Quitters never win (but sometimes lazy people do). And Scoop Jackson is a hack.

I walked past the bar before and almost walked in to watch the Bengals/Ravens game. But I persevered. I went and got my food and came home and baked brownies. Yes I am a sports fan, but I am a wiz in the kitchen as well.
I will confess, I monitored Pistons/Heat while I was baking, and I am watching a bit of Lakers/Jazz. If it makes anyone feel better though, I really have no idea what a 1-2-2 zone looks like.

Does Luke Walton have a new tat? I am DIGGING his new 'do. I would totally do him now. (See? Sports fans can be girly too.)

OK so about that...
This all coincided w/ a little discussion over at KSK earlier, so I wanted to expand a bit on where I'm coming from here.

I'll be honest, I never had any intention of really quitting watching sports. I just LIKE them. I'm pretty disgruntled w/ the GMen though (almost as disgruntled as they are w/ each other apparently...) and the Nets are either the best bad team out there or the worst good team. Until I figure out which I'm going to need to watch them sparingly. In all honesty though, it's really just that I can't be sitting in a bar watching bball when I have a paper/presentation due on Monday and 4 finals starting 1 week later. Even so though, if I'm writing my paper at the last minute on Sunday (which is more than likely) I will still end up in the student lounge every 15 min or so checking up on the Bumbling Big Blue.
I guess the advice though is not to talk about sports so much around a guy you just met and are interested in. Which may or may not have something to it. It really depends on the guy.
I've had my experience w/ the whole range of this situation:
Junior year of college I dated a total non-sports fan. I was constantly accused of emasculating him but he didn't really care. To him, history and politics were the most important thing in the world, and sports were trivial. He played a lot of Madden, but that was the only thing remotely even close. I mean he would be playing Madden on Sunday and I would be like, helloooooo there are ACTUAL GAMES GOING ON. We went to FL together for spring break and while we were getting ready to go out, we had a little remote control war, where he would leave the room and I would turn on the NCAA Tournament (it was the Sweet 16!) and when I would leave the room he would turn on CNN. Granted we were about to invade Iraq, but...Sweet 16!!! Anyway, he didn't care that I knew about sports and he didn't. He really didn't care at all.
The guy I dated senior year of college was a big sports fan. And he did hate that I was into sports too. Once he openly chastised me for saying "K-Mart is so nasty," back when he was. But he knew way more about sports than I did. He just didn't like the idea of a girl being so into it. He would start these little fights during games, about a call or something like that, just to start them. He made me cry over the "Was Jason Collins' foul on Tim Thomas intentional?" issue he got so mean about it. He would constantly quiz me about where players went to college and what college's mascots were. He knew a lot more about sports than I did, and that was fine, and I never tried to show him up. He really hated when I beat him in sports trivia on the MegaTouch though. (As a side note, I'm a fucking CHAMP at the naked lady game, or PhotoHunt for the uneducated.) But when I beat him it was due to luck, and he knew it, but it still killed him. He didn't like dating a girl that liked sports and he was ultra ultra competitive with EVERYTHING so that was kind of just...the way it was.
The conceded Worst Person in the World, who I shall only refer to as Senor Douchebag (he referred to himself in the 3rd person as Senor Sexy Pants and Senor Pimp Juice and was totally serious....my version is way more accurate) was a sports fan. He was really into the NBA and the NFL but not so much baseball. I was much more into baseball than him, and prob wasted a couple Yankee tickets on him...but bless his heart, he was WONDERFUL in regards to the theme of this post. He didn't care one way or the other that I liked sports. Half of our relationship revolved around sending links to sports articles/columns to one another and we just sat around watching football on Sundays, and sometimes I knew more than him about something but it didn't matter at all. To be fair he make sure to be dominant and abusive in every other aspect of my life, but the sports thing...he was perfect with. So here's to you, Senor Douchebag, I am actually saying something nice about you. If/when I ever write about you again, you can't say I haven't been fair.

Annnnyway. I'm not going to stop watching sports to make boys like me. I might curb how much I talk about them at first though. It's too easy to fall into the "friend zone" I guess. When I asked this guy about this whole subject the other day he told me that he likes girls that like sports but if they are insane about it, that's a turn-off, citing a girl he liked that memorized the stats of all the Yankees every year who he stopped liking. He and I have hooked up sporadically and he said it was not an issue w/ me bc everything I had to say he was interested in (I send him links sometimes). But I pointed out that hey, we are just friends w/ benefits. He's not interested in me. Maybe if I hadn't been all "let's talk about the NBA whenever you come over" we wouldn't have the type of thing where we watch the end of a game and then hook up. I'm not really into him romantically anyway, but it's the principle of the thing. So the next time I meet a boy I like I am going to be cautious about saying how nasty Dwight Howard is. (He is a freaking beast though.)

I've never watched/talked about sports to impress a guy. I mostly watch games alone. This has even caused me to drink alone (thanks again, GMen) which I'm pretty sure makes me an alcoholic. It's not like I say to myself, "Hey, if I talk about sports he will think I am SO COOL and REALLY DIG ME." It just so happens that I literally read sports blogs/stories all day long, so it's a big part of my conversational matter. With friends, family, etc. If I had a dime for every time I tried to teach a girl friend about sports so I could have a conversation with them about it...well I'd have a few bucks but it still would have been futile.

I'm not great at being a girl. The subject of engagement rings has come up a few times in the last month or so and I'll be honest. I don't know a THING about cut or clarity or setting. And I only learned TODAY that those are what that stuff is called. Some girl was telling me about the ring she wanted (note: she is single) and asked me what kind of ring I wanted and all I could come up with was, "I'm really in the mood for a doughnut actually...."
But I am not a total tomboy. I like cooking and shopping and The OC and cute underwear.
It's a weird little dichotomy. But it's me and I can't really help it.

I changed my mind on Luke Walton.

In other news, Scoop Jackson is a hack. I mean we always knew he was a moron and a terrible writer (and BOJANGLER!), but now he is a hack as well.
And I will NOT link to a Scoop Jackson "column." If you're not reading the Yay! and actually want to read anything written by Scoop...well just go away. Seriously.

And to put on my girl hat as a post script...I wrote a paper for my Queer TV class (who else misses college???) about the HoYay (that's internet slang for "Homoeroticism, Yay!") on The OC, and I have to say that I thought the insomnia scene in tonight's episode was going to go in a COMPLETELY different direction.