Epic-level Weakness
About two months ago, Bobby and I got in the mail from Comcast (our cable television and Internet provider) an envelope. I, of course, thought it was a bill, but when we opened it, we found a voucher for four free Orioles' baseball tickets.
Bobby and I are shameless sports fans. We love our home teams. I bleed purple for my Ravens, but I love my Orioles too, even though they usually don't love me back and never do very well. (Although they had an *awesome* start to the season, they are back in fourth now ::sigh::) So four free O's tickets was immediately declared as "Te Hotness."
We had a choice of like six games. When Comcast entered into the deal, they obviously chose the teams that were expected to do poorly this season and not have a huge turnout. In other words, there were no NY Yankee games or Boston Red Sox. But they underestimated the White Sox a bit, and they were one of the games available and quickly became one of the best teams this year in baseball.
Given that--and that it was the only Friday game available (and Bobby gets up early for work during the week)--we chose that game to use our voucher.
We drove into downtown B'more, got to the stadium forty-five minutes early, and stood in a huge (read: frikkinyuge) line for the box office, free ticket voucher in hand. The place was packed. A good number of the people in line had free vouchers too. (Comcast is the number one cable/Internet company in Baltimore.) We cheerfully waited. The white trash kids behind us in line were getting on my nerves--they were determined to find out if ID was required to use the vouchers; I think they may have acquired theirs nefariously, as they were not the age where they would have homes in which to install cable and thus be eligible for the voucher--but I forced the bad, evil 'gund to be quiet for once and remained cheerful. Of course, accompanying us was our good mate Harry Potter, so there was plenty of opportunity to wile away the evening, quoting nerdy movies. And I was going to an O's game, for free! I had no reason to be mad.
We got up to the box office, happily handed them our voucher, and...standing room only.
I think the collective drops of our jaws must have been a sorry sound indeed.
Orioles' games do not sell out. Ravens, yes. Orioles? Excuse me while I pick myself up from laughing.
And, as packed as the place was and as many people as there were with vouchers, Bobby said, "We're not going to be able to see sh*t in standing room only," and so turned our sorry Bal'more hon asses around and wandered morosely away.
There's only one game left on the schedule and, incidentally, we have tickets one of Bobby's coworkers gave him for the next night.
Potter declared it perfectly: "This is epic-level weakness."
To add insult to injury, we decided to wander the Inner Harbor for a while, and Bobby got the idea to go see the sea lions at the National Aquarium. They are alongside the building, in an outdoor pen, overlooking the harbor. So we walked down there, but they are doing construction on the Aquarium, and they aren't there anymore.
Epic-level weakness.
I, of course, began my poetry-of-profanity, muttering as we walked about. The movie A Christmas Story describes it best: "He wove a tapestry of profanity that, as far as I know, still hangs over Lake Erie." That is me. I admit that I cuss a lot. I am very professional at work, and it builds up until I get home, open the door, and say to Bobby, "So how the fuck are you?"
No, it's not *that* bad :) But I was rolling some interesting combinations of swear words on Friday. Blame it on the fact that all my friends are obnoxious men except two: my sister-in-law, who is worse than me, and my nerdy-friend Claire, who is credited with last Friday's tag-team-harassment of our co-nerd Dave and the comment that I am not going to repeat again about one's affinity for hair-pulling and rearward penetration techniques :D
Finally, we ended up in the huge Barnes & Noble on the Harbor, which finally brightened my spirits a bit. Books have that power! I camped out in the Tolkien section for quite a while. They had a book called something like The Tolkien Reader's Companion--basically, a dictionary of names and places. Of course, who did I look up first? Fëanor! The author was pretty spot on, but s/he credited him definitely as the maker of the palantíri, and as far as I know, it is only said that he is "possibly" their creator. So that made me skeptical, although I am hardly a canon expert myself. I looked up "Maedhros" and "Maglor" and finally realized how stupid I was being--what could s/he tell me that I didn't already know? it was mostly Sil stuff--and so put the book away and spent another long spell in the role-playing section with Potter, looking at hard-to-find D&D books that I am too poor and unwilling to buy. Blame the feeling that using other people's stories/magical items/rule variations is akin to wearing their dirty underwear.
So the evening wasn't a total bust, but we could have driven five miles down the street to the B&N in Ellicott City for the same thing. Oh well. How's the saying go? There's no such thing as a free lunch--or ballgame either, apparently.
On a sports-related note: Ravens' training camp starts tomorrow! W00T! I am a hopeless football fan! Blame the year the Ravens won the Super Bowl. I hated football before that point. Of course, I didn't understand a bit about the rules. I told Bobby that football was a bunch of fat guys lining up Revolutionary War-style and running into each other. My heart changed the moment that Shannon Sharpe ran for a 98-yard touchdown in the 2000 playoffs. I was on my feet, yelling and screaming, and it was like "Wha--?! Who is this girl? I hate football!" Apparently not.... :)
So Bobby explained to me about downs and field goals and running and passing plays (I wasn't so hopeless that I didn't know what a touchdown was), and now, Sundays find me on my couch, yelling at the referees, who everyone knows hate the Ravens because they were owned by Art Modell and the NFL commissioner Taglia-boo-boo still resents him from moving the team from Cleveland.
Conspiracy theory, anyone? :D