Here’s a blog entry in which the author (per usual) vastly overestimates her importance in the world.

In the interest of full disclosure, here is a bilingual list of exactly how important sports are to me:

not at all
not a whit
barely
un comino
un pucho
un carajo
(where the last three in Spanish basically mean a cumin seed, a cigarette butt, and a damn, in descending order of politeness).

But I have recently determined that I am important to sports. For my ninth (tenth? I forget)-grade boyfriend (who I recently spied on facebook and seems to be having a good life, and why not, there are enough of those to go around), I chose the (I think) football pool choices one year, based squarely on uniform colors, and for which I’m sure he was soundly laughed off the school yard, because I really like purple and am not a big fan of yellow, but he ended up doing comparatively well.

And then there was Ecuador. Oh, the famous 1996 Jefferson Perez win of the racewalking event in the Summer Olympics. Surely you have it etched in your sports-loving memory. Well, I do, because he happened to be from Cuenca, Ecuador, which is where I was living at the time, and it was Ecuador’s first ever Olympic medal. And we watched replay after replay of Mr. Perez swing-hippedly breaking the finish ribbon. And listened to a soundbyte in which he proclaimed his favorite food to be noodle soup.

Next on the list was Chile’s 2004 gold medal in tennis for Gonzalez and Massú, also won while I was in-country. At this point I vaguely considered renting myself out to other unsung nations for their Olympic-medal-winning glory. But then I thought about how much I like living in Chile and also of the possible mobstyle repercussions if the home team favorite didn’t win, and I decided not to switch teams, as it were.

Which is why I owe the United States Soccer team a giant apology, because I am so sure that it is my fault that they squandered a 2-0 lead over Brazil, Brazil! a nation I never would have chosen, yellow and green! oh! my aching eyes. But since I don’t live in the United States, the soccer team was sure to lose, and for this I almost apologize. I can’t help it if I am important to sports, though sports are not important to me.

My powers are somewhat unpredictable and it doesn’t seem like I have any control over them. Also, before inviting me to your country, consider the fact that as I landed in New Orleans a few years ago, the biggest natural disaster to ever hit the United States was brewing. And I haven’t been to Honduras in years, but if all the countries I’ve been to are headed for a coup, a bunch of you might want to duck and cover, I’m just saying. And sorry I couldn’t make your sports teams win. But at least I haven’t brought a natural disaster.

Just mirth, a short attention span and lotsalotsa words.