Wisconsin

Vermont

West Virginia

Texas

Oregon

North Carolina

New Jersey

Illinois

Idaho

Hawaii

Christmas weekend marked the culmination of four anxious months of tedious work to assemble what might be the single greatest fantasy football roster my league has seen in four years of existence. At the end of our draft way back on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, which involves the twelve of us sitting in a buddy’s basement eating junk food, enjoying high-shelf microbrews, and selecting real NFL players to staff our pretend football teams, I sat there looking at my completed roster knowing full and well I was a contender. Great players were falling right into my lap, as if the Fantasy Gods were winking at me from their football-shaped clouds up in heaven, whispering, “This is your season, Joel. You’re finally going to win. We have willed it so.”

I told everybody at that draft, “This team is epic. I’m about to destroy all of you guys. I really, really like my team,” and they all laughed, thinking they were just humoring me. “Yeah, Brigs,” they might have said. “We all really, really like our teams. We just finished drafting them like five minutes ago.” But once the season started I ripped off 12 straight wins, beating everybody in the league once and the commissioner twice.

Throughout those twelve consecutive victories, it continued to feel as though Fantasy Gods were urging me to win this stupid thing. I got the better end of every single trade I made. Chad Henne for Andy Dalton; LaGarrette Blount and Tim Hightower for Chris Johnson, and then Chris Johnson for MJD. That kind of thing. I picked up Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez off of waivers. Arian Foster and Calvin Johnson, my top two draft picks, put up video game numbers. My God, even Beanie “The Weenie” Wells put up strong numbers.

And then there was Tony Romo.

In our league, we keep one player from year to year, and that player is usually a quarterback since our scoring allows for QBs to put up the most points. I hung onto Romo because if I didn’t I wouldn’t get an elite quarterback, and for the most part the guy did exactly what I’d hoped he’d do this season. There’s no denying the fact that there were games I won because of Tony Romo.

I told you, 12 wins a row. That’s 12-0, folks. Ask Mercury Morris how good 12-0 feels. Ask Tom Brady or Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers. That’s good stuff. You’re euphoric on twelve wins in a row. Nobody can touch you. On five separate occasions, I went into the Monday night game down, sometimes by a ridiculous margin, yet I won every time. Tony Romo had a lot to do with that.

How does that make a guy a feel? Like nobody can beat him, that’s how.

Even in Week 13, my only non-win of the regular season, I came into Monday night down by something like 27 points (which is a lot, for those of you who don’t play the game), but Maurice Jones-Drew exploded for like a bajillion yards and a couple of touchdowns. We ended up tying, and that tie kept a very good team out of the playoffs. I’m sure that guy has his own share of gripes about near-misses.

But I don’t care about that guy. I care about what happened to me, and what happened to me was probably the low point of my 2011. I don’t even remember what else happened in 2011. Just trust me that this was worse.

As the top seed in the six-team, three-week playoff, I had a bye in the first round, and I handled my semifinal game pretty handily with huge games from all the guys that mattered. In the championship game I found myself pitted against the sixth-seeded team, who we’ll call BHBB because the real team name probably isn’t appropriate for print.

BHBB had a solid team. You don’t get to the championship game without one. But my team was, on paper, significantly better. Most of the Week 16 games were played on Christmas Eve this year, and luckily my in-laws have the Red Zone channel, which switches games when a team is close to scoring a touchdown. It’s like porn for fantasy football team managers. So I’m watching the first huge batch of games unfold and come out of it feeling a little disappointed but overall still pretty confident of my chances at taking home the trophy.

The second, significantly smaller batch of games started at 3:15, and I was counting on 12-20 points from Romo to help pad my lead. But two throws into the game he knocked his stupid fat hand on the helmet of a defender and had to leave the game. X-rays were negative (who cares), but he was out for the game, leaving me with a lousy -2 output from my top scorer on the season.

Brutal. I texted a buddy immediately and told him my season was over. He offered condolences. I’ve never been so unhappy on Christmas Eve in my life.

When I went to bed that night, I had a six point lead and no more players left. BHBB had the Chicago Bears defense and a running back for New Orleans named Darren Sproles. The Bears played the next night, and the Saints played Monday night. I was sort of hoping that Chicago would do enough Sunday night to just put me out of my misery, but instead they sucked it up against the juggernaut Packers and posted a -3, bumping my lead back up to 9 with only Sproles left.

If you watched Drew Brees’ record-breaking game on Monday night, you know how this story ends. With about two minutes left in the game, I was holding onto a 2-point lead with New Orleans marching down the field. One more stop by the Falcons, and they’d get the ball and pretty much end the game. Sproles wouldn’t get any more chances at earning yards, and I would win the trophy that I not only suggested we get for this season, but actually found and put together myself.

But Brees kept going, and Atlanta couldn’t do anything to stop him. On the Falcons’ nine-yard line, Brees needed only 7 yards to break Dan Marino’s single-season record for total yards thrown, so he went for the throw.

Me: “Don’t pass it to Sproles. Don’t pass it Sproles. Don’t pass it to Sproles…”

Nine-yard touchdown, Darren Sproles.

My one-year-old daughter had been sleeping blissfully upstairs in her crib for a few hours by that point, so my explosive and vulgar outburst at that exact moment didn’t wake her up. But it was loud enough to have done it, and my wife, who was starting to drift off on the couch, didn’t appreciate the reaction. She looked at me the way you’d look at a kid whose guy got killed on a video game that nobody cares about. She knew this was important to me, but she doesn’t care about fantasy football. Why would she? Unless it’s your team, fantasy football isn’t really all that interesting. In fact, if you’re still reading this you’re either a member of my fantasy league, or you were just waiting to see what awful, horrible thing happened to me. Even now, when you find out that a Darren Sproles touchdown is what I consider to be the fantasy football equivalent of the poo pie in “The Help,” you’re walking away disappointed.

But I promise, you aren’t even fractionally as disappointed as I was after that botched championship. The fifteenth game of my fantasy football season was the first one that I lost, and I lost it in the last two minutes of the last possible game of the entire fantasy season. It was very, very hard to fall asleep knowing my beloved Fantasy Gods had jilted me. It was even harder to wake up and face the reality of another day, almost the way you feel when somebody has died. That’s really what it felt like. Like somebody died.

Somebody might as well have, because Tony Romo is basically dead to me.

There are three really sad things about all of this, things that I just can’t shake, even though I no longer get sick to stomach thinking about Darren Sproles and Drew Brees:

1. I’m going to have to make Tony Romo my keeper next year, even though I have warmer feelings for Adolph Hitler than I do him.
2. The guy who beat me is the only guy who doesn’t come to the drafts, so nobody even really knows what he looks like. So it’s not even somebody I can be happy for. He’s this mysterious entity I have to hate like Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.”
3. The guy who beat me didn’t even draft his own team. Outside of Tom Brady, who was the BHBB keeper, the rest of the roster was selected by the guy’s brother, who also is in the league and, ironically, finished in last place with the team he picked for himself for the second year in a row. I got beat by a 6-7 team hand-picked by the guy who’s finished dead last for two years running.

It’s okay if you don’t care about any of this. I’m not even sure I care anymore. When August rolls around and I start seeing fantasy football magazines on the shelves at the drug store, I’ll get into it again. Right now, though, I just want to drown my sorrow in basketball.

At least I won $225 in the affair, but this will always go down as the perfect season that was not to be. I remember rooting for the Giants that year they beat the perfect Patriots, and now I feel badly for having done so. Never again. Long live the juggernauts. They’ve earned it.

I know, I know… The overwhelming majority of adults in this world don’t even get summers off and I shouldn’t be complaining, but no matter how great summer vacations may be, it always sucks when they do finally end.

No more pool. No more naps. No more quality time with Wifey and The Squirt seven days a week (I’ll have to settle for two plus evenings for the next nine months). No more going for wonderful sunset runs after the kiddo goes to bed. And while it’s not the end for cookouts and watermelon and sweet tea and lemonade, none of those things taste quite so heavenly when the weather is cold.

I mean, whether you’ve got a summer vacation or not, I think you can lament the end of all that awesome stuff right along with me, can’t you?

Despite everything, the return of school is a genuinely exciting venture even eight (eight!) years into my teaching career, and with that excitement comes the deliciously rich complexities of autumn—a season that, despite not being quite as amazing as summer, actually doesn’t suck.

So in an attempt to pump myself up for the beginning of autumn, I wanted to delve into my Top 5 Reasons For Looking Forward to Fall. Here they are:

#5 – Chili Cook-Off

While summer foods like watermelon and ice cream and lemonade tend to go on vacation when cooler weather hits, a whole new gaggle of good eatin’ swoops right in behind those foods’ departures to make sure that we fat Americans can still get our fill of carbs and calories. One such autumnal delicacy is chili, for which I happen to have a stellar recipe.

Mine is a thick and meaty brew, with myriad herbs and spicy spices, and while some colleagues have jealously called it “Too Sloppy-Joe-ish,” I know that deep down in their hearts they understand the quality of the concoction. That’s why, in 2009, I won the teacher chili cook-off at school, replete with Golden Ladle.

Wifey and I also have plans to reintroduce the chili cook-off to our own group of friends this October, as we’ll be hosting a gathering of wannabe contenders vying for crockpot reputability. Neither she nor I are sure how we’re going to go about it yet, but we did one a couple of years ago and had a blast. I can say with absolute certainty that this is something we’re looking forward to doing again this year, though I’m not sure yet what sort of trophy I’ll have made up…

#4 – Picking Out a Halloween Costume for Paige

Eventually, my daughter will be old enough to tell us what she wants to be for Halloween, but eventually has not hit the Brigham home just yet, and that means we get to choose her costume once again this year.

In case you were curious as to why this is so exciting (More exciting than chili? Surely I jest), understand my child is a determined one, and rarely do we get the opportunity to exert our will upon her without some serious kicking and screaming. This is probably the last year that we’ll get to dress her up as something awesome, and I don’t want to blow the opportunity.

Last year she was a duck because the costume was painfully adorable, but this year we haven’t even talked about it, even though it’s already mid-August and time is clearly running out. (This isn’t a joke; there are baby Halloween costumes already on sale at Meijer). As ever, I’m hoping to go the comedic route, but it’ll likely be a fight to the death with Wifey, who’ll be pulling for “cute.” There’s really no middle ground between those two extremes, which means it’ll have to go one way or another.

Knowing where Paige gets her willfulness, I think we can all guess who’s going to win this particular argument. Penguin (or bunny or panda) it is.

#3 – TV Shows Come Back

Having stuff sitting on my DVR stresses me out, mostly because I really don’t want to have important episodes of my favorite shows (of which there are many) spoiled by Facebook or Twitter or Entertainment Weekly. So I always push Wifey to watch our stuff as soon as possible for fear of reading about things I’d rather not have read about.

The downside to this means that by the time summer hits, we’ve got nothing backlogged to occupy our evenings, so we end up scraping together a smattering of odd TLC and History Channel shows that’ll just have to do while we wait for the good stuff to come back on. Luckily we had “Game of Thrones” and “True Blood” and “Breaking Bad” and “Louie” to sort of keep us company during the delay, but it’s good that the majority of the stuff we both really care about will soon return to our high-definition television.

Here’s what we can’t wait for: “Sons of Anarchy,” “Parenthood,” “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Archer,” “Raising Hope,” “Modern Family,” “Community,” “The Office,” “30 Rock,” “Happy Endings,” “Dexter,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and “The Amazing Race.”

Yes, we actually watch all that crap.

“House” has started to get on our nerves, but we’ll watch it because we’ve invested too many years of our life not to.

We quit on “American Idol” last year and found that we didn’t miss it at all. Similarly, “Glee” was fun once upon a time, but we only wanted to hear Rachel sing, and when they went away from that, we went away from the show. Done and done.

While we’re on the topic, here are some new shows I’m looking forward to checking out when they premier over the course of the next month or two: “Terra Firma,” “American Horror Story” (tagged as a “psychosexual horror mystery series,” and it appears on FX? Yes please!), “Grimm,” “Person of Interest,” “Up All Night” (which I’m not optimistic about, but is has GOB so I’ll try it), and “Hell on Wheels” (which looks sooooo awesome).

Truthfully, we’ll be lucky if two of those end up being any good.

Also, I might like TV a little too much.

#2 – Rader’s Farm & Tanner’s Orchard

Few places in Central Illinois make me happier than Tanner’s Orchard, and now that I’ve got a little squirt to take along with me, it’s only that much more enjoyable. (Especially since, you know, it’s sort of made for squirts in the first place).

Like any self-respecting orchard, Tanner’s does apples. Buy an empty plastic bag for something like $8, and they’ll cart you out to their tangle of fruit-bearing trees, where you just pick the apples that look most delicious, shove them into your bag, and then take them home for pies or pies, or even pies.

Jonagold apples are my favorite, and they’re impossible to get nice and crunchy from any grocery store, so a trip to Tanner’s is the only way to get the most out of that particular brand of apple. That’s also the brand I use in my apple cream pies adapted from my Grandma Beauclerc’s recipe, so God bless ‘em, every one.

As for Rader’s Farm, it’s a local pumpkin patchery with all sorts of things for kids to do after picking out their future jack-o-lanterns. It doesn’t hold quite the special place in my heart that Tanner’s does, but it’s become a quintessential part of my Octobers as well. Between the two locations, we’ve got a whole lot of happy autumn happening. And it ain’t no autumn if it ain’t a happy autumn. Na’ mean?

#1 – Fantasy Football

Go ahead and roll your eyes, ladies. I’ll wait.

Done? Okay. There’s more to fantasy football than you think, and for me the absolute peak of enjoyment out of the whole process is the draft itself. Once a year, right around Labor Day, my teacher friends and I get together in one buddy’s basement after a delightful cookout and take turns selecting NFL players for our imaginary teams.

This is fun for a number of reasons, the most important of which is making fun of friends who draft like idiots. Last year, one of my guys drafted his first quarterback in the sixth round, and it was a player who wasn’t even going to be the starter. A year has gone by and we’re still giving him crap about this, and we’ll continue to give him crap about this until each and every one of us is dead.

The rest of the fun comes over the course of the year, though, where we’re able to make trades with each other, talk all kinds of trash, and if you’re good at it (I am) even make a little bit of money when it’s all said and done. I love the competition of it, I love the camaraderie of it, and I love football, which I guess should probably get its own slot on this list, but whatever. I’m grouping it all together, and NFL football plus fantasy football is so easily #1 on this list that it’s painful. Painfully awesome.

Honorable Mention:

The Hibernation of Yard Work – Screw you, lawn. Screw you, weeds. Screw untamed hedges. You can sit and rot until the spring and I won’t miss you one iota. In fact, I’ll enjoy the break for a few months, at least until snow shoveling has to happen. The respite will be brief, but deserved. Seriously, screw you, yard work.

So I guess the fall really isn’t so bad. That’s the lesson I’m trying to make myself learn right now as my final hours of summer tick away. It’s been a good one—really and truly—but now there are other fish to fry. Or apples to bake. I guess it kind of depends on the season.

I’m told that’s what happens when a body that hasn’t come into contact with legitimate exercise for almost a year shocks itself back into reanimation. I was also told before starting P90X—a rigorous exercise and diet program—that if I wasn’t in reasonable shape heading into the endeavor I’d find myself very, very, very sore for the first couple of weeks. I laughed inwardly at those naysayers. “I think I can handle a little weight-lifting,” I’d said with a sardonic grin plastered across my face.

And then a muscular forty-something named Tony Horton wiped that stupid smile off my face right through the TV screen, turning that smirk into a frowny face that pretty much resonated all through my body. Every muscle I own was sad for 90 days, and I have yet to apologize to them.

Guys, it was difficult, but necessary. For those who don’t know, P90X is a program that requires 60-90 minutes of exercise a day, six days a week for three months. For three days a week you lift weights (I had never lifted weights for an hour at a time, non-stop in my life, but hello P90X!), and the other three days are all different sorts of cardio. All week long you alternate between the two. Weights, cardio, weights, cardio, and so on.

The crux of the program is this 15-minute beast of a video called “Ab Ripper X,” which is basically 350 ab moves, one after the other, to be performed every weight-lifting day. When you’re coming into this thing with stomach muscles the approximate consistency of memory foam, something like this is not going to be easy. And it wasn’t. At no point over the course of the 90 days did I think to myself, “Man, this is getting easier,” because it never did. It sucked forever.

Other than that, though, I have a hard time complaining about the program other than it was a ridiculous amount of work and that Horton’s jokes are awful. I’d love the shake the guy’s hand because I’ve spent 60+ minutes a day with him for the last three months, but I get the sense that I probably wouldn’t enjoy knowing him on a personal basis. Whatever, he knows how to work you the hell out, and that’s why I’ll love him until I die. Or until senility kicks in somewhere around age 74.

So why put myself through all of this? Because I had ballooned to well over 200 pounds, and that wasn’t okay with me. It definitely wasn’t okay with my wife and the rest of my family, who were starting to get concerned about my health. Something needed to change because I’d like to see my daughter grow up and have kids of her own someday. Throw in a history of heart disease in my family, and it was time to start fixing some things.

When I wanted to lose weight in the past, I almost always exclusively ran. The problem with that is if I run three miles, that’s like maybe a half hour of exercise at a semi-leisurely pace. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to try something that I knew would be really hard and really out of my comfort zone. It seemed really structured and mixed things up enough where it wouldn’t get boring, so I gave it a shot.

And I’m really glad I did.

Dieting is hard, no matter what else you’re doing for exercise, and for the first about 30 days I was borderline neurotic about what I ate. It was actually really frustrating—for a month I ate practically nothing and worked out as hard as I had since high school, and I lost only four pounds. One pound a week was it, and having watched some “Biggest Loser” over the years, it seemed as though more LB’s should have been falling off. I understand the people on that show come in looking like flesh-colored zeppelins, but still. Four pounds?

It was pointed out very early to me that muscle weighs more than fat, so undoubtedly I’d lost plenty of goo and added plenty of musculature. That fact actually became pretty clear early on in the second month, when I started to see more definition in my arms. By no means was I starting to look like a bodybuilder, or even a cast member from “Jersey Shore,” but there was definitely tone there, and that gave me the confidence to continue even when the numbers really weren’t happening for me.

Maybe the phrase “confidence to continue” isn’t exactly right. It’s more like “motivation to continue,” and there were definitely days when coming home to exercise was the last thing I thought I’d be able to do. With a full-time job, two freelance gigs, and a beautiful wife and daughter I’d also like to occasionally spend some time with, I usually didn’t get into my videos until 8:00 at night. I’d get home, do dinner with the fam, bathe the baby, get her to bed, then exercise, shower, write, and hit the hay. Swear to God, the book I’m reading right now feels more like something I dreamed about than actually did in person since I’ve been 80% asleep for every chapter I’ve ingested.

But, small sacrifice I guess. I wanted to get healthy, and when you’re as busy as me there’s really no way to go about doing that without some sort of serious commitment. So I just had to pledge myself to it, kick my own ass on a regular basis, and do everything I could to stay motivated even when I absolutely wasn’t. The end results of all this hard work actually came out pretty nicely. Check it:

Weight: 198 pounds (208 lbs. to start)
Waist: 39 inches (44”)
Body fat: 16% (21.5%)
Resting heart rate: 56 bps (72 bps)
Pushups: 40 (25)
Sit-ups: 55 (20)
Vertical leap: 21” (17”)
Pull-ups: 3 (0)… Yes, I still suck at these. But I couldn’t do ANY to start, so… yay, improvement!

Ten pounds isn’t quite as dramatic as I’d have liked to have seen, but the rest of those numbers are all things I’m really proud of. Where do I go from here? To keep everything at the status quo, and to potentially continue dropping some pounds, my game plan is to do two weight-lifting videos per week, then two days of serious cardio. I’ve been running again lately, some days up to five miles, which I’d never been able to do before this. Honest to God, I’ve never run five consecutive miles in my entire life, and I did two five-mile runs last week alone.

So running is going to play a huge part in what comes next, and I’d love to be at around 190 by the time school starts back up in the autumn. I’m planning on keeping the diet reasonable (not by killing myself, but by eating reasonable foods in reasonable portions), but more importantly I’m hoping to keep up the exercise. I really feel like the important part is not allowing myself to lose motivation in that regard. Going from six days a week to four is already going to feel like a vacation. I just don’t want to stop working at this.

Been thinking about maybe signing up for a half-marathon in the fall sometime. My brother and I already are signed up for a couple of goofy races in the next few months (Warrior Dash and the Great Urban Race), but I’d like to do some more of it.

Am I a skinny guy now? Nah, but I’m working on getting there. Spending the last three months lifting to the point of exhaustion and flat-out pain was, ironically enough, a pretty good feeling. Of course, I’ve got a long road ahead that I’ve still go to walk in order to get to my ideal weight, but I’m walking hard to get there. Most importantly, I can feel my legs again while I do it.

Well, for now. Tomorrow’s another day, and another day means another workout. But, as Tony Horton says in the cheesiest way possible, I must “Bring It,” and if I continue to do that, eventually it will have been brought. I’m ready for that. I really and truly am.

Dylan: “You know what’s the best kind of exercise there is? Hardcore dancing.”

From Traci Manning, the art teacher:

We’re drawing portraits, and they have a photo of someone they want to draw. Austin chose Gandhi.

Mallory: “Oh my gosh, how old is he?”
Austin: “I dunno. Probably 50.”

Alexis: “Mr. Brigham, look what Justin did to my hair! There’s pencil shavings all over the place!”
Me: “Okay…”
Justin, her older brother, grinning mischievously: “I didn’t physically touch her.”
Alexis, fed up, announces to the entire class: “When Justin was six years old, he spent three days in the hospital for gas pains. Three days. And they gave him morphine. For gas pains.”

Justin: “I miss the Crocodile Hunter. I haven’t seen him on TV in a while.”
Mitchell: “That’s because he’s dead, you idiot.”

From Cody’s persuasive essay about curfew:

“Kids have a higher chance of being kidnapped at night when they are at their most venerable.”

“Kids have more to worry about than just getting hurt. They could also get rapped.”

Taylor: “Did you hear some church is suing IHOP?”
Liz: “What?! But Jesus loves pancakes!”

Brie: “Elton John is old.”
Dylan: “Hey! Elton John is gay and wonderful. Rocketman!”

Me: “Luckily, I’m never going to go bald. There’s no baldness anywhere in my family for several generations.”
Eric: “Not me. Both my grandpas went bald after they got cancer.”
Dylan: “That’s like saying you’re going to go bald because your grandpa shaved his head.”

Natalie: “There’s an ‘n’ in ‘autumn’”?

Richard: “Mr. Brigham, what was the name of the main girl in that story we just read, ‘A Rose for Emily’”?
(I just smile in silence.)
Richard: “Was it Emily?”

Me: “I need a good trivia question about Ancient China. Kali, give me a good little bit of trivia about Ancient China.”
Kali: “Um… What continent is it on?”

I have no idea what the context of this conversation was, but all I heard from across the room was Drew say, “Yeah, but what if you gave a midget a sniper rifle?”

Autumn, in the “Skills and Accomplishments” section of her senior year resume: “I dissected a frog in 7th grade.”

Me, seeing Chase limping down the hallway: “You limping, buddy?”
Chase, somberly, over his shoulder as he trudges tenderly past: “Yeah. I did some groin exercises in P.E. today that my body wasn’t ready for.”

From Traci Manning:
Jack asks me what my plans are this weekend. I tell him that my husband & I are going to dinner to celebrate my birthday.
Jack: “Is it going to be sensual?”
Me (choking): “I don’t think that’s any of your business, Jack.”
Jack: “Oh, ok.”
Me: “Do you know what sensual means?”
Jack: “I think so.”
Me: “Did you mean sentimental?”
Jack: “Maybe.”

Brandon: “I’ve been on fire 87 times, but only 7 of those times were my fault.”

Sam: “Don’t worry, Brigs. Grant gets really defensive about everything.”
Grant, defensively: “I do not!”

From Kelly’s persuasive essay: “Alcohol should be banned. Get rid of the drinking alcohol. Yes, the crimes will sky-rocket. But isn’t it worth it? Isn’t it worth protecting our young from the claws of the dangerous alcohol? More and more bodies are being buried from car crashes, bar fights, and other major fights of the drunk, murder, and other disturbing incidents or accidents that alcohol causes.”

And: “Having liver cancer is a slow but surely death, caused from long-term possibly hard liquor.”

From Katie’s essay: “Hemp is considered not smoke able but echo-friendly and cheap.”

And: “Around every person in the United States will know at least one person that will smoke marijuana. About 75% of Americans will try marijuana and half of those people will continue to use marijuana every day.”

(According to my calculations, that means well over a third of Americans smoke pot every day. Considering that current data shows only about 20% of Americans smoke cigarettes on a daily basis, I’d say Miss Ryder aimed a little “high” there…)

I noticed that Hannah had what appeared to be a pretty cool looking t-shirt on underneath a zip-up hoody, but because the words were mostly covered I asked her what it said.
Hannah: “It says ‘Modest is Hottest.’”
Me: “And you’re so proud of that fact that you modestly covered up 80% of those words up with your sweatshirt.”

Sarah, struggling with one of her yearbook pages: “What would you say an administrator does? They administrate. No, that sounds funny…”

From Miles’s transcendentalism paper: “Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’ is commenting on our destruction of nature and the lack of peace that we’ve all claimed to support for so long, but continually prevent through fighting and war. Fortunately this is all fixable, as the music video shows that Michael Jackson’s signing has the power to raise trees.”

From Kayla’s transcendentalism paper: “Transcendentalism is still around in today’s society, and will continue to be around because I have a feeling that people will love the world more and more, day by day, similar to the hippies.”

Brandon, as I sit next to him in the computer lab on St. Patrick’s day: “If you pinch me, I swear to God I’ll punch you.”
Me: “What? Why are you threatening me with physical violence right now?”
Brandon: “I’m aware I’m not wearing green, and if one more person pinches me, I’m going to punch them.”
Me: “I’m not going to pinch you, bud. I promise.”
Brandon: “I got kicked out of school once for punching a kid in the nose on the St. Patrick’s day.”
Me: “Because he pinched you.”
Brandon: “Yup. And I had my steel knuckles back then, too.”
Me: “Yikes.”

From Grant’s slave narrative: “I opened one of the crates and found what looked like red sticks. I knows what dey was cause ma old massa had some imself an I had asked wat dey was. It was trinitrotoluene or TNT for short. I also finds a crate of turpentine, a highly flammable liquid.”

(Is it me, or is this slave alternating between genius and borderline retarded a little too fluidly?)

Then: “Iza running to the area where the boat was stored when I pass the massa’s Ford, and I lights the last bomb. Then I hear BOOM BOOM BOOM, just a mass of deafening explosions. We sees metal parts flyin everywhere and one of the other slaves says, that musta been massa’s Ford.”

(Because cars existed in the 1830’s. For the record, Henry Ford was born in 1863 and started his automotive company in 1902).

From Kelsey’s slave narrative: “We planned to go on the Underground Railroad and meet Harriet Tubman. Word round the slaves is that she can get you to the north with no trouble. Harriet met me and Xavier under an abandoned house, and there it was, our road to freedom. We walked for hours until we came above ground and a carriage was waiting for us.”

(No, the Underground Railroad was not literally an underground railroad. You’d think that at 16 years old, they’d have been taught this at some point…)

We’re discussing a F.E.W. Harper poem called “Double Standard,” and we got discussing how when men get a lot of girls, they’re considered studs, and how when women get a lot of men, they’re considered hookers. I asked why that was the case, and Jordon’s arm shot right up:

Me: “Yeah, Jordon?”
Jordon: “It’s like this—if you’ve got a key that opens up a whole bunch of different locks, you’d consider that a pretty awesome key. But if you’ve got a lock that can be opened by a bunch of a different keys, that’s a pretty crappy lock.”

One of Mrs. Uhlman’s students who I don’t know: “I want to go to Key West.”
Jesse: “Ooh, isn’t that in Mexico?”
Student: “No, it’s in Florida.”
Jesse: “Well, it’s basically the same thing. I mean, they’re neighbors.”

Me, correcting a kid who screwed up the rhyme: “No, it’s ‘April showers bring May flowers, but what do May flowers bring?”
Several students shout out: “Pilgrims!”
Ben: “Yeah, but what do pilgrims bring?”
Sam: “Disease and death.”

Grant: “Mr. Brigham, I can’t find any database articles that talk about what cholera actually does to people.”
Sam: “Isn’t cholera that thing that makes babies cry all the time?”
Me: “Nope, that’s colic. But you were close, I guess.”

From Reese’s short story: “Mark didn’t think he could push himself anymore. It felt like his lunges were going to collapse. In fact, he wouldn’t have been surprised if his lunges just stopped working completely.”

I usually hate watching children’s sports (like college football), but this right here is crazy:

Cat Video of the Week: KITTENS! Inspired by kittens:

The unhealthiest thing on the menu is the 10-piece Chicken Selects strips, which has 1,270 calories, 590 of which are calories from fat. There are 66 grams of fat (12 saturated), 3100 grams of sodium, and 180 grams of cholesterol.

Pictured: Death.

Conversely, the healthiest thing on the menus is the Apple Dippers without caramel sauce. That’s a mere 35 calories and 6 grams of natural sugars. Adding the caramel adds 65 calories and 9 grams of sugar.

A Bacon Ranch Cripsy Chicken salad with Cobb Dressing (470 calories, 26 grams of fat) is actually worse for you than a double cheeseburger (460 calories, 23 grams of fat).

You would have to walk for seven hours straight to burn off the calories ingested from a Big Mac, Super-Sized Coke, and Super-Sized Fries. (For the record, after the success of the film “Super-Size Me,” McDonald’s no longer offers Super-Sized items).

McDonald’s is the top distributor of toys in the entire world. That includes Toys R Us.

Due largely to the success of these little guys.

40% of all profits made by McDonald’s are from Happy Meals.

McDonald’s is the world’s #1 purchaser of beef and potatoes, and the #2 purchaser of chicken.

One in eight Americans will have worked at a McDonald’s at some point in their lives.

Pink, Sharon Stone, Tony Stewart, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Fred Durst, Rachel McAdams, Jay Leno, Carl Lewis, Macy Gray, D.L. Hughley, Eva Mendes, and Shania Twain are included among people that once worked at a McDonald’s.

I would've eaten at that restaurant Every. Single. Day.

A new McDonald’s restaurant opens every four hours.

Today, McDonald’s buys 54 million pounds of fresh apples a year. A decade ago, they bought zero pounds of apples a year.

In a number of tests done regarding the image of Ronald McDonald, many children could identify him before they were even able to speak. Even more disconcerting is that the only figure more recognizable than Ronald McDonald was Santa Claus. And yes, that includes Jesus.

Who?

See how happy he is?

It’s a perfect combination of these players having had a whole summer away from media and not having played a single game yet for us to break down and nitpick. We’re all coming back fresh, so there’s this blanket of optimism spread over the whole lot of us, making these Media Days one of the best work days for me all year.

I’m pretty calm and efficient at these things now. I know how to run around, get short interviews with just about everybody in a Bulls uniform, and then get back to my computer to start transcribing and giving my baby birds the informational feeding they crave.

Back in 2006, though, when I attended my first Media Day only a few months after joining the HOOPSWORLD team, there was nothing even resembling coolness or organization in my approach to the event. Keep in mind, this was the first NBA goings-on I had ever attended. Before this, I’d never really done any serious interviewing and I certainly had never come face to face with a professional athlete. I didn’t have butterflies in my stomach; I had gigantic mutant versions of those skull moths from “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Yuck.

Scared, excited, and more than a little dazed, I remember walking into the Berto Center in Deerfield for the first time and feeling a significant wave of panic. Good panic, though. Immediately through the doors is a sort of waiting room area with entrances to the press room and to the practice court.

Wasting no time, I headed down the hallway leading to the gym, noticing team rosters of every Bulls team ever plastered along the wall as I drifted slowly, dreamlike towards the real-life members of my favorite sports team of all time. I saw pictures of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Artis Gilmore and Norm Van Lier, and with very step it was like I was walking into stronger and stronger sunlight. I had the shakes and my palms were producing enough sweat to leave palm sized stains on the side pockets of my khaki pants, which was where I’d been wiping them all the way down the hall.

The gym itself isn’t anything spectacular—just bamboo-colored hardwood centered among white walls, a few office windows overlooking the whole area—but the fact that there were championship banners and retired number banners hanging all over the place nailed it home that I was in the place where Jordan honed his skills en route to six championships.

All of which can be viewed at Berto, which is more awesome than I know how to express.

Inside this effervescent box lay all sorts of photo and video booths, where players were waiting in short lines to fulfill the rest of their media duties. We press could either wait for some of the bigger-named players to head up the podium for mass interviews, or we could try and pull a player aside and hope for a few quick questions before he went on to get his photo taken again.

The first player I actually saw was Kirk Hinrich, and I immediately felt my blood cool inside my veins. There is something undeniably creepy about coming face-to-face with someone you’ve only ever seen on television and who you never expected to ever see outside of the TV. It’s almost like seeing a ghost. It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be happening. But it is.

My God, there’s Kirk Hinrich. The real Kirk Hinrich.

Cue up "Dream Weaver."

He wasn’t free for any sort of chatter, so I looked around at all the white jerseys and tried to decide who I would pull aside first. It’s like stepping up to a really good Chinese buffet and figuring out how to fill up your plate most efficiently and most deliciously.

I ended up going with rookie guard Thabo Sefolosha, who ended up being one of my favorite Bulls for as long as he remained with the team. He was a Swiss kid making the transition to the NBA, and a lot of people were excited about what he could be capable of. We had a very amiable conversation, joked around a little bit, and I found myself surprised how easy it was to interview one of these guys.

Of course, they weren’t all that easy. For as nice a guy as Hinrich is, he never really showed warmth towards me. Ben Wallace, fresh off his gigantic contract with the Bulls that summer, started off kind of cool, but for the most part was just crabby and aloof. Tyrus Thomas was purposefully a jerk to media, and even though I still adore Ben Gordon, he never made interviews easy for us, either.

I miss neither of you.

Other players proved to be amazing people, however. P.J. Brown will always be one of my favorite players if only for the character he showed as a Bull that season. Constantly in trade rumors because of his expiring contract, Brown always answered every question anybody every asked him, and he offered real insight and thorough responses while doing so. Few players I’ve ever met have been that nice.

Luol Deng, as I explained in detail last week, is also a cool guy, as were Chris Duhon, Malik Allen, and Andres Nocioni. The mix of all these players on that first Media Day taught me a lot about what to expect for the rest of the year. It was, among many other things, a very informational experience.

Eventually, over the course of the next hour and change, I lost myself in my work and forgot how star struck I actually was. I ended with a few minutes of audio from every single player on the team, which my boss—who was test-driving me as someone who would be covering games that year—seemed plenty happy about.

It wasn’t until I left Berto that night that everything really hit me. A happy sort of anxiety rose up through my gizzards as I left Deerfield and hopped back on to 294 for the long drive home. I found myself rewinding the audio and listening to it over and over again, incredulous that I had just been among a group of people that I admired so much in a building that housed some of the greatest NBA players of all time.

Like this one, for example.

How could I help smiling for the next several hours? I went to bed with a smile that night, actually, and could barely wait to get to my first game and do it all over again. Now that I’ve got four full seasons under belt and am gearing up for a fifth, I still can’t find it in me to be tired of what I do. Ask the high school me what his dream job would be, and he wouldn’t even have thought to say “NBA journalist” because it’s simply too far out of the realm of possibility. Yet here I am, still amazed by Kirk Hinrich, and still an awe of the time my feet follow the same paths that Michael Jeffery Jordan’s once did.

Since then, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for that particular skyline, but I know that there are many more gorgeous ones in these grand States which are United and named America. Here’s a top-five list of my favorites:

#5 – San Francisco – Flanked by the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, Frisco has loads of gorgeous tall buildings to fill up the spaces surrounded by water. The Transamerica Pyramid stands out more than any other building in the skyline, but the twin spires of the California Center are pretty lovely to look at, too. Overall, it creates a pretty overwhelming, gorgeous experience.

#4 – St. Louis – Compared to the other big cities on this list, St. Louis is one of the smaller ones, but the Gateway Arch creates a perfect work of art right along the banks of the Mississippi River. While it’s true that there’s not a whole lot going on behind that Arch, just that one structure is enough to put San Louis in the top five. It really is a beautiful city. East St. Louis, however, is an entirely different story.

#3 – Seattle – Without the Space Needle, we’re looking at a whole lot of blasé buildings somewhere in the top left-hand corner of the country. With the Space Needle, you’ve got the third-most recognizable (and awesome) skyline in the country. From the right angle, Mount Rainier off in the distance adds a whole new level of local color to the composition, and that helps Seattle a great deal as well.

#2 – New York City – There are tons of great buildings in NYC, the most notable of which is obviously the Empire State Building. But with other behemoths like the Bank of America Tower, the Chrysler Building, and the New York Times building (all of which rank in the top 35 tallest buildings in the world), you’ve still got yourself a gigantic and lovely skyline. With twin towers, we’re probably looking at #1 here. Without, they fall just shy, although the effect of the spotlights replacing the towers is hauntingly effective.

#1 – Chicago – You could argue that there’s something to do with local bias here, but with two of the most iconic skyscrapers in the world, the John Hancock Building and what will forever be known to me as the Sears Tower, there’s no doubting the City of Big Shoulders is the most imposing cityscape in the country. If it weren’t for stupid Hong Kong and Dubai, it would probably be the most imposing in the world.

Honorable Mention

Pittsburgh – All the rivers and bridges rock, but the buildings themselves leave a little to be desired.

Dallas – The Bank of America Plaza and Renaissance Tower both are among the top 25 buildings in the world, and certain shots of the skyline that include the fun yet sort of pointless Reunion Tower make it all the better.

Philadelphia – What I like about Philly is that the tallest buildings don’t just square off at the top. There’s tiered pyramids and spires that make things look very interesting, especially from afar when the Ben Franklin Bridge can also be seen in the picture.

Las Vegas – While the Strip isn’t big and scary like the others on this list, it is just about the brightest damn group of buildings on the planet earth, with tons of out-of-place landmarks like a gigantic pyramid (the Luxor Casino), replicas of the Statue of Liberty and Eifel Tower, and the emerald-colored MGM Casino.

In the first place, there are few pro ballers I like personally more than Deng—an intelligent, soft-spoken young man who has always handled himself with composure and treated everyone around him with respect. In the second place, Deng’s story is pretty epic. Not D.J. Mbenga epic, but close.

"Oh, it's epic alright," Deng said epicly.

Having grown up in Sudan, his father, as a member of the Sudanese parliament, had to send his family to Egypt during the Second Sudanese Civil War out of fear for the lives of wife and sixteen children. Within a year, the government was taken over in a military coup, Papa Deng was arrested and gunpoint and then imprisoned for three months. When Luol was eight, with his father released from jail, the whole Deng clan headed for England to claim political asylum.

From then on, Deng lived his life as a Brit (which is why he’s now a member of the British National Basketball team), at least until high school when he moved to the U.S. to attend school and play basketball. At Blair Academy in New Jersey, he teamed up with fellow future NBA star Charlie Villanueva (who is the only current pro hoopster with alopecia, a genetic disorder that makes it impossible to grow hair), and eventually was recruited to play for Coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. After one year there, he bolted for the Big League, where he was drafted by the Phoenix Suns with #7 overall pick and immediately shipped off to Chicago. And that’s where he’s been ever since.

Except when the Bulls are on the road. Or when he's traveling overseas to play for Great Britain. Or lots of other times. But he does spend several days a month in Chicago.

His story is what makes him interesting, but it’s his character that makes likeable. Let me tell you something about an NBA locker room—when you walk into one with your little hand recorder, players sniff you out like a bloodhound and either leave the room to escape you or drape their massive headphones over their ears to zone you out. They purposefully make it very socially awkward for some media to do their job, and that can be very frustrating at times.

But Luol isn’t like that. Whether he’s reading something, listening to music, or texting someone on his phone, he’ll look up at you, shake your hand, smile and actually give you a good interview. Like I said, he’s a smart dude, so it’s not the same ol’ stock responses to every question. He’s the kind of guy that asks how your kids are doing, you know what I’m saying?

Plus he does tons of charity work for the Lost Boys of Sudan, as well as many other charities—something that earned him a citizenship award or two over the years. But he keeps his head and just works his butt off, despite whatever animosity some Bulls fans may feel for him because he’s underplayed the giant contract he signed in 2008.

I still like the dude, as a player and a person, and I wait patiently for the day when I’m commissioned to write his biography.