Tag: Super Bowl

Monday – Funday

Credit: @ArgyllSeaGlass, X

Mondays are tough. Mondays after a Super Bowl that goes into overtime are brutal. What I do love about the Super Bowl is that it is a great connector of people. Even if you don’t love football, you can’t help but giggle at the commercials, be completely wowed by the halftime show (Skates! Usher, you blew it out of the water!), and feel your patriotism rise a little bit. (the flyovers never fail to take my breath away.)

I was flipping through Big Panda and Tiny Dragon by James Norbury. On page 28, is this exchange:

“Nothing is happening,” said Tiny Dragon.

“Maybe,” said Big Panda, “it’s happening underneath first.”

I love this exchange. Sometimes in the beginning of the year, you feel like everything that you want to accomplish and experience is at a standstill. But you’ve made plans. You’ve implemented changes. You’ve gotten organized and did some purging to make room for the new, but your outsides don’t necessarily reflect this. Or do they? We’ve lived 6 weeks into the new year. I bet if you look at these past six weeks, you’ll be amazed at what you packed into them, and all that has already occurred in your life since the beginning of the new year. I did this exercise yesterday and I was happy to realize that in the last six weeks, we created a lot of fun memories with our family, and also with some of our extended family and friends. We attended a wedding, made a couple of nice upgrades to our home, and made some decisions regarding our plans for a secure future. We packed plenty of our normal routine stuff into our days, with some really good, fun times sprinkled into the mix. Our seeds for the year of 2024 are definitely coming up to the surface and they are beginning to sprout.

Reading this passage from Big Panda and Tiny Dragon, also made me question if I was doing a good job, making sure what happening “underneath” is being healthfully nurtured. Am I feeding and nurturing my hopes and dreams, for the year and beyond, with good thoughts, faith, plans of action, and steadiness? Or am I letting what’s “underneath” rot in the decay of negativity, regret, hopelessness, aimlessness and frenzy? What happens underneath the soil, is always a good indicator of how healthy and vital a plant will grow. What does my own grounding of soil need to ensure my own healthy growth? I am the gardener of my soul.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

194. To whom do you matter most?

Soul Sunday

Happy Super Bowl Sunday. There’s excitement in the air for a lot more than just football. There are the commercials (my personal favorite – I was a marketing major, what can I say?), camaraderie, food, and the halftime show. My husband played football throughout high school and even into college. There’s a thought that most men don’t feel comfortable showing any emotion other than anger. I think that a lot of men hold so much of their emotion inside, that what is finally expressed isn’t so much anger as it is more of a brewing pot of stored emotional energy that urgently explodes. Perhaps football is a game of collective explosive emotional energy? Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Today’s poem is offered up by Etsy’s PersonalWordsmith.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Monday Fun-Day

https://youtu.be/g6CVKs77X74

In case you missed it, this was one of the funnier commercials that ran during the Super Bowl. There were a lot of things that I liked about this year’s Super Bowl, including Tampa Bay’s win, but I did notice something kind of obscure, at the beginning of the game, that got me to thinking. When the sign language translator was translating “America the Beautiful”, the symbol for “America” seemed to be the loving, cradling of a baby. In a historical sense, the United States of America is very much a baby country. Our country is 245 years old. China, Japan, Iran and Greece are thousands of years old, each. We have an exceptional, gifted, healthy baby country with an excellent foundation, and yet also, so much growing to do. Like all babies, in order to reach its highest potential, our baby country needs to be guided, and cradled in Love.

This is from an article entitled “How To Raise a Happy Baby and Child”, published on the babycenter website:

We are all helping to raise our baby country, whose potential is phenomenal. The steps above, give us good guidelines to use, in order to help America become all that it is meant to be, in the thousands of years ahead, in “his” long-lived journey of Life. What a beautiful gift and responsibility, our baby is to us! How blessed we are to cradle our America, in our arms, nourishing America into “her” greatest potential!

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul (Super) Sunday

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” – E.B. White

As my regular readers know, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, I either write a poem or I share a poem written by another poet, which has moved me, deeply. Keep in mind, we are all poets. I would love to see some of your poems in my Comments section. Do not be shy. This is not a critique zone. This is a loving, release zone. Poetry is made of words that are asking to be released, with all of the feeling that gives these very words meaning and momentum.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. I know that sometimes, some of us self-professed high-minded, serious, spiritual, literary, intellectual types, think that we are “above” such earthly frivolity and carnage. Ha! The Super Bowl is awesome. Even if you are not a football fan, the creativity that goes into the commercials and the half-time show always blows me away! I am so grateful to live in a time period, where I can easily rewind and watch a hilarious commercial, again and again. I never thought that I would live to see the day, that the former sentence that I just wrote, would hold real meaning for me. (grateful to watch commercials again and again, huh?!?) Also, don’t get me started on the singing of the National Anthem. (tissue box is full, and at the ready) And let’s also not get carried away here, discussing Super Bowl food fare. No one sets down a plate of bean sprouts for the Super Bowl. Bean dip, yes! Bean sprouts, no. Eat more chips!!! Eat more wings!! I think that E.B. White (author of the above quote) would choose to make Super Bowl Sunday, a “savor the world” day, no question about it. Savor the world, today, friends, and let’s go Buccaneers!!!!

Today’s poem is someone else’s poem. I love it! Here it is:

Are you passing on love, or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

The Bright Side

Fortune for the day –“If you wish to be loved, love.” – Seneca

As a getting older person, I admittedly sometimes question all of the fast-based, interesting changes society is going through (me-“Why does that nice, talented young man, Post Malone have so many tattoos on his face?” daughter -“Mom, he’s doing self-expression.” me- “Okay, please promise me that you’ll never self-express that way, okay?”) and all of the new technology and all of the craziness which I perceive that some of these changes, have brought into our lives. However, as I am noticing myself having more and more careless “senior moments”, I have to say that I truly appreciate a lot of the instant gratification and information onslaught, which is available at almost a twitch of my nose, these days.

For instance, my flight landed home, on Sunday, right after the Super Bowl started. (My husband REALLY APPRECIATED my travel scheduling choice – HA!) Anyway, my favorite part of the Super Bowl has always been the commercials, so I was delighted this morning, to just watch every commercial, right in a row (this is the only time in the year that I am very delighted to binge watch commercials) which I had missed, since I didn’t get home until late in the second quarter of the game. YouTube had them all ready and set up for me. I love it!

Another example – Recently I wrote “10:30 a.m.” on my calendar square, for today. Yep, despite my New Year’s resolution to get better about my calendar skills, that’s all she wrote – “10:30 a.m.” Last week, I sheepishly started to ask my husband and daughter if they had any idea what I might be up to, at 10:30 am on Monday. They looked at me like I had two heads. I decided to blot out the “10:30 a.m.” scribble, with a black Sharpie, on my very old-fashioned paper calendar, hoping to blot it out of my mind as well. Still, the question of where I was maybe supposed to be, or who might be showing up to my house this morning, was nagging at me, constantly. Luckily, though, my young millennial doctor, is very tech happy/savvy and over the weekend, I got about 82 reminders via texts, emails, and voicemails that I have a follow-up shot appointment, today at 10:30 am. I suppose that there must be something in my medical chart, vaguely suggesting early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Final recent example, to illustrate my point – my friends and I were discussing TV shows/series that we have enjoyed watching and I couldn’t think of “Fleabag”. (I don’t think that this is part of my growing senior moment memory loss collection, as I have never been great about remembering names of anybody or of anything, since I learned to talk.) Anyway, I googled something like “name of show where dark-haired British lady scares husband in shower.” Google – Fleabag. Just like that. Boom! Drop the mic. I think that’s wonderful. I am paranoid about privacy issues, yet I adore that Google knows exactly what I am thinking/doing/talking about, at all times. Google normalizes me. I love Google for that fact!

So, moral of the story – there are always two sides to the coin and it is best to focus on the bright and shiny side, right? Now, I have to go get ready for my 10:30 appointment. I have to psych myself up for an old-fashioned shot in the arm. Unfortunately, some things never change.

Less, Bowl, Dance

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.” 
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

I picked up Andrew Sean Greer’s Less yesterday and I’m almost halfway through the book. The book is all about an aging gay writer’s last minute worldwide trip to avoid the wedding of a former lover. I have very little in common with the hero of the book, other than the hero is turning 50 and I am 48. It wouldn’t be my typical book choice ordinarily, but Less won the Pulitzer Prize. I wanted to experience what Pulitzer Prize writing is like these days and the book does not disappoint. It has been an adventure and a glimpse into a life which is very, very different from mine and yet I find Arthur Less, the book’s protagonist, to be so relate-able and easy to empathize with. Even though we are very different people, Arthur Less and me, I connect with his humanity, his humility, his fears of aging and his need to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I think as people, we are always concentrating on what makes us different, unique, special and differential from each other, because deep down, we really know that at our very cores, we are all, and in sometimes a delicate, fragile, exquisite way – very, very much the same.

Later tonight, I will watch the Super Bowl with my family and the rest of most of America. I will connect with my fellow human beings, in a vastly different way, than I am connecting right now by reading an insightful, Pulitzer Prize winning book. And yet, in both activities, I am and will be engaged, in beautiful human connection. The rapport felt when an author expresses the very feelings and thoughts that I have had churning inside of me from time to time, is very similar to the relational laughter being shared at the audacity of the funny Super Bowl commercials or just the general anticipation and excitement in the air, for the “big game” tonight.

“Sharing a life together is sharing steps in time. The music is different to each of us, but how beautiful the dance.” – Vinay

You See, I’m Friday

Somebody out there: You can’t make everybody happy. You’re not a taco. (seen on the internet)

Friday: Um, well, actually, yes, I can. You see, I’m Friday. (just the Truth)

Happy Favorite Things Friday! Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, readers!!!! New readers, I don’t look beyond the surface on anything, on Fridays. Fridays, I keep it light and list three favorite products or websites or books or songs, etc. that are currently adding joy to my life. I sure do wish my readers would share their favorites in the Comments section. Hint! Hint! I’m always looking for new delights in my life. Please see previous Friday posts for more favorites. Here we go! Here we go:

Keter Easy Grow Patio Garden Planter – My husband and I both have farming in our blood. However, neither of us have the time or the inclination to do a lot of weeding or hoeing. We keep this attractive, elevated planter on our covered lanai and we grow all different lettuces, some cilantro, celery, strawberries, etc. all in this one container. It makes for delicious, fresh salads, harvested right outside of our door. It’s like an instant farm market where you don’t have to pay or wait in line. This lovely planter even has a built-in water gauge to let you know when there is too much or too little water for your lovely, giving plants. My husband researched and found this one. Great find, honey!

Charmin Toilet Paper with the Scalloped Edges – I didn’t even realize, at first, that my toilet paper had scalloped edges, but now that I do realize that it has scalloped edges, I’ll never go back to straight-edge toilet paper. I’m not sure why this brings me so much pleasure, but it does. I hope the novelty doesn’t wear off. The scalloped edges make the paper tear off so much easier and it looks so cute! As my friend likes to say, it’s the little things that make life so great!

Mids Tomato Sauce – Yes, readers, this is tomato sauce in a jar. Please forgive me for being such a mediocre cook. We have tried a lot of jarred tomato sauces in our years of being a family, and this one has become our holy grail sauce. It tastes amazing and comes in many different varieties. I can’t even be lured away by BOGO sales to buy any other tomato sauce. For all my other mediocre cooks out there, this one is for you!! Mediocre Cooks of the World, Unite!!

Happy Super Bowl Weekend, my friends!! Since the Steelers aren’t in it, I’m watching the Super Bowl for the commercials and Maroon 5!

“Let’s barely watch the Super Bowl together.” – someecards