Amanda on Being on the Team: It's "Them," Not "We"

“Fan” comes from “fanatic,” defined as “a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal.” Not all fans are fanatics; it’s possible to enjoy something without it overcoming you. But one indicator that you’ve crossed the line from fan to fanatic is if you begin to believe you are a member of your favorite team. If you have reached this point, you have contracted this “excessive and single-minded zeal” like a virus. And when you are focused so intently on a team that you begin to think you’re on it, life becomes sad for you if you realize that you aren’t.

Friends, let’s come to reality slowly and together. You are not a member of the team, and life is still not sad. You have so many good qualities. I’m sure you are an excellent singer. Or you’re really good with kids. Your mom probably thinks you’re great. You might be a math genius or a really fast runner. Whatever the case is, just be you, which is a truthful role you can inhabit, not some delusion that you are a member of a multimillion dollar franchise that doesn’t even know your name.

I’m not a big fan of sports, but I am a big fan of lots of other things that I know have nothing to do with me. I don’t think I am a part of my favorite band. I know my favorite book was not written about me. I don’t try to wait tables when I’m at my favorite restaurant. I know there are boundaries between me and the things that I like, and that this is OK, and that happiness can be found in other ways rather than insisting that I am included in something that I am not included in.

The beautiful thing that you are a part of as a fan is a fan base: a group of like-minded people who enjoy the same thing as you do. This is great! This is coming together in a good, healthy way! In the case of sports, this is watching football or baseball or whatever and appreciating it, and identifying with the struggle of it, and maybe even getting a rush or two out of it. Making some friends because of it, and maybe having a disagreement or two with a fan of another team, but not declaring him your mortal enemy. Because you don’t need to hate any more people than you already do, and you especially don’t need to hate people because they like different guys who throw or kick or hit balls on TV than you like.

This is not taking anything too personally, and this does not lead to the maniacal burning of cars and drunken riots in city streets.

So let’s just let our favorite teams be our favorite teams, and us be ourselves. And in case I’ve left anything unclear, feel free to utilize the flow chart I’ve created to determine whether or not you are a member of the team.







Football Field by Dan X. O'Neil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on Being on the Team: Why I Am A Packer

Maybe it’s my rivals love for grammar, or maybe it’s the idea itself, but one thing is certain, if I ever use the pronoun “we” to refer to a sports team, (10 out of 10 times being the Green Bay Packers) I am harshly criticized, judged, and reminded that I am in no way part of the team. While this statement may seem true to some, I think any sports fan can agree that the fan is in many ways part of the team.

Before I justify my point I would like to make clear that I know I am in no way an owner, coach or appear anywhere on the roster for any team. I realize that even if every player were to get injured, retire, strike or sick that I will never be called to play.

Also it is important that I note that this does not apply to all things. I do not listen to my favorite band and say, “We put out a great album” or write a letter to Stephen King and say “We have good character development in chapter three.” A sports team is more closely comparable to a supporter of a political party. Even if they do not vote, many consider themselves a part of political party for just sharing the same views and opinions.

Try telling this guy he's not on the Seahawks.

With that being said, the fan plays an important position on any kind of sports team. Below are some of the responsibility that qualify you for such a position:

• Till Death Do You Part: To be part of a team, you are part of a team for life. In your position, you are never cut or traded. If you have a bad season, your coaches make horrible decisions, all of your players all of the sudden play like your grandma, well then you can either criticize them openly while still being a fellow supporter or you can cry every week till your team gets better, but you can never change your team.

• Know Thy Enemy: In many ways the fan is often a defensive position. If you find yourself constantly defending your team to friends or strangers then you are doing your job. It is important to identify your ally (fellow supporters) and your enemy (everyone else), and while you can be friends with everyone, you cannot be friends with everyone during game time.

• Game Day Responsibilities: Your responsibility on game day is to treat every game of the season like it is life or death. You can do this from anywhere, the bleachers, the bar, or in front of your television. Though your screaming, clapping, complaining, cheering, swearing, or act of violently throwing things may never be seen or heard, they are still important to the world of sporting.

You may still be saying to yourself “none of these things makes you part of the team.” If you are, then consider this Mr. or Ms. Know-It-All, when you are a fan of a sports team you’re a single thread of a social fabric made up of hundreds or thousands, or possibly even millions of others. Though your role may seem insignificant, if every fan were to stop caring then there would be no team to care for. It is for this reason more than any other that you can consider yourself part of a team. Lets face it; no team can exist without a fan base… except maybe the Jets (who are pretty damn close).





12th Man by Matt McGee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Amanda on Buffets: This is Not the Pride Lands

The attraction to buffets is a magnetic, dangerous force. Those who love them are laboring under some delusion that buffets are the promise land, a Mecca of chicken wings and soggy pound cake. It’s a sick trick that buffets are pulling on us, and I’m here to put a stop to it.

And when I talk about buffets here, I am not talking about your rich uncle’s buffet-style wedding. I am talking about the shopping center buffet with the $5 all-you-can-eat lunch special. I am talking about Sizzler before Sizzler vanished with the rising prices of green Jell-O and grade D meat.

There are two fiscally sound ways to approach buffets. The first is like a rowdy frat boy spending all his summer job earnings on a weekend in Vegas: take whatever comes your way, whether you like it or not, and get your money’s worth. But with this mentality, terrible things start happening. I find myself eating French fries dipped in hot fudge, just because I have the option of doing so. Dave starts eating fried frog legs. The crusts of horrible, microwavable pizzas with sour cheese litter plate upon plate across the table. It’s not a pretty scene. It’s one you might see in a bad symbolist film about the deterioration of pride.

The other is what I like to call the “Jane Doe Method,” named after someone close to me and Dave who asked not to be identified in this blog post:

• Choose a target. In this case, Dave and I were in college and a chain buffet had just opened up a few miles away from campus.
• Prepare materials. Jane came down to our school one Sunday equipped with a large purse and multiple one-gallon Ziploc freezer bags.
• Identify desirable items. While most of the food was too vile to think about ever reheating, Jane scoped out the one passable dish, grilled steak made to order.
• Acquire substance. Jane slyly dumped multiple platefuls of steak into the plastic bags in her purse.

While I am a vegetarian and am revolted by the idea of eating the flesh of a dead animal, from a buffet or otherwise, Dave ate some pretty decent steak for dinner every night for the next week.

But there’s a problem with these two methods. One is unhealthy, disgusting, and soul crushing. You do not leave a place where you ate four pounds of mashed potatoes mixed with what looked like cheese whiz but tasted like crayons without sustaining some physical and mental damage. The other is in a moral gray area and could be considered illegal. So what is the best way to approach buffets?

The answer is don’t. Avoid them at all costs. Take your money and buy a modest amount of quality food anywhere else.

Everything in moderation, except puppies.
And Office reruns.

At buffets, you are not really paying for food. You are paying for the joy of your inner-Mufasa telling you that everything the light touches is yours. But ladies and gentleman, this is not the Pride Lands you are being offered here. This is a shadowy place akin to the elephant graveyard. This is where food comes to die.

Don’t be deceived. Save yourself from the possible food poisoning, the calories, and the potential embarrassment of being stopped and questioned for carrying a sizeable amount of dead cow in your purse. If you don’t want to cook, for the love of God, just order a pizza instead.









Suki has the purple collar by Ingo Di Bella is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on Buffets: A Feast Fit For Kings

As an avid eater of any kind of food, I have a strong passion for the buffet. Whenever I see an all-you-can-eat establishment, I see an invitation to a unique cuisine experience that will serve dishes from around the globe and allow me to shove as much of them as I can down my gullet. Buffets are a great way to get to experience new foods and combinations for an affordable price.

The Land of Milk and Honey.

There are many reasons why you should be excited about any form of buffet. When you go to a regular restaurant you have to take a list of a thousand dishes and narrow it down to just one, but at a buffet it’s a free-for-all where you can chow down on practically anything found on the planet. When you walk into a restaurant you have to go through a whole process of being seated, waiting for a server, choosing a meal, and waiting for the meal to be plated, but at a buffet your feast fit for a king begins minutes after stepping through the door.

Buffets also give you the chance to work your inner creative slob. This is the only place where you can try eggs over eggplant, mac and cheese salad, Jell-O with string beans, or gravy over anything. Your dish is not a just a dish, but a canvas to create the perfect combination.

The key to getting the full experience of any buffet is to make sure you get at least four times what you pay for. To ensure such a task I perfected a fool proof, easy to follow technique for any fellow buffetist to use. The technique revolves around one important principle: eat as fast and as much as you can before your body can realize that you are full. If you can master that simple technique then your buffet possibilities are endless. Below are a few more simple techniques that may also help:

• Practice getting out of your chair and on your feet faster; speed is everything.
• There is little time to read what each dish is, so it is best to go by sight and smell.
• Use the whole dish to your advantage. There is more space than you think on one plate.
• Choose your beverage wisely; water is easier on the stomach than soda is.

Chicken, shrimp, pasta, pizza, steak, fish; you could have any one of these for dinner but why have one when you can have them all? That is the beauty of a buffet, instead of asking yourself which to eat, you instead ask yourself how much of each to eat. Sure, all the food may be mediocre, but for the price that you are paying, you have already subconsciously prepared for something very short of a gourmet meal.

There are a number of complaints I always hear from people who don’t enjoy a night at the buffet, but one specifically: they always feel sick after eating too much. I will admit that even I say this, but to me it is not a complaint, it is an epiphany, a moment of victory where I know I accomplished the goal that I have set myself. Yes, it is uncomfortable, but the pain is the same pain I imagine Bill Gates feels in his arm when he lifts up his wallet.

You may see a buffet as a place that is unhealthy, disgusting, and leaves you wondering what you ate (I get the same complaints about my cooking). However I see it as a golden ticket to a smorgasbord of unlimited opportunity. And sure it may be a little unhealthy, but hey, all that walking to get your food has to burn some calories…right?



Buffet fit for a king by Bev Sykes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Amanda on the Coin Flip: Just Use Your Brain

This adorable baby knows how ridiculous it is to live life by the coin.

When I first started dating Dave, I thought the coin flip was a quirky thing he did to pick his order at restaurants in a way that would make the server laugh. I soon learned it was more than that. The moment I fully realized how important the coin flip was to him was when I walked into his apartment to hear him chanting, “flip the coin! Flip the coin!” to our friend who was deciding where to go to grad school. Any decision that leaves Dave even marginally unsure of what to do, he will immediately try to solve with the coin. And he will follow the coin’s decision blindly.

The coin flip is only useful in the way that any exercise that makes something definitive is useful. Let me explain. Let’s say you are twelve and your mom asks you if you want macaroni and cheese for dinner or if you’d like to order pizza. You say you don’t really care. But when you see your mom pull out the pot to boil water, one of two things will happen: either that pizza starts sounding really good and you rush to grab the phone before your mom puts the pasta in that pot and your shot at pizza is blown, or you become content with the prospect of macaroni and cheese for dinner and you wait calmly until she calls you to the table. The mom is the decision maker for indecisive twelve year olds. The coin flip is the decision maker for indecisive grown-ups. After the coin hits the surface, there’s a good chance you will know what you were actually hoping for.

The coin flip brings out your gut feelings when you didn’t know you had any. And I’m all for following your gut.

So if the coin helps you come to a decision, that’s great. But if you realize you aren’t happy with the decision the coin made, go against it. Do not let a little metal thing with some dead president’s face on it dictate what you will do with your life. Put it in its place and use it for some gumballs or an arcade game instead.

Dave might argue that it’s silly to waste all your brainpower making unimportant decisions. Fine. I will cede that you can thoughtlessly use the coin for some mundane things, if it’s helpful to you. Here I have included a brief list of example predicaments and divided them into those which can be safely decided by the coin and those which you should employ logic for.

OK to use the coin	Not OK to use the coin
What movie should I see?	Where should I invest my life savings?
What should I make for lunch?	C-section or natural birth?
What clothes should I wear today?	Should I wear clothes today?

There is, however, a perk to dating someone who believes so unwaveringly in the power of the coin and fears horrible repercussions should he disobey it. Things that I want to do that I have 0% chance of getting Dave to do with me suddenly become things that I have a 50% chance shot at if I involve the coin. In this way, I have gotten Dave to do a number of things including:
• Watch Rent.
• Eat at a vegetarian restaurant that plays strange music that scares the bajeezus out of him.
• Go to poetry readings.

I have also been given a free pass on ordering a super girly drink at the bar because I had Dave flip a coin on what I should order.

Thus, while I don’t believe in the power of the coin, I sometimes embrace Dave’s belief in it. But as for me, my decision maker is a spongy mass of cells and tissue. It’s called my brain.



Clara's New Laugh by Mitch Bennett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Dave on the Coin Flip: The Coin Never Lies

    If you have ever found yourself in a situation in which you have the choice of two possible outcomes, then you know there are only two ways of handling it. One: you can analyze the situation, hypothesize the short and long term effects of each decision and make a list of pros and cons to each outcome. Or you can do the smart thing and flip a coin.


There is a reason why the coin flip has been used to settle disputes for centuries and that is because the coin never lies. The beauty of the coin is that it shows no favoritism towards either side, it can be used to settle virtually any problem at any time, and you will always be able to find one on hand. Now, before I go any further it is important to explain that the coin can only actually settle a real dispute. The coin is never used to see if you should exit your eight story hotel room through the door or the window, or whether or not to wrestle an alligator, because there is no real conflict between the two options and the answer you want is perfectly clear to you (in other words, you want to wrestle the alligator). Therefore, the coin should only be used to choose one of two realistic options.

I regrettably learned the power of the coin the hard way while in college. One morning at 3 am, my roommate, his girlfriend, Amanda and I were debating whether we should go to the diner or get some sleep before our early classes. We flipped a coin, which suggested that we sleep. Though until then I have been a strict follower of the coin, I was upset with the outcome so much that I decided to give an emotional monologue about how we “cannot live our lives by the coin” and how the coin was “the worst idea we ever had.”

I was a fool and I recant that entire speech.

The four of us ended up going against the coin and had perhaps the worst diner experience we had ever had in our lives. I will eat almost anything, and I especially will eat anything that I ordered and am paying for, but my French onion soup, usually my favorite dish at that diner, tasted like how my four-year-old moccasins smelled after walking a mile in a rainstorm. The other dishes had similar problems: the fries were cold, the omelet half cooked. In fact, everyone had a problem with the food except for my roommate. As we sort of ate, but mostly just looked at our food, we patiently waited for our server to come so that we could ask for the check. We had not seen him since we got our food forty-five minutes ago.

Eventually, when he came with the check, my roommate asked for a box for the other half of his chicken wrap. After the server disappeared for almost an additional hour, we decided to leave, wrap in hand. Ultimately, the four of us returned two hours later, tired and dissatisfied, and we only had ourselves to blame for rejecting the coin. While this may not seem like it was a total disaster, I’m just grateful we chose this situation to not listen to the coin rather than a serious one with serious consequences. I have never gone against the coin since, and have heard too many disaster stories to even consider.

What I have learned in life is that there are basically two people in this world: those who listen to the coin and those who are doomed to live a life of misfortune and regret. It is not important to use the coin for every decision you have, but it is extremely important that you never go against the coin. Below I have made a brief list of those who listened to the coin, and those who openly rejected its wisdom.

Followed coin blindly	Went against coin
John D. Rockefeller	The Owner of Hostess
Thomas Jefferson	George W. Bush
Every lottery winner	Every Jets fan

Many believe that the coin flip is fate. Maybe it is fate, or maybe a butterfly flaps its wings in China and makes your quarter lands on tails. Fate or not, the importance of the coin should not be taken lightly. The coin defies logic and reason to no explanation, and while I cannot guarantee that always listening to the coin will bring you fame, power, and success, I can guarantee that it will steer you away from disaster, misfortune, and chaos. I can think of no better way to end then to leave you with my new favorite poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I flipped a coin to make my choice
And that made all the difference.
                     -Robert Frost, had he flipped a coin



Call ! by Rob is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Amanda on Competitive Bearding: A Manly Miss America

I got conned into watching Whisker Wars after losing a bet to Dave. He insisted that I would like it. I watched the first episode with bitter reluctance, and then pretended I was still bitterly reluctant while watching the second, third, and fourth episodes, partly because I didn’t want Dave to know he was right, and partly because I wanted to be able to hold it over his head as something that I did even though I didn’t want to, which could maybe win me a back rub or two.

Competitive bearding is, at its core, a form of pageantry. Hairy, manly, beer-drenched pageantry but pageantry nonetheless. Yes, the intricate patterns of curls in these beards are often made with beer cans instead of curlers. But if you take a cupcake and ice it with Jack Daniels steak sauce, it is still a cupcake.

But this contrast is what makes the show sort of awesome. Bearded manly men walking around drinking beer does not make good television. Bearded manly men walking around drinking beer and taking turns hair-spraying and primping each other makes good television.

My gut revulsion to the show came from one of its stars: Jack Passion. Passion, who says things such as “I’m going to beat everyone and then spit on them,” turns bearding into a cast for his bruised ego. Does that mean that the entire culture is like this? No. In fact, James Moody, the hilarious “spiritual advisor” to the Austin Facial Hair Club, emphasizes the importance of the ying and yang of beards: in order to be a respectable beardsman, your “inner beard,” or attitude and sportsmanship, must be just as impressive as your outer beard.

And even if I totally hated the show, I might still watch it because of this guy:

Aarne Bielefeldt is the founding member of the Terminal Length Beard Club whose philosophy is to just “Let it Grow.” When Aarne suffered a string of losses and switched categories from Full Beard Natural to Freestyle, I came close to swearing off Whisker Wars for good. But even with his switch to the showier category, Aarne maintains his down-to-earth attitude, still wears outfits sewn by his wife, and still dons his adorable old man grin. My favorite moment of the series is when Aarne produces a collection of sepia photographs that he has taken of beards that inspire him, including one of his fellow competitor holding his daughter who, head-to-toe, is only a bit longer than his beard. Aarne says that he collects these pictures because they resonate with him emotionally. And who am I to discredit the value of something as heartfelt and innocent as that?