Unrelated things...

These things all happened yesterday...

1. On the train to a "career fair," (quotation marks explained below)I saw a van parked behind a building somewhere on the NorthSide. The van was painted up with the logo and trade dress of the Illinois Lottery (Have a Ball!), and sitting on the front dashboard were two giant novelty checks.

2. Chatting with a woman in line at one of the booths at the fair, she recognized the person at the table as someone she'd interviewed with earlier that morning.

3. Open letter to the gentleman on the el sitting across the car from me...the whole "tough guy hair net" thing complete with "you lookin' at me? Huh?" scowl is totally undermined by the fact that you are carrying your son's Thomas the Tank Engine backpack. Cute kid, but it's kinda hard (and unnecessary on a midmorning Red Line train) to be that much of a badass that way.

4. Still on the train, at one point (maybe Argyle) a woman quickly fumbled with her fancy phone-camera (don't know what kind, but a nice one) and started furiously taking pictures of...? No clue. There was nothing I could imagine anyone taking pictures of, unless the train was the only way she could get a high enough view of something. But then, why the suddenness to it? Wouldn't she know where she was looking if she was on some sort of photographic mission? My guess was she was looking for a car parked somewhere it shouldn't be.

5. Return trip, several hours later (I really need to ride the train more often, I guess), a rough-looking older guy is sitting in front of me. He's on his phone barking orders at someone in a gravelly, Eastern European accent that instantly reminds me of some kind of bad guy from 24. With that image in mind, I can see him texting. It's relevant that he's older, because a) his phone is pretty old, and b) it's taking him FOREVER to text. Naturally, I'm fascinated by what could be worth this much effort. When I manage to sneak a peek as he's finishes, it says "Sorry for the way I've been acting lately. I love you." I feel terrible for spying on him.

6. This last one, I need to tread lightly. Because there are all kinds of things wrapped up in this that I don't really want to go stomping around in. But here goes...So I'm standing in line to get in to this "career fair" (ok, explaining the quotes. Basically, if you're unemployed, avoid these things like the plague. If you want to spend your time more productively, make two phone calls to random companies inquiring about their open positions, then take a 3 hour nap. At least you'll be refreshed, instead of exhausted from getting dressed up, slogging downtown on the train, getting totally f***ing lost in the Merchandise Mart, standing in a giant line of desperate people only to find out that the 20 booths inside consist of 4 insurance companies hiring sales people, a retail chain hiring stock clerks, 2 or 3 companies looking to fill incredibly specific positions (you could tell the HR person just wanted out of the office for the morning), and 10 or 11 booths where they were actually trying to sell you something (get computer training! Get your bachelor's degree/GED! Enroll in the police academy! Have you considered the Coast Guard? Run your own home busines over teh interwebs!) Just. Don't. Go. Next time you go downtown, fling 10 copies of your resume into the air at random points on the sidewalk while passing large office buildings, you've got a better chance of landing something. Ok, I'm done now. Where was I? Right, standing in line). So I'm standing in line, waiting to "register" (don't get me started). Everyone has their resume out so the registration desk can take your information. Looking over the shoulder of the woman in front of me (hmmm, seems to be a theme...I was nosy yesterday, I suppose), I saw her name written in comically unprofessional 18 point type, the kind where the letters were all jagged and uneven. If she was a graphic designer, then maybe it works, I suppose, but it was the name itself that jumped out at me.
Her name was DeJaVu.
Yes, it was her first name, and yes, it was capitalized like that. Her last name was something common, plus I don't want to publish it here. Oh, and I almost forgot, there's an accent mark in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell if it was over the J, the a, or the V. And yes, only one accent mark. Again, I know this gets complicated when discussing these things, and gawd knows that a guy whose surname is pronounced "more head" (not to mention a first name that can be a title or a verb) has no business making fun of anyone else's name, but how much do you have to hate your child to name it something that ridiculous? How is she ever supposed to be taken seriously? How does she not strangle someone after hearing, for the 3,052,789th time "Haven't we met before?" In short, and to sum up: argh.

At least I don't have to pretend Andie MacDowell can act

Of course I watched Groundhog Day last night. What the hell else was I going to do? There are two movies which must be watched on the same day every year...Planes, Tranes and Automobiles must be watched on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving (the day the story starts), and this one. I can't believe TBS doesn't show it on a continuous loop every year the way they do A Christmas Story. What other movie has been named for something (in this case, a holiday), then has completely overtaken the meaning for it? When someone says "it's like Groundhog Day around here," they don't mean that there's a weird animal ceremony regarding the weather, they mean it's the same thing over and over, like the movie. People reference the movie far, far more than the actual day.

Anyway, even though it's Super Bowl week, and it was primary night (and let's face it, watching the local news doofuses try to be CNN or MSNBC and report on election returns while mixing in occasional commentary is high, high comedy), I watched it. First, a nitpick: really, Bravo? You took a 1 hr, 41 min movie, stretched it to two hours and yet still somehow had to cut the flapjacks line? D-bags. Whatever.

I should warn you that I'm a sucker for these types of things. I don't know if there's a good word for them, but I suppose you could call them Connundrum pieces. They aren't all good, but they are, to me at least, interesting. "What if you lived the same day over and over?" "What if you had 30 days to spend $30 million?" and sadly, even "What if you were on a bus that couldn't go below 40 mph or it would explode?" There's a book that my friend Ramon gave me a long time ago that's sort of a variation on the Groundhog Day theme, where a guy has a heart attack on his 40th birthday and wakes up 18 and in college again, and keeps living his adult life over and over, always having the same heart attack at the end no matter what. Whereas Groundhog Day was personal, this book ("Replay") got more into how this one guy could change things (could he prevent the JFK assassination? Could he make a gazillion dollars investing in Microsoft in 1975? And so on.) Hell, I even still like playing the "What would you do if you won the lottery?" game. But back to Punxsutawney...

It never fails to strike me what a sad movie it really is. Maybe it's because I buy into Phil's
character so completely, but the look on his face sometimes when he "wakes up" is excruciating. Harold Ramis says that originally, the idea was for Phil to spend something like 10,000 years reliving the day, but they considered that too cruel, so it's probably more like 10 years. I suppose that's enough time for him to learn the things he learned, but it really feels like longer to me, as though he lived an entire lifetime just on Feb 2nd. Watch it once and you'll laugh, watch it a couple times and it will become a Connundrum piece for you too...

But a strange thing happened while I was watching it last night (warning: Larger Point Ahead). I realized that in some ways, I had been patterning my own life after Phil's for the last 11 months or so. Ever since I've been unemployed, getting a new job was my "waking up on Feb. 3rd." And like Phil, I've tried a lot of different ways to make it ok for me to wake up tomorrow. By which I mean I subconsciously think "ok, if I can just do X, then I can move on." Over the last 11 months, X has mainly been based around "getting my s*** together" either figuratively or almost literally. Getting our financial house in order by finally, after 10 years, getting all my old 401Ks into the same place, and really, truly learning my lesson about being in debt and spending too much money seemed like the thing. Then it was "doing all that stuff around the house" like remodeling the upstairs and cleaning out the garage. Surely I'd get a job after I did all that. "Getting in shape," while certainly not complete, was a contender there for a while. I go to the gym a lot, which coincidentally enhances the Groundhog Day feel to the whole thing (I try to use the same locker and the same elliptical machine every time, and until yesterday I had no idea why). I could've sworn that the universe was going to give me a job recently when I decided that it was time to swallow my pride and apply for a temp job with the Census. The fact that I got a call for an interview for a real job the same day I decided to do that was a clear sign. I guess not.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that I need to let go of the crazy. I'm not a superstitious person (great line by Peyton Manning at Media Day yesterday "I'm not superstitious...well, maybe I'm a little bit stitious"...what, you thought there'd be no football at all in this post?), but for some reason I've been working under the unconscious assumption that two unconnected things could possibly be affecting each other. So no more. I do what I do, and that won't change whether or not I get offered a job. Period, end of story.

Unless, of course, watching the movie again, making this realization and letting go of it was what I needed to do all along in order to move on to February 3rd, which would be some remarkable irony if it happened on February 3rd, right?

Your move, groundhog...

Roman Numerology

So a lot of people have been asking me who I'm rooting for in the Super Bowl (ok, not really, that's just a construct to start this thing off). The bye-week story seemed to be that these were two evenly matched teams with no good-guy/bad-guy issues. There are no TOs to root against, no arrogant cheating-coach overdogs, and no aging superstars who want one last shot at a ring.


It also happens that these two teams are involved in the complex calculus of teams I root for in the NFL (yeah, I stole that line from King Kaufman, big deal. It's not like he's Rick Reilly, going around trademarking all his bits). So the reality is that no matter which team wins, I'll be ok with it for a change. I say "for a change," because I'm not sure the team I was rooting for has won more than 3 times; Giants in XLII, (and even that had a caveat), Bears in XX (I didn't live in Chicago yet, but c'mon, nobody outside of the state of Massachusettes was rooting for the Patriots), and Broncos in XXXII (only because I wanted Elway to get one so he'd be ahead of Marino, who I always thought was a punk and a loser). There were a few times I didn't really care that much (Patriots/Panthers in XXXVIII? Ugh, whatever. I was more interested in the long roman numeral than the game). There were also, of course, times when I cared a lot; two of them, to be exact (XVI and XXIII). Both times I was crushed by the same Notre Dame quarterback, cementing my hatred of two pro franchises, the one in San Francisco and the one in South Bend.

So anyway, this is the first time, at least in recent memory, that I've had two teams I liked in the game. How to distinguish between them? I mentioned a complex calculus, here's an in-no-particular-order ranking...



Bengals: Ok, this part isn't so complex. Still rooting for them pretty much no matter who they play. I grew up there, went to my first game there, and even attended a playoff game in the run-up to XXIII, the infamous "Joe Nash injury game" that you no doubt remember (Seahawks DL Joe Nash faked a leg cramp on every 3rd down to slow down the Bengals no-huddle offense). Or at least you would remember it if it hadn't happened 3 hours after the "Fog Bowl" at Soldier Field.



Bears: I have a really complex relationship with the Bears. I either want them to be 13-3 or 3-13. It has to do with the sports talk radio. It's cool when they're good, and schadenfreudtastic when they're bad. Seasons like this most recent one, where there are mixed expectations and mediocre results, are the worst. The hiring of Mike Martz as offensive coordinator makes me happy, because it means both 13-3 and 3-13 are in play.


Those are the easy ones, and I dare say the top 2. No matter who they play, I'm rooting for them, and if they play each other, there's no doubt I'm rooting for the Bengals. Then it gets tricky. There are a bunch of teams I don't care about, and a few I root against actively (PIT, BAL, CLE, DET and MIN for divisional reasons, SF for historical reasons, WAS for racist nickname reasons). There are some who will note an omission in that last set of parentheses and maintain I can never really be a Bears fan because I don't hate Green Bay with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Those people are stupid. Green Bay, in theory, is what all sports franchises should be. Publicly owned, part of the community, smaller market that actually gets behind the team (I'm looking in your direction here, Jacksonville). The others I root for:

San Diego: Yeah, ok, it's mostly about the throwback uniforms, but what I really like is the restraint they've shown in not becoming the Los Angeles Chargers.

Tennesee: Hard to explain this one, but I like the fact that they have had the same coach for 15 years.

But neither of them are in the Super Bowl, now, are they? I'm clearly procrastinating here. So let's get into it...

I really should dislike the Colts. They were a classic bedrock franchise of the NFL, and then they packed up in the middle of the night and moved to Indianapolis, ripping the hearts out of Barry Levinson and everyone else in Baltimore. Peyton Manning destroyed my Wildcats in a bowl game (something I never forgave Keyshawn Johnson for). They play in a dome. They once employed Jim Harbaugh. But here's the thing...screw Baltimore. First of all, it was 25 years ago, you really should be over it by now. Second of all, you guys went and stole another team, so you got your blood revenge (for which I thank you, because you made Cleveland miserable, and that makes me happy). Manning? Eh, it was the Citrus Bowl. I was so hung over for that game, I don't remember it much. As for Harbaugh, well, everyone makes mistakes.

But Indy has a lot going for it, both as a team and as a fan base. They're right in between my other favorite teams, three hours from Chicago, two from Cincinnati. I once spent the Friday afternoon before a game day in downtown Indianapolis. It was a regular season game, but if I recall correctly it was fairly important. Walking around Monument Circle and the surrounding few blocks, I was stunned. Almost half of the people walking around were wearing Colts jerseys. And yeah, a lot of them were #18, but there were a ton of Marvin Harrisons and Edge James and Dwight Freeneys also. Of those not wearing jerseys, there were a ton of Colts sweatshirts and hats, and even a couple of guys wearing horseshoe ties. And not only was this not the playoffs, this was a Friday. One last note on Indy fans. You'll rarely see Manning give the "quiet down" wave, because those guys act, when the Colts are on the field, like they're at a golf tournament. Once the play is over, they applaud, even cheer, for about 10 seconds, then it's back to near silence. That's why any time you watch a Colts home game, you can hear everything Manning says.

As for the on-the-field stuff, the Colts don't do much that's fancy. They don't run guys around or shift guys four times before the snap. In fact, they seem like they only have 3 or 4 formations. If Wayne is in the slot left for the first play of the drive, he's probably there for the entire drive. There used to be a lot of whining about Manning's machinations and gyrations before the play, but I think people understand now that it works. It's scary how well Manning reads defenses, and how well the offense has been tailored to his strengths.

New Orleans? It's one of my favorite places to visit, which is not exactly a stunning insight. But I should dislike the Saints primarily because of a really picky thing. "Who Dat?" is really similar to the Bengals rallying cry of "Who Dey?" While "Who Dat?" has been around at Southern University and/or Alcorn State forever, the Saints reportedly didn't start using it until 1983, while the Bengals started with the "Who Dey?" in 1981. Now everyone assumes that Cincinnati stole it from New Orleans, because what the hell would Cincinnati be doing with something before New Orleans? But that's stupid, and I actually think it's kind of cool, in the age of the generic stadium with the Jumbotron that has to tell you when to cheer with the same graphics package that every other team has, to have something unique like that. As for the fans, I think the national media makes more of the whole "lifting the city up after Katrina" thing than the locals do. But they're into it, and they don't really seem all that bandwagon-y. It seems like how you feel about the Saints determines how you feel about Reggie Bush. I thought the guy handled it perfectly when he came into the league the season after Katrina. He negotiated sponsorship deals for himself that demanded the company make significant contributions to the city as well. He gave his his share of merchandising revenue to relief efforts (thus why I was willing to own something with the name "Bush" on it in 2006), and he was very conscious of doing good without calling a whole lot of attention to the good he was doing. How many 23 year olds can handle something like that? Ok, sure, it was probably a shrewd agent, and yeah, it makes for a good joke that he didn't need the money, he still had plenty left from his days at USC, but still...

As for the on-the-field, dang is Sean Payton good. They throw like nine guys at you, all with different skills, all of them really good at what they do. Their defense is exciting, in that they give up a lot of big plays, but they make a lot of big plays. In other words, they are the perfect opponent for an entertaining Super Bowl.

As I write this, I realize something. The point of this whole thing was to tell you who I was rooting for, and truth be told, I haven't figured it out yet. I'm leaning Colts, but it's a very, very slight lean, and it may have more to do with my prediction than my feelings.

So let's get that part out of the way. Every schlub with a picks column, or a football blog, or an internet connection and a blogspot account (present company included) is going to make an "official" pick. I'll go one better, I'll make a prediction about the predictions. A whole lot of guys who do this for a living are going to look at the line (hovering between Colts -5 and -6, depending on where you look) and take the ultimate copout by saying "Hmmm this feels like a field goal game" and thus default their pick to the Saints. It's a copout because they're really just picking a close game, which is much safer than saying either that the underdog will win outright or the favorite will win big. Since nobody really cares about my pick, I'm willing to do that. I try to make my Super Bowl pick as soon after the Championship games are over, just because you get so much crap over the next two weeks, you can talk yourself into anything. Freeney's injury is big, but it's not as big as we all think. It won't matter that much in the end. The Colts just have too much offense. They have shown they can win 14-12 games and 45-38 games. I think this one ends up Colts 38, Saints 24.

That's what I think will happen. Is that what I want to happen? I'm surprised to say, I still don't know...