One of the senior people in the office who hasn't been around much just stopped by to ask how I was settling in. He said, "I hear you're fluent in Chinese." I responded quickly, because it sounded like he was about to test me. "Um. Not fluent, exactly," I said. "Working on it. Let's just call it proficient for now." He smiled and walked away. Crisis avoided.
The Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers 14-12 in Monday Night Football a few hours ago. I know because I was following it online (remember, not a whole lot to do). The game ended on a controversial touchdown call -- the Green Bay defender appeared to come down with the ball for an interception, before the Seattle recevier tried wrestling the ball from him. The play was ruled a touchdown and chaos ensued. The call would have been disputed regardless of the situation, but the reaction to it has been further fueled by the fact that the league as a whole has been under a firestorm of criticism for locking out its referees and allowing regular season games to be called by replacement officials from lower division college football, arena football, and, yes, the Lingerie League...
...OK, timeout for a quick side note. For those of you who frequent this blog for fascinating pictures of China, today's just not your day. I'm bored at work, and my little free-write here just stumbled upon the Lingerie Football League, so the picture you all get is of the famous San Diego Seduction:
Those of you intrigued by the Seduction can find further information about the league here: Lingerie League! Woo hoo!. I'm shocked and appalled that this website wasn't blocked by my office internet firewalls. I guess it's a "legitimate sports league".
ANYWAY, so this is where some of the officials that are currently charged with maintaining order in NFL games comes from. I don't have to tell you that the rules of the NFL differ substantially from the Lingerie League. That much should be obvious. But wait, it gets worse. The hoopla surrounding the botched ending to the Packers-Seahawks game has been so ubiquitous, that even the LFL felt it necessary to join the fray. Not only have LFL referees been hired to officiate NFL games, but some of them were FIRED from the LFL: Hilarious.
I can't say whether that press release is genuine or not, but the fact that Deadspin is reporting on it suggests to me that it is. In any event, this replacement referee thing has gotten out of hand. Fans, journalists, players, and coaches were all waiting, simultaneously hoping for and dreading what ultimately happened tonight: a single call affected the outcome of the game. Russell Wilson became the first player in the history of the NFL to throw a game winning interception for his team. An NFL Fan Boycott page has cropped up on Facebook, calling for fans to stay home from games next weekend in protest. I don't think it'll work -- the NFL has always banked on the elasticity of its fan base, and I think this officiating debacle has been a test of that gamble (a test that, so far, the NFL has won). But I've been a pretty avid sports fan for my entire life, and I've never quite seen something like this. The NFL and its owners will have to answer a very simple question in the coming days: is it willing to sacrifice the integrity of the game for the sake of their negotiating position with the NFLRA? For the first three weeks of the season, the answer has been a resounding yes, and that's stunning from a fan's perspective.
I'm feeling the diaspora effect from all of this, too. My inability to watch any of the games has increased my fascination with what has been going on. My mouse cursor was fixated on the refresh button at the end of the game, eagerly following the reactions on Twitter and waiting for ESPN to finally load the video of the final play onto its website. I feel how far away I am the most when things are going on with the things I'm interested in, to the point where I seem to care about them more than I would otherwise. It's not just the NFL - I've been following the election campaigns way more closely than I have in the past. There's something real about how being absent from something can inversely correlate with the extreme to which one cares about it. I was always interested in news and current events -- now that my access to it is so limited, I've become a junkie, lapping up whatever I can get.
I've been asked to write a short piece on my experience moving to Shanghai for a corporate newsletter. Cool, I thought. What a fun thing to do. Ironically, I can't figure out what to say. Here I am furiously keeping up with a blog that I thought I'd fail miserably at, and I can't fill a page with coherent thoughts about my experiences for work. It'll come eventually, but I think the writer's block relates to what that friend of a friend told me before I came to China the first time: "when you're here for a day, you want to write a book about it, but when you're in China for a month or two, you don't know what to write about anymore." Little things, blog-sized kernels for me to remember, those are easy and fun. But "my experiences"? How do I fit those into a page and have them make sense? I just spent three two paragraphs on the Lingerie Football League for goodness sake...and you want me to write a page on moving to the other side of the world?
Guess I better get cracking...
No comments:
Post a Comment