Why being a giant dork is a lifelong labor that involves memorizing the design of Minnesota's natural resources license plate

In the summer of 1991, my parents took my brother and me on one of those "explore the west" minivan vacations. You know the trip that includes stops at Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, the Black Hills...and, if you were a savvy travel researcher in the pre-innernets era like my mother was, the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, and the Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota. It was the classic American family vacation for two children who were classic American whiners.

Mom & Dad certainly knew my brother, David, and I were giant pains in the ass. They knew that, unless they were brilliant and strategic in planning the trip's activities, they would spend hours trapped in a Dodge Caravan listening to "Owwwww!," "I'm not touching you," and "Shut up."

So they planned some games for us, the chief one being "License Plate Game," which involved watching vehicles through the window and being the first to shout out the states in which they were licensed. For example, if you saw a car from Virginia the goal was to be the first to shout, "Virginia! I got it!" And then you could count Virginia as "yours." And as long as your opponent hadn't "gotten" that state, you could continue to call out cars from Virginia as a defensive move. Winning required an intense dedication to observing oncoming traffic lanes, parking lots, and the handful of cars my safety-conscious father would dare pass ("Dad, drive FASTER," was a common command from the back seat.) Mom even gave us each one of those dry-erase U.S. maps and markers so that we could color in the states as we "got" them. Needless to say, David and I didn't like this particular game.

We motherfreaking loved it.

By the time we reached South Dakota, we were so consumed with this competition that we could barely function outside of the "License Plate Game" bubble. In fact, when we arrived at Mount Rushmore, David began racing through the parking lot, "getting" license plates instead of viewing one of our nation's most inspiring historical tributes.

Because c'mon: Only we could turn the thing that was supposed to prevent us from being annoying into the most annoying thing EVER.

And I've now been playing "License Plate Game" for two decades.

It was early in my relationship with my now-husband that we took a car trip together and I shouted out, "North Dakota! I got it!" His life has never been the same. He's become my primary "License Plate Game" opponent, even though we don't have the maps and no one's really even keeping score. We're just sort of always playing. And I'm sorry to say he's a terrible opponent. My eyes are much better, and I have a firmer grasp on our nation's many license plate designs. In fact, his only hope is to beat me when I'm not in the car -- which is something he certainly tries to do.

Because if my husband had been our third sibling on that van trip, he would have been right there with us, shoving my brother out of the way in order to "get" Alaska at Mount Rushmore. It's a freakish nerd quality about him that makes me know we're the perfect match. I can't help but smile when I receive a random text message in the middle of the work day that says, "Delaware. I got it."

Pshaw. I got Delaware at the Jolly Green Giant in 1991.

Just saying.

Defending women or defending journalism? Why I'm pretty peeved that I've been forced to make this choice.

Some news stories are so annoyingly anti-feminist that the best policy is to just ignore them until they go away. That being said, I'm going to jump in and become part of the problem by talking about the Ines Sainz situation.

First of all, let me express as absolutely as possible that I am not a victim-blamer. Nothing makes my skin crawl more than "she was asking for it" defenses of sexual harassers and assailants. And though she now says that she wasn't offended or wasn't actually harassed or was harassed but not really or whatever her current story is about the New York Jets situation, I do not condone any real or hypothetical harassment of Ines Sainz. Professional men should behave professionally on the job, whether or not their profession is playing a game. Period.

But I do have to blame Ines Sainz, at least in part, for one thing: the resurrection of more obnoxious attacks on female sports journalists that veteran professional Andrea Kremer told the New York Daily News this week she thought had been laid to rest years ago. Because while the Jets players apparently weren't behaving very professionally when Ines Sainz visited their practice a few weeks ago, it doesn't appear that Sainz is exactly a shining example of professional journalism, either.

I realize that sex sells. It sells in every industry, and especially in sports -- a world where men clamor to get front row seats so they can ogle the big-haired women in spandex bun-huggers at NFL games and where Danica Patrick ranks fourth among U.S. female athletes for earnings despite recording just one win. And even though it's taken from this testosterone-fueled, less-than-serious world of sports, I believe that Ines Sainz is just another example of the ever-blurring line between journalism and entertainment.

Check out the directory of the reporters on Sports Illustrated's Web site and let me know if any of their bios come with photo galleries that include bathing suit shots. Maybe ESPN's Sage Steele will change her Twitter background to a montage of images that includes a photo of her wearing an evening gown on a tennis court. Then again, maybe she won't. It seems that Sainz has built her career around "hey, look at me" stunts like flirting with athletes, dressing inappropriately on the job, and yes -- intentionally creating a media circus around this incident in New York.

Situations like this put female sports journalists like Kremer and even me -- someone who, yes, has had her ass patted in a working football press box -- in a tough position. Women in sports have had it very rough for decades and have been repeatedly harassed, demeaned, and ignored while trying to do their jobs. No, covering sports isn't as serious as covering U.S. foreign policy or Wall Street or even local city council meetings -- but it's still journalism. And all journalists should be treated with professional respect, just as they should be expected to behave professionally.

Keith Olbermann put it harshly when he recently named Sainz one of his "worst persons in the world," but I think he was largely correct: Ines Sainz puts all female sports journalists in the (necessary) position of defending her against the poor treatment she received, but also the quandary of whether or not they also have to defend her as a journalist (something she claims to be but which all evidence seems to indicate she is not), and in the process diminishes decades of work that serious female sports reporters have put in to gain the respect they deserve.

Does Ines Sainz have the right to make a buck off her voluptuous body? Sure, it's the world we live in. But don't expect me to only view her situation through the lens of whether or not I'm offended as a woman -- I also view it through the lens of a journalist who has watched almost exclusively pretty faces and thin bodies pop up on football sidelines and behind anchor desks over the last 20 years.

And when women's credentials for doing a job -- any job -- are reduced to whether or not they won the genetic lottery, all women lose.

Even Ines Sainz.

I'm apparently the lyrical gangster.

One recent oppressively hot spring day, I found a new hobby I didn't even know I was looking for while I was doing one of my least favorite activities -- getting my hairs done. (I realize most women view a trip to the salon as "pampering," but I loathe it. And now that I'm in my 30s I have to color away the fields of gray on my scalp, which means my hair appointments have been extended in their length of torture by nearly two hours. Spending that much time on any grooming activity, much less one that involves chemicals and gale force bursts of hot air being applied to my scalp for an extended period of time, tends to make me a little stir crazy.)

In an effort not to burst into tears and climb out of the chair like a 3-year-old having a tantrum during these hair appointments, I look for distractions -- usually the salon's music. On this particular day, the music was Sirius/XM's 90s pop music channel.

Song after god-awful song that came drifting out of the overhead speakers was something I hadn't heard in at least a decade but to which I could sing along, and in most cases indentify by title and artist. There was "Sadness: Part 1" by Enigma, "Love Will Be Right Here" by SWV (which stands, I remember all too clearly, for 'Sisters with Voices'), Skee-Lo, The Soup Dragons, Matchbox 20, Sister Hazel, The Gin Blossoms, Coolio, and an endless parade of other crap that just made me laugh out loud and which, to be truly honest, I at one point owned on cassette single. I even heard Inner Circle's cringeworthy "Sweat," which to this day you can't tell me isn't about date rape (How was that even allowed to be played on the radio?), and Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper." (Murder-ah!)

The whole experience illuminated the power of popular music as a memory trigger. How does Extreme's "More Than Words" NOT immediately make me think of every high school dance I ever attended? And my college days will always be associated with Third Eye Blind's "Jumper," which my fellow intern, Josh, used to sing to me while we were endlessly scanning football players' head shots in the back corner of the sports information office. I also can't hear Savage Garden's "I Want You" without remembering those days working in the back of Jacobson Building with only a boom box to entertain us -- and the fact that our boss repeatedly referred to that particular tune as "the chicken cherry cola song."

These days, I listen to very little pop music. I don't know any Justin Bieber songs and only very recently decided that Lady Gaga was worth a listen. But I still consume massive amounts of new alternative rock and feel like music is a big part of my life. But apparently my current music consumption pales greatly in comparison to that of my teen years. In addition to knowing all the songs on the 90s pop station, I can also sing you everything by Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Sonic Youth.

So my new commute-time hobby is switching back and forth between XM's 90s pop channel and XM's 90s alternative channel (These both exist!) and seeing how many songs I can identify by title and artist. It's actually an alarming number. I even shocked myself the other day when I immediately came up with "I Know" by Dionne Faris and "I Nearly Lost You" by the Screaming Trees in the same car trip.

If you're close to my age, I highly recommend this ridiculous but highly amusing activity. I mean, where else but 90s on 9 are you ever going to hear the remix of Maxi Priest's "Close to You" or suddenly have a vivid flashback of the 1992 presidential election?

And with oil continuing to gush into the Gulf of Mexico and the Pac-10 trying to destroy the last vestiges of parity in college athletics, I certainly don't want to listen to the news or sports right now. So I'll take my 90s music, which might as well finally finish the job of rotting my brain that it started all those years ago.

I mean, come on: I know what Bo don't know. I'm the lyrical gangster.

I'm so cool I didn't even know I was cool. At all.

So one of my favorite stores, Raygun, has a new T-shirt on the shelves that proclaims, "I listened to NPR before it was cool." In what is a likely a telltale sign that I am most definitely NOT cool, I did not realize that listening to public radio had become cool and am not really sure how to handle this revelation that something I do is considered "cool." It got me wondering if some of the other things I do had suddenly become cool. Please let me know if any of the following have become cool or are likely to become in the near future:

• saying things like, "Oooh! It's almost 9 o'clock! We can go to bed soon!"
  
• watching "Top Chef" when it first airs and then watching it again when it is rerun over the weekend
• wondering if a statistical detail of a sporting event is nationally significant and then actually going to the trouble of looking it up (or, actually, any obsession with/mild interest in sports statistics)
  
• facial depilitory
• knowing how to use a semicolon
• taking pictures of your food at restaurants
• watching CSPAN (and possibly even CSPAN2)
• being able to recite all the presidents in order of service and all the U.S. states in alphabetical order as a result of past elementary school choral performances
• Al Gore crushes
• pen/marker collecting
• watching Sesame Street as an adult
  
• unflattering, uncontrollable, pants-peeing laughter
• actually having Erasure songs on one's iPod
  
• vacuuming mishaps

Because I'm gonna want the T-shirt.

Captain Weirdo has a stat sheet, and she's not afraid to use it.

In the mid-to-late-1980s my favorite toy was an avocado green manual typewriter on which I put together regular editions of the "Daily Tribune," a newspaper of fictional stories written and illustrated (with pencil drawings inside black magic marker square borders) by me while I sat on the living room floor, hunched over the machine that emitted a musty metallic odor as I told it tales of fake petty crimes, fictional football games, and imaginary international crises. I gave myself deadlines and critiqued my headline choices. I collated and numbered the pages and paid careful attention to creating ads below the fold. For me, this was playtime.

From an early age, I was obsessed with the idea of a career in journalism. More specifically, I was obsessed with a career that, until almost a decade later, I wouldn't even know existed.

At age 18 I discovered it and was even offered an opportunity to do it: sports information -- the art of compiling and distributing information about athletics teams and competitions.

You see, though I was the faithful editor of the "Daily Tribune," one of my favorite childhood projects was actually a postseason Iowa State men's basketball review that I created as a gift for my father by writing news blurbs and cutting and pasting news articles, statistics, and photos onto looseleaf pages in a red binder. I was reminded of this project yesterday when I was filling a red binder with articles, rosters, and statistics that I'll need to use this weekend at the NCAA women's basketball tournament's first and second round games in Ames. Saturday through Tuesday, I'm volunteering to help out one of my former bosses -- a lifelong friend acquired during the three years I spent working as a sports information student assistant -- who is coordinating media relations for the event. We are both out of that line of work nowadays, but we both relish the opportunity to volunteer at tournament time. Because, well, we are both still sports info geeks at heart.

It's this time of year, when the excitement of March Madness is at its peak, that I most regret not pursuing an SID career. (Though, if I'm being honest with myself, I'm probably better at the job I do now.) There's just something exciting about the yards of blue carpeting and the smell of freshly-copied stat sheets and the pressure of deadline as the sneakers squeak out a countdown to the next tipoff.

It takes a special breed of weirdo to appreciate it. And here I am: Captain Weirdo, reporting for duty. I can't wait to collate.

Fore.

None of my personal possessions are as well-traveled as I am, but I need to give a shout out to December 2009 for probably being the most adventurous month of travel my Titleist Ultra Lightweight Stand Bag has ever seen.

On December 21, it boarded a semi trailer for Tempe, Arizona and was whisked to the desert with 600+ carefully-tagged friends. But less than two weeks earlier, there were moments of doubt that my clubs would even survive to see their morning of abuse at Papago Municipal Golf Course. Because in five minutes on an icy December morning, they took a lot more abuse than I could ever have inflicted upon them in 18 holes' worth of sandtrap hacks.

It was, well, the ride of their life.

Let me just point out that I am a person who has both vacuumed her face and hit herself in the mouth with the leg of an ottoman. I once lost my car key, um, on my person while out jogging. I have torn my earlobe in half falling onto a wrought iron chair, lost my prosthetic tooth in a steak sandwich, and slashed my own tire while parallel parking. I've had bread stolen from me by a goose and been knocked on my face by a grounder in beer league softball.

So is it really any surprise that, on Dec. 7, I backed over my golf bag and dragged it 3 1/2 blocks to a quickie mart, all the while littering my neighborhood with clubs that were shooting out from beneath my car like graphite-shafted primitive warfare projectiles?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

It's our new Blu-Ray player's fault, actually. Because I had purchased the device as a Christmas gift for my husband and hid it in the trunk of my car just a few days earlier, I didn't put my golf bag back in my trunk after a joint Sunday morning practice session at the golf dome. I didn't want Ben to see his gift and figured I'd just leave the bag sitting behind my car and stash it when I left for work the next morning.

But there was a problem: I was the first to leave for work the next morning. I slipped through the door on the side of the garage, pushed the button to raise the garage door, threw my shoulder bag on the passenger seat, and started out of my driveway for work.

Upon starting down the street, I immediately noticed that the roads were icy and that I was having quite a bit of trouble getting my car to accelerate down the road. My car drove almost like it was dragging something. Stupid ice, I thought. I need to fuel up my car, so maybe I should reassess my decision to commute to work this morning when I get around the corner to the gas station.

By the time I turned the corner, I became convinced that I actually was dragging something under my car. Stupid chunks of snow and ice that get stuck under your car, I thought. When I pull up to the pump, I'll just kick that stuff off my car and it should drive better.

So I pulled up to the pump, started the auto fueling process, and took an exploratory lap around my Honda. I found no attached chunks of snow and/or ice. But, dammit, I knew there was something dragging under there. Determined to solve the mystery, I moved to the front of the car and bent all the way down to the ground, almost placing my ear on the snowy ground as I looked underneath the car. That's when it jumped out at me, peeking out between blackened pipes in vivid white script embroidery: "Titleist." The previous day's events finally came flooding back.

Holy nerds. I ran over my golf bag.

There is only one thing a person can do in this situation: Start to cry; decide that crying would be pathetic and sort of stop crying but not really; stick your arm under the car and lunge at the bag, which you have no hope of retrieving because it's in the exact middle of your car, you're wearing heels, and it's snowing; pull only your golf towel and one catty-wompus club out as they are the only items you can reach; call your husband, because surely he will know what to do; and sit in the car and be a total pussy about the situation.

So that's what I did.

When my husband arrived at the gas station it was quickly apparent that he, too, would be unable to reach the bag without mechanical assistance. But he did make one discovery that for some reason had escaped me until then:

"Ummmmm... Kate... There aren't any more golf clubs in this bag!"

He threw me the keys to his Ford Escape. "Go. Find. Them," he said. I shuffled toward the car, panic-stricken.

"Wait," he stopped me. "I need to go home and get my jack so I can get your bag out from under the car. I'll come with you."

So we left the Honda and golf bag parked at the gas pump and started up the icy road toward home. When we turned onto our street, that's when we saw it: Our neighborhood looked like a Dick's Sporting Goods. A cluster of irons lay in the middle of the road, and my other clubs were scattered randomly about. Brightly-colored head covers dotted snowy front yards on both sides of the street. I drove the car slowly with the window rolled down, pointing out clubs as we crawled toward home. "There's my driver next to that person's lampost!" "There's my 7 iron next to that dumpster!" My husband picked them up and filed them in the back of the car. I can only imagine what was going through the heads of the motorists who passed us, what with me driving three miles per hour in the Escape while my husband walked alongside the car clutching a handful of golf clubs, barely able to get traction on the ice-covered road. At 8 o'clock on a Monday morning.

We found all but four of the clubs. Remarkably, none of the ones I found were damaged. Ben was able to pull the bag out from under the car after he jacked it up, and even the bag still works! (It just has a couple of new dirt stains. I'm planning to send my story to the Titleist Corporation.) I figure there is a chance those four missing clubs might turn up when the snow melts this spring, so I decided to leave notes in my neighbors' doors. A normal person might simply have written, "I had an accident with my car and lost some golf clubs. If found, please return to Kate." But that's just not my style, so I left a note for my neighbors that told the whole story, ending with a statement of absolute and humiliating fact:

"I'm sorry to say this is probably not even the stupidest thing I have ever done. But it's at least in the top five."

Some day I may have to put this up to vote.