Why is "Fantasy" Football not a dream come true?

My best score of the season. The team name is because every team I root for loses.

Fantasy Football provides an immediate topic of bonding between males through the sharing of virtual war stories: "Yeah, then Vick got concussed, Jackson's ankle got jacked, and with the whole front line of the Chiefs decimated . . . My whole team was wiped out." I finished my first season of Fantasy Football last week, but I was left wondering where the "Fantasy" part was. I ended up sixth in my league (out of eight), and that was after pulling a Tebow the last week: the clouds parted and three miracles occurred simultaneously. Even though I was ecstatic to make the playoffs by the flukiest of flukes, that moment of elation could not counterbalance all the psychic pain that plagued me the rest of the season. Sure, Notre Dame dashes my hopes every year, but it doesn't gallivant around under the optimistic name of Fantasy Football, which I thought meant that everybody would have their wildest dreams realized. I am left feeling that Fantasy Football is as far from fantasy as one could possible dream.

First of all, let's admire the name brand of Fantasy Football, which appeals to two primal urges of men. The first part of the phrase is "Fantasy", which connotes sex. Ask a guy what comes to mind when he hears the word, and I bet the top three answers are sex (<--you really want to click on this, don't you), football, and sex--and football is probably actually third on that list. Of course, one could argue that those are the first things that come to mind in response to any question put to a guy. The second part of the phrase, "Football", connotes violence--along with beer, greasy food, glory, and scantily clad cheerleaders (<--this one, too I bet). I don't know a better phrase for getting a man's attention. Maybe something called "Strippers, Cars, and First Person Shooters on XBox 360", but that certainly lacks the subtlety of "Fantasy Football". I will concede that "Fantasy" in Fantasy Football doesn't directly refer to sex, so I will use the definition "unrestrained imagination" for the rest of this post.

The season begins with the creation of a roster that is almost never the product of unrestrained imagination. During the draft process, each participant chooses NFL players for his (or her but mostly his) team. Each player can be picked once, leading to a roster that is far from ideal. I would bet that many people end up with a roster that they kind of hate right after the draft. (I didn't, but that's because I had no idea what I was doing.) So right away, you end up with something that is very restrained by reality. It is so restrained that you often curse your good friends for picking the player you wanted. While that pain is somewhat alleviated when you mock them for their idiocy on their next pick, your roster is never the one you dreamed you'd get.

As the season progresses, there are many points when excruciating psychic pain visits almost all participants. It may originate in a close loss or the loss of a key player to injury or personality. It may come from the realization that you have once again squandered money that could have been spent on real fantasies or real football. Whatever the reason, psychic pain is rarely associated with fantasy. (Maybe other types of pain, but let's focus here.) I, for one, certainly don't happily daydream about how my monstrous lead on Monday morning could be lost at the last second on Monday night by a blocked field goal. Ouch, it hurt just to write that sentence.

Fantasy Football also requires an average participant to spend an inordinate amount of time hunched over his computer managing his team. While one could argue that there are worse things to be doing on the internet, it's difficult to argue that an average person dreams of pouring over thousands of numbers and deciding whether Jason Wittens's 0.32 predicted point advantage is worth starting him over Tony Gonzalez. (The answer was yes a couple of weeks ago.) If staring at a computer screen for unpaid hours on end is part of anybody's dream world, well, you are a freak (said the somewhat aspiring writer).

Unless you made your entire roster members of the team you root for, then you will probably be forced to root against your own team. If part of your dream is hoping that something you love fails--sick, just sick. You may try to delude yourself and say you're not rooting against the team but the individual, but you are a liar. If you are rooting against any part of your team, you are not completely rooting for its success. And if that is not causing you pain in your heart and your loins, you have truly lost your soul to Fantasy Football and are less of a man. I cannot respect you, and you are probably going to burn in the first four letters of my last name. Sorry--you scumbag. Anyway, rooting against your own team is not fantasy material.

Finally, the season never ends in an ideal manner. The ideal season culminates in winning the Championship and taking all your friends' money, providing you beer money and bragging rights for an entire year. The reality is that odds are very high that you won't win the Championship given the number of teams in a league and will thus lose all your money and dignity. Any table in Vegas is a safer bet. In a nutshell, you are almost certainly doomed to failure. If this is the scenario that your unrestrained imagination has created, you have set the bar extremely low. But congrats on your dream coming true.

Sadly, Fantasy Football is completely restrained by reality, from choosing a roster to not winning the Championship. Psychic pain and financial losses are much more common than earning bragging rights for the year. Only one person or team in each league will win, just like all sports. But perhaps winning it all is the fantasy to which Fantasy Football refers and which is made all the more fantastic because of its unlikeliness. Perhaps the fantasy is saying that you emerged victorious despite an imperfect roster, injury set backs, and getting Tebowed. That's just like normal football and all sports, which is what makes all of them great and probably why I will continue to play whenever offered the chance despite the name and all the reasons I mentioned here. Because that one chance at living the fantasy is what makes the ride worth every year of hard reality.

Why does "Jump Around" have phat lyrics?

Warning: this post contains language that may be considered offensive.

As a child in the '90s, I enjoyed clever phrases that compared seemingly unrelated objects. For example, if somebody blocked your shot in basketball at recess, you got "packed like a box" or "stuffed like a turkey". If you got beaten to the hoop, you got "burned like toast". If you don't get what I'm talking about by now, you're slower than molasses in February in the high latitudes. Yeah, really really slow. Perhaps my fascination with clever metaphors was influenced by the dope music of the 1990s, which was full of them as I am just now discovering. Yeah, I'm molasses. As a case study, I will explore "Jump Around" by House of Pain. There are a few rad phrases in this song that are funny, if not completely sensible when thoroughly examined. Let's break 'em down. (If you think the lyrics I'm using are wrong, blame these guys.)

Jump around!

1. "I'll serve your ass like John McEnroe." This metaphor makes sense on many levels. According to Urban Dictionary (obviously, a source of myeh reliability), the definition of "to serve" is to "deliver a swift and decisive round of ass whoopin". Thus, House of Pain is claiming to deliver an ass whoopin' as good as McEnroe or his serve. The first layer of the metaphor is that tennis players actually serve a ball! You're probably thinking, "What! what! Andrew, you teach me so much in these posts." I know. For the analogy to truly make sense, we have to explore whether or not McEnroe's serve was something to be reckoned with. Otherwise, the analogy just means House of Pain will deliver a so-so round of ass whoopin'. McEnroe was a serve-and-volley style player, and it turns out, according to this random web site and this other random web site with user lists (what do you want? this is a blog) that I found via google , that McEnroe isn't even in the top ten servers of all time. Thus, at the very least, House of Pain is not delivering a Top Ten level of ass whoopin' if this is the intended meaning, which I think it is. Of course, one could argue that I should go back to the time when the song was written and determine who the top ten were then. Yes I should and no I won't.

But maybe House of Pain was talking about the second layer of the metaphor. McEnroe definitely delivered his share of whoopin's to opposing players--and refs--during his career. Thus, the metaphor could make sense on this level, but it's less clever than the first. The third layer of this analogy is that in 1984, John McEnroe actually threw a donkey into the air, struck it with a racket, and it landed in bounds on the opposite side of the court, giving the metaphor a final--if you are buying this, you are as crazy as an Aerosmith video starring Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler. Of course, House of Pain may have also just liked the heritage of fellow Irish-American McEnroe and a name rhymes with "ho".

2 and 3. "Word to your moms / I came to drop bombs / I got more rhymes than the Bible's got Psalms / And just like the Prodigal Son, I've returned." Back to back Bible references?!! Can I get an Amen! House of Pain claims that it has a lot of rhymes, and they didn't go with "stars in the sky" or "Lindsay Lohan arrests" but instead went with the remarkably modest number of Psalms in the Bible. The question is how many Psalms are in the Bible? Again, a Google search provides an answer: 150. House of Pain claims to have over 150 rhymes. I'm guessing they are correct: 3 CDs of at least ten tracks with probably at least five rhymes in each song. Seems reasonable--almost to the point of not being very many.

The next line has to do with the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is told by that superstar Jesus Christ in the Gospel according to Luke (thank you Catholic school--but mostly Google). If House of Pain is returning to a father's forgiving arms after spending an inheritance on hos and blow, then yes, House of Pain is actually returning like the Prodigal Son. But I'm guessing it's just a clever turn of phrase that is as fresh as a character, played by Will Smith, who moves from West Philadelphia, where he was born and raised and on the playground is where he spent most of his days, chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool . . . then he moves to live with his auntie and uncle in Bel-Air. Too much? Or are you confused?

4. "Tryin' to play out like as if my name was Sega." To define "play", I will refer you to a quote in The Wire, also known as the best thing ever written ever (no that is not a typo) for a screen. Omar Little says, "The game is out there, and it's play or get played." If you don't understand, you should spend 60 hours watching The Wire, and then you can thank me for referring you to such an enlightening piece of work. Now what about Sega? The Sega Genesis was a gaming console that competed with Super Nintendo, TurboGrafx-16, and NeoGeo (a very clever console name, now that I think about it) during the 16-bit console generation. I was a Nintendo fan, but I did learn almost all I know about hockey, its rules, and its players by playing Sega. My friend and I would down Jolt (the 90s caffeinated soda) and try to stay up all night playing NHL '93. You probably played Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis. I would say that getting played like Sega is getting hella played, making the lyric as dope as that dwarf. Oh, is that Dopey? Close enough. Nobody's going to really examine my metaphors.

In conclusion, an in-depth-ish look at House of Pain's lyrics may not have served them well, but who cares? I still find them as fly as a model organism (that's for all you bio nerds).

Why is this blog back?

During the past few months, many people have asked me, "Andrew, why don't you post on your blog any more?" I blush and say, "Aw, shucks!" And then I wake up from my dream. The reality is that I have been slightly busy doing other things. Those things have given me some ideas for blog posts, and I'm pretty sure you all want to hear my opinions, especially about the importance of the Oxford comma. Therefore, I am back to blogging for three reasons: I have nothing better to do, my brain is fat (technically, everybody's brain is mostly fat--nerd alert!), and I'm in a different place than I was two years ago, both literally and figuratively.

Time. I simply have more of it. I am no longer writing a thesis, moving, or planning a wedding. For sure, I enjoyed generating a 170 page document (my thesis) that a total of three people in the world will read. Who wouldn't feel that that is an important and worthwhile task? The experiments for that document and the actual writing consumed most of 2010. After that, my move to San Diego had me packing and spending a lot of mental energy on logistics, so that ate up early 2011. After the move, we (my girlfriend -> fiance -> wife) jumped on a plane and headed to New Zealand for a month. That excursion provided a few posts on a different blog (http://travelinghobnobs.blogspot.com/), which, now that I look at it, looks like it took a ton of time and makes me wonder why I am starting to blog again. After getting engaged in New Zealand, we returned to start planning a wedding. If you've done this before, you know that it takes a wee bit of time (April through November) and mental energy, even if you do have a stellar mother-in-law who is willing to plan almost everything. You also know that the To Do List doesn't quite end the day after the wedding due to gift exchanges, Thank Yous, and catching up on sleep. So, now I finally have some time to write and am ready to make you wonder why you just wasted some time reading a blog post.

Mental obesity. During my blog absence, I have been content posting what some call "clever" status updates on facebook (by "some", I mean "me"). However, I realized that this medium required little time, minimal risk, and no real effort to complete a thought. And oh how I like it! Ooh, look, a shiny thing! What was I writing about? Oh yeah: status updates. Status updates are like eating ramen: easy to make, immediately satisfying, and--wow, it's exhausting thinking of similarities between ramen and status updates. There must be millions. Blog posts, on the other hand, are like Kraft macaroni and cheese: it takes more effort to "cook", requires a person to exercise delayed gratification, and . . . Anyway, writing blog posts requires different and (slightly) deeper thinking than status updates. Granted, it's not like writing a novel, which would be like preparing a five course meal in that--forget it, this is too much work right now.

The final reason to restart this blog is that life has changed a lot in the past two years, and I have changed, meaning that there is a lot to explore. I am thinking of altering the topics of this blog from the mundane (complaining about small stuff that bothers me) to more important topics like the rise of the single woman and the decline of the marry-able man, the effect of the video game culture on the tweenie generation, and the development of the presynaptic structures of the sensory neuron AFD in C. elegans. Or I'll just stick to inanities like college football, old(ish) cars, and song lyrics. We'll see how much life has changed.

If you thought this post was horrible, I've intentionally set a low bar so that there is nowhere to go but up. Hope you'll be along for at least some of the ride. And I'll be adding post-appropriate pictures this time around because some of you may not be here for the words.

Probably my greatest achievement during my hiatus was scoring 185 points in one move in Words with Friends.