Posts tagged ‘portland timbers’

Nov 18

spinning to nowhere

Used to be, you couldn’t mention the word “bike” without prompting Tom to launch into his standard tirade about bike commuters. But listen. Tom’s white. He’s an attorney. And nearing middle age. You put those three things together in a Venn diagram and the overlappy bit in the middle will say “soccer” and “bikes.” So the bike thing was inevitable.

Tom started getting into bikes last summer, when he began riding his giraffe bike to and from Timbers games. We call Tom’s silver Globe the giraffe bike because if a normal-sized person stands next to it, it looks freakishly tall. It also weighs approximately what a giraffe weighs. I’ve seen people try to hold it up only to have it topple onto them.

“YOONA!! You don’t even know how awesome a Timbers game is until you’ve ridden home with the Timbers masses,” he told me. “Mmmm,” I’d respond, having tuned out everything after the word “Timbers.” He started to treat his buddy Ethan like he was a loser for driving a car to the stadium. “ETHAN! You HAVE to ride your bike to the game. Stop being so lazy.” Ethan, who rode his bike to and from his house way back in law school and once had the nerve to show up at my house in a bike unitard, would become visibly annoyed in the way that you get when a friend becomes newly and loudly obsessed with something that you discovered ten years ago.

Next, Tom started spinning. I don’t regularly work out with Tom, but I’ve worked out next to him in hotel gyms, so I know what that intense regimen looks like. 15 minutes of a loping, horse-like canter on an elliptical trainer while paging through the New Yorker, followed by a couple sets of half-hearted chest presses with eyes glued to ESPN. Rinse, and repeat. I’d observe from a distance and wonder how he didn’t gain weight during his workouts.

But once Tom got a taste of spinning, he became an animal. Not having broken a sweat during a workout in years, he viewed all the new-fangled wicking fabrics with the skepticism that the rest of us would reserve for, say, a muscle tank made of mesh. “Now, Dri-Fit–do you think that’s trying too hard??,” he’d ask. I didn’t have the heart to point out that the only other guys at the gym still wearing cotton t-shirts were all 80 years old.

Tom started making his own spinning playlists, which I only learned about when I received an email receipt for my Amazon account with a bunch of song purchases. I took a quick look at the email and concluded that my account had been hacked. I forwarded the email to Tom and Cuz, both of whom have access to my Prime account, before I called Amazon’s fraud alert line. I got an immediate response. “That’s for my spinning playlist,” emailed Tom. Spinning playlist? I took a closer look.

Ah. This explained why he’d been turning up “Royals” whenever it came on in my car, eyes rolling back into his head. “I LOVE this song,” he’d moan. Tom habitually discovers a pop smash three to six months after it first becomes popular. A month ago he turned up “Get Lucky” and gave me a knowing look. “You’ve heard this, right? It’s awesome.” I expect he’ll discover “Blurred Lines” sometime in early December.

I looked again at his spinning playlist. Eminem, ok. As a white guy from the wrong side of Detroit (Ann Arbor), Tom has long identified with Eminem. Ke$ha is like, workout gold, so I respected that. But Bryan Ferry, for SPINNING? The Smiths? What kind of depressing workout was this? And what about Gordon Lightfoot? Who plays Gordon fucking Lightfoot during a workout?

Anyway. The bike thing’s not going away. On his trip to Ann Arbor last month, Tom mailed back to Portland his dad’s Schwinn Le Tour III. Once it arrived, he texted our friend Dieter, who gave him advice about how to (pay to) convert the bike into a single-speed. I observed it all with amusement. But when he brought it home from Velo Cult, I got it. It was orange, a very good color. For a 35-year old bike, it seemed rather elegant. Best of all, it was a connection to Tom’s dad, who I never got to meet. A man who was responsible for raising my irrepressible, inimitable Tom.

So welcome to the family, Mr. Schwinn. And do watch out for the giraffe bike in the garage.

Oct 29

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timbers ho!

Tom and our friend Ethan have season tickets to the Portland Timbers, an MLS team. If you don’t know who the Timbers are, you are probably, like me and 98% of the American populace, ambivalent about major league soccer in this country.

Today was the last game of the season, against the San Jose Earthquakes. When Ethan can’t go, Tom likes to take Finn. But Tom was in Seattle for business, and Ethan had just returned from a trip, so Finn and I put on three layers of clothing and trudged out into the rain to watch the match.

Finn had me stressed long before we got to the field. When I told him I was going to take him to the game instead of his dad, he very politely, but very firmly, declined. As the kid loves nothing more than Timbers games, I was totally offended. After I cajoled him into going (“Why don’t you love Mommy as much as Daddy?”), he spent all morning looking anxious. “Mommy. Do you know any of the Timbers songs?” I was aware the Timbers fans chanted different songs during the game. I lied and told Finn that I did. “Which one?” Oh shit. “Uh, the one that goes like this: ‘Portland Timbers, here we go. Portland Timbers, here…we go?” Finn stared at me, unblinking, and then shrugged. “I guess, Mommy.”

On the way to the game, Finn kept asking if I knew where the seats were. So much so that I kept looking at the tickets, assuring myself that the seats were indeed numbered. I felt victorious when we sat down in our seats with time to spare. Finn immediately broke out his program to study the lineup. I took advantage of the extra time to use the vanishing batteries on my iPhone to zoom in on the deep stretches of the visiting team. And then, with the whistle, we were off.

I expected I’d have to entertain Finn for the game, but he wanted nothing to do with me. You know that boring relative who invites you to games but you never want to go because he’s so into it that he keeps his own stats and brings a transistor radio to listen to game commentary? Finn is going to be that guy one day. He wasn’t interested in chit-chat, least of all his mom’s. His eyes were glued to the players, only looking away to match up new players to the photos in his program. When he started cheering and I took his lead to contribute some “woo-hoos,” he turned and pressed his index finger to my lips and mouthed a silent “NO.” When I asked him what you call it when there’s one guy in front of the goal and he gets to take a shot with no defenders, he rolled his eyes so hard I thought they’d get stuck in the back of his head.

At some point, I got tired of trying to look credible to my almost-six-year old, and just took in the surroundings. Tom and Ethan’s seats are square in the middle of a tight nest of hecklers who know their art. The two women who sit behind them look like they got lost on their way to their knitting circle, but nonetheless managed to provide blistering commentary throughout the entire game. In my head, I named one The Timekeeper, and the other, Pancake Patrol. This is what they sounded like, for the full 90 minutes:

The Timekeeper: “Well that’s just ridiculous. They’re just trying to run down the clock.”

Pancake Patrol: “Look at this guy. This guy is a flopper. Just look at him flopping around!!”

The Timekeeper: “He’s just wasting our time. Wasting it!”

Pancake Patrol: “The whole San Jose team should just play laying down. Because all they do is fall down. Stand up!! FLOPPERS!!!”

chaz and chazzers

The Timekeeper and Pancake Patrol, while annoying, were completely benign compared to the two guys who sit in front of Tom and Ethan’s seats, who I have named Chaz and Chazzers. Chaz, on the left, is the milder of the two. Chazzers, on the right, looks normal, but is insane. During the game, he screamed nonstop at the referee on our side of the field, calling him “Pussy,” “Bitch,” and, for a change of pace—“Pussybitch.” It would have been an entertaining experience, this hysterical misogyny—but for the fact that this is how close Chazzers sits to Finn.

I don’t know which was more alarming: Chazzers, or the fact that Finn seemed completely unfazed by the language, which he’d clearly heard before. I mean, how ironic that I’d been biting my tongue at home for “damn,” when Finn’s been hearing “Pussybitch” all season.

We had fun, my Finny and I. I got to escape my increasingly shrill 3-year old for a few hours, and it was awesome watching Finn develop his own passion for the game. And let’s be honest, from the perspective of a 35-year old hetero female, there’s a lot to appreciate at an MLS game. The legs. The sweat. The aforementioned stretching. I felt like I needed a cigarette after the game.

Go Timbers!