Packer Season Is Year Round

WOO-HOO!  GREEN BAY PACKERS 2013 SCHEDULE RELEASED!  :D :D :D

Okay, I got that out of my system.

Man, who am I kidding?

GO PACK GO!  GO PACK GO!  GO PACK GO!  GO PACK GO!  GREEN AND GOLD ALL THE WAY!

Now that any readers from Minnesota, Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas have x-ed out (or are alternatively posting a choicely-worded comment down below), I can continue freely.

Also, San Francisco fans may want to leave because I am about to swear my vengeance upon you during the first game of the season.

We don't forget losses easily around here.

Okay, that was it.  I hope you were able to handle it.  Besides, it's too early in the season to start all the threats.  I'll save them mainly for the day of.

"Excuse me, Katrina, the season hasn't started yet."

The season started the morning after the Super Bowl, and all naysayers need to reconsider their dedication to football.

"Isn't it a bit obsessive?"

You're talking to a member of the football fanbase who believes its completely normal to wear giant foam cheese wedges.

Real men wear cheese.

 I mean, come on, Packers fans are the only people on planet earth who believe the term "cheesehead" is a compliment.

You're also talking to a member of the fan base who sees the guys who stand around with nothing but paint between themselves and the elements of the frozen tundra as the most heroic idiots on planet earth.

So, like many Packer fans, I've never actually been to a game.  This is because there's a thirty-five-year-long waiting list for season tickets, and I'm not lucky enough to know someone who will part with their tickets for a game.  My parents are Packers owners, though.  Yep, they got Packers stock for Christmas a couple years back.

Ah, the pieces of paper that make the Packers unique in the world of football.  The thousands of owners who have been buying stock since 1923, thereby funding the team, even though the stocks bring no benefit to them other than providing us with good players and stadium improvements.

We are the Packers.  I mean, some people think I'm crazy for saying, "we" when talking about the Packers, but that really is how I feel about the team.  Maybe I don't own a single piece of stock; I'm certainly not on the team (I'm female and far too small.); and I certainly am not one of the coaches, managers, etc.  Nonetheless, "we" are the Packers.  "We" being every fan.  Without the fans, there is no team.  Hence the reason why in the world there's still a football team in Green Bay.  They can't leave.  The owners would never agree to it.  I mean, imagine convincing thousands of people all over the world to let their team move to a new location.  We'd bring back Reggie White from the dead to tackle you down and have Mason Crosby kick you through the posts.  That is, if you make it through the posts.  Otherwise, you just might bang around painfully on the posts.  Either way, you're not moving our team.  And if you even think of buying our team...I don't think you'd want to try to take our stock away from us.

Anyway, I mean, let's face it, for me, each new football season begins the morning after the Super Bowl ends.  It's a fresh new start to the football year.

And, trust me, I have the newscasters on my side.  I'm from the state where the Packers can be squeezed into the news somehow every night:
Cancer awareness?  Throw in a Packer.
Celebrities meeting ordinary people?  It's Wisconsin.  We don't have any other celebrities besides sports people.
Nothing good happening in sports?  Talk about the Packers upcoming season/retiring Packers.
Boston bombing?  Find random picture of former Packer and show it.
Major disaster?  There's probably a Packer/former Packer who helped.
Commercial break?  Probably a Packer endorsement/reference to the Packers in there somewhere

I mean, the Green Bay Packers are something you cannot escape in this state, and I love it!  Call us obsessed and crazy, but Packers season never ends in Wisconsin.  We go straight from post-season to pre-season.

Maybe some other teams are going to claim to be just as obsessed as Packer fans, but we're the fans who will pay $250 for a piece of paper.  And not a paper that has Curly Lambeau's signature on it from 1919.  No, we'll pay $250 for a piece of paper that was printed yesterday just to be able to say, "I own the team.  I probably paid for Aaron Rodgers' new jersey."  With my luck, I probably paid for a urinal in the nosebleed section.  But, come on, even if you're in the nosebleed section, you made it to Lambeau.

The best football stadium on earth

How can you mess with a fan base who cheers year round, owns their team, is willing to freeze for them, and actually wants a player to jump on them and spill their beverage?

This is what happiness looks like.

So, yeah, there we go, my first post about the Packers this year.

I was originally planning to do a historical post about Paul Revere's midnight ride today, but then the NFL schedules were released, so I had to "regrettably" change my mind and post about the Green Bay Packers instead.

BECAUSE THEY ARE AWESOME!

GO PACK GO!

Stability

          “But I don’t want you to move.”  I can still remember the context in which I thought these words.  I was in computer class in tenth grade—one of my years in America.  In Japan, I was home schooled and had a grand total of about five friends my age, two of them Australian, two of them American, and one of them Japanese.  Here in America, though, I was in a Christian school.  There were forty-nine kids in the high school, and I considered myself friends with about forty of them.  I was the one who drifted in and out of their lives, four years in Japan, one year in America.  This was my family’s second furlough.

            My class in America was one of the most important parts of my life.  They were the first people I wanted to see again.  Within months of arriving in Japan, I wanted to see my class again—to bring them to Japan.  I had daydreams of my grandpa coming to visit and bringing my class with him.  My grandpa did visit once, but it was just him.

            The reason my class was so important was they were the one constant thing I could hold onto in America.  Yes, individuals came and left, but my class was always there, sending me letters and/or videos about once a year.  I didn’t know a single year where a person in my class didn’t write or email me.  I knew only two years where the class didn’t send me a stack of letters or a video from them.

            The girl who I didn’t want to move had been my friend since preschool.  Her family was indeed thinking of moving, but she had said something about moving to Colorado or Montana or something far away—not Wisconsin  (Her family only ended up moving to a new house in the area.).  I couldn’t imagine that happening.  She was one of the people who’d always been part of my class.

            I was the one always moving.  Things were always changing.  What did it matter to me if this one girl moved?  This was my last year of school in America.  Simply put:  something would change.  A part of me would be ripped from the comfortable halls of Union Grove Christian School and sent off to Colorado or Montana or somewhere.  I hated when that happened.  Even if you switched to public school, a part of me got torn off.  You were part of my class.  My class was my identity in America.  Oh, I would learn to adjust once I got back and met the new people, but until I got used to it, you were conspicuously missing from my life.  When I’d said “good-bye,” I’d thought it would mean “good-bye for now,” not “good-bye forever.”  I hate “good-bye forever.”

            Those paragraphs expand all the emotion I felt in a moment’s time in computer class.  It was only the time it took to send a shock through my body, and enough time for me to say something intelligent along the lines of, “No!” or “Why?”

            A sense of stability—that’s what my class was to me.  I could always go back to America and see those faces who I already knew and have a feeling, “Nothing has changed.”  My class was so good to me that even people who I’d never met before would come to me and say, “I’ve heard so much about you!”  I can tell you for a fact that my class did talk about previous members on occasion, and I sometimes wonder what stories they told about me when I was gone.  “Katrina Zemke.  Her parents are missionaries.  She lives in Japan.  She brings things called Pocky and dried squid to school.”  Who knows what else they said?  I always knew, though, that I would return to a place where I was loved.

            Nowadays, when I walk through the halls of UGCS, I rarely see the people I attended school with.  Still, though, the building echoes with haunts of happy memories—the memories that kept me going when I was six thousand miles from my friends.  Maybe I wouldn’t live in the same house as I had the last time, but I would always be going back to the same class.  A class where I always had a friend; a class where I was known; a class where I belonged.