It's been fun to tell people here that I've been catching various football games and seeing their completely confused reactions. After all, I have never talked about football in my life before. And goodness knows I didn't even know what an "endzone" was three weeks ago. For those who care, the Lions game this Sunday was amazingly dramatic, and I also caught the mess of an end of the Packers game last night.
It's been interesting thinking about the process of learning this new skill of football spectating. I think I'm starting to get it, although I have to focus enough to follow that it's hard for me to exult (in sympathy) or despair (in sympathy) in realtime. There's a lot going on. It reminds me of figuring out Mathcamp travel or other Mathcamp logistics for the first time, where there are so many balls in their air to juggle that my first priorities are figuring out what the balls even are, and whether there are some that are more important than others to focus on at a given time.
Unrelated, but amusing: today's exchange with Verizon. My favorite part is when he shares his reasoning for why he believes what I'm saying.
Verizon rep: Have you considered a nice new smart phone?
Me: Nope.
Verizon rep: Wouldn't you be happier if you had a slide out qwerty keyboard?
Me: Nope.
Verizon rep: To do all your texting?
Me: No. I'm happy as is.
Verizon rep: Is there anything that we can do to make you happier? Because we want to keep you as a Verizon customer.
Me: If you would believe me when I say I'm happy and not act as though you don't believe me, that would make me happy. One way to not keep me around is to not believe what I say.
Verizon rep: Well, I do believe you're happy because 99% of the customers I have dealt with in the past year, actually, 22 months, that I have worked for Verizon have been happy.