I had avoided watching the Butler basketball game in the second round of the NCAA tournament because I’ve decided I can’t stand to watch sports games when I actually care about the teams. It makes me anxious. (I can’t watch The Amazing Race either because I get worried that the good people will miss their flights and the bad people will win because this is not scripted and evil sometimes wins.) As I confessed last year, I love the Butler Bulldogs, and I still find comfort in the idea that there is a parallel universe somewhere in which Gordon Hayward’s buzzer beater shot from half-court actually landed in the basket, they won the tournament, and someone is producing a movie about it. And I don’t even care about basketball!

So, there I was avoiding the game, which was easy because it was on cable and I do not have cable. My dad was visiting, so we were watching a game between BYU and Gonzaga, which sounds more like a cheese than a university. Alas, CBS had an infographic at the top of the screen that updated with the latest scores and the time left in the other games. So, of course, the Butler game comes up with Butler down a point with one whole minute left in the game. And I was like, “Damn it, Butler! Why must you always do this to me? Why can’t you just demolish your opponent instead of eliminating my need for nail clippers?”

My dad and I watched the timer run down to 8 seconds (actually, I watched through my nail-bitten fingers), and then it held at 8 seconds for awhile, which was driving me crazy because I didn’t care about the cheese college’s game. So, what does a girl without cable do? She gets her Twitter on! People are always clogging up my Twitter stream with stupid talk about basketball, and now I was finally grateful for it! I pulled out my laptop and searched Twitter for the #butler hashtag. Oh, marvel at my ingenuity, me the 21st century girl (without cable).

This was at once both incredibly informative and totally confusing. For instance, in the tweet stream I would see something like this:

@bballFan4Life: YESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!
@LiveToLayUp: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

So, something important had obviously just happened, but who was the Butler fan and who was the Pittsburgh fan? Why couldn’t their Twitter names be @ButlerRocks and @Pitts4Evah or something?

Then the clock restarted on the TV and then stopped again at 2 seconds, which is when the Twitterati let me know someone had done something stupid, though I could not determine what. I kept hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, trying to sort out facts from the chatter, and finally figured out that Butler had gotten the upper hand by one point and was good to win the game when—d’oh!—somebody fouled Pittsburgh, which meant they’d get two free throws and might win the game.

This was when I remembered why I DON’T WATCH SPORTS GAMES THAT I CARE ABOUT. I evidently needed to expand that rule to include not searching Twitter for hashtags about sports games I care about.

So, there was more rapid refreshing and I announced to my dad, who was watching over my shoulder, that there would be overtime. Yay, overtime! I hate it at work, but in this basketball game it was a Godsend. Go Bulldogs, you’re the—Oh, wait, what’s this? We’re not in overtime? There was a foul. Huh, what? Do they mean the earlier foul? Someone else couldn’t have possibly fouled with less than 2 seconds left. Did we foul again? Were we doubly stupid? When did this become “we,” anyway? Oh, right, many, many moons ago when I worked a contract job at Butler for two months. Here’s the picture of the cup I stole from IT to prove it:

Finally after several tweets about overtime, fouls, and the bowel movements of the tweeters in question, I finally figured out that Pittsburgh had fouled Butler (God only knows how), so now Butler had two free throws to break the tie and win the game they really should have won several seconds ago.

Tension!

I kept clicking the refresh button and again there was the “YESSSSSSSS!!!!” and the “NOOOOOOO!!!!” and I was like, “Yes! No! Yes! No! What the hell happened?!?!?” Finally, FINALLY, enough tweets came through for me to learn that my boys had come through and Butler had finally won, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat that they had just snatched from the jaws of victory, like some sort of metaphorical turducken, all stuffed within each other.

It was a rather odd way to follow a basketball game, as thrilling as it was confusing. I had to wait 20-30 minutes before CBS finally showed the highlights, so I was glad I hadn’t been stuck in a clueless vacuum with only a cold infographic to keep me company. Later I poked around the NCAA site and learned you can watch live streaming video of games, which would have been good to know earlier, but probably would have been choppy and unreliable because of buffering and datastream speeds and all that nonsense. Watching a game in ASCII takes much less bandwidth.

Here’s a more linear, less confusing wrap-up of the game if all the Twitter recapping left you puzzled. (I hear ya’!)

Go #butler!

Back in the year 2000, I started watching a TV show called The West Wing and loved it. That was the good. The bad? I started watching from the second season premiere and we had no Hulu, no Netflix, and no BitTorrent for me to watch the first season. It was the dark times, younglings. (We did have IRC sharing channels, newsgroups and FTP queues, but we also had dial-up*. Oh, dial-up.)

So, what was a girl to do? Well, she got on the interwebs and got a fan to send her ten VHS tapes containing copies of copies of the episodes. Shipping cost at least twenty dollars and thirty seconds of one episode was overridden by a California emergency weather alert, but they were watchable and that’s what we had, so we made do.

But now, now we have DVDs and Netflix streaming and life is good! Life is fantastic! Now entire seasons of television shows are available to watch in binge marathons on the weekends. It has transformed the way I watch TV, no longer parceled out in bite-size pieces every week, but watched as a detailed season-long story arc. You don’t want to read a chapter of a book every week. You want to read the whole book at once, and that’s what is possible now, which is what’s great. And I love it, because I think the televised season-long story arc is one of my favorite forms of storytelling, if not the most favorite. (So says the book author who reminds you to love books and buy books, especially my books!)

A season of a television show gives you more time to meet the characters, tell the stories and flesh things out. When I compare Friday Night Lights the movie and Friday Night Lights the television show’s first season, the TV show wins. Both have excellent production values and great acting, but you can tell so much more story with umpteen hours of TV than you can in two hours of movie. And you can tell it’s good because I do not care an iota about football and still love that show.

It seems like TV is looked down on as inferior to movies, but I don’t think that’s a valid stereotype. The quality of TV shows has gotten so good in the past few decades that they’re just as good if not better than many movies. You’ve got accomplished actors of stage and screen appearing in shows, like Laura Linney in “The C Word” or Anna Paquin in the hit “True Blood.” And now with our smartphones and media players, it is becoming less important where you watch a show. You can watch it almost anywhere.

I love good TV shows. I love that I can watch them in my house and not at a theatre with chatty couples and the distracting light of someone texting in the second row. I love that there is so much more to devour and enjoy than in movies. I love that the characters continue to change and grow more than they typically have space to do in films. I love talking about TV shows with my friends. I love TV!

And I love that TV comes on DVD, so I don’t have to wait through commercials. I love that it’s available online, legally, so I don’t really have to pay for cable if I don’t want to. I particularly love it when I discover a great show after it’s been on the air for five years. Then I get to watch seasons of it back to back, not waiting long summers for the resolution to cliffhangers. So thank you DVD and the Internet. And thank you TV!

* If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry. You don’t need to and it probably means you actually interacted with human beings as a teenager.

I lived without cable television for…five years? I don’t really remember. It was a long time and particularly unexpected because I grew up on television. In 4th grade, we had to track how much TV we watching in a week, and I was in the top 5% of my class, which might also explain the whole morbid obesity thing. However, I found that once I cut the cable cord, it was surprisingly easy to live without cable TV. I could still watch network shows and the nightly news, and I had movies and the Internet and books and always found something to do.

Now that the cable TV is available, I find myself flipping it on and expecting it to entertain me. It’s funny how quickly I’ve become dependent on it. I’ve become addicted to NCIS, a show I avoided because I was sick of shows titled with acronyms, but soon discovered was actually kind of quarky and fun, if formulaic. I spent one day watching a marathon of Cake Boss while working and almost screamed in horror when a bride purposely trashed her wedding cake. I’ve watched so many episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that I can guess what season I’m watching by the size of Vincent D’Onofrio’s pants and how scraggly his beard is.

Yet overall, I feel like it might be better for me if I didn’t have the cable. I might be forced to read more or socialize or something if there wasn’t an NCIS marathon on every evening. I dunno. Oh, gotta’ go! Criminal Intent is coming on!

That’s right, y’all. American Gladiators is back.

I’ve been looking forward to the excessive use of spandex on this show since September. For those of you unfamiliar with syndicated television shows broadcast on the USA network in the 90′s, American Gladiators was a show that featured two male and two female competitors who would face off against the gladiators in several trials of strength, agility and balance. The remake is cheesy, good fun and it’s co-hosted by Laila Ali, a veteran of my other favorite, cheesy show featuring spandex, Dancing with the Stars.

While the gladiators have impressive physiques, it’s the competitors who are amazing. First, there was, Venus Ramos, a 5’4″ rehab physician and reigning Miss Fitness America who was called in as an alternate for Jesse Foster who hurt her knee after the first event and then had to go back to her job as a toilet paper salesmen. Venus inherited Jesse’s score, so she started out 4 points down, matched up against 5’10″ Koya Webb. I did not have Venus envy. Yet somehow she was able to make up the difference and come in 2 points ahead before the final obstacle course – The Eliminator – named such because it will make you shit your pants. Contestants have to swim under a lake of fire. A lake of fire, people!

This course is so exhausting that every contest who managed to get to the end of the Eliminator was practically hyperventilating and could barely stand for the post-race interview.

Koya was ahead for most of the course, but kept slipping and falling on the Travelator (yeah, they’re just making up words now). Venus rallied and passed Koya, winning the event and this round of competition! It was amazing. I’d completely written the tiny, doctor off, but she pulled it off. Venus is officially my hero of the week.

My runner up for hero of the week is Bonnie Blanco, a retired marine who rocked the Hang Tough event in which contestants have to swing cross a pool of water on rings hanging from the ceiling. Oh, and they have to avoid a crazy gladiator like Wolf who hasn’t showered for a month and howls for the audience before each round. I was the girl who would grab onto the first rung of the monkey bars and dangle for three seconds before dropping to the ground and twisting my ankle. I admire anyone who can just cross this course. Bonnie got about halfway across when Fury wrapper her legs around her in a death grip and flipped down into the “suicide squeeze.”

But Bonnie was not deterred! She clung onto that ring, for about 20 seconds while a 148-pound gladiator clung to her waist and tried pulling her down. Fury had to flip back up and fight with Bonnie – who tossed her off into the water below! Bonnie didn’t manage to get all the way across before the time ran out, but the only thing stronger than her tenacity is her upper body strength.

While I really enjoyed seeing athletic women rocking it on prime time television, I am concerned about the contestants’ safety. There were a lot of injuries. Jesse hurt her knee during the first round of Power Ball, a gladiator hurt his arm during Hang Tough, and Bonnie whacked her head on a metal pole during The Eliminator and was bleeding from the forehead for the rest of the event. It seems like a lot to go through for only a $100,000 prize. C’mon, NBC! They’re swimming under a lake of fire! That’s worth at least a million bucks.

There are only eight episodes in this season, three of them airing this week, but I’ll be tuning in to hear the contestants’ inspirational stories and to admire Crush’s lace-up, jersey corset and to watch Hellga, who actually admits to weighing over 200 pounds and can totally kick your ass if you have a problem with that.

Sixth grade. Louisville, Kentucky. Westport Middle School. Each grade was separated into three or four teams of students who had the same teachers. It was a way of dividing up the student body to make them more manageable. Our teams were astronomically themed: 6-1 Nebula, 6-2 Nova, 6-3 Pulsar, and 6-4 Fine Arts and Humanities a.k.a. Snobby Little Bitches who were too good to be named Quasar or Red Dwarf. As you can see I was chubby even back then and had a propensity for correcting our yearbook staff’s typos with a ballpoint pen. I was on 6-2 Nova, but they never made me run a marathon to graduate, thank goodness. I didn’t even have to take PE. Otherwise I might have been a sixth grade drop-out.

They expected at least half of PBS’s Team NOVA to drop out over the nine month training period due to injuries, but amazingly only one women had to quit. And that was only because her legs were literally shattering with stress factures due to her diabetes and the repetitive stress of running. My favorite team member was probably Betsey, who started out 70 pounds overweight with, as the narrator so tactfully put it, a body that was almost half fat. She almost had a heart attack right there on PBS during the preliminary health testing, but after being OK’d to train went from being the slowest female runner to being the fastest. She lost 40-something pounds, ran the marathon with a urinary tract infection, and according to her profile just came back from mountaineering in France. I would totally hang with Betsey, at a coffee shop or off the side of a glacier, whichever she prefers.

Other interesting points they covered:

• A good way to measure someone’s cardiovascular health and aptitude for endurance sports is by determining their VO2 max, “the volume of oxygen a person can consume in one minute as he or she exercises at maximum exertion.” To measure this value however, they have to hook you up to a device that resembles what astronauts pee in, only they stick it on your face.

  

• Some people really are natural athletes. Jonathan’s VO2 max was as high as many elite athletes’ even though he hadn’t been exercising that much. He’s also the president’s cousin, which means that not only are the Bush’s wealthy and privileged, they also have good fitness genes. Bastards.
• You can be thin and overfat. You can be overweight and in good cardiovascular health. As most of the contestants got in better shape, developed more lean body mass and scored a higher VO2 max, their weight was hardly affected. Your size is not the ultimate determiner of your fitness. So next time someone tells you fat is unhealthy as if it’s a de facto statement, tell them to watch NOVA more often. However, don’t do it while eating Cheetos while you’re sitting on your ass actually watching NOVA.
• As is implied by the last fact, marathons are not a great way to lose weight. (They didn’t cover this in the show, but the word on the street is that high intensity interval training is the best way to burn fat, not low-intensity aerobic exercise. Pass it on!)
• While one might assume that the farther you run, the fitter you get, it’s not true. After Team NOVA had trained for six months and gotten up to 10 mile runs, they’d experienced about 90% of the fitness benefits they were going to achieve. After that it was more about strengthening ligaments and soft tissues for endurance running. Marathon running is more about achieving a goal and building mental toughness than just being fit.
• Human beings can actually outlast dogs and horses in long runs in hot weather because we can sweat and cool off, whereas horses overheat. This allowed us to chase down animals as a meat source back in the caveman days. Personally, I’m glad that these days I can just go to the deli for my lunch meat instead of chasing down a dog over the African savannah.

I wish the special had been longer. I still had questions about what they were eating and wanted more details of their training schedules. They also could only cover a few team members in depth and basically ignored others. Since they expected half of them to drop out, maybe they just ran out of time. When they showed footage of the race they kept following some guy with orange hair and I kept wondering, “Am I supposed to know who this is?” I guess his story did not have enough personal trauma and drama to be covered in between CGI animations of the circulatory system. It must suck to spend 9 months training for a marathon on PBS and then only be referred to as the orange-haired guy in some blogger’s review.

When I saw everyone cross the finish line despite urinary tract infections and knee pain and pieces of glass in their feet (seriously, no joke), I almost cried. And my feet are shard free. Then I watched an episode of Frontline afterwards which was about the life of an undertaker and featured a dying baby. That really did make me bawl my eyes out because there is nothing funny about dead babies.

If you missed the marathon challenge, you can watch it online because PBS is cool like that.

Meme Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

I’ve spilled my guts on this blog so much I sometimes feel like I need my own biohazard waste bin to clean it all up. But here are eight health and weight-loss related things about me that you probably did not already know.

1) I don’t care if artificial sweeteners kill me, I’m eating them anyway

I know some people don’t like to use aspartame, sucralose, saccharin or any of those sweet, sweet, chemicals that end in –ol (sorbitol, xylitol, malitol, etc.) because they are concerned about having three-headed babies or growing a sixth finger. I don’t care. I will be the guinea pig who drinks diet soda every day for 30 years so we can determine if all those modified molecules actually cause cancer. You’ve got to die of something. If it’s going to be death by artificial sweetener, so be it.

2) I watched TV constantly as a child, but now, not so much

I was a complete TV addict as a kid and through high school. In 4th grade we had to track our watching habits and I think I watched at least 30 hours a week, more than almost anyone else. I honestly didn’t think I could live without cable, but once money got tight in college and the credit card debt started piling up, I canceled my Comcast subscription and surprisingly I did not miss it that much. I still love TV. The best stuff on TV is better than it has ever been before. I carefully select the shows I watch, just like I am picky about what I eat. Of course, we also didn’t have the Internet back then, so maybe I’m just spending time reading blogs now that I would have previously spent watching The CW.

3) I was thrilled the day I learned I could order pizza online

I used to have severe phone anxiety. For several years in middle school I didn’t answer the phone at all. I hated a required journalism class in college because I had to call up strangers and ask them questions. I would get nervous and fret and stare at the phone for at least 20 minutes before getting up the nerve to make the call. Even now, I still prefer to e-mail strangers, but I can answer the phone and can call people without throwing up first. I always hated ordering pizza though because I was scared to call the pizza place and go through the ordering process. (Yes, I know this is bizarre and weird, but as I said yesterday we all have our own personal weirdness going on.) In college I was searching the Papa John’s website for the phone number of the closest store and discovered I could bypass the stressful “talking to strangers” process completely by ordering online, thus making it easier to eat an entire box of cheese sticks than ever before. It was awesome.

4) I licked the frosting off the cake

I wrote an entry last year about an episode of Desperate Housewives where a fat girl at a birthday party was accused of licking the frosting off of a birthday cake, even though a thin person had done it. I bemoaned how horrible it was that stereotypes like these persisted, that the fat people of the world were not necessarily out to lick the frosting off of your birthday cakes. Except, I totally did that. I don’t remember whose cake it was, either my own birthday cake or a cake at some family function, but I remember I once stuck my finger into the gooey puffs where the frosting met the cardboard bottom of the box and licked that buttercreamy goodness up. It was awesome.

5) I am not a weight-loss role model 100% of the time

The same week I so effortlessly avoided eating the apple pie at work I also went home and ate two bowls of oatmeal and a batch of sweet potato muffins. As I was pouring the water into that second bowl of cinnamon and sugar and dried oats, I thought to myself, “This is not behavior becoming of a weight-loss success story.” And I stuck it in the microwave anyway and it was really good. I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway. I don’t always mention this stuff because this isn’t a food diary and I don’t feel a need for “forgiveness” or “confession” that much anymore when I overeat. I ate too much. I shouldn’t have done that. Oh, well. I’ll try not to do that tomorrow. But I’m not perfect, people, and it feels a bit odd when people congratulate me for having such control over my eating these days when it’s only true maybe 95% of the time.

6) I don’t think Spanx are all that uncomfortable

Spanx are a body-contouring undergarment that help smooth out your body and make you look thinner. I always hear about how uncomfortable they are, like a modern-day corset, but when I wore a pair I felt fine. Maybe I needed a smaller size to completely cut off my circulation and turn my thighs blue?

7) I still have some photos of fatter versions of myself around the house and it doesn’t bother me

I do have some no-good, horrible, fat photos that never fail to make me cringe. These are not on display. However, I also have some fat photos where I am neatly groomed, well attired, smiling and with my family. These are on display. Ironically, I have far less shame for my morbidly obese self now that I am no longer morbidly obese. However, if we were ever to take a more recent family photo I would probably replace them since they would be more up-to-date and I do enjoy looking thin in my photos.

8) I am one of the Nursing Online Education Database’s Top 100 Health and Wellness Blogs

Okay, this is not so much a fact as a way to thank the NOED for linking to me and to point out a list of 100 health and wellness blogs. It’s an annotated list too, which means it must have taken forever to put together. I was recently putting together some footnotes and it was a horrible, draining, tedious process that made me glad I am no longer in school. However, the list is a good place to start if you are looking for more health resources online.

I’m not going to tag anyone because I am a daring rule-breaker, but if you want to run with these, go for it. And if you just want to run, period, go for that too! Just remember to stretch first.

When they weren’t working out or abusing performance enhancing drugs, gladiators had part-time jobs performing inner-ear hygiene on giants. They also used the big Q-Tips in the “Joust” competition where competitors stood on two raised platforms and tried to knock each other onto the mats below. I doubt I would do very well in that game because I was the girl who was terrified to jump out of the back of the school bus during emergency evacuation drills. If I were to find myself at the top of a 6-foot platform being menaced by a bodybuilder on steroids called Zap, I’d drop the Q-tip and curl into a ball to cushion my inevitable fall.

A lot of the events on this show were rather ridiculous, which is why they were so fun to watch. All the gladiators had silly one word names like Laser, Turbo, or Bronco that made it sound like they were forming their own mutant superhero team. Each season was one long tournament and whichever competitor scored more points on each show got to move onto the next round. It will be interesting to see how they remake this series. I certainly have more appreciation for the athletic abilities it takes to do well climbing walls and dodging balls now that I’ve tried tennis and that I run on the trail as regularly as I am passed by other runners.

The application itself is interesting to read. For instance, you should not “harm anyone or any animals in the making of [your] video.” Thanks, I really needed that to be clarified. In question number 4 they ask “Do you work out?” but only leave four lines for people to brag about all the weight they can bench press. I’m betting people are going to be scrawling in the margins on that one. I also love how question number 19, “What conversation topics are ‘off limits’ for you at a dinner party?” is probably only be asked so they can needle you about said topics at your interview to see if you explode like a crazy person.

Question number 27 has you gauge your level of skill at different activities. Some of them are what you would expect: bungee jumping, gymnastics, rock climbing. But they also include things like: being bratty, manipulating people and tempting the opposite sex. Oh…kay. It’s as thought they just slip them in there between “high diving” and “motorcycle riding” to see if you’re paying attention. I took a long questionnaire for extra-credit in psychology once that was similar. You’d get a dozen questions asking if you liked reading books or if you like setting schedules and then suddenly they’d ask, “Can you read the thoughts of dogs?”

For question 42 you have to write a short poem or rap. For number 43 you have to draw a picture of yourself. Yes, draw, not attach a photo, but actually sketch your visage.

Also note that you cannot be a candidate for public office nor can you become one for a year after the show airs. So we won’t be seeing Hillary Clinton running The Eliminator.

I’m looking forward to the return of this show, though I know I could never be a contender as a contestant. I’ll have to settle for jousting my cat with normal-sized Q-tips for now.