I said, on Thursday night while watching Central Florida upset Louisville, that football is in some ways even more fun when you are watching the emotions of a game in which you aren’t invested.
Sometimes. Because when you are wrapped up in it, this stuff can be anxious.
Four years ago, when Arkansas visited Auburn, was the last time I watched an emotionally wrought football game. I didn’t feel like that in the BCS championship game or in the 2010 Iron Bowl comeback or the SEC Championship game that year. But the back and forth, punch-counterpunch of the Arkansas game that season felt a lot like tonight’s game. Anything was possible, nothing was too absurd, no one was stoppable. The heart races even in a seated position.
Tonight was like that. We got to watch a bunch of young men we don’t know stick with something and stick together. We saw them play against perhaps the best player in the game, just months removed from some of the worst athletic experiences they’ve every encountered.
We watched them claw and fight. We witnessed them realize their goals were before them. We saw them pull off something pretty spectacular. We watched young men with tears of happiness in their eyes and joy in their heart.
Fans gathered just before midnight to welcome the team home:
This is a special place with some special people and they all felt like it tonight.
The post where photos, and the occasional video, finally find a home. And we call this Sunday, and Catching up. On with it then.
The bride and groom had a string quartet just off to the side. We offered them cash to insert a new song into their playlist. This didn’t cost as much as you’d think:
This was one of those weddings where the guys in tuxes looked underdressed:
We had a great time at the reception:
At the after-party:
Since I forgot the media card for my DSLR I shot everything this weekend on my phone. Most of them were bad. But, anyway, meet our new friend, Dru.
The OK Cafe, in Atlanta. Haven’t eaten here in several years. It is named after a restaurant in To Kill a Mockingbird.
There is nothing wrong with anything on this plate:
Sometimes the day gets away from you. Sometimes you get away from the day. Others, one supposes, are pleasantly predictable, moving at just the right pace, each thing approaching as you expected, addressed, completed and reflected upon. In between there are days that have some combination of all of those attributes.
Today was none of those things. Which is not bad, or good, just a thing.
The students at the Crimson went strong until about 3 or 3:30 this morning. That is imprecise, but chronometer precision isn’t a necessary function of my world at that time of day. The late hour, being an early hour, also informs the day.
That’s what I’m getting at here. It was late. Today was early. Things moved accordingly.
That little boy has a disease that has only been diagnosed about 100 times worldwide, and he’s already endured a host of surgeries. Now he’s got a new team on his side:
Had a fun critique meeting today. The silliness overwhelmed us, but work was done. A little more levity in the middle of the week never hurt anyone, and don’t you think that cutline needs better punctuation?
Ran into a former student this evening. She’s graduated. She completed a high profile internship in D.C. She now has a distinguished sounding title at her new job. Charming young lady and talented, with a great future ahead of her. I wonder how many times I say that a year.
Things to read that I thought you’d enjoy. Here’s your daily dose of silly. I remain of the opinion we’re going about this all wrong, but, this story got to use “‘Gestapo’ tactics” in an American headline, so there’s that unfortunate development:
Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.
The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.
[…]
The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.
“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.
The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.
The longer this goes on the more absurd the stories will get, it seems.
This young woman is studying to be a classical soprano in Scotland. She started following my campus blog today. I’ve been listening to some of her performances. It isn’t every day you meet talented singers. She fulfills the requirement. That link takes you to her performance as Eponine.
Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral. Worse, the moral weakness of parents is always on display, for children bear witness to their incessant ethical hairsplitting. It may be delicious fun to tut-tut over the corrupt child-rearing customs (and to pity the progeny) of the aggressively rising class: the mother who, according to Urban Baby legend, slept with the admissions officer (with her husband’s consent!) to get her child into the Ivy League, or the one who sued an Upper East Side preschool for insufficiently preparing her 4-year-old for a private-school test. But such Schadenfreude elides a more difficult existential truth, which is that ever since Noah installed his own three sons upon the ark and left the rest of the world to drown, protecting and privileging one’s own kids at the expense of other people has been the name of the game. It’s what parents do.
Your child constantly puts you in quandaries, but everyone is right there, so ignore the lice, do their homework, hold your kid back, game the system. Everyone is doing it!
Not being a parent, I can only pretend to understand. Surely I’d want the best, and to see my child was well prepared for this and that as possible. But I’m also fairly certain that, on the off chance I did not have a perfect child, I’d want them to learn from any struggles and imperfections, so that they could, maybe, appreciate the things that come easier to them and see those less ideal moments for what they really are.
But, then, I have probably fewer answers than the author of that piece, I know. I’m only trying to be a member of her “aggressively rising class” a frame through which she portrays the most condescending examples of life you’d find in almost any other magazine, but just feel so delightfully tacky here.
Most parents don’t think of themselves as the kind of people who prize winning above all. Most hope to teach their kids what used to be called “good values,” which a previous generation learned in scouts or church: kindness and compassion, respect and responsibility, to “do unto others” and be grateful for small things.
Society now looks back and down upon solid values as quaint relics of a past age, because moral equivalence has diminished even the Golden Rule.
And then: “All the data show a generation far less ethical than their parents.” Soon after we’re learning of “a hazy space where right and wrong seem porous” which is just a logical excuse to allow for more modern superiority through the ill-defined virtues of a mantra that says no one is wrong, unless their righter or wronger than me: “There’s lots of room to wiggle here. Especially when the transgressions get you where you want to be.”
So we suggest that parents do all for their kids yet haven’t transferred a moral foundation which just makes things somewhat foggy and non-descript, but, hey, it’s for the children and so then all bets are off.
This is an article indulging our judgmental lapses. So you think I don’t raise my children according to what I read in New York Magazine, thank heavens. And you read the wide-ranging examples offered by this mother of a 9-year-old and you wonder about the ethics of others. It is, as she says, tough out there. You get the feeling it is the most difficult when she intervenes, though.
Finally, a few things from the multimedia blog that I forgot to mention yesterday:
In the morning I read, in the afternoon I worked in the library, in the evening I was in the pool and tonight I’m with the student-journalists who are putting their newspaper together.
Which, in the scheme of things, makes this a pretty great day. Dinner could have been healthier, but I promised myself a Milo’s burger if I swam a lot. So it was that I caught up on the morning’s news. I sat in a deep leather chair and watched the reflection of the world in the dark corners of my computer screen poring in from the window behind me.
It was a beautiful day. I had a conversation about it while I was trying to make this panorama. A colleague and I decided we shouldn’t be inside, but rather on the quad:
Photosynth, showing me the errors in my panoramas, but only after I uploaded the thing, ever since I got the app. However, if you are in a picturesque place, that’s a pretty good free app.
I made it to the pool just in time to spend that sunlight-twilight-dusk-darkness period carefully avoiding drowning.
I swam 1.5 miles tonight. I’ve been told by the best swimmer in my house — and probably the best swimmer on our side of town — that I should note these measurements in a different unit. So I swam 2,700 yards.
I do not know what is happening.
Every third lap I did freestyle, so 900 free. And remember, I couldn’t do half a length of any pool like that this summer on account of my shoulder and collarbone.
The last 200 yards or so were even more ragged than usual. I am slow, and it isn’t pretty, but I am pleased.
Then a burger and fries. Finally back to the office for a night enjoying the editors put their paper together. It’ll be done sometime after midnight. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll be another strong edition.
The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom”, My Fox Phoenix reports.
“I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous … I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability,” Nadien Schweigert told Anderson Cooper.
So long as you now feel accountable to yourself and, one presumes, for yourself.
Collins said she feels lucky to have a job and supervisors who will allow her to take paid time off to take care of her son’s return. For those who aren’t as fortunate, the death gratuity may be critical to their survival and sense of closure.
“While that benefit may not be urgent for me, it’s urgent for somebody. There’s somebody who needs to fly their family home. There’s somebody who needs to have expenses covered, or be able to take off work to handle the affairs of their loved one,” she said. “And to know that the government shutting down will delay their ability to handle their business, some people just won’t be able to do it.
While, financially,she is able to address her son’s return, Collins said she still could use help in paying for his funeral.
“I don’t necessarily have $10,000 to bury my son,” she said. While she is working with the funeral home to make arrangements, she wondered: “Am I going to be on a payment plan for the rest of my life so that my son can have the services that he deserves?”
You also have this feeling that this particular cruelty will be remedied right quickly now that Congress sees it played out in the media. And that should tell you everything you need to know about how the government works.
Jorge has lived with amputated limbs since he underwent a life-saving procedure at the age of 14 months because of an infection — most likely meningococcal meningitis, Dyksen said. “His skin was just rotting away,” she said. Today, he’s healthy.
It’s not only on the soccer field that Jorge has looked past his physical constraints. He’s also a member of the school bowling team, using both arms to roll a ball without holes. And he’s also prolific at text-messaging, family friend Carla Nash said, hitting away at keys without his prosthetic right hand. In the classroom, he holds a pencil between both arms.
[…]
He said he hopes to be a motivational speaker as an adult. “Because I know there’s people out there that really need motivation and everyone says I always motivate other people,” he said. “I help them get happy in their lives. I’m always smiling and I just feel like that’s the right thing for me.”
Good for Jorge.
You want video? They’ve got video.
“Nothing is impossible,” his teammates say. Special young man, there.
It was an evening kickoff, which meant an afternoon spent sitting in the tailgating tent, sorta-watching other games.
People coming and going in the tent make for good conversation, but seldom do they let you dissect the intricacies of a cover-two defense. Not that I’d prefer to do that over the former.
The thing you’d prefer to do is watch the game on CBS, but apparently they and Dish are having another spat, and that means we couldn’t get the Georgia at Tennessee game today. It only went to overtime, so thanks CBS and Dish.
Not that we would have seen the end. We would have been inside the stadium watching the Tigers play, which is precisely what we did.
Nova flew this evening:
So did these planes:
I do not know why people wave their shakers at planes, but they do.
Anyway, it was military appreciation night, so all of those themes were added to your usual Saturday night pageantry. And Nick Marshall might have earned his own appreciation night.
The quarterback ran for 140 yards and two scores and threw for 93 yards in a gameplan designed to show off his feet.
Tre Mason showed his off, too:
He gained 77 yards on the ground, 62 receiving yards and the game’s first touchdown.
The game almost got out of hand when Robenson Therezie managed an impressive interception and returned it 78 yards for the score. The best part are the crestfallen looks on the faces of the visiting Rebels fans in the background. I love the background atmosphere shots, the accidental documentary snapshot:
Auburn couldn’t put Ole Miss away, though, and the Rebels would fight back. All the while, Marshall just kept running.
Ole Miss churned up yards, and they eventually turned a three score deficit into a five-point affair. And despite allowing 464 yards, it felt like a game for the Auburn defense. At the end, when it counted, the defensive line came up huge. The Tigers beat Ole Miss 30-22, the first ranked opponent they’ve defeated since 2011, to go 4-1 on the season.
Here are the video highlights, edited to make the game look terribly lopsided. I assure you it was not:
