The Super Bowl

I have never watched the Super Bowl. I'm talking ever. I just don't get the idea of bashing an opponent shoulder to shoulder, head to head, but still being unable to see eye to eye. When my mom was taking driving ed. in high school, the teacher/football coach would give pop quizzes on how the team did. My mom refused to attend the games and began to fail the class she excelled in, so she took a stand. My mother quit the class and had her dad teach her Americana-style, down a road, dusty road in the south, out into the tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, when a wrestling instructor came to our school and half-ton black mats where hauled in from who knows where for us to jump on, I kept my mom in mind. The teacher was the only female wrestling silver medalist for the United States ever. That's pretty impressive. But I? I thought of Mom, all alone in a world of full-fledged attack addicts, who managed to stand for what she believed in. In my head, the story twisted and turned, changing from a drop of water in the ocean to a wave crashing down on the shore. I, thank you very much, refused to wrestle. Even in jest.

All that led up to last night. Perhaps it can also help to not at all explain how after a mere thirty seconds, I got bored with the Puppy Bowl and changed the channel to CBS. I can tell myself that it was for the ads, or in pursuit of yet another ridiculous halftime show. Maybe it would be fun to pretend that the main attraction was the blackout, or even that I was succumbing to peer pressure. But honestly, the reason that for the first time ever I watched the Super Bowl is that I finally understood the violence; I could feel the tearing feeling inside that could push a person to make their way by literally knocking others down. As I mentioned in the previous post, I have recently bashed all expectations of me by failing to be in the top quarter of interested writers in the city from 7th to 12th grade. When I first read the list last Thursday, I was sure I had read it wrong, that I had skimmed over myself in a hurry. When I proved myself wrong, I had a wrestling match with my blankets. I knocked them shoulder to fabric, head to fabric, but I could not bring myself to see the comforting circles in the print eye to eye.