TASK #10: U Pick ‘Em
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live”. Jean-Paul Sartre
March Madness is f—ing awesome. I’ve one my pool twice over the past 15 years, both time by pure luck–basically I rode one team all the way through. And I love that it is a great humbler–I know guys who spend every waking hour for a week pouring over stats, reading what the idiot bracketologists say, and then confidently pick some outrageous upset like Rutgers over Kentucky–and are absolutely crushed when the inevitable happens and Rutgers takes a monumental beating…
I’ve done it too. I picked a MAC team to beat a Big Ten team and the MAC team got wiped out and I ripped up my picks and tossed the paper into a trash can.
The psychology of the whole thing is tremendously ironic. March Madness forces even the most equivocating man to make decisions. The guys who have a hard time deciding between curly and straight fries have maybe 48 hours to do what their wives can’t get them to do for months– make a decision–and they can’t take their picks back.
As a kind of experiement, I decided to come up with a bracket of my own. It was supposed to help me decide what to do with my free time. I wrote down all my choices on a make-shift bracket, then weighed them all, activity by activity, and came up with a winner.
You try it. When you get done write about the activity you chose, and why it’s more important to you than the others. Good luck!
TASK:
Photo credit: I a Walsh and Joe Doe
