Cruel, Sweet, Sweaty Distractions

Currently, grad school applications are the bane of my existence, and it’s funny how easily one can be distracted from one’s bane.  Facebook is the devil—that’s well known.  Gmail should remove the refresh application from the menu bar because apparently I have to click it every thirty seconds.  And Hulu, well there’s just no escaping from the latest episode of Law and Order SVU—the stories are frick’n ripped from the headlines, people! 

Drama at its best, don't tell me different

 These are all horrible distractions and I am a horrible person for giving them power over me.  But they all pale in comparison to the grand-daddy of all distractions for me: fantasy football.

Sports have long been the grand distraction from life for dudes, if not lady dudes and all dudekind.  They're an amalgamation of various rules, statistics, and actions, none of which make any sense from any “real world” perspective.  Take baseball, please.  If an alien race came to Earth and tried to understand the twisted, sweaty Rubix Cube that is the three-outs, three-strikes, infield fly rule game of baseball, they would probably just vaporize us out of frustration. 

The Wide World of Sports totally separate from the real world, and thusly, offers an escape from it.  The arbitrary stats and figures fans get from sports might as well be pertaining to city bus schedules—they’re just as worthless to everything outside of them—but they are also an investible distraction from everything outside of them.  Fantasy Football is just the natural evolution of this.  Watching football and mentally collecting these stats and figures is okay, but to use them to compete against friends, casual acquaintances, or mortal enemies takes the distraction to a whole new level.  Suddenly, the distraction is given additional validity. 

I loves the Fantasy Football, but I harbor no delusions about it.  It's the essence of trivial.  But if I didn't realize this, every female comedian is kind of enough to devote a portion of her routine to explaining it to Neanderthals like me.  Now I wouldn’t dream to contend the likes of Kathy Griffin or Whitney Cummings, but I would like to offer a slice of enlightenment pie to all of those pots calling kettles black out there, and it’s called celebrity gossip.

For every ESPN and Fantasy Sports chat room there is an E! Network and TMZ.  There is no difference between knowing how many yards Frank Gore rushed for against the Cowboys and what the details of Kim Kardashian's pre-nup.  Both are equally trivial, and to argue against either is even more trivial. 

     

                                                                    

       

But sports and celebrity gossip are unified in what they offer the world: a distraction from it.  Everything in moderation, to each his own, and blah, blah, blah.  The real take away here is that writing a blog is also a grand distraction--maybe reading it can be too?  Now if you’ll excuse me I have to finish my statement of purpose to Ohio State and decide whether I want to start Hakeem Nicks or DeSean Jackson this week on my Fantasy Football team.  Both are of equal importance.