WHERE IS THE LO\E?

Never Done: Watched the entire Superbowl

Can I be a slacker for NOT playing video games? I finally made a date to play Xbox with Lucas, but by the time late Sunday afternoon rolled around, I was deep under my covers, groggy from an impromptu nap, and not able to motivate myself to go out again. You know I had to be tired, because not only was I gonna get to hang out with Lucas, but I was also going to get to hang out with Andy and Jesse, who are my longest and bestest friends in NY, and Andy was going to give me dinner, and Jesse was going to give me books and CDs about musicals that he's been saving for me.

Instead, I stayed home, popped in an Oscar-nominated movie I thought I hadn't seen yet, and settled in on the couch. Except that the first shot looked very familiar, and by 20 seconds in, I realized I had already seen it. And didn't like it. Five bucks if you can figure out which movie I could have seen, not remembered I saw, and put on my Netflix queue of Oscar-nominees I thought I hadn't seen in the theater.

So what was a sluggish, DVD-less girl to do? I actually watched the entire Superbowl. For the first time ever. No party, no bacon explosion, and not even any team allegiance, but I watched the Superbowl. Sure, I paid a lot more attention to the commercials (One Epic Ride, Release the Hounds) than I did the game play, but I got behind the Steelers in the second half because I love competition, and I love the promise of a comeback.

And I also love those televised moments that were so important when I was growing up (tshuve) -- before DVDs and DVR -- when it's on, it's on, and everyone's watching. Well, I know not everyone is watching, but if you want to see it, you're watching it at the same time as everyone else. The Wizard of Oz, the State of the Union address, the moon landing. (Really, who would DVR the moon landing?) And while watching the Superbowl didn't have the depth of meaning for me that any of those other televised events had, I did feel connected to friends and strangers, and I value being in on the shared cultural reference of it all, most delightfully to an editor's daughter, the Black Eyed Peas half-time show fiasco: WHERE IS THE LO\E? (For those of you who missed it, the right hand horizontal of the V was missing from their illuminated stage design.) Here, I'll show it to you, and now you are in on the biggest editorial glitch of Superbowl XL\.