Watching Notre Dame this year should count as penance

Sorry guys but it's true. I just watched a Notre Dame player try to catch a ball while he was looking at the field and then did a face plant. No one was near him, no one tripped him. Perhaps it was a shoe lace untied.

And yeah my bloggin' break is over.

Mostly because of Notre Dame. I'm sitting here watching the game and thinking about shoes. A Boston College player catches the ball and his shoe comes off and he manages to finish the play. Then he goes to the sideline and one of the coaches ties his shoe for him. I know because this is the kind of thing they show during a football game.

No one cares anything about my shoes and who ties them. Although it's not me. I tied my last shoe many years ago. I don't miss tying shoes. The only time I cared in the past decade that I couldn't tie my shoes was when my nephew asked me to tie his and I had to send him elsewhere. But now he can tie his own shoes too so that's no longer an issue.

Over the years I've watched lots of people tie my shoes. Everyone does it differently and no one ties my shoes the way I did. I never realized how many variations of shoe tying there are. And here's the funny thing: while people are tying my shoes, they talk to me about how they do it, most of them in a self deprecating way. "This is how I do it," almost all of them say, as if I'm grading them.

And I don't care. I just need my shoes tied.

At first this kind of talk made me uncomfortable, as did the whole idea of needing someone to tie my shoes. But now I find it interesting, as if I'm adding data to my study entitled "Third person shoe tying". I think, after my empirical studies, that people act this way because when they were learning to tie shoes, most of them were told how to do it and treated by their parents as if the way they did it didn't quite measure up, so they wound up feeling as if they never quite got shoe tying down right.

Why else does everyone apologize for how they do it? "I'm sorry, I tie it (tighter, looser, bigger, smaller) than most," is all I hear. "I know I'm doing this wrong." In my book if you tie a shoe and it stays tied for longer than eight or ten hours I'd say you've done just fine.

Such a simple act. Yet apparently it reflects a lot about us.

And then there's the Notre Dame receiver. I really don't think he tripped over an untie shoe lace. But if he did, that's one other reason for him to feel bad about himself. He'll think "I can't even tie my shoes right!" So I'm glad the Boston College player's shoe fell off.

Just like when people apologize to someone who can't tie her own shoes about how they do it, It kind of levels the playing field, don't you think?