Stuff your eyes with wonder

An hour after the first of Jürgen Klopp’s many jokes, interspersed with his worldly insights into football and life, he returns to a more personal memory. It is fitting and evocative because the tumultuous journey that Klopp and Borussia Dortmund have taken to the Champions League final at Wembley, where they play Bayern Munich on Saturday, has been this season’s most memorable story. A passionate club’s exhilarating play and outrageous drama, painful transfer intrigue and riotous joy, validates Klopp’s claim that “this is the most interesting football project in the world”.

It was strangely similar for Klopp at Mainz, the first love of his sporting life. Klopp, who eventually became their coach, used to be a lumbering striker-turned-defender in the German second division, and he suggests that: “Just like every person who works for Dortmund is a fan of the club, it was the same at Mainz. When I was a player there we had 800 supporters on rainy Saturday afternoons and if we died no one would notice or come to our funeral. But we loved the club and we have this same feeling at Dortmund. It’s a very special club – a workers’ club.” (more after the link)

literaryreference:

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he wants to be your friend.

But then, then comes the fateful moment where you find out that all this time, he’s only seen you as a potential girlfriend. And then if you turn him down, he may never speak to you again. This has happened to me time after time: I hit it off with a guy, and, for all that I’ve been burned in the past, I start to think that this one might actually care about me as a person. And then he asks me on a date.

I tell him how much I enjoy his company, how much I value his friendship. I tell him that I really want to be his friend and to continue hanging out with him and talking about our favorite books or exploring new restaurants or making fun of avant-garde theatre productions. But he rejects me. He doesn’t answer my calls or e-mails; if we’d been making plans to do something before this fateful incident, these plans mysteriously fail to materialize. (This is why I never did get around to seeing the Hunger Games movie. Not to name any names, but thanks a lot, Tom.) Later, when I run into him at social events, our conversations are awkward and lukewarm. This is because the moment we met, he put me in the girlfriend-zone, and now he can’t see me as friend material.

I must say that I find this really unfair. I mean, I’m a nice girl. I have a lot to offer as a friend, like not being a douchebag and stuff. But males just don’t want to be friends with nice girls like me. They can’t help it, I guess; it’s just how they’re wired, biologically. Evolution conditioned our male hominid ancestors to seek nice girls as mates and form friendship bonds only with the other dudes that they hunted mammoths with. It’s true—I know this because I studied hominids in my fifth-grade science class.

So what’s the answer? Should I take up mammoth-hunting in an attempt to appeal to the friendship centers of men’s primal lizardbrains? Should I keep making guy “friends” and then prevent them from making a move on me by subtly undermining their self-confidence? Should I just give up on those manipulative, game-playing, two-faced bastards once and for all? I don’t know. I mean, I’d really like to have a true friendship with a guy someday, but it’s so hard to trust and respect them when they never say what they mean—and you never know when you might be relegated to the girlfriend-zone.

moreawesomewithfootball:

I see cules and madridstas claim that they are the best fans in the world and I wonder if they are truly serious. 

Being a culé or madridsta might be the best feeling in the world because we are blessed with great teams, but as fans, we are quite horrible. No matter what Valdes says “desire to experience new things” it was the fans who pushed him out the door. A madridsta in my opinion said it best. For every brilliant Messi goal, there is an equal brilliant Valdes save that kept Barcelona in the game. Valdes never really got proper credit for his work at Barça. To make matters worse he was always harshly criticized. Every single one his teammates had said so. Xavi even hinted this was the reason for his departure. I had seen so many Barcelona fans complain that we need a new keeper during this past season (before he announced his departure). That was just shameful. And now we want to question why he does not love us enough to stay.

Same goes for Iker. Iker is a true madridsta in my opinion. I laugh when some fans say he lacks discipline or respect because he did not get along with Mou. THIS GUY LACKS DISCIPLINE? This is the same man who has put his pride aside every single time to keep the Spain NT together after the heated clasicos and all the dramas that followed afterwards. He has led the Spanish team through 3 of the biggest titles. If there is anyone who knows respect I would think it is this guy. As a keeper he is one of the best in the world, if not the best. And yet just like Valdes he has faced some of the harshest criticisms. Even he has said that someday he might like to be a goalkeeper to a team that was not as harsh. I can’t remember the exact words he used but something along those lines. It’s crazy to think a club icon like that might want to leave a team because the fans were too much for him. 

So being a culé or a madridsta might be the best feeling in the world, but we suck as fans. 

Exactly. I can’t speak for madridistas. I’m not one and I don’t fucks with them.  However as a culé, I have been very frustrated lately. Spoiled brats. The level of entitlement I’ve seen over the last month (actually correction, since last season) is sickening.

Last season everyone wanted to sell everyone except Xavineista and Messi. One bad season or hell a few bad matches, and you want to them sold? The year before they won the league & the champions league, they also reached the CDR final.  Not repeating that success every season equals failure? Everyone is looking at this season like it’s a failure. This team is 6! 6 fucking points away from having 100pts in La Liga. Check yourself!

Losing to Bayern was pretty fucking awful. With all the success Barca has had lately, we are not used to losing. Especially 0-7 (fuck that is even hard to type), feeling irritated is perfectly fine & normal. But cules have to be honest with themselves  the moment Barca drew Bayern, we all knew it was the end of the line. If you want someone to place blame on, the last place is with the players.  Look to Rosell & Co for not signing the players Barca needed last summer. Look to Rosell & Co this summer to still not buy the players Barca needs.  Also just for good measure….Fuck Neymar!

thy-name-is-woman:

Okay - Kendal.  As funny as Charlie Baker, Danny Buckler and Pete Firman were, I only really went to see Jon, so he’s all I’m going to post about.  If you have specific questions about the others, ask me and I’ll see if I can remember.

Jon was on first and did about 20 minutes, and later in the night he came on again before each of the other acts for 10/15 minutes each time.  He talked to some people near the front and generally seemed in a good mood.  He said his mum was in, so it shouldn’t get too rude.

A couple of people he spoke to had abbreviated names, and he couldn’t do that unless he was ‘J’.  Someone actually asked if he was a Jonathan, and he said no, that he felt sorry for Jonathans because he doesn’t like that name.

He spoke to a man in the front row about being a ‘geezer’ or not, and when the guy said he’d fitted a bathroom, Jon said that wasn’t something he could do.  He said he’s currently moving house, and there were ’70s uplighters in his hall which he tore off as they were horrible, but now his hallway is dark because he doesn’t know how to fit new lights.    He said that he didn’t really check the garden of the new place and later realised that there are loads of fish that he now has to keep alive.  He said he wants them to die, but not to actually kill them, so he ended up buying 10kg of fish food online.

This led to him talking about weird online purchases when he’s drunk.  He said that he recently bought (on one day) a mannequin’s head (because he had a hat and had nowhere to put it), the fish food and extra wide razor blades for his wallpaper scraper,  which Barclays let through no problem, [‘they don’t mind me cutting a model of myself out of fish food and sticking a hat on it’] but when he tried to buy two tickets to go on holiday they stopped it as a ‘suspicious transaction’.  “Who’s he got to go with, eh?”  That’s when he said he was in a relationship for the first time in 8 years, and everybody gave him a little cheer.

He said he was looking forward to living alone again because he liked getting drunk on his own (because there’s nobody to remember what you’ve done).  He said if you’re on your own, you see the bin the next day and all you remember is ‘Oh, I had pizza’, but if there’s someone else there they’ll tell you about putting your penis over the bar and saying ‘Put it all on that’.

He talked about going away to Hamburg a couple of weeks ago for a stag and eating a Big Mac ( apparently having asked for a Fillet ‘o’ Fish and being given the wrong one, and that it was delicious) and that by sneakily getting water for himself when it was his round, he went back to his hotel to watch the snooker when everybody else was hammered.

He talked about his next show that he’s writing, and that he doesn’t know what he wants it to be about.  He mentioned touring next year.  He said that as he becomes funnier in his career, he’s less funny in real-life.  He mentioned doing his Christmas shopping in Penrith, and buying a little mini-keg.  The cashier apparently said ‘I don’t think the bags are strong enough for that’ and he said ‘Let’s hope the arms are strong enough’ and just got nothing back from her.

He said in reality he wants to be seen as a better person than he is, so he does these charity shows but that’s only because everybody sees them.  When nobody’s looking, he said he isn’t like that.  He said he got given change in a pub and a pound coin accidentally fell out of his hand and into one of those charity tubs.  “You can’t say ‘Oh, have you got a key for that?’”  He was also talking about the size of his hands and wrists, saying that years ago when he bought a watch the woman told him he’d have to get links taken out because he had ‘very feminine wrists’, which has stuck in his head.

He spoke a bit about growing up, and a kid who threw stones at his head.  He kept saying he was tedious and irritating and a bit of a catchphrase became “And that’s why I got bullied.”  He also talked about someone else who used to wet themselves in class.

At the end he was talking about two kinds of comedian - ones who are nonchalant about needing audience approval and act cool, whereas he said he really needed to know whether we liked it.  He also mentioned someone whistling, and when a girl in the front row said she couldn’t, he asked her how she would call a dog that had run in the road if she didn’t know its name?  Then he called her a dog murderer.  After trying to whistle a couple of times he ended up having to turn his back on the audience to stop laughing, and got a big clap when he managed it.  “That may be the most patronising round of applause I’ve ever had.  Still one, though.”

If anything else springs to mind I’ll post it later.  I’ve just realised that I’ve remembered quite a lot of it - not a stalker, just got a bloody brilliant memory.