Super Bowl Sunday (yawn)

True story.

Back in 1989 when Don and I were dating, we were both living in Davis, California, an extraordinarily flat college town where there were far more bicycles than cars. Seriously, everyone rode bikes, and the whole town was designed around that concept, which was actually very cool. (This was back in the 80s. I don't know what it's like these days.)

One day in early February, I rode my bike a few blocks away to where Don was living. The streets were extra quiet because it was Super Bowl Sunday and everyone was inside watching the game.

When I arrived, Don was out on his front lawn, his bike upended in front of him, working on the chain. For some reason, this surprised me.

"Why aren't you inside watching the game?" I asked. "It's Super Bowl Sunday."

"Well..." He shrugged. "I'm just not that into football."

I distinctly remember looking at him and thinking, "Hmmm. This is someone I could get serious about..."

A year later, we were married. The rest is history.

The reason I tell this story is just this morning, Super Bowl Sunday, we woke up and were drinking our morning tea/coffee and reading the news online. I saw something football-related, so I turned to him and asked, "Is today Super Bowl Sunday?"

"No idea," he replied. He checked online and confirmed it was.

Happy sigh. That's one of the reasons we've experienced nearly 35 years of marital bliss so far.

Super Bowl? Yawn

Actual conversation as it just happened:

Me: "Oh, is it Super Bowl Sunday tomorrow?"

Older Daughter: "Yes. The only reason I know is because there's a show I like watching on Sunday, and they moved it to Friday for this week only."

Don: "Who's playing?"

Older Daughter: "No idea."

Me: "Don't know, don't care."

Don: "It will be interesting to see how many people are in church tomorrow."

Older Daughter: "Or how rapidly the church service progresses."

Don, looking up who's playing on the computer: "Oh, it's the Chiefs vs. the Eagles. Whoever they are. All I can think of is 1970s rock bands."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how we celebrate Super Bowl Sunday.

True story: Back in 1989 when Don and I were dating, he lived around the corner from me in a college town where bicycles were more common than cars. One day I hopped on my bike and rode around the corner to see him. I found him on his front lawn, his bicycle upended in front of him, doing some repairs on it.

"Why aren't you in watching the game?" I asked. "Today is Super Bowl Sunday."

"Well..." He looked up from his bike. "I'm not really that into football."

"Hmmmmm," I distinctly remember thinking. "This is someone I could get serious about."

The rest is history.

Thoughts on Superbowl Sunday

Yesterday afternoon:

(Don is outside working on a fencing project.)

Me: "When is Superbowl Sunday? Is it today?"

Older Daughter (types a question into her computer): "Yes, it's today. And the players are..."

Me: "Oh, I don't care about that."

True story: Back in 1989 when Don and I were dating, he lived around the corner from me in a college town where bicycles were more common than cars. One day I hopped on my bike and rode around the corner to see him. I found him on his front lawn, his bicycle upended in front of him, doing some repairs on it.

"Why aren't you in watching the game?" I asked. "Today is Superbowl Sunday."

"Well..." He looked up from his bike. "I'm not really that into football."

"Hmmmmm," I distinctly remember thinking. "This is someone I could get serious about."

The rest is history.

A few random thoughts

A few things have caught my attention lately that I thought I would combine into a single blog post.

Tim Tebow

I'm not a football fan. Neither is my husband. The sport absolutely leaves me cold. But I must admit, I'm delighted with Tim Tebow's "buck the system" approach to the game. Not only is this young man a devout Christian, but he isn't fazed by the good-natured and not-so-good-natured teasing and heckling he gets about "Tebowing."

And darn it, he's a GOOD football player. As in, incredible. That's what annoys the hecklers the most.

Keep it up, Tim -- even non-football fans are rooting for you.

Black Friday from the Trenches
I have a friend who works in a large department store, specifically the fragrance department. She was required to report to work on Thanksgiving evening since the store was opening at midnight.

Here's what she wrote about her experience:

Yup, I'm alive. I survived black Friday.

It was simply stunning to me at midnight when all of us [department store] associates were ready for the doors to be opened and there were actually people, hundreds of them waiting to come in the store AT MIDNIGHT ON TURKEY DAY!!!! I was thinking: "Are all you people nuts??? Apparently not.

Because they spent like drunken sailors. Where is all this money coming from? Who knows??? I personally sold over $1600 today during my 11:30pm to 9:30 am shift.

Honestly unless I hadn't already experienced it I would never known we were in a virtual depression in this country! If I was Jim (her outspoken husband) I'd be having a soapbox moment. I'm just too tired. I got home from work at 10:15am and was fast asleep by 10:30 easy. Got up at 2 and tried to pretend it was a normal day.

Passing on the Baton
In response to a blog post called Preserving the Work of Five Millennia, a young homeschooling mom named Sara wrote me the following email. I was so delighted with the idea of this woman passing the baton of knowledge to neighborhood kids -- a true Titus 2 woman -- that I thought I'd pass it on to you.

My 6 year old home schooled daughter, Ella, wanted to start a club. So, we spent some time brainstorming and this is what we came up with: Ella's Edible Club. Several of her friends come over once a quarter and they learn how to make something from scratch. Ella had the idea to make food based on seasons.

We met for the first time in October and made small pumpkin pies and applesauce. Several of the girls had never cracked an egg much less mold a pie crust in to a pan. They did not realize that you could make your own applesauce. We all live in a suburb of Houston, Texas and are far removed from the food chain. None of her friends home school and most of their moms make cookies with frozen pre-sliced cookie dough. They all had a great time and we able to take their goodies home to share with their families.

Other items that I will be teaching them are making your own hot cocoa mix, Christmas finger food type dessert (good to give away as gifts), sugar cookies decorated with icing, pick strawberries and make jam, and bread (no mixers involved). That should get us through the summer.

It's the little things that we contribute to society -- like this mom's efforts to teach other children that food doesn't grow in grocery stores -- that is our culture's salvation.

Good for you, Sara! Keep it up.

Football with a conscience

I have about as much interest in football as I do shoe fashions. But I'm coming to greatly admire this Tim Tebow guy for his strength of character and his ability to quietly live his beliefs.

And while I'll have to disagree with sports columnist Sally Jenkins' pro-choice stance, she wrote a wonderful piece in support of Tebow's pro-life position. My heartiest congratulations, Ms. Jenkins, for having the courage to say what you did.

[This article is excerpted, not printed in its entirety.]
________________________________


Tebow's Super Bowl ad isn't intolerant; its critics are

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 2, 2010

I'll spit this out quick, before the armies of feminism try to gag me and strap electrodes to my forehead: Tim Tebow is one of the better things to happen to young women in some time. I realize this stance won't endear me to the "Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep," otherwise known as DOLL, but I'll try to pick up the shards of my shattered feminist credentials and go on.

I'm pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I've heard in the past week, I'll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the "National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time." For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow's 30-second ad hasn't even run yet, but it already has provoked "The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us" to reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually "pro-choice" so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn't be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn't.

There's not enough space in the sports pages for the serious weighing of values that constitutes this debate, but surely everyone in both camps, pro-choice or pro-life, wishes the "need" for abortions wasn't so great. Which is precisely why NOW is so wrong to take aim at Tebow's ad.

Here's what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren't embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too -- and they should step up to that.

"Are you saving yourself for marriage?" Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.

"Yes, I am," he replied.

The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.

"I think y'all are stunned right now!" he said. "You can't even ask a question!"

That's how far we've come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn't shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him.

Obviously Tebow can make people uncomfortable, whether it's for advertising his chastity, or for wearing his faith on his face via biblical citations painted in his eye-black. Hebrews 12:12, his cheekbones read during the Florida State game: "Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees." His critics find this intrusive, and say the Super Bowl is no place for an argument of this nature. "Pull the ad," NOW President Terry O'Neill said. "Let's focus on the game."

Trouble is, you can't focus on the game without focusing on the individuals who play it -- and that is the genius of Tebow's ad. The Super Bowl is not some reality-free escape zone. Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn't just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers -- who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW.

Let me be clear again: I couldn't disagree with Tebow more. It's my own belief that the state has no business putting its hand under skirts. But I don't care that we differ. Some people will care that the ad is paid for by Focus on the Family, a group whose former spokesman, James Dobson, says loathsome things about gays. Some will care that Tebow is a creationist. Some will care that CBS has rejected a gay dating service ad. None of this is the point. CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants, and Tebow has a right to express his beliefs publicly. Just as I have the right to reject or accept them after listening -- or think a little more deeply about the issues. If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Tebow's ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it's apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life." This is what NOW has labeled "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning." But if there is any demeaning here, it's coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren't real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.