My Most Unusual Valentine's Day Ever

A few years ago I bought a package of personal training sessions and was paired up with a trainer named Jodie. Jodie was a great trainer. She always knew the right thing to say to keep me motivated, both when I was doing well and not so well. She joked around with me and in turn I dished it back to her.




Jodie was also fun to look at.


I thought about asking her out, but one day she casually mentioned a boyfriend. So I re-focused on getting into better shape. 


This particular package of sessions ran though February, and soon it was close to Valentine's Day, I had a training session with Jodie and she asked me if I had any plans. This particular Valentine's Day was in the middle of the week and I was single, so I had nothing special planned.


"What about you?" I asked her. She told me she was having dinner with her boyfriend at her place.




I kind of forgot about that conversation, until I was watching TV that Valentine's Day night and my phone rang. I looked at my caller ID. It was a phone number that wasn't programmed in, but looked vaguely familiar. So I answered.




"Hi, Phil?" says the voice on the other line.




"Yes?"




"It's Jodie."


We talked for about 20 minutes. We laughed. We had some really great conversations during my training sessions and this was one of the best. And then there was that lull that inevitably occurs in every conversation, and my curiosity got the best of me.


"So....you having dinner with the boyfriend?"


Pause.


"Oh yeah, yeah," she said, "we're getting ready to eat." And this began the wrapping up of the conversation.


After that conversation, there was that part of me that always wondered if I should've pushed the envelope with Jodie and pursued something.


That said, only she really knows why she called me -- maybe she got into a fight with the boyfriend and everything smoothed over a few minutes later. Maybe she was just being friendly. Or maybe there was no boyfriend. Who knows? Certainly not me.


In any event, at the time my training sessions were about to run out and I was about to move from Connecticut back home to Massachusetts, and I've never been excited about the long-distance thing. We did stay in touch for a little while. But I'm a firm believer in destiny, that if things are meant to be they'll happen, particularly when it comes to relationships.


I woke up this morning and for some reason this phone conversation with Jodie popped into my head. Probably because it's almost Valentine's Day. Probably because I don't think I've ever told the story. I always thought was an interesting one. It's certainly not a Valentine's Day story I expected, even if nothing really happened.

The Day My Twitter Surpassed My Facebook

My experience with social media follows a pattern:


1) I create an account with a social networking site
2) I sit on the sidelines and observe for awhile until I get a good feel of what it's all about.
3) Then I jump in with both feet.


It happened with Facebook -- I joined in late 2007 but didn't post anything to my Wall until January 2009 (first Facebook status update, 1/7/2009: "Phil is trying on his new boots"). A few months after that initial post, I created a Twitter account, sat around and watched what this microblogging thing was all about, and since then I've tweeted more than 10,000 times.


Once I started working each site in earnest, I picked up friends/followers. But since I found Facebook first, I always had more Facebook friends than Twitter followers. Until recently.


Over the past couple of years I've gotten into the habit of livetweeting TV -- mostly NFL football games and The Bachelor. This is not necessarily something I'm proud of (I guess maybe it's a creative outlet for my snarky side?), but it's caused me to gain a lot of new Twitter followers. And a few days ago my number of Twitter followers, for the first time, surpassed my number of Facebook friends.


For some reason this bothered me.


I had a tough time putting my finger on exactly why, but then I figured it out. Twitter is much more anonymous. While I can say that I've, at worst, held at least one conversation with virtually every one of my Facebook friends, many of my Twitter followers are people I don't know at all. And if someone wants to follow you on Twitter you really can't prevent it, outside of outright blocking them, which I've had to do from time to time because someone who followed me began posting very inappropriate tweets.


Sometimes I feel like Twitter is the casual sex of social media, while Facebook is more of a long-term relationship.


Now that's not to say Facebook doesn't have melodrama or awkwardness to it. Four of my Facebook friends are cats, and I have a handful of Facebook friends who, sadly, are deceased. Also I've occasionally defriended people on Facebook (not often; I can count the Facebook friends I've unfriended on two hands, and each time the offender did something that REALLY pissed me off. But there have been times when I've had to say, I can't be Facebook friends with this person anymore).


I also have some Twitter followers whom I would really like to get to know better. They seem like genuinely cool people. Often they live in another part of the country and it would be difficult to hang with them. Sometimes I wish I could be on Facebook with them too.


I do have some people with whom I'm on both Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram too, which I've also recently discovered).


Maybe that's what I hope for long-term -- a melting pot of my social media.














   

Super Bowl XLIX Prediction

First of all, a couple of quick asides:


* Solid year for me picking games. I'm going to finish the 2014 season with a .689 (if I pick the Super Bowl incorrectly) or a .693 (if I pick it right) percentage. Not bad considering I was 13-19 after the first two weeks. Since then I'm prognosticating at a .731 clip.


* If the Green Bay Packers hadn't choked in the NFC Championship game, I'd be a perfect 10-0 in the playoffs. Thanks a lot, Packers. You suck.


Anyway, I've made a Super Bowl prediction each year since I started this blog in the fall of 2010. But I went back and forth about whether I should bother to make a prediction for Super Bowl XLIX, largely because my Patriots are involved. The Pats made it to Super Bowl 46 and I picked the Patriots, although conceding that it should be a close game that could go either way, and it was a close game that the Patriots lost, so I feel bad. Part of me wants to pick Seattle to win 73-0 to try and reverse karma. Part of me just wants to watch the game without feeling pressured to make a pick.


Injuries could be a factor. Seattle's secondary is banged up. New England's offensive line is banged up. After DeflateGate, Tom Brady's ego is banged up.


Like SB 46, I can see this game going either way. I can see the Seahawks riding the momentum of their last-second, come-from-behind win and cruising to a second consecutive Super Bowl win. I can see their defense giving Tom Brady and his banged-up offensive line fits. I can see Russell Wilson giving New England fits rolling out, much like the Ravens did in the AFC Divisional Playoff game. It's been a pretty exhausting first month of 2015 for me, and I feel like when I'm exhausted life has a way of piling on and making me even more miserable, and Seattle winning would be a tailor-made way of doing just that.


I can also see the Patriots shutting down Wilson, Marshawn Lynch and the rest of the Seattle offense. After all this DeflateGate BS, I can see an angry Patriots team taking it out on the Seahawks tonight.


I'm 14-4 picking Patriots games this year. And I started the season 1-3 calling Pats games, including a head-scratching decision to pick them to lose to the Vikings, not sure what the hell I was thinking there. Since Week 4 I'm 13-1 picking the Pats; the only time I've whiffed since then was picking them to lose to the Broncos.


I'm 13-5 picking Seahawks games this year (including blowing it in the Weeks 1 and 2). One week, I not only correctly picked Seattle to win but also correctly picked the exact score.


Even though I'd rather not make a prediction, I feel like I have an obligation to make one.


This could very easily be the wrong prediction. But I'm a Patriots fan, first and foremost. I have to go with my heart.




Patriots 24, Seahawks 6.




LAST WEEK -- 1-1

SEASON TO DATE -- 184-82 (175-81 regular season; 9-1 playoffs)

My 10,000th Tweet

About three years ago I composed my 1,000th tweet and felt like it was an epic fail. It seemed to me like I needed my 1,000th tweet to be more profound.


I tried to be a little more careful as I found myself approaching another milestone in tweet #10,000.


I still don't think I nailed it, but I think 
"I get tired of Belichick referring to "all three phases of the game." I want football to have a fourth phase. #Patriots"


is slightly more profound than
"I like those lyrics better."


The thing that struck me the most about tweet #10,000 was that it took me slightly less than three years to get from 1,000 to 10,000. I had predicted it would take five years.


At that pace, I'll be posting my 100,000th tweet in about 29 years. Stay tuned.

NFL Championship Game Predictions

Wow. I'm 8-0 in the playoffs so far. I even, on a whim, picked the Colts to upset the Broncos and it worked out. I need to correctly pick three more games to go a perfect 11-0 in the playoffs.


Here's where it all falls apart:


Packers 23, Seahawks 17 -- Everybody seems to think Green Bay has zero chance to win this game, and there are some legit reasons for that: Aaron Rodgers is hurt, the game is in Seattle, and the Seahawks thumped Green Bay pretty good  when they met back on Opening Night. For some reason I feel good about the Packers' chances, though. It would add to Rodgers' legacy if he were to pull off the upset on a bad leg (and, to be honest, to me he didn't look like he was in serious discomfort during Green Bay's win last week over Dallas). And what the hell, I bucked the trend in the Colts-Broncos game and it worked. Why not?


Patriots 23, Colts 21 -- Everybody seems to think Indianapolis has zero chance to win this game, and for my sake I hope everybody is right.




LAST WEEK -- 4-0
SEASON TO DATE -- 183-81 (175-81 regular season; 8-0 playoffs)

Goals 2015

If you've read my blog you know I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. I don't like the concept of waiting until the beginning of a new year to try to better yourself. You can just as easily set self-improvement goals on April 17 or Sept. 20 as you can on Jan. 1 (or Jan. 11, as I glance at the calendar).


That said, I'm a little motivated right now and I feel like now would be a good time to set some goals for myself. So, here goes:


SAVE MORE MONEY: This was a goal for last year, too. I'm being purposely vague because I don't like to get too specific about finances. I will say this: the target dollar value I've selected is a pretty ambitious goal.
Sometimes they say being too ambitious is unrealistic and sets yourself up for failure, but I'm looking at it this way -- if I save half as much money, I've done myself a lot of good. So, I'll do my best and I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't achieve it.


LOSE 7-10 POUNDS: In the past year I've lost a good 25-30 pounds and I feel a lot better about myself. I have more energy and that's helped me not just physically but emotionally as well.
When I started this health kick, I had a goal weight in mind, which was what I weighed a few years ago when I felt like I was in the best shape of my life. I am currently (depending on the time of day I weigh myself and how good I've been) about 7-10 pounds away from that goal weight. Now, my goal weight is an educated guess. It's possible I may only be able to lose 5 more pounds without starving myself. Time will tell.


FINISH MY NOVEL: This is the one goal I set every year, and the one goal I have the most problem with. It's always a time commitment issue -- I have a full-time job and a part-time job, an active social life, and unfortunately a need for occasional sleep. Sometimes these are legitimate reasons; other times I uses these as excuses because I fear that nobody will ever want to read my novel and I'll fail.
Back in September, a friend of mine gave me a really good suggestion as to how to force myself to continue to work on my novel (and of course, after this suggestion two of my associates at work spent the next month taking vacation time and it made it very hard to implement this idea). I'll keep working on it, because in a lot of ways this is my most important goal. Sometimes the best goals are the scariest ones, and the ones you're most afraid of failing at, but that doesn't mean you can't confront your fears and strive to achieve them. I would like to get my novel to the point where I can at least have some trusted people read it start to finish and give me helpful feedback.


So there it is. We'll see what happens. I'll be back at the end of December to let you know how I did.

NFL Divisional Weekend Predictions

I went 4-0 last weekend. Can I keep the undefeated streak going?


We'll see:


Patriots 20, Ravens 3 -- I hate picking Patriots games, because my heart is always in it. But here we are. Anyway, everyone across America seems convinced Baltimore's gonna win. When that happens between two fairly evenly matched teams, it's often a jinx. For my hearts sake, hopefully it is.


Seahawks 13, Panthers 10 -- I think this will be a closer game that everyone else does: they've played each of the past two seasons and Seattle has had to come from behind late to win both. But Seahawks probably do have too much talent to lose this.


Packers 20, Cowboys 10 -- Tony Romo can't have two clutch playoff performances in a row, right?


Colts 33, Broncos 14 -- There's always seems to be an upset in the divisional round and in the other three games I picked the home game. Aw what the fuck, why not....






LAST WEEK -- 4-0

SEASON TO DATE -- 179-81