Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

No, this isn't a Ulysses post, but it is about hoops. It's that time of the year again.

This time of the year:

Women's basketball season. Yesterday, three ( THREE!) women's basketball games were on national tv. We skipped the first one (Kentucky vs. OSU) caught the tail end of the second one (where number one ranked Maryland kicked Michigan State's ass by about a million points), and then had friends over for the third one: UConn vs., you guessed it, Tennessee. It was a great, great, great game, but I don't know sports' lingo, and I also don't think sports' talk makes for great blogging, so I won't say much more about that. But really, if you aren't watching women's basketball, you should. It's the right thing to do.

Then, last night GF and I went to one of my school's women's basketball games. I had three players in my intro. to women's studies class last quarter, and when I admitted what a huge Lady Vols fan I am they told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had a responsibility to be THEIR fans. I wasn't really up for that, because our team has a male coach and, well, I don't really like men, or male coaches, but they told me about how he is completely committed to women's sports and that he only hires female assistant coaches, so that he can train them and send them out into the world to be the kick-ass female coaches, and told me, as well, that our entire athletics program is headed by a woman. That, and the fact that our women's team, which is nationally ranked, gets far, far less attention and funding than our crappy men's team, which isn't ranked, and our players are all strong students, some of whom now want to be women's studies majors, pushed me to buy tickets.

So last night GF and I dragged ourselves out of our house and into the not-so-chilly night and went to the big game against a team from that one state with all the cheese, and had a surprisingly great time. I say surprisingly because I am not, actually, a sporty dyke. I'm way more a campy queen. Really, I promise. Or as Djuna Barnes might put it, "I'm not a sporty dyke, I just love Pat Summitt."

Sitting there in the brightly-lit, packed auditorium, amidst lots and lots of what I can only assume are alumni families (I didn't recognize any other faculty members or any students) many of which had elementary aged daughters in brightly-colored shirts with our coach's name on them, meaning they had been to one of his summer camps, we realized how negative our world-view has been these past few years. When a fun night out is sitting in a darkened movie theater or in a darkened bar or, or . . . or when I can't even think of anything we've done socially in the past year that didn't have to do with drinking and/or sitting in the dark, maybe a dose of flourescently-lit, ten-dollars-a-ticket simpleness is in order. Especially when it's all about girl-power.

It was oddly comforting to be in such a happy, wholesome place. And I know that's not representative of the world, and I know that I teach at a pretty posh, solidly middle class university, with alumni who are happy because they're privileged and well-fed and well-paid. I know that these things should make me feel cynical, but last night I didn't want to. Our team didn't win, but the game was really close and my students played well, with even more aggression and fire than I had seen on the tv earlier that day. So I'm thinking it might be time to get out to family-friendly places a little more.

But don't worry, I'm not going over to the light side. Maybe I'll pack a flask, or at least mutter lines from Valley of the Dolls under my breath, just to make sure I keep in touch with my inner-queen. Yeah, I can just see it. Here's me, pushing the pre-teen basketball camp girls to the side as I lurch drunkenly out of the bathroom. "Get outta my way. I gotta man waiting for me."