(02FEB2009)
For the second straight year, I struggle to stay awake during the Super Bowl.
I remember when I used to get together with friends, beers, and heaping plates of various sauced meats for the big game. It’s been years since I’ve done that.
Last year, I returned from a mission in Iraq the day before the Super Bowl, and struggled to get into a normal sleeping schedule. Suffering tremendous jetlag, I woke at 0500 on Super Bowl Sunday and by the time the game started I was only barely thwarting sleep. I dozed intermittently throughout the game, missed the end, and woke long enough to see Eli Manning celebrating at which point I knew I could turn off the television.
This year, the game starts at 0400 local time and I decide to stay up for it rather than go to sleep and set an alarm. I regret that decision long before the game actually begins.
I have no dog in the fight, but I’m glad to see that it’s a good game, competitive. I slip off to sleep at various points, my room darkened but for the game on, the volume kept low. Izzy swears he can’t hear my television through the thin wall that separates our rooms, and I can’t hear his, but nonetheless I’m wary of making too much noise at such a late/early hour.
Izzy keeps fairly normal hours, up for breakfast and “ten toes up” (as he always says) by 2200 most days. I definitely wouldn’t call my hours “normal”.
The biggest difference about watching the Super Bowl in Afghanistan is that AFN doesn’t air commercials. They can’t, because they get almost all of their programming for free from the networks, and part of that agreement is that they don’t make money off of them. While I’ve always been more interested in the game than the commercials – and have been the only person at a large party of that opinion – I do enjoy them. But not this year.
I find an alternate airing of the Super Bowl on a BBC-Sports channel, with an altogether different team of commentators, but they sound amateurish, the broadcast is about a minute behind AFN’s, and even the BBC isn’t airing the US commercials, so I end up watching AFN with all of it’s little Public Service Announcements in lieu of the commercials.
I’m awake for the end of the game, at least, and watch one of the most amazing endings of a Super Bowl ever. I stay up long enough to watch the replay of the catch a few dozen times, not thinking both feet were in the first several times I see it, and then just being in awe of it.
I’m asleep within seconds of turning the television off, wishing it were baseball season already.
AFN = Armed Forces Network
BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation
