sunday, bloggy sunday

- Though their tickets webpage seems to have been designed by Samuel Beckett (no, not the Quantum Leap guy), I finally fought my way through redsox.com and secured two seats to the Mets/Sox game at Fenway Park on June 29th. Single-game tickets went on sale at 10 am yesterday, and I had registered with the site earlier in the week to save as much time as possible while ordering. So 10 am yesterday - I was gonna be there, clicking away!

Of course, I slept until 11:30 and totally forgot about the Red Sox until about 8 pm last night, as Kris and I decided to secure our Valentine's Day Penn/Princeton tickets ("cool, we have tickets... hmmm, 'tickets'... oh shit").

Now, because Fenway Park seats about 1500 people, and because Red Sox games have been made popular in recent years by the Jimmy Fallon megahit Fever Pitch, there is apparently an extremely high demand for tickets - so much so that redsox.com set up a "virtual waiting room," where one stays until he or she is randomly selected to receive the opportunity to buy single game tickets (limit of four per game, maximum of two games). This lessens the demand on the Geocities-esque bandwidth with which redsox.com is blessed.

There's no virtual magazines or virtual sick coughing kids in the virtual waiting room; just lots of disclaimers, instructions, warnings ("IF YOU BUY MORE TICKETS THAN ALLOWED, YOUR ORDER WILL BE CANCELED AND THE RED SOX WILL MAKE SURE YOU CAN NEVER VOTE OR OBTAIN A MORTGAGE"), and a little 30-second countdown timer that automatically refreshes the window; if you've been randomly selected to get to buy tickets, the window closes and you're almost home free. If not, back to 30 seconds.

RYAN
Well, shall we go?

KRIS
Yes, Let's go.
They do not move.

We had pretty much given up hope and stopped paying attention to the virtual waiting room (in favor of Chris Noth's debut episode on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which I actually enjoyed in spite of my previous thoughts on the subject). I was checking my email midway through a routine Det. Mike Logan suspect assault, and I realized with a start that I had received my random selection into the Kool Kids Club. I was in.

And I still almost blew it. I was immediately given two tickets in obstructed view, and I said "nah, I can do better." Turns out I was wrong; for one thing, the ballpark was built during the Taft administration, and I think that pretty much every seat has its own load-bearing column directly in front of it. For another, the website began to warn me that there were only scattered single seats left. Realizing this, I spent another 15 minutes clicking on "Best Available," hoping that somebody else given two adjacent seats would be a dope like me and release them.

It worked. I escaped my existential nightmare, and Kris and I get to go to Fenway Park, sit together (something which is not to be taken for granted), and watch the Mets play the Olde Towne Team. We'll be sitting in section G22, right behind home plate. I've never been to Fenway Park (immediately outside of it doesn't really count in my mind), and I've always always always wanted to go. And now it's turned into a summer minitrip with the woman I love, to see the team I love. I can't imagine how it could be better (maybe it gets better if it turns out Pedro is pitching that night, but ESPN's Pitching Probables page isn't quite bold enough to project who'll be starting five months from now).

- OK, here's my new dilemma: leave a house devoid of breakfasty food to go secure said breakfasty food, or stay in and see if heating up Thursday night's Border Cafe fajitas is enough to get me through the morning? I love breakfast, but I also love staying in my PJs and generally sitting around on my ass. What to do? Should I stay? Shall I go? If I stay there will be trouble; if I go there will be double! (I'm paraphrasing from what I can only imagine is Waiting for Godot). Really, I could go for a sandwich and a black cherry soda from Koch's, but seeing as how I'm in Delaware, I don't think that's going to happen.