Single and ready to mingle

I don’t know where I am going with this

Autumn McDowell
Sports Editor

It’s that time of the year again: it’s less exciting than Christmas, less liquor-soaked than St. Patrick’s day, and more annoying than that kid who is repeatedly kicking your seat at the movie theatre but you can’t yell at him because it would be awkward. That’s right, it’s Valentine’s Day.

In light of our Singles Issue, it was thrown onto my plate to somehow connect sports with singledom.

My immediate thought was to do some silly list of the top-five eligible athletes, but then I realized how stupid that sounded. Then I was going to come up with some sort of play on words with singles. Exhibit A: he put up a single tonight; Exhibit B: they are going to be playing singles; and so on. But that was even dumber than my original idea and would be much less hilarious than I intended it to be.

My next thought was to go on some type of rant about how Canadian girls love athletes, in particular hockey players. But I thought that I would save my biography for another issue. Now is just not the time.

A co-worker then suggested to me that I should ask the athletes how many times they masturbate during the week and ask if their masturbation habits affect their playing ability, because that wouldn’t be an awkward conversation to have at all with people I barely know. I had horrible visions of how that conversation would go and most of them ended with me blurting out the word masturbation in between mumbles followed by an exchange of awkward facial expression between myself and said player.

I also debated talking about the best and worst pick-up lines I have ever received, most of which have come from one athlete or another. Example the first:

Me: “Hi, I’m Autumn.”

Random athlete: “I’m born in September!”

Example the second:

Random athlete: “What’s cookin’, good lookin?” (Seriously, I thought that line died with Punch Out)

Random athlete’s friend: “We’re not all like him!”

Though these lines may be hilarious, I felt that it would be slightly wrong of me to assume that all athletes use these types of lines, and I surely don’t have enough of them to fill up an entire column.

I was then going to tell the other side of my Winnipeg Jets trip that none of you got to hear and that I might regret telling.

What most of you don’t know is that, during my time in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ locker room, I saw the entire team naked. We’re not talking about guys sitting in the locker room with a towel around their waist. We’re talking full-frontal nudity.

After I finished my interview with Joe Vitale, during which I was paying absolutely no attention to anything that was happening around me, I heard some guys start yelling. Naturally, when you hear someone yell you look, so when I turned my head I got the full panoramic image of the Penguins’ wide-open shower with all of the players standing in line, staring at me as I was staring at them, naked as the day they were born.    

I would pay good money to see what my facial expression was at that moment.

All of these possible topics seemed great at the start, but had serious problems when it came to putting them on paper. But, after all of that, Valentine’s Day is not a day to love each other, it is a day to make sure that the single people are well aware that they are single and for your friend to constantly bring up what she is getting her boyfriend for Valentine’s Day in order to subtly rub it in your face that they are in a relationship and you are not.

My name is Autumn, I like hockey and video games, I’m single.