Football and Hot Wings

Worked on The Project today, and wrote a couple small things, one of them being this. 

I love the Super Bowl. It gives me a chance to catch up on my reading.

There’s a proverbial bandwagon coming my way, and I’m going to jump on it. For those of you who don’t follow football, don’t be alarmed: neither do I. I am aware of its presence, and I’m sure it’s on all the time, and I’ve even been to Super Bowl parties, where my main objective was to eat and have a good time. One does not have to follow football in order to do this.

My first husband was addicted to football, as well as any other sport that was in season. During the sports season he would sit next to the fireplace so he could blow his cigarette smoke up the chimney (under the mistaken impression that it would then not affect me, but he was so wrong) and drink beer by the caseload. He amused himself by building pyramids of beer cans which could easily reach five feet in height. Notice I said “during the sports season,” which means, as far as I can tell, 365 days a year, and he would panic at the possibility of missing one day.

Once I escaped from this marriage (by means I won’t go into here, but rappelling may have been involved) I married a man with little interest in sports. This was fun and entertaining.  He would watch football, but it wasn’t his life. He had other things he was far more interested in, and I thought this was a fabulous way to live. That one didn’t work out either, but he’s getting an entire book written about him so we won’t go into details here.

And now Charming Husband (CH). Football is not CH’s favorite sport. Baseball is. He loves baseball with a passion, but not as much as he loves me. This is a nice change from husband number 1. During baseball season CH is active in fantasy leagues, and he watches games . . . if they don’t interfere with anything else going on in his life. If it’s a really important game, he’ll Tivo it and ask me not to tell him the outcome. Not that I would know, of course, but it’s nice that he might suspect me of being aware of my surroundings. He’s very attentive to his alma mater’s football season, and he plays fantasy football. I once asked him what he gets for winning, for putting so much energy into this, and he answered with, “Bragging rights.”

“Can you trade those in for valuable prizes?”

The answer was no.

That’s okay. I engage in some pretty pointless activities myself.

Husband number 2 and I would watch the Super Bowl for the ads. #2 was an advertising and marketing guy, and he loved seeing what was going on out there.

CH watches the Super Bowl for the game itself, and because it’s a very good excuse for us to sit around and do nothing while eating hot wings. It’s not as if we need an excuse – who would notice? But just sitting around seems to warrant some kind of explanation. Also it’s a good time for me to take a nap and catch up on my reading, and an excuse to eat hot wings. I usually avoid fried foods, but there’s something about Super Bowl that just cries out for hot wings.

And it’s a tradition, of sorts, here in our household, even if I don’t care about the sport itself. I gather it’s like that in other households too. Some may decry the senseless violence and pointlessness of playing a game that doesn’t, in the end, make the world a better place, but maybe all we need sometimes is something to occupy us so we’re not making the world a worse place for the time being.

I say, “hand me those hot wings, and that book over there,” and all is well.