To Our Team (Players as well as Fans)

Dear Brave and Bold,

Yeah, this is going to be a pretty shallow, ridiculous letter. Frankly, I'm behind the eight-ball on paperwork and classwork and papers and classes and just plain work. So sometimes it's nice to just turn the brain off, talk trash, and revel in the feel of a ridiculous, beautiful, phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes type of college football win.

Well done, boys. Good job, team. Thank you, coaching staff. And hell yeah, fans! I was there back in 2003 when we took down Auburn (and consequently, the goalposts) in an unprecedented upset. Kennan and Team Redd and I took to the field back then, and it was amazing. I would expect nothing less from fans for this game. I so wish I had a piece of goalpost... I know it's destructive and expensive but I envy our friends who have ragged chunks of bright yellow metal on their desks. I settled for a chunk of turf because I was young and crazy then (as opposed to now being older, crazier, but also theoretically more responsible, and concerned with the well-being of my kiddos).

I guess I'll get just a little political here and say: why not expand the definition of the "brave and bold" to include not just the football team but all of GT and her fans? I didn't even understand why the proposed song amendment "If I had a daughter sir, I'd dress her in white and gold; and put her on the campus to join the brave and bold" didn't make sense, because all along, I'd been thinking of the brave and bold as everybody. Which I realize doesn't make great sense, but hey--this proposed change wouldn't be the first time it was changed, anyway, as shown by these lyrics. If nothing else, "... put her on the campus to improve the ratio" is another option. Not necessarily the most flattering, or even helpful, but it at least acknowledges that engineering is a (sadly) male-dominated field.

As far as changing lyrics, I've been doing that ever since I became a fan, anyway. I sing, "He would yell, 'To Hell with Georgia!' like his mommy used to do!" so it's obvious I'm not above interjecting my own feminist politics into sacred words (I do the same thing with praise songs and hymns whose lyrics I find theologically questionable, though actually not targeting gender bias... but that's another post entirely). Really, I'm just here to cheer the team to victory, which is actually kind of possible. I remember another great game, in 2006 against Miami (weird to think of the days of Chan Gailey and Reggie Ball with fondness), where my delusions of fan grandeur were actually confirmed when I HELPED FORCE A TIMEOUT. We had amaaaazing seats in the student section, thanks to friend Kdids, and I screamed my heart out, along with everybody else, enough so that their QB had to call a timeout because nobody could hear the audible. This did not help me to calm down and not take things so seriously. But it was soooooo much fun. There's a small part of me that thinks that they can still hear me through the television, from hundreds of miles away. Like I said, now more responsible, in theory only.

Anyway, it's a rainy Monday morning but the glow from the weekend is sunshine enough for me today. Up with the White and Gold! Am I watching the #BlockSix clip online, again and again? Maaaaybe. Can you blame me? Go Jackets!

Drinking to All the Good Fellows (gender-neutral...?),
A Ramblin', Gamblin', Helluva (Wife-uva) Engineer!