Super Bowl Sunday

I am an American, so I cannot NOT watch the Super Bowl, and I feel like an absolute loser if I don’t watch it with at least one other person who is not a blood relative.

It’s generally the only football game I watch all year.  I don’t even like football.  But I do love football snacks.

My father is from Tennessee and my mother is from Texas, so I think I am genetically predisposed to drive a Cadillac and eat cheese dips.  I am also not bad at the arcade game Big Buck Hunter, although my ball-cap wearing flannel-obsessed 17-year-old daughter will beat me every time.

We got invited to a Super Bowl party this year, and I felt as if the universe was correctly aligned as I sat in someone else’s living room and pretended I cared about football.  Until I got to the party, I didn’t even know what teams were playing, where the game was being played, or who was doing the half-time act.

I can thank the Trump presidency for my general ignorance of the world at large.  I used to be an NPR junkie but now I only listen to audiobook mysteries.  The news just makes me angry and sad.  Larry tells me if there’s some current event I should know about, and he cares about football almost as little as I do.

Normally I might have stayed in the kitchen at the Super Bowl party, gossiping with the other wives, but all the football snacks had been placed in front of the TV.  So I had to pretend I was a Rams fan to be near those delicious cheesy snacks.

We live squarely in the fruits-and-nuts part of California, so normally “snacks” consist of kale chips or hummus or some such quasi-healthy food, but on Super Bowl Sunday people bring out the mini hot dogs, the Doritos, the cheese balls, and oceans of beer.

By all accounts the game was boring to everyone, not just me, but I’d say the snacks were worth it.  And it was fun to hear all the ladies gasp when Adam Levine took off his shirt.