Adam

I’m a little heartbroken. Football’s over, which means the sports I watch on purpose are done until the fall (I’ve fallen asleep to a baseball game several times). The festivities culminated last Sunday, in a super event of epic proportions. At least, that’s the way things were supposed to turn out. I’m not sure what changed this year, but the most exciting part of the big game was, according to this blogger, when the lights went out. At our party, the jokes would not stop, and bets were made on how much longer it’d take.

Some friends and I did have a small get together. We all brought a dish. I’ve never had so much cheese dip nor as many desserts in my life, because that’s everything everyone brought. But it was still nice. Then, to the background noise of the biggest football game of the season, we played online quiz games. Before we knew it, the game was over.

The commercials weren’t very memorable.

What happened?

Did you know Poland has the 5th most tractors on any country on the planet?

That’s from one of the quiz games I played.

Anyway, I’m not sure what made this year’s football showdown so not important to me. Maybe it’s because both teams came from opposite coasts, causing me to be completely neutral. I tried to be a 49ers fan. They had a great comeback, or so I’ve heard.

Missed it.

The game yesterday was rough. I mean, really, really rough. Like in shop class in high school, when you learn about the grades of sand paper? This is like grade 2 rough. After literally screaming my lungs out (I think I saw a chunk fly out during the second quarter), it was exhausting to walk back to the house my friends and I were headquartered at, and then sit there and listen to complaints from Hawkeye fans, and take in the silent grins of the present State fans.

What made it worse was that I had been up since 4:30 that morning to work event parking. So I was pretty beat. However, allow me to put some optimism into a seemingly bad situation. During my nine hour shift, I did a little social experiment to flex what I had learned in one of my classes the day before. We had studied how facial expressions can be both conscious and subconscious, and, more specifically, what people do when they lie.

(Side Note: When someone’s lying, the area between their eyebrows will furrow for a split second.)

Now, my job was to make sure that one of the lots was kept empty as people desperately tried to find a spot before the game. The method I was instructed to use involved me asking if they were going to the game, and if so, to direct them away from the lot (for the sake of the parking department, I’m not going to specify which area. Park where you’re supposed to!). If someone (most of the time with full Iowa swag on) said “No,” and that little furrow appeared, I prodded a little more.

I ended up turning a lot of cars away.

It was amazing how many people would attempt to snake their way in, even with plenty of time left to find other parking before the game. What was more amazing was how I used something I learned in school in the real world. One of my professors had said that one of HIS professors said (he said, she said) that real learning happens outside of the classroom. I half agree.