The Better Half

(ESPN has Erin Andrews, FOX has Pam Oliver, ABC has Michelle Tafoya and What Would Oakley Do? has Becca. Please join me in welcoming our first-ever sideline reporter/guest columnist. "The Better Half" will appear in this space each and every week and will feature the best, brightest and prettiest sports-related musings in all of the land in an attempt to explain what our girlfriends and wives are thinking when we ask them if they want to order wings before the Giants game starts.)

Episode 5
My Holiday Vacation
(Or, the latest story ever told)

One of the perks of my job is that I get vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Day. And, it’s not just days off that I get, it’s paid days off. Every year I fly to the Bay Area in California, my home home. I eat free meals, go on hikes and sit in my mom’s kitchen. Oh, and I don’t watch sports. This year’s trip was no different. It was relaxing and perfect.
But then I got back to New York and it was cold and I had no idea what was going on in the wide world of sports. It was unsettling. Three weeks later I still feel out of touch and the fact that feeling out of touch about sports makes me feel unsettled makes me even more unsettled. It’s complicated. Like Nancy’s life on “Weeds.” Except not at all like that and way less complicated.
The straw that really broke the bee’s bonnet was all the college football bowls happening when I was away. Rose, sugar, orange, banana, apple, kiwi—there were so many bowls! I didn’t even know what a bowl is and being away from a certain Mr. McSporty I wasn’t being forced to watch any so I wasn’t figuring it out. The only time I came close to watching sports was when my grandfather showed me how awesome it is to watch football on his giant HDTV.
For three weeks now, I’ve been back at my desk reading sports columns and blogs more than I want to admit, at least when I’m not looking at kittens in cups on cuteoverload.com, but nothing is really sticking. I’m hoping that the Super Bowl can get me back into the swing of things. I knew it was the playoffs the Sunday before last. We bought a lot of beer and it was nice beer so I could tell this was a big deal. And I know the Giants won, that the Super Bowl is soon, that Tom Brady buys flowers for one of his girlfriends and that I wish someone would buy me flowers. (That’s true. Ahem.) But I still don’t feel like I know what’s going on.
Who ended up being the winner of college football? Did they fire Isiah? When you feel part of something, the pain of feeling left out is disconcerting, even if you never wanted to be included in that thing in the first place. You know?