Rose Bowl Bound – Ugh
Michigan lost to Ohio State. Yay! (Without resorting to being sponsor-whores!)
Wisconsin lost to Iowa. Idiots!
Now Michigan’s going to the Rose Bowl. Boo! I hate the attention lavished on the Tournament of Roses, and I especially hate the shirts and sweaters that M-Den and Steve and Barry’s crank out right around New Year’s Day. It’s really not fun. I appreciate the academic side of my alma mater, but the athletic side just makes me roll my eyes. It’s now what it’s all about, and it’s not what it should be all about, anyhow. Unfortunately, it is. Fucking athletics.
Sigh. Times like these make me miss my days of pissing off visiting alumni by writing "Go Opposing Team!" on a white board at the hotel at which I was a desk clerk. The only time I would root for Michigan would be when they played Michigan State. Because, as we all know well, Michigan State sucks academically and athletically.
I have to admit, though, the Michigan-Ohio State game has brought about pretty funny searches on my stats listings. There’s someone out there looking for a "Fuck Michigan" tee. I don’t know where you can get one, but I can point you to an America Is Scary tee (which, coincidentally, I’m wearing right now!).
However, diligent shopper, if you do find a "Fuck Michigan" tee, please point me to it in time to wear it during the Rose Bowl. I will, though, put it away once the Alumni Association actually informs me of in-depth, intriguing research being done by my old U-M professors instead of trying to sell me travel packages to said Rose Bowl.
You know, now that I am an alumnus (alumnus! singular!) and live 1500 miles away, I have much less of a hard time rooting for Michigan (in the abstract, at least) than I did when football Saturdays were the bane of my existence and the outcome of the game might very well affect whether someone would try to steal our garbage cans and whether I’d get any sleep that night (at 1201, at least). But instead of rooting for them, I find myself simply indifferent. Yet if I pick up a copy of “Nature” or “Science” and see a paper with a U-M author, I give a little internal cheer. The way I look at it: U-M football has nothing to do with me, and never did. U-M scholarship? Yeah, I was in that game for a while myself.
My problem is that I’m too close – football Saturdays still affect my schedule and I’ve been a member of an Alumni Association that really cares about football but little else. Bastards.
Wait, stealing garbage cans? How many times did this happen?
Never, but they tried. On game days it was actually more likely that our garbage cans (if it was some slacker’s week to take in the garbage and they were still out on the street – garbage day was Friday) would wind up several blocks away. However, one night someone did come and try to steal our recycle bins. I happened to be out there and I stopped them. And, I will never forget this, the Saturday right after September 11 (also a game day if memory serves me), some idiots came onto our porch late at night and stole our ancient gas grill. They got half a block away and the thing basically disintegrated. I found it there the next day. That especially upset me because, so long as it wasn’t moved, it was still a functional grill. Of course no one wanted to chip in for a replacement, so I bought that cheap little charcoal thing that followed me to Koch. That incident, among other things, was a contributing factor in my moving out after that year, and especially in trying to get out of that “neighborhood”.
Well, the student ghetto is not a place you want to live, but of course it does offer the possibility of cheap rentals. What happens down there on game days I never witnessed – however, whenever I’d run down there during the summer, it always looked like it’d be hit by multiple tornadoes. I can only imagine what it looked like after game day.