Madness!

hooray! i love march! so many cool days-- pi day, ides of march day, st. patrick's day...and of course...MARCH MADNESS!!!!! this year, i'm in three (THREE!) pools and apparently, it makes me really like exclaimation points!!!!!!!!!!!

okay, for seriously. this is tres important stuff. at stake: nearly $4,000. sadly or fortuitously (ask me when the final seconds tick down and a new champion cuts down the nets), i decided to share my potential winnings or losings with Y this year. it's a good way for me to hedge my bets now that NCAA basketball has become an exercise in over-analysis for me. i've won three pools but have been in a three year dry spell (for shame)--and since the first pool, i've acquired a little too much knowledge about the games, the teams, the hot stars. i even got my poor innocent friends into--dragging them to vegas a couple years back, forcing them to throw their money (and ear drums) away on parlays, weeping into their vodka tonics over missed spreads. oh good times. but too much knowledge, as any seasoned bracket buster will tell you, is the WORST kind of knowledge to have.

so this year, since Y and i are sharing the wins/losses, i decided to try a two-pronged bracket strategy: (1) my real picks. you know, where i over-think, bite my nails and engage in a pick-erase-re-pick cycle of self-destruction, and (2) my Mascot strategy: choose the mascot i prefer. Great Danes or Cavaliers? The Wolf Pack or Blue Jays? Fightin' Illini or Salukis? dude. i learned so much. did you know that an Illini is a Native American tribe? we once thought it could be a magician. luckily, a great dane is still indeed a dog. heh. depending how i fare, i'll do the mascot strategy again. next time though, i'll pick which mascot will win in a street fight.