Captain's Log, Day 34: Is It Too Late to be the Gleek of the Week?

Date: May 22, 2021

Time of post: 1:53PM

Quarantine Day: 423

Last Song I Listened To: "Not the Boy Next Door (Glee Cast Version)"

Last Person I Communicated With: The Taylor Swift group chat was freaking out about a "traitor" (by Olivia Rodrigo) & "Burn" (from Hamilton) mashup (this one: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeW1h21G/)

Last Thing I Ate: Mediterranean chicken patty on a pretzel bun with a caesar salad (because I'm adult who cooks sometimes now) 

Last Thing I Read: Stranger Than Fanfiction by Chris Colfer

Current Mood: nostalgic and content

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: Not today, but I've done a lot of summer teaching prep this week, so I'm relaxing today.

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: Take a shower and do some dishes

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: gotta do more summer teaching prep

One Reason I’m Happy Today: I'm really excited about starting a new book today (don't know which one yet)

Dear Apocalypsers,


There are 2 things you need to know before I start: 1) I graduated high school 7 years ago today and 2) Glee has changed my life.

I’ve watched all 6 seasons of Glee since February, so when I say it’s “changed my life,” I don’t mean that it was foundational to my high school career or that it inspired me to chase my Arts dreams or anything like that. (Full disclosure, I watched 20 episodes—S4E4 “The Break Up” to S5E1 “Love, Love, Love”—within 24 hours at one point because I was mad they broke Kurt and Blaine up and swore to watch until they got back together. Honestly, I think I watched Seasons 3-6 in a couple weeks.) I never got into the show in high school—which, in retrospect makes no sense—but I existed between 2009 and 2015, so I knew about the show, and I knew about every Taylor Swift cover, and I had definite opinions about them.

The number of times they broke Kurt &
Blaine up was unreasonable. If
you're gonna commit to teen marriage,
then commit to it.

Dylan, you should have known...

But, no. Something about quarantine and my Trashy Teen Show watch history on Netflix led me to watching Glee nearly 6 years after it ended and nearly 12 years after it premiered. Now, I could write an entire blog series on things that show did poorly; I honestly thought I was on an extended acid trip for seasons 1-3A (and then I think I just adjusted to it and stopped questioning it, like it was a form of Stockholm Syndrome). I sent furious texts to so many people seeking some kind of explanation for what I was seeing. Surely it was satire…right? They wouldn’t present this to tweens and teens…in all seriousness? Or would they? And, if they did, how were we supposed to distinguish between the satire and the sincerity? Like I said, this could be an entire series.

Pretty sure he never forced me to watch Glee with him in high school because he KNEW I'd react like this and wanted to save himself.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for Glee, but I certainly didn’t expect it to give me closure about my own high school experience.

Like I said in my opening, I graduated high school 7 years ago, and for the first time since then, I’ve been able to look at pictures of my friend group from that time and not feel like I’ve swallowed a razorblade and it’s just perforated my stomach. And that’s, strangely, thanks to Glee.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I’m an unfailing optimist, and I always have been. (I didn’t believe in love for four days my first semester of grad school, and it was, quite frankly, the most concerning time of my life.) I want every single moment to be straight out of a coming-of-age movie or a Disney fairytale. I want things to come full circle; I want signs from higher powers; sweepingly grand gestures, little miracles, and for my memories to all be coated in that warm, hazy, sunshine nostalgia that feels like a country song about your hometown. And as much as I’ve tried to force myself to “be more realistic” because I’m “getting older” and “can’t be this naïve,” but, dear readers, I’m writing this from a pillow fort I constructed in my living room a week ago. The point is, I don’t think my heart is ever going to “grow up” in the way that some people think it “should.”

But when your heart’s built like that, it gets broken more often than you think it will and you have to decide to keep believing that it will all work out like a YA movie.

That’s what I didn’t realize when I graduated high school.

My high school friend group were the first people to break my heart.

When we graduated, we were all going different places—as you do when you graduate high school. I was cut up about it literally all of Senior Year. I did the thing I do when I try to make every moment count; everything is heightened and important, and it matters. I started school in August holding on like it was May and they were leaving me the next day. And they laughed at me for it.

“There’s so much time.”

“Where are you even going to college?”

“We’ll always be friends.”

We’ll always be friends. That’s what I wanted, of course. That’s what I had planned. (I do love a good plan, you know.) And I would have done anything to make that happen.

This was Dylan's 18th birthday party. It was a decades themed murder mystery that I wrote.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

I see now why it didn’t work out. We all had growing to do. Most of those friendships were friendships or convenience, of having grow up together, of having a place in the social war zone that is the high school hallways. I still talk to all of them. We like each other’s Instagram posts and respond to Snapchat stories, but I’m only close to one of them, really. And that almost makes my heart break more, because nothing happened. There was no big implosion, so there’s no one to blame. We just…grew apart.

But they told me not to worry. They said we’d always be friends. And, like falling asleep—slowly, then all at once, as the 2014 Tumblr posts said—my worst fear came true, and we…weren’t.

By the end of my freshman year of college, we pretty much weren’t speaking, and we definitely weren’t hanging out. And I was jaded and resentful about that for years.

We were supposed to be in each other’s weddings where they married their high school sweethearts. But, instead, they all broke up. We were supposed to move to New York City and live in the same apartment building. Instead, all but 2 of us are still in Alabama. (Maybe 3; I honestly don’t know where one of the guys is.) And 4 out of the 8 are within 20 minutes of our hometown. We were supposed to live together and fall in love together and have all the quintessential young person sitcom struggles, and we were supposed to reminisce and laugh about it all when we were middle-aged and our children were all best friends. We were supposed to be each other’s go-tos, ride-or-dies forever. Instead, I find out about relationships from updated Facebook statuses instead of giddy midnight phone calls, and I know I’ll find out about engagements and pregnancies and births the same way.

Reading that back, it all sounds a little silly and unreasonable to expect us to stay locked into that high school mentality for the rest of our lives. But, in my defense, every book or movie I saw about high school had the main characters staying friends. So when I realized in undergrad that my friend group was unravelling/had unraveled, I was constantly trying to blame someone for taking away the fairytale that should have been.

One of the highlights of Senior Year was the Piedmont Band Competition where we won all these trophies! I was beyond proud!

I blamed myself for a while: “Maybe I shouldn’t post so much about my new friends. Maybe my old friends feel like I’m replacing them and pushing them away.” (But, if you know me, you know I’m “all in.” I fall in love fast and hard and loud.) Then, I blamed them: “They let it go. They gave up. They abandoned me. They didn’t want this as much as I did.” (The last statement is a sentiment that’s plagued my entire life, and it’s always the sentiment that, regardless of the truth of it, breaks my heart the most.)

And for a long, long time, I carried some cynicism and resentment with me. I realized recently that I didn’t have a single high school picture up in my apartment. The photos had been up in my college dorm room, but stayed packed away when I moved to Kansas. And it didn’t bother me until nearly 3 years later. Because, until I watched Glee, it hurt too much. Because when I looked at those pictures and my smiley, naïve face, all I saw were broken promises of forever. (Dramatic, I know, but very raw and honest and real for what I was feeling at that time of my life.)

So you’re wondering, “How on Earth did Glee give you closure?”

Great question.

The answer hit me like a Lady Gaga group number to the face.

The answer is that: because the Glee kids got what I had always wanted for me and my friends.

Giving myself whiplash the way my tone changed between 1AM and 6PM

In Season 4, Rachel and Kurt move to New York and live together while attending NYADA (fictional performing arts school a la Julliard). Artie is already in Brooklyn for film school. Eventually Santana (who leaves her cheerleading scholarship at the University of Louisville to pursue her dreams of being a star), Mercedes (who convinces her producers to move her to New York from LA to give her album a “more urban” sound), Sam (whose character motivation is to be a male model and see himself half naked on the side of a bus, but is there for the plot purpose of getting back together with Mercedes), and Blaine (who’s also attending NYADA but is also engaged to Kurt by this point) all join them, and they all basically share 2 apartments for Seasons 4-6.

So they got that dream of mine: running away to NYC, living together, and pursuing their dreams.

Screenshot from S5E14 "New York, New York" of Sam, Blaine, Artie, Rachel, and Kurt in the apartment in Bushwick.

They also get to marry their high school sweethearts—not without an unnecessary amount of heart palpitating drama, but still. In a move that I’ve learned is either loved or loathed by fans, there was a Brittany/Santana and Kurt/Blaine double wedding in Season 6. All their friends were there, and they were bridesmaids and groomsmen, and it was everything! And, yes, they’re only 20-21 at that point, and, yes Kurt and Blaine got engaged when they were 18-19, and, yes, I logically know that it’s ridiculous, but my romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart absolutely eats that kind of stuff up.

So they got another dream of mine.

Santana & Brittany and Kurt & Blaine's double wedding in S6E8 "A Wedding"

But what really solidified all of my feelings was the time jump in the series finale. It flashed forward 5 years, to 2020 (big yikes!) making the Class of 2012—Rachel, Kurt, Quinn, Santana, Brittany*, Mercedes, Artie, Mike, Finn**, and Puck—26-years-old, and the Class of 2013—Sam, Blaine, Tina—25-years-old; basically, they were supposed to be the age I am now.

And, in that flashback, we get the most perfect Katie Cline Ending: it all works out for them; their dreams come true. Rachel, now married to Jesse St. James (whom she dated in Season 1, so she also kind of gets to marry her high school sweetheart) wins her Tony while all of her friends watch. She’s also very pregnant, acting as a surrogate for Kurt and Blaine, who are still married and performing together (most recently in the first “LGBTQ version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? at Lincoln Center,” which I would pay so much to see, honestly). Mercedes has had a world tour of her own, and Tina starred in Artie’s film which got accepted to “Slamdance” film festival. (They’re also together, which is wrong, because it should have been Mike and Tina, but whatever. Also, Mike went to the Joffrey Ballet Academy of Dance in Chicago after graduating.)

All of those dreams that people laughed at them for for 6 seasons came true. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted for my friends.

(*Brittany was supposed to graduate in 2012 but had to repeat her Senior Year. **After actor Cory Monteith’s death in 2013, Finn was written off the show, so he isn’t featured in the Season 6 flashback.)

So, you’d think that seeing these fictional characters live out my dreams would make me sadder and angstier—but it didn’t. It strangely gave me a sense of closure. And I can’t explain why unless you also happen to be an unfailing optimist with a romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart colored with warm, hazy nostalgia and a hint of naivety. But, basically, I liked seeing that it was all possible—even if it was just fictional characters on long-finished TV show. Just seeing it made it feel more real and less like a pipe dream.

I honestly think that if I had watched Glee while it aired, I wouldn’t have viewed the finale the same way. It aired in March 2015, the middle of my second semester of my freshman year of college, right when I was realizing that my high school friends weren’t going to be the “forever friend group” I had hoped and begged and fought for. Seeing the finale at that point in my life would have been like rubbing salt in the wound. But enough time has passed that watching it in 2021 didn’t sting (as much; I definitely felt some twinges of jealousy). And I definitely still sobbed, but I was happy—for the characters, because I get ridiculously attached to fictional characters, and for me, because I still want those things to happen to me and my friends, and I still honestly believe we can have it in some way, shape, or form.

I don't think a day has passed in 7 years that I haven't thought about at least one of these weirdos. 

I recently told a friend that I go into every relationship expecting to be hurt. (Let’s not try to unpack that now.) That’s something that high school taught me, because I was blindsided when my fantasies didn’t become reality. Now, I still throw myself into friendships. I still come on strong and love too quickly and refuse to let it go until it’s pried forcibly from my hands. But now I do it with the expectation that it will end. Theoretically, that knowledge should make me more reserved and cautious, but I’m not in the habit of depriving myself of good things. I’d rather give everything for 2 years and make the most of that time than sequester myself off in an effort not to get hurt.

I have a soft heart; I’m going to get hurt regardless, so I might as well enjoy every moment that comes before the inevitable heartbreak.

So, to all my artist friends, this has been a very long-winded explanation as to why I’m also so aggressively supportive of your dreams: I want to have our Glee moment. I want to cheer you on when your book is published and wins awards and is made into a blockbuster movie; I want to be backstage at your Broadway debut and sit with you when you get your first (of many) Tony nominations and when you win it; I want to be the first follower on your indie film’s social media so that I can follow it all the way to its Oscar win. It’s why I jokingly ask for your autographs and tell Twitter how big you’re going to be—because I believe in the silliest and most far-fetched things, but because I believe in the most magical and wonderful things, too.

There’s a song in the Glee finale called “This Time.” Darren Criss (Blaine Anderson) wrote it and Lea Michele (Rachel Berry) sings it. And it’s such a me song that I can’t be embarrassed about loving it with every bit of my being. I mean, I dare you to listen to it and not think of me:

“These walls and all these picture frames

Every name they show

These halls I've walked a thousand times

Heartbreaks and valentines, friends of mine all know

I look at everything I was

And everything I ever loved

And I can see how much I've grown”

…

“I think of all the things I did and how I wish I knew what I know now

I see how far I've come and what I got right

When I was looking for that spotlight

I was looking for myself

Got over what I was afraid of

I showed 'em all that I was made of

More than trophies on a shelf

For all the battles that we lost or might have won

I never stopped believing in the words we sung, we sung”

…

And the chorus:

“This time no one's gonna say goodbye

I keep you in this heart of mine

This time I know it's never over

No matter who or what I am

I'll carry where we all began

This time that we had, I will hold forever”



This song is how I feel about every friendship I’ve ever been a part of, about every school I’ve left (with varying degrees of jaded cynicism and resentment—because I’m definitely not on good emotional terms with my undergrad yet).

“I never stopped believing in the words we sung” is an obvious reference to “Don’t Stop Believing,” which I think Glee was contractually obligated to perform once a season, but the line resonates with me because I have never stopped believing in these dreams and the possibility of reaching a “coming-of-age movie level of happiness.”

I also keep coming back to the lines “When I was looking for that spotlight / I was looking for myself,” because, while I’ve never had hyper-specific, Rachel-Berry-level dreams of the spotlight, I do have a performer’s personality (but not really the talent), and I definitely see “spotlight” as translating to “being the best in your discipline” and publishing articles and writing books and winning awards and being liked wherever you go. And, to an extent, I think we all have our own definition of what that spotlight looks like—it’s whatever our dreams are—and while we’re getting there, we do have to find ourselves.

Okay, maybe  I was a little bit of a ham. (These are all the Senior cast and crew members of The Secret Garden--just the straight play, not the musical, unfortunately...or fortunately if you knew my high school's relationship with musicals.) 

I mean, what have I learned from this whole post? I want these neat endings all tied up with a bow because I crave certainty and reassurance and control. I want friendships to last forever because I hate conflict and want to be wanted. And I want to, need to, believe that remarkable and magical things can happen to kids from a small town in Ohio or Alabama or Kansas, because being a part of something special makes you special.

Or, as Rachel says in her Tony acceptance speech: “Being a part of something special does not make you special. Something is special because you are a part of that.”

That’s one lesson I’m still learning.

Talk to me 14 years after I’ve graduated high school, and we’ll see.



In the meantime, may the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie

Captain's Log, Day 23: A Non-Football Fan’s Love Affair with Football

Date: September 21, 2020

Time of post: 10:40PM

Quarantine Day: 180

Last Song I Listened To: “The Boys of Fall” by Kenny Chesney (obviously)

Last Person I Communicated With: Meg McCrina via Instagram DM

Last Thing I Ate: cinnamon tea and a croissant

Last Thing I Read: my own essay that I was editing

Current Mood: ~n o s t a l g i c ~

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: made edits to an essay!

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: start grading some (more) papers…or maybe just HW assignments

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: so much to grade! And I just found out that I have about 2 weeks less time to work on a presentation that I thought I’d have

One Reason I’m Happy Today: spontaneous Zoom chat with one of my undergrad professors today!

Dear Apocalypsers,

We get a few days of 50-degree weather a couple weeks ago, and I get nostalgic. To be fair, nostalgia is my favorite emotion, so it doesn’t take much, but, every fall, without failure, you can expect me to wax poetic about some seemingly insignificant thing.

Since moving to Kansas in 2018, that “thing” that really gets me misty-eyed is…football.

I know, I know. The Alabama girl getting worked up about football is the most cliché thing ever. But you have to know me: I don’t like football.

Granted, my behavior might say otherwise:

Growing up in a college town, I was a fixture at JSU gamedays from the time I could toddle. (I didn’t pay much attention, but I really liked the mascot and the band.)

I went to every high school football game from 7th grade to senior year. (Years 8-12 I was in the marching band, though.)

I played on the Powder Puff team my senior year. (I was an offensive linewoman, FYI.)

Once I got to college—the same campus and stadium I frequented as a tot—I went to every home game for four years. (What can I say? My roommate was in the band; I like school spirit and winning.)

I hosted a “First NFL Game of the Season” party and a Super Bowl party for the 2019-2020 season.

But I’m still not sure I like football.

To be fair, I still don’t know all the rules. My brother literally taught me what the phrase “ice the kicker” means today—it’s when the other team calls a timeout right before the kicker kicks the field goal to throw him off his game. I didn’t learn what a “pick 6” was until undergrad—that’s when there’s an interception (the ball’s “picked off”) that’s run back for a touchdown (which is worth 6 points). Thank you to my football friends who patiently sat in the stands and explained football terms to me for 4 years. I’m still trying to learn the fouls and what they mean, but I usually just gauge my reaction on whether or not the home crowd boos.

But football, for me, has never been based off the sport. It’s the people. It’s the memories. It’s the nostalgia. Even my favorite teams are rooted in people. My parents grew up just outside of Pittsburgh, and we're big Steelers fans. I was really into Troy Polamalu as a kid. I think I liked his name. Or maybe his hair. My other team now is the Kansas City Chiefs, for the sole reason that they’re the “hometown team,” and I love a hometown team. Plus, Patrick Mahomes is such a cutie, inside and out. (Fun fact: I was once in the same room as Patrick Mahomes AND the Jonas Brothers. Okay, it was arena. For the Jonas Brothers concert last year. And I never saw Mahomes. Still, technically I was in the same room as them.)

My biggest NFL memories include youth group Super Bowl parties where we paid more attention to the halftime show and the commercials than we did to the game and popping into the living room on Sunday nights to ask my dad, “Who are we cheering for?” (For the record, the answer is “Not the Ravens” whenever the Ravens are playing. Same for the Patriots and the Cowboys. Dad has always liked an underdog, so we usually cheer for them.)

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a few opinions, like how I think Russell Wilson (Seattle Seahawks) is a good guy or how like the Watt brothers (JJ for the Houston Texans and TJ and DJ for the Steelers) because of all the fundraising they did when Texas flooded. I melt at how much Patrick Mahomes loves KC, and I fume any time Jerry Jones’ (owner of the Dallas Cowboys) name is brought up because of how he spoke/speaks about the Black Lives Matter movement and forbids his team from kneeling. I’m a sucker for a human interest story, too. Catch me tearing up whenever a player talks about buying their parents a house or they air a heartwarming pre-game feature about a player who overcame big odds to play pro football. (Shaquem Griffin? The Seahawks’ linebacker who had his left hand amputated when he was 4? I actually cried the first time I learned about him.)

Even writing that previous paragraph, I had to look these players up. I couldn’t have told you what team Griffin plays for. I don’t even know what a linebacker does. Does it matter that he only has one hand? Does he ever touch the ball? I don’t know. It’s not about the sport.

When I was young, I liked the energy—the palpable crowds, the competition, wearing matching shirts, and getting to scream. Once I hit high school—and, even then, not until my Sophomore-ish year—it was personal. I knew people on the team. Come Senior year, it was REALLY personal.

My Senior year of high school was magical. (“As it should be,” my mom snuffled when I brought this up to her over the weekend.) Really, Netflix should have made a movie about the Jacksonville High School Class of 2014. The highlight of my Senior year fall was football season. The new administration reinstated the Powder Puff football game after a 6-year absence—there was some vandalism and destruction of property involved—only to try to cancel it a couple weeks before the game. We even had secret practices off-campus so the principal wouldn’t find out. And, during those weeks leading up to the Powder Puff game—which we didn’t even score during, let alone win—my class got closer than ever: football players and band kids and cheerleaders and popular girls and nerds and athletes. I talked to people I hadn’t spoken to since elementary school—and we got along. Shoutout to our coaches LaVonte, Reid, Payton, and Dominique, who showed us nothing but patience as they taught us all actual football terms and plays. (I remember the word “sweep,” but I couldn’t tell you what I was supposed to do during a sweep. Run left? Run right? Who knows?) They made sure we all had a position to play—even me, and I have NO athletic ability. 

Those same guys brought some of their teammates to a marching band competition later that season, and if anyone knew less about something than I knew about football, it was their knowledge of band. But they came. And the band took home some serious hardware that day.

(Can you spot the football players?)

But Powder Puff wasn’t the only football highlight of Senior year. Our football team was actually good. We’d been on the upswing for a couple years, following more than a few 2-8 seasons, but the 2013 season was *chef’s kiss*. We beat our arch-rival in triple overtime on Senior Night when their extra point kick bounced off the upright. It was magical. Then, we hosted the first round of 4A state playoffs for the first time in history, and we won. When we lost in the next round to the team that would ultimately go on to win State that year, I bawled my eyes out for the whole fourth quarter. When the players lined up in front of the “Do It For The Moms” banner on the sideline and cried while singing our alma mater, I was inconsolable.

Like I said, we were movie material.

Maybe it’s the culture of small Southern towns. Maybe if I had grown up in a different region, in a bigger city with more funding, I’d get teary-eyed over debate team scenes or that Scholar’s Bowl scene in _Mean Girls_. As it is, though, I romanticize the heck out of football now, and there’s no bigger football in the South than SEC football.

I have a distinct memory of being in third grade, and every day my teacher would have us answer a question, and we’d put a star with our name on it by our answer. This particular day, the question was, “Who’s your favorite football team?” Our choices were “Alabama,” “Auburn,” “JSU,” and probably “Other.”

Now, if you’re not from Alabama, you might not fully realize the significance of the Alabama vs Auburn rivalry.

It is a barely contained war. (Don’t even get me started on the Iron Bowl.)

Former Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville is runningfor Senate, and there are people who won’t vote for him because they’re Alabama fans. (That’s not why they shouldn’t be voting for him; there are endless otherreasons, but his football team association is what they’re basing it off of.) Alabama’s legendary (deceased) head coach Bear Bryant ends up a write-incandidate on ballots every election. There are babies born named Crimson, Tide/Tyde, Auburn, and Bear more often then I care to think about. A crazed Alabama fan poisoned the iconic 80-year-old trees in Toomer’s Corner on Auburn’s campus just because, “I wanted Auburn people to hate me as much as Ihate them.” And I’m very convinced that current Alabama head coach Nick Saban could start a religion to rival Christianity if he got it in his head to do so.

(PS, Alabamians reading this, vote for Doug Jones. Please.)

So back to third grade Katie. I didn’t care for either Alabama or Auburn, having Pennsylvanian parents who didn’t subscribe to either cult follow—I mean, fanbase. So I put JSU as my favorite team, because, again, they were the home team. 

I was one of 2 to do so. 

The older I got, though, the more I paid attention to college football and noticed that the names I’d hear praised by announcers on Saturdays often turned into names I’d hear on Sundays a few years later. (Like, you may or may not remember the “Scam Newton” scandal, but he’s playing for the Patriots now, and, honestly, that’s fitting. Cam Newton has the right energy to play for the Pats.) Even as a young high schooler, I thought it was pretty cool to hear about professional athletes coming from Alabama. (What can I say? It makes my heart warm to hear my home state on the news for something that isn’t our failing education system or misogynistic politics. And sometimes the pro players coming from an Alabama school aren’t involved in scandals…sometimes.) And when you’re 10/12/14/16, those 20 and 22-year-old Heisman-candidate athletes feel like adults. It’s only when you hit 18/20/22 yourself (and older) that you realize all this hype is about…kids.

And here’s where I’m going to get all sentimental.

I’ve seen football players at every stage: I’ve been 8 watching other little kids bumble around on the field in too-big shoulder pads. I’ve been 8 watching 18-year-olds sign to their dream college. I’ve been 18 watching other 18-year-olds get scouted by big schools. I’ve been 18 watching 22-year-olds win Heisman Trophies and getting drafted to the NFL. I’ve been 22 watching “that guy I had a COM class with once” play in national championship games or go to the NFL draft or get injured and end his career. Now, I’m 24 and teaching 18-year-olds with whole careers ahead of them, careers that have been and will continue to be full of grown adults literally assigning point values to them, comparing them to every other boy with a football dream in the country, putting the weight of a team and a university and a city and a region and a franchise on their shoulders sometimes, telling them how talented they are, telling them they’re not talented enough, screaming at them and tweeting at them when they have a “bad game.”

I sometimes wonder how many of the Patrick Mahomeses and Russell Wilsons and Payton Mannings and Aaron Rodgerses and Troy Polamalus and Watt brothers and Shaquem and Shaquill Griffins started playing football as little kids and never really had the chance to stop. Growing up in Alabama, some people will put their sons in peewee football at 3 or 4 years old, and they’ll play ball until they go pro or get injured. And when you do something for that long, it’s got to start feeling like the only choice, even if you love it.

I can’t even wrap my mind around that, around having an ideal life course set in place at 4-years-old. But I’ve seen it. As a Communications major in undergrad, I could have paid for college if I had a dollar for every football player who was a Broadcast major. Their plan was always to be an ESPN broadcaster after their NFL career ended.

(The football team and cheerleaders would always run over to the band at the end of the game to play "All I Do Is Win" (when we won) and/or the unofficial school song, "I'll Fly Away.")

None of them were drafted.

And I always wondered what happened to them or how they coped with life plans going so awry. I hope they found their worth outside of football.

One of the essays I teach in my freshman composition class is called an autoethnography. It asks students to write about a moment that they were made aware of a part of their identity in a way that they maybe hadn’t thought about before.

Every semester, I have an athlete who wants to write about being an athlete. We talk about it, and I almost always let them, because I know firsthand how important sports are to people, and, for some of these students, being an athlete is all they’ve ever known. It’s what they’ve been working toward for years, it’s why they’re able to afford college; it’s their identity.

But in my own little ways, I try to remind them that they’re more than an athlete, so in case they (God forbid) get hurt, they won’t see it as the end of their lives; so if they don’t go pro they won’t see themselves as failures; so that even if they become the hotshot star player with the eyes of every sports-loving fan in the nation boring into them every weekend, they’ll remember that their ENGL 100 instructor really only cared if they turned in their essay on time, and maybe they’ll find that a little comforting.

There I go again, romanticizing football. Being from the South, football tinges a lot of aspects of my life, even if I don’t retain the actual nuances of the game. I definitely spent a lot of time fighting against it, because how dare football get more funding than the Arts? I tried to be too cool for it, to shake the stigma that Southern football fans were just beer-drinking, tobacco-chewing, toothless, middle-aged white men who poisoned trees for the hell of it. But the truth is that some of my best memories from growing up come from football-adjacent events. From the people I spent time with while tolerating the thing I didn’t enjoy.

I don’t honestly expect my football players—or any of my students—to remember me. I won’t remember all of them. Even the ones I do remember now will probably fade if I keep teaching long enough. But, as a whole, I do wonder who those wide-eyed freshmen in my classes will grow up to be. I mean, someone had to be Patrick Mahomes’ freshman comp teacher, right?

May the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie