Nihau means hello!

I've hit a roadblock: information.

You see, all things relating to football are basically marketed to men (and, in the words of Howie Long, “very occasionally, women”) who have been fans of football for their entire lives, and so the most, most basic information is not covered. It's like trying to learn to read Chinese by reading a book for Chinese children. They already know that a football is called 足球 , so they just have to learn the phonemes. I, on the other hand, am stuck accidentally saying “I love you,” when I mean to say “welcome,” which is one of only four Chinese words I actually know (none of them are “football”). Sometimes I wonder how people who do like football learned how it works, and then I wonder if maybe they don't and they're all just playing a massive joke on the rest of us, like Mornington Crescent with tackling.

But I'm still working on the assumption that there is some order somewhere, so today I was trying to play Madden Football and nothing made sense, but that was okay, I didn't really expect it to. I had one very simple goal, which was to figure out which of the approximately seventeen hundred little men on the television was controlled by my Xbox controller, which is very difficult when they all move around at the same time and try to kill each other. The problem was, I had a native speaker in the room.

“Why don't you run forward?” my husband asked me. “You're supposed to get to the End Zone.”

“I would run forward if I knew which one I was!” I snapped.

Him: “You're that one. The one with the circle.”

Me: “Which one?”

Him: “Well it just changed because you threw the ball.”

Me: “How? Never mind, just leave me alone, I'll figure it out.”

Him: “Wait, why did you rewind that? You just scored!”

Me: “But I don't know how! Go away, I'm figuring this out!”

Him: “I'm just trying to help you! Why don't you ever let me help you with anything?”

Me: “Because if you do it I don't know how it works! Go away!”

Him: “I can't go away! We live in a studio!”

Me: “I can't play with you here. You make me too self-conscious.”

Him: “Well, I'm not leaving. I have to write my own blog right now before I leave for work.”

Me: “Fine then. I'm just going to turn off the game and write about how we got in a fight today.”

Him: “Make sure I look like the good guy.”

Me: "I'm going to tell everybody you said that."

And that's why I haven't learned anything yet. Next entry will be about quarterbacks, probably.