Day Five - Super Bowl "Monday"

Perhaps the thing I hate most about living in Europe is that it makes being an NFL fan a complete pain in the ass.

I watched the Super Bowl last night (Monday here), which kicked off at approximately 1 am in the damn morning. Ugh. Having had a long and exhausting weekend, I shunned a couple of parties I was invited to and decided to watch the game miserably from my couch, where I knew it was likely that I'd be napping frequently.

Sure enough, after a flurry of first quarter turnover-based excitement, I found myself yawning more and more frequently until I finally zonked out by the mid-second quarter, only to wake up in a daze (and feeling like crap) to Prince's shimmying hips sometime near the end of half-time.

Last year, I remember watching the Super Bowl here in Germany, at a similar time, but at a friend's house. For Gwen's sake, I was rooting hard for the Steelers, but I remember it wasn't a very good game, being punctuated by poor quarterback play and horrid officiating. By about 3:30 am, I found myself in one of those "moods" one tends to be in when awake needlessly in the middle of the night - bleary-eyed and with headache - and I was even more pissed because I had stayed up so late to see such a mediocre game.

This year wasn't much different. The game was better, or more enjoyable anyway, but by the end I was extremely fatigued and of surly disposition, and found myself half-yelling, half-yawning things like "Just run out the damn clock so I can go to bed you assholes!" while rubbing my eyes in drained disgust.

I was in bed by about 4:30 am. Luckily Landstuhl was kind and gave us all the morning off - literally a Super Bowl holiday - but it doesn't mean that the game is any more pleasant to watch in the middle of the night.

This sort of thing happens all season long, and for the most part, all Sunday and Monday night football games are out. The one exception I make, of course, is for the Giants, and sometimes I can't even manage to watch them, especially if I'm in for a busy day at work the next day. And should I stay up and watch, and should the Giants lose, the depressed anger is amplified because I realize at 5 am that I basically stayed up all night to watch my team lose a football game.

The only other part of my Super Bowl experience that is worth relating is the fact that, like for ALL games I watch out here, I have to watch it on AFN (Armed Forces Network). So instead of getting all the normal Super Bowl mega-commercials (which I hate anyway, come to think of it), I have to suffer through something worse - hours and hours of mind-numbing AFN "ads", which seem extended somehow during the Big Game because there are so many damn TV timeouts.

So rather than watching hot chicks walk around with Dorito bags, I'm relegated to some Air Force Tech Sgt telling me about "Combat Weather Balloons" or some old hag reminding me, in low-budget video, to "eat vegetables every day". There are also a score of ads especially for the Big Game, which consist of NFL players thanking deployed service members for all they do. This is fine, though in standard AFN fashion, they are shown over and over again a MILLION times. (And I can only take Dallas Clark telling me how thankful he is for all that I do - at 3 in the morning - so many times before I want to punch him and every other player right in the face.)

I shouldn't complain TOO much (even though its fun) - I should be thankful that AFN even exists out here to let me watch the games at all. But its hard when forced to be awake at 3 am just to watch the Super Bowl.

As for the actual game, my favorite things were a)the size of Billy Joel's head during the national anthem, b)Rex Grossman being simply awful, and....well, and that's it.

I was too tired to remember much else.