A Billion Civilians

"And Sanchez takes the sn..."

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"...eller inside the 20. 1st down Je..."

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"Your video will continue in 15 seconds."

Insert annoying JLo Fiat commercial. JLo proceeds to drive around in a Fiat while singing her new single, Papi. Meanwhile, men from all walks of life hurry and push their way past each other to be able to catch a glimpse of the aging has-been star. Brief cases fly in the air, the papers falling out and dancing in the wind. For some reason, there are men on skateboards doing kick flips off of the stairs to try to catch up to JLo in her affordable ride.

Now I don't claim to be a Spanish linguist so I could be wrong but, is it a little strange that she is singing this song about her Papi? Isn't that her father? Is she calling him 'baby' in this song?

Back to the NFL.

This is how it's been for quite some time here in Xining. In fact, I am sure that the world is full of thousands of men, and perhaps women, who stream NFL games in the middle of the night. The stream is usually pretty choppy and there are a lot of pop-ups and commercials that you have to look around, but it's all we have.

The good thing about watching football at 1am is that it is a quiet time of day on the Internet, meaning the connection is usually a little faster than usual and the stream is not as choppy as, say, when you want to watch Monday Night Football on a Tuesday morning.

The bad thing is that you are actually up all night watching football, which, depending how you look at it, might not be the best way to start the week.

This past weekend I bought a special imported beer to watch the Jets' game with. At around 2am I realized that drinking a beer at 2am isn't the smartest thing to do. It remains unopened in the fridge, to be utilized at a later date.

The Jets ended up playing pretty well and easily won the game. The game ended at 4am.

At this point I decided that it was time to get 2 hours of sleep. The problem was that at the same time I realized that the Oilers' website was streaming the Joey Moss Cup, a sort of inter-squad scrimmage between all of the players trying out for the team. Well, I watched 2 periods of that and then fell asleep just in time for Miles to wake up crying. His problem?

"Dad, I can't see."

"Miles, it's 530 so it's still dark out."

"Oh."

I got back to sleep and then Jonas decided that it was time to get up for his milk. I muscled him back into bed and slept for 30 minutes.

The 3 stars of the night are....

3. The Jets Defense. Played really well and gave the offense time to make mistakes and still dominate the game.

2. The stream was smooth for most of the game. It was nice to watch football.

1. Barbara, who left with the boys around 830am and let me sleep in for a while.

God Bless the loyal fans who stay up to watch their team, no matter what time that might be; though, the smart thing to do would be to only do that once in a while.

But who am I kidding, I'm talking about football! A familiar North American cultural tradition that, though it takes away our sleep, infuses us with something much better and more reliable than sleep... magic good-feeling sentimental over hyped excitement.