Sunday, January 18, 2004
PATRIOTS ARE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!
Ha ha! Super Bowl XXXVIII, here we come! Carolina Panthers, here we come! Oh, t'was a most glorious game to watch. I was quite beside myself for much of the time. Ty Law (who, may I remind you, went to the University of Michigan) had three interceptions. Our defense in general was spectacular, as it generally has been this year. They were intercepting and sacking Peyton Manning all over the extremely messy field. Of course, having Tom Brady throw in his steady, intelligent, level-headed way pretty much all game was a great help as well. That bizarre safety we got when they chucked the ball over the punter's head had me squealing in joy, much to Amanda's amusement (I was watching it in her room, since I no longer have a TV. More on that later in the blog).
That said, I must confess to some worries. Tedy Bruschi came limping off the field at one point, which is most decidedly not a good thing. OK, so we held off the Colts for the rest of the game without him. But let us bear in mind that the Colts were already pretty demoralized at that point, whereas Carolina is going to be riding high. We've got a whole lot of really good players on defense... Law, McGinest, Vrabel, Washington, Hamilton, Phifer, and so on... so it's not as though the entire defense is riding on one player, but Bruschi really is a key point. I don't know, I just hope that he's playing in peak condition by the time the Super Bowl rolls around.
Also, Vinatieri made a lot of field goals (5) in this game. Yes, great, shows that our kicker knows what he's doing, which is a good thing. But the worrying bit is that an awful lot of those field goals came when the Pats had stormed down the field, gotten into goal range, and been unable to turn the drive into a touchdown. We still got points, thanks to Vinatieri, and we beat the Colts anyways. But is that going to fly in the Super Bowl? I am concerned. Most of those drives really, really ought to have ended in touchdowns. I'm not sure why they didn't (sudden spurts of concentration on the part of the Colts defense, complacency on our side of the ball, whatever), but that's definitely something that's going to need to be looked at most carefully before Feb. 1.
I don't particularly like that Brady threw his first interception in 10 home games during this one. OK, so Manning threw a whole heck of a lot more (4). I still don't like it. There were a couple of throws by Brady that probably should have been picked off but weren't. Now, that might have been because of alert Patriots smacking the potential interceptors, and it might have been because of the snow making things slippery, but it is a fact that Brady got really lucky a few times today. I don't like the idea of the Pats relying on luck against the Panthers. Hopefully Brady'll have his wits about him in Houston, and there won't be any issues.
But hey! WE WON! I put a tracing paper Patriots symbol on my window, and a large Go Pats sign on my door. Oh yes, I am excited. Headin' to Houston! Two Super Bowl trips in three years!
A side note, who else noticed the fedoras on Deion and Jim before the game? Deion is always well dressed, so it didn't surprise me to see him wearing the best hat ever created, but I will admit that Jim surprised me. Both looked good in them, thusly adding further proof to my theory that every guy looks hot in a fedora. I spoke with Chris after the game about the fedoras, as he had also noted them with glee.
OK, now, a lot has happened since I last properly blogged, so I am afraid the entry's just going to get longer from here.
Thursday night was the guest artist lecture. This week it wasn't so much a lecture as a performance. The artist is called Dred, and she is a 'gender illusioning woman'. A drag king, to be more precise. Her entire spiel was about assumptions about gender, and things of that nature. I know, it sounds lame, but it was actually really, really good. She was very good at dressing up to look like a man (and she made a very attractive man too, I might add), and she was quite funny. The crowd reacted to her quite well.
After that I had dinner with Heather, Helena, and Yoko (she lives in MoJo). We nearly perished in the extreme cold, but we lived to feed ourselves. We decided to make it a 'thing' and have dinner together every Thursday night. Helena was extremely hyper for some reason, which is saying something, since she's very high-energy even on her most sedate days. I'm certain the singing and shouting coming from our table annoyed everyone else in the place, but such is life. It was highly amusing.
On Friday night I did a whole lot of nothing. I spent most of the night sitting next door in Sara and Elisa's room with them and Kevin. We watched some old movie called Now and Then, for lack of anything better to do. Much chattage was had, and Kevin appropriated my phone for a very long while, causing me to attack him out of fear that he was doing evil things to it. Well, he deserves such suspicion. He got smacked around a little, and I got my phone back with none of the address book altered, so everyone won. Elisa spent the night playing with one of my kneaded erasers. She likened the consistency of it to 'cement poop', which I find confusing, but there you are.
Guess what also happened on Friday night? *insert deliriously happy giggling here*
The roommate moved out!
Yes! It is the sovereign truth! I guess one of her friends in Alice Lloyd (the dorm next door) had a single, and this semester he moved into his frat. So she worked it that she got his room! She moved all of her stuff out on Friday night, with the exception of a bunch of boxes and trash that she kindly left me. Didn't even say goodbye. I was sitting next door with Sara, Elisa, and Kevin the entire time, and by the time I got back to the room, all traces of her were gone (excepting, of course, the garbage). Our rooming history concluded as delightfully as it began.
My joy at her departure knows no bounds. I will be able to sleep on weeknights! I can listen to my music whensoever I please. No more bad rap! No more Britney Spears! Never again shall my rest be disturbed by the TV or the brightness of a computer screen or the strident ringing of a cell phone at odd hours. Never again shall I have to worry about kicking unwelcome visitors out, or about waking up to their odious presence. Never again shall I have to suffer the choking smell of her coming in after a bout of heavy smoking.
I don't know if housing is going to stick me with a new roommate or not. But no one's said anything to me yet, and I'm rather hoping that they don't. Lord knows I deserve a single after the horrors of this semester, and lord knows I could use it, with the batshit insane schedule I've got now. People I've spoken to tend to think that, this late in, it's not real likely someone will move in here, but we'll see. Anyways, I'm going to utilize the room as though it's going to be mine and mine alone for the duration of the year, and we'll just deal with what comes as it does.
The room is now wonderous beyond belief. It seems much larger now, despite the fact that the exact same furniture is present in the exact same locations. As one of my hallmates said, though, it's a wonder that two people ever fit into it. I put some lovely bright blue sheets on her old bed, got a couple of pillows, and brought out my fleecy Swampscott Big Blue blanket. It has now been reclaimed and made into a couch for everyone's seating convenience.
This is why I no longer have a TV, see. I probably will have one by the end of the week, though. Shelby said it was like a horrible marriage that never should have happened and has just now ended in divorce: we were sniping at each other the entire time, we both complained about the other to our respective friends, and when she went she took the TV and left me all her garbage. Ah, the amusement of analogy.
The one problem, other than that of the TV (which will swiftly be fixed), was that the walls around her former living space were now entirely bare, and made the room look depressingly unlived-in. I don't really have any big art I could put up there, and a lot of what I do have is pencil work that wouldn't help matter much. I didn't have any extra posters either. I needed a quick decorating fix. What to do?
On Saturday night me, Shelby, Pam, and Sara went to the Auto Show in Detroit. It was absolutely insane. The place was huge and was packed with people (and, unnervingly, cops). We stayed for several hours, and there's no way we saw everything. There were a lot of concept cars that had me going bug-eyed at the skillful industrial design that went into them. There were a lot of cars in general, actually. Everyone you could think of was there... Toyota, Ford, Mazda, Ferrari, Nissan, Lincoln, BMW, Honda, Chevrolet, GM, Dodge, Jeep, Jaguar, Volkswagen, Volvo, Lexus, Aston Martin, Hyundai, Maserati, Chrysler, Porsche, Cadillac, and countless others. There were some there I had never even heard of, like Scion, or Saleen.
We went around and gawked at the nice cars, and sat in some of them. We saw a group of people sitting in one of the big SUVs. They had turned the radio on and tuned it to a rap station, and were enjoying themselves by rocking out in the middle of the auto show. We had a laugh at that.
The Jeep area was very atmospheric. They had fake lampposts and cliffs and under foot they had green carpet meant to be fake grass. We were highly amused by this. They also had a waterfall set up that spelled out JEEP in the water. Quite impressive, in a cheesy kind of way.
I probably can't convey the atmosphere of the place accurately unless you were there. It was enormous, and packed, and there were shiny cars everywhere, and it frelling rocked. I, of course, took pictures, which you may peruse here. If you already saw them (I had them up last night), you may want to look again. See, I asked Dave to look through them and ID them all for me, which he very kindly did, including intelligent and insightful comments on each. So, armed with this wealth of information, I've updated all the captions. Well worth viewing again, I should think, now that all is filled with car information and incomparable Dave wisdom.
Anyways, after the Auto Show we went to Meijer, because that's we do here in Michigan. That's when I got the pillows for my new seating area, and I got some more yogurt and popsicles (which, despite the obscenely biting cold, everyone eats as often as possible). But I forgot to get more string cheese, alas.
Back to the problem with the room. What's to be done about these depressing, bare walls? Well, I had just got back from the Auto Show, armed with a bagful of car pamphlets. What the heck else was I going to do?
there was a picture of my room here, but villagephotos decided to suck, so now it is no more
It's still not done, since I still have tons of pamphlets left to work with, and I think I'm going to try to incorporate some of the pictures I took into it. But it looks loads better now than it did before. I really like the (unintentional) way that the blue of the Chevy poster and in a couple of the other cars pictures picks up the blue of the sheets. So now it looks like I'm entirely car-obsessed, despite the fact that I'm not. I mean, I enjoy cars, and I like knowing about the new designs and ideas and all, but I'm not as obsessed with them as I am with, say, cats, or football.
But the moral of the story is that Auto Show pamphlets = quick, creative, attractive decorating fix for your dormroom or similar habitation.
OK, I probably should get to bed now, as I've tons of homework eyeing me hungrily for tomorrow. Check out those Auto Show photos, celebrate the Patriots victory, and do whatever else seems good to you.
10:19 PM
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