited and inertia will gangster you.

You don’t want to be fighting the same fights, tabling the same questions, rationalizing the same dissatisfactions indefinitely. And waiting, hoping for someone to change their mind, change their life, change their personality is just a waste of time.

I plan to follow this rule rigorously, and if me and the dyslexic egomaniac ever make it to three months, I’ll let you know.

Sunday.

Football makes me a bad person. It makes me belligerent, petulant, vindictive, irrational, manic, and uncouth. It makes me drink too much on Sundays, scream obscenities in front of strangers; sometimes it fills my heart with hate, and once it made me cry.

But oh hot damn, I love it so much. Nothing in life—not breakups or makeups, layoffs, first dates, traveling across oceans, or even tequila —can incite in me the searing despair and unbridled euphoria of fourth down conversions, red zone fumbles, booth reviews, overtime coin tosses, unstoppable Peyton Manning drives, acrobatic Polamalu interceptions; the seconds that change everything.

This girl once told me that I was the shallowest person she had ever met, that all I ever did was drink, party, and shop. And then she tried to get my boyfriend to dump me. Still, I don’t remember hating her as much as I hated Phillip Rivers after the Chargers beat the Colts at the playoffs.

I care too much, but before last night, I thought there was a line.

I thought that when my girl Erin’s Redskins—a team she grew up watching with her father, a team that I had arbitrarily decided to hate—lost to the Detroit Lions, I wouldn’t openly taunt her. I thought that because Erin is one of my all time best buds, because she’s helped me through three breakups, makes me dinner a few times a week, lets me pick out the first song on the Jukebox at Stetsons, rationalizes my fuck-ups, and cabbed home with me on Saturday night to make sure I got upstairs without falling—that because of these things, I would muster up the restraint to not gloat gleefully over her team’s humiliation. That I wouldn’t say things like “I’m no expert, but I think the reason the Redskins lost is because they are not good at football.”

Well I thought wrong, and guess what, I’m not even a little sorry. Because the Redskins suck.

Go Lions! 14-2 :)