Grocery shopping is hard.

I hate it. I go to the grocery store and the only thing I want to do is leave immediately. I wander the aisles and think about how much work it's going to take to prepare and cook the food I see. The first week out of my parents' house, I bought virtually nothing but Oreos, candy bars and mac and cheese. Speaking of which, am I the only person who thinks that the theme-shaped Kraft Macaroni & Cheese tastes way better than the normal kind? I've always thought this. I used to insist on grocery shopping with my mother when I was younger (16) just so that I could ensure she bought the "wheels" kind. That and butterscotch chips, like for cookies. I'd just eat them out of the bag. I should have weighed 400 lbs. That first day doing my own shopping I scoured the shelf for my beloved wheels but found nothing, and I returned to my apartment sadly with a box of Spongebob Macaroni & Cheese. Fortunately for me, Spongebob noodles are a savory cheesy delight. I returned the next week for more Spongebob and of course they were out, so I left the store with a Spiderman box. Also good. This led me to decide I would rank the most delicious kinds of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese:

1. Wheels
2. Spongebob
3. ??? (I know there was a kind I had as a kid, not as good as Spongebob but better than Spiderman)
4. Spiderman
6. Regular

I put regular at number 6 because it's mostly gross and not worthy of 5th. Does this imply I would eat nothing before I would eat regular? No, it does not. I would just be angry and stir the noodles very hard.

Oreos were easier. There's never any shortage of them. Even now that I've cut back on copious sugary treats on my shopping visits, I always like to have a package of Oreos on hand. I used to dip them in the milk, and I'd sit there and wait until the part around my fingers started to dissolve before slopping them into my mouth. I spilled everywhere, and sometimes I'd wait a second too long and the Oreo would disintegrate into my milk. I always panicked, cause disintegrated Oreos float right to the bottom and soggy things are disgusting. So I usually drank the whole thing right there quickly and got more milk. This became such a problem that now I put the Oreo in my mouth and drink some milk and let the whole thing melt right there on my tongue. It's delicious and in no way conducive to tooth decay. Some people prefer Double Stuf Oreos, though I'm not sure I understand why. I mean, you get more of the white stuff, but the entire Oreo concept is predicated on the balance of white stuff to black stuff, and Double Stuf just completely upends this balance. It's madness. And I've seen those green-fringed "diet" Oreos lurking in the shadows. Horrifying. I bet they taste like fish.

Anyway, now I'm on a budget. I found out that my monthly food costs for myself was as much as my cousin's, which includes him, his wife and two small children. I'm eating for four people! I'm the reason the Arabs hate America! And now that I'm facing some very hefty upcoming expenses, I've got to cut my food costs by at least half. That means rice and beans. That's right, I'm going full third world. I've done it before, I swear I can do it again. But I'm still going to buy Spongebob and Oreos.

Football and love songs.

Oh, hey, BYU won the MAACO BOWL LAS VEGAS. Kicked the snot out of the Oregon State. Of course, it was only because the Beavers weren't motivated and didn't care. Their season ended with their loss in the Civil War a few weeks ago. Nevermind putting up a good show against a "lesser" opponent or going out on a high note or notching another win for the sake of pride and history. Game doesn't count, guys! Bowl games, apart from the National Championship mean nothing, everyone! I'm sure that will be an easy stance to stick to consistently. Whatever.

Utah beat Cal earlier tonight. Cal definitely looked listless, but that's their own damn fault. Get up for the game or get out. I'm seriously tired of the excuses. You're an 8-5 team and you lost to Oregon by 39 points who lost to Stanford who beat USC (and who, incidentally, lost to Oregon State). Find some motivation or don't even bother showing up. Or, you know, do, and keep getting waxed by the WAC and MWC.

I was thinking today that there's about a 20 year dead zone between when new technology can be referenced in love songs without sounding silly. I don't really have anything to back that up, but take "answering machine" or "answer phone," for instance. I mean, I can only think of two songs off the top of my head that use it--Nice Dream (Radiohead) and a Joseph Arthur song I think I know the name of but can't be sure and I don't want to be wrong or look it up, sorry--but think about it. When answering machines were first invented, it probably would have been weird to hear someone mention them in a song, but not anymore. When's the last time you heard a love song that seriously referenced new technology like, "Hey baby/I texted you and you weren't on Facebook/why don't you poke me back." Yes, I know back and book don't rhyme. But really, songs like that would sound kind of stupid. When VCRs first game out, I don't think you had like Linda Carpenter or Paul Simon throwing a lot of "I saw your face on my tape-recorder" type lyrics. But now it's not all that weird, is it? So maybe in 20 years we'll have Miley Cyrus telling us about her Twitter love affair and no one will boo her off the stage. Well, I mean, I still would, but..

5 Gifts For The 27 Year Old Bachelor

If you get the 27 year old bachelor in your life any or all of these gifts for Christmas, he will love you forever, until next year.

1. NBA basketball -- I don't mean an NBA size basketball, or an NBA brand basketball, I mean an actual NBA game ball. They're like $100. TF-1000s are great, don't misunderstand, but this is the real thing. What better way to show off to your friends than to show up at a pickup game with an actual NBA ball? And then of course proceed to play expertly, proving beyond a doubt that you belong in the NBA.

2.  A pig -- Every guy wants a pig. While most guys love dogs and plan to own about 16 of them as soon as they can, pigs are that one pet that will make everyone understand just precisely how awesome you really are. Look at me, I am eclectic, I have a Piano Magic b-side and swine in my house.  Pigs are smart and adorable. And they're pretty easy to care for. Just don't feed them dog food. They go feral and chew your face off.

3. A new Xbox 360 -- They break all the time, so chances are that while your 27 year old bachelor already has a 360, it's probably broken and the warranty has expired. This is an important gift because 27 year old bachelors need to unwind after a long day of not having any responsibilities. Video games are a fantastic way of doing this.

4. A guitar -- Every guy wants to play the guitar. Even if a guy already knows how to play the guitar, a new one is always wonderful. Martin acoustic guitars are fantastic for the price. A set each of light/medium and heavy gauge phosphor bronze steel strings are necessary, electric input not. Your 27 year old bachelor needs a new guitar to impress a lady, marry her and please his folks.

5. Camping things -- He may need any or all of these items: a backpack, stove, sleeping bag, tent, hiking boots. You never know when he may want to take a sudden trip to, say, Greenland.

A lot of guys would also want books, but the problem with 27 year old bachelors is that they often buy books on impulse, which results in them having more books than they've read and being well-stocked for at least a year in advance. Adding more books to his collection will just confuse and possibly upset him.

Down with capitalism/TV execs.

On Thursday, I spent my day at work looking forward to the Colts vs. Jaguars game. I naturally assumed a mid-week NFL game with an undefeated team in week 17 of the season with 0 realistic ratings competition would be on network TV. Well I got home to find out that the NFL Network had snatched the game at some point and my basic Comcast package doesn't get the NFL Network. Sigh. Right now my cable bill is around $32 a month, and my roommate and I would have to pay around double that to get the NFL Network (along with a buttload of other channels I'll never watch). So weak, you guys.

So I had to settle with following the score online while I watched Mythbusters and I became increasingly disappointed that I was missing the game with each touchdown. It was a shootout, with Manning, Dallas Clark and Reggie Wayne essentially castrating the entire Jaguar defense for 3 quarters.

That's what makes Peyton great. He surgically removes the opponent's will or ability to fight by being maddeningly consistent and precise. Quarterbacks in the NFL are basically like hedge fund managers--they play statistics and odds from ground zero. NFL QBs have to manage the game, looking not necessarily just for points on every drive, but to maximize the optimum position for each move made--putting their defense in a position to get the ball back, running the clock, confusing the opponent's defense, etc etc. In order to do this they have to be in two places at once: present in the moment, on the field, making the plays, as well as constantly assessing the meta-game by understanding the odds. Knowing where each receiver is supposed to be on each play, knowing when to get rid of the ball and when not to, and also knowing the probabilities of certain outcomes, if we get here and punt from this position, what are the chances we get the ball back in how long at what position and so on. Tough job. And Peyton is great at it, possibly the best ever.

Bill Simmons talks sometimes about how amazing it is to see certain players who really, really get it retire and then go into coaching/managing and fail spectacularly. It's curious. You would think guys like Isaiah Thomas or Kevin McHale or Michael Jordan (for crap's sake), all guys who really understood team dynamics and how to manage games, would be ideal coaches or general managers. But they often aren't. It's like once they're removed from the game itself, they have a difficult time understanding how players on a team interact and work together. In Isaiah's case, he made one boneheaded move after another spending money on players who had numbers, but he never created a team, miring the Knicks in 10+ years of mediocrity. Makes me wonder what kind of coach Peyton Manning would make.

I'm going to Greenland.

Okay not really. The other day after work I spent about 6 hours looking at Greenland on Google Earth. Now I want to quit my job and go wander the frozen wilderness for a year. I started in Nuuk, which looks like a decent place but somehow stuck between trying to be a normal Danish town and a suburb of a city run by clowns. It's the biggest city in Greenland, but apparently the airport there is useless, so all major air traffic comes in through Kangerlussuaq, which is a tiny little place far to the northeast of Nuuk with a population of 500. I would guess approximately 490 of them are boat drivers (to Nuuk), 9 of them are cooks or hotel owners and 1 of them is a bum. That's the worldwide ratio of normal people to bums, right? 499 to 1?

I found Kangerlussuaq by accident--in fact, all of my Greenland discoveries were accidents which I happened across by mindlessly clicking my way north for several hours--and when I found it I was delighted to discover that even in Greenland tourists are under the impression that they are the first and only people to discover a touristy gimmick. As far as I can tell, there's only one touristy gimmick in all of Greenland and Google Earth has about nine thousand photos of it. So if you've penciled in time on your schedule to click through photos of Kangerlussuaq, be warned that as you search for more interesting photos of what is essentially the only viable commerical airport which also happens to be a town on the world's only subcontinent with an icesheet the size of Mexico, you're going to see a lot of one thing. Here, I'll save you the trouble:

Every other photo anyone has taken of Kangerlussuaq is either that signpost or some part of a red plane with white polka-dots (Air Greenland, go figure).

As I made my way north along the western coast up to the icesheet, I had to keep zooming in and out because certain photo icons won't appear if you're not close enough to the surface, but being close to the surface means you move slower, so it was this tug of war between wanting to see as many photos as possible while also not wanting to spend the remainder of the year squinting at blurry, green-brown satellite imagery. After I tired of Kangerlkajsdlka, I began viewing photos people had taken of the surrounding area. They were absolutely gorgeous. I picked up the trail of some guy called "marcus_weidler" who was headed west with a companion or two, along what looked like a general route some other people also take (give or take 50 miles of latitude), and some of the pictures blew me away. This is virtually untouched, untapped wilderness for hundreds of miles with vast canyons and huge mountains and beautiful, clear blue lakes. Truly epic. Going there right now might be a mistake since it's -600 degrees, but I'd love to someday.

About the clown comment, I found that virtually every settlement in the country was full of brightly colored houses, red, blue, green, etc. I decided they painted them those colors because when you live in the freaking Arctic, bull crap if you're gonna let anyone tell you you can't paint your house a garish shade of yellow simply because you freaking feel like it. When it's cold enough outside to freeze piss every day of the year, you're gonna paint your house any damn color you want, and if we're being honest, deep down everyone wants to live in a yellow house. I know I do.


(marcus_weidler's awesome photos, my favorites around pages 15-17)

Tiger commits adultery, moves to Sweden.

I watch golf on TV sometimes. It's certainly not any more boring than baseball. I watch it because I appreciate the madness-inducing difficulty of hitting a little ball with a lopsided club into a small hole a few hundred yards away, and I appreciate that difficulty because I am awful at golf. Golf is completely immune to any natural sports aptitude I have. I've tried playing for years. I've never been good at it. It's a whole other game from anything else. Personally I blame genes or sorcery.

I make fun of my brother sometimes cause he watches golf usually only if Tiger is playing. Recently he watched like ten hours of the Tour Championship just to watch Tiger lose at the very end to Phickelson. He was all upset about it, as though his ten hours of watching golf were suddenly a waste because Tiger lost. While one could (and did) argue that watching ten hours of golf was a waste regardless, I think it's odd that people follow an entire sport for one guy. It seems to me that in a way it devalues the sport itself. I also get fussy when people follow an entire team for one guy (coughLakers fans), so while I've always had a bit of a man crush on Peyton Manning as well as some respect for the organization (and its previous coach), I didn't feel I could legitimately favor the Colts until Austin Collie (former BYU receiver) joined Indianapolis this year as a rookie. I get a little annoyed when hundreds of Mexicans invade Rio Tinto stadium every time Chicago plays RSL just so they can scream out their love for no-neck Cuauhtémoc. They wouldn't be there if he weren't there, and the whole notion of it cheapens his team, because the moment he retires (which he will soon, because he's older than France), Chicago loses a bunch of fans. I think there should be loyalty toward the team, not just an individual. (Then again, if you can draw people in with an individual--David Beckham, for example--with enough continued exposure some of them might just become actual fans).

And by that logic, I've somewhat vindicated my brother and a billion Tiger fans who follow golf only when he's on TV, since golf is an individual game.

Anyhow, it took the revelation that Tiger had a harem to turn my mostly sports-averse mother into a Tiger follower. The other day she said to me, "Do you think he has a sex addiction?" (Sex addiction is the new thing male celebrities say they have to excuse an appalling lack of self-control). No, mom, it's not a sex addiction. It's just about access. It is my opinion that men are wired to want sex from any available source. That doesn't mean they have to linger on every little fantasy, let alone act on one. Many don't. Many do. But the truth is that when a man sees or interacts with an attractive woman, some part of him desires her. At that point the overarching question is, morality aside, one of self-control. If he's married, the question often takes the form of loyalty and respect toward his wife and his marriage as well as access. If he's not married, the question is largely one of just access. For the happily, loyally married man, the thought may not even register consciously. He has no reason to consider such infidelity. For a different type of married man, one like Tiger, there is apparently nothing to hold him back morally, and he seems to have little, if any, respect or loyalty for his marriage or his wife--so at that point it's just a question of access, and Tiger has no restrictions there. He's rich, he's famous, and he has a gaggle of people waiting to do anything for him. Tiger's not addicted, he's just utterly uninhibited.

It's not all that simple, obviously, but I think it's a big part of why he did what he did.

It's a shame, too. You'd think a beautiful wife, two kids and more money than he could possibly spend would be enough, but it often seems the opposite is true. The more someone's potential to buy their way into gratification increases, the more their desire--and sense of entitlement--to be gratified increases. As Joe Thiesmann said about his own infidelity, "God wants Joe Theismann to be happy."

And now golf ratings will be in the toilet. And Tiger will be the punchline to every sports-related sex joke for the next ten years. Wonder if it was worth it.

Correction.

TCU will play Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl instead of what I said before. This is actually worse than what I said. Instead of at least one "mid-major" team having an opportunity to prove itself against an "elite" program, two undefeated mid-majors will play each other. Proving... well, nothing of consequence. Whee. I don't know to what extent--if any--the BCS itself engineered this matchup (the Fiesta Bowl has some power over who ends up in its game), but to me the whole thing stinks. Like crap.

It makes sense to pit the two together for big-6 conference and BCS execs. An elite program playing a non-elite is a lose-lose for the elite program. For example, if Texas plays TCU and wins, they feel they haven't gained anything besides maintaining the status-quo--they're expected to win, they're Texas. If Texas plays TCU and loses, well now, that's just downright embarrassing, isn't it? And the same thing works in reverse in TCU's favor. So it's no wonder rising programs like Boise State can't get any big-name programs to schedule any games with them--meanwhile a lack of "quality" wins over big-name programs is referred to whenever teams like Boise State or TCU ask for a little fairness in rankings, respect, bowl matchups or what have you.

That is what we call a Catch-22, and it's no accident.