I m vastly more excited for the premiere of Gossip Girl� on the CW this week than I am for NFL football. Granted, this probably has more to do with my obsession with cheesy teen literature than it does with the sport itself, but it probably also doesn t hurt that every time I m at my dog adoptions gig at the ASPCA someone asks me what I think about Michael Vick. For the record, I think he should have his balls coated in A1 steak sauce before being dropped into a pit of his own fighters. I think his probation should include trailing after me every weekend when I walk shelter dogs because it would be fun to watch him obey the Clean Up After Your Pet ordinances without the help of plastic baggies. I think I m seriously considering making the dog shelter the lone benefactor of my 401(k) so that, should something happen to me before I m able to enjoy the fruits of the rule of 72, I ll be comforted knowing that the pit bulls I work with have the option of buying up a couple of football players and making them fight to the death for fun. In short, I m not terribly thrilled with the man.

But I ve never been terribly thrilled with pro football, and I can t blame that on him. My family never really had room for the NFL, what with all the time they spent framing pictures of the 59 Dodgers and screaming God, you are WORTHLESS! Throw an effing STRIKE!� at whatever hapless 22 year old the Mets decided to put on the mound. Wait, that was just my dad. My experience with football is comprised of a short stint as a cheerleader where I was way more invested in wearing saddle shoes and a side ponytail than I was with anything going on on the field, and attendance at high school and college games as part of a crowd that was most interested in lording their intellectual superiority over the opposing team. I associate football spectating with the use of proper grammar and punctuation, as was always practiced at my alma mater ( Give me a W! Give me an Ampersand! Give me an M!�), along with the healthy sense of entitlement that came from chanting Safety School� at every team we played for four years, blissfully unaware that they were kicking our Fulbright scholarship asses up and down the field.

It all turned around a little bit when the NFL draft showed up this year. I don t really care about draft days, largely because the baseball draft is totally lame and involves a bunch of 18 year olds I don t feel comfortable assessing on my patented scale of Athletic Hotness who are just going to marinate in the farm system for another 3 years anyway. Besides, the best thing about drafts are the controversies, and if I need a fix of that I can just start googling phrases like Patrick Ewing� and frozen envelope� and see what comes up. But all it took this time around was 20 minutes of watching Brady Quinn s shit eating grin slowly downturn and I was completely hooked. I can t tell you how many times I ve said that pro sports need more of a People Magazine angle, and if ever there was anyone to prove that, it was Brady Quinn. I watch a lot of sports for your average pair of ovaries, but most of my probing questions go unanswered. I don t think it s too much to ask to have one relentless but well spoken gossip in the press box or on the sidelines chiming in with He may be having a career year, but his wife was recently spotted giving Cuba Gooding Jr. a lap dance.� No one on ESPN answered my important questions about Brady Quinn on draft day who was the chick sitting next to him holding his hand? Is she planning on moving to whatever city drafts her man? How is she dealing with the fact that he has obviously at least given serious consideration to, if not actualized, sex with another man?

In middle school, I ran in a tight-knit band of girls that were constantly talking shit about each other. If you ever had the passing thought that hey, we all seem to be getting along pretty well recently, even though I did accidentally buy the same exact pair of converse one-stars as {name redacted},� that meant that it was your week in the dog house and the other three were at the mall trying on flannel shirts at Aeropostale and talking about how ugly you were. Of these girls, one I m completely ambivalent towards, one retained her best friend status, and one achieved the coveted position of Nemesis when she turned into a heartless biatch during college. I subscribe fully to Chuck Klosterman s analysis of human nature when he says that everyone has both a Nemesis and an Archenemy, but I also truly believe that only women are able to fully understand and embrace these titles. I know plenty of men that are living a Nemesis-free life, but I don t know a single female who can claim as much. If she tries to, that means more people dislike her than she could possibly imagine, and it s best that you not explain that to her for her own mental health. Around when we were juniors in high school, that particular Nemesis became obsessed with a series of annoying things; namely, her own boobs, hair, face, and general perceived prettiness. It was enormously satisfying, then, when she was the last person in our grade asked to the prom. And that was precisely why I loved the NFL draft, because it was like watching people pair up for the prom, only with a level of statistical analysis and commentary that would have made high school exponentially more interesting. Because, deep down, everyone secretly loves it when the ones who expect to go first are left to the 22^nd round.