We're going to the Super Bowl! Well, at least the Chicago Bears are going to the super bowl, and since I live in northwest Indiana, I am seemingly included in the Chicago Bears Super Bowl lineup. Super Bowl weekend is always a big deal, no matter how secluded from normal people you may be. Regardless of your social circle, at least one person that you know is going to be getting ready for the big game every year. But this year is something different for people within a few hundred miles of Chicago.

Professional football in my area has a very long tradition of ineptitude. In fact, the last time either the Colts or the Bears were in a Super Bowl was the year that I was born, 1985. And since then everything has gone downhill for football fans, each year seemingly outdoing the last in complete worthlessness. But after ten years of having the first grab of the top college football graduates, it became impossible to keep up the same level of shame year after year.

I had the misfortune of being in the vicinity of a TV last night, and each and every major network television station was covering the excitement of having an area football team go to the Super Bowl. The impact of seeing just how many people truly care, are personal invested into this football team has begun to strike me as insane. Everyone has their pointless entertainment, things that they just naturally love to do and talk about, but having this part of your life filled with watching professional football is nothing less than crazy.

Alzheimer's is a rapidly becoming more and more common among younger and younger people. Formerly associated with the extremely old, Alzheimer's is being diagnosed in people as young as fifty years old. Researchers are frantically trying to come up with ways of curing this frightening "new" disease, but where are the people in the health and medical industry fighting to get the message out that people need to be doing more with their free time than mindless entertainment? Alzheimer's almost always gets diagnosed after retirement; what a surprise! The attitude for Americans used to stress separating work from play, but now it seems to only stress separating work from vegetation.

The obsession with sports doesn't even make sense even if you only want to vegetate once you are off work. Your entertainment, and even how happy you are as a person, is dependent upon people hundreds of miles away from you, people who couldn't care less what you think, and people who you will never influence in any way, shape, or form. Instead of watching sports, how about reading books? Or this is crazy, how about going out on a limb and doing something productive like writing or getting some exercise yourself? With all the time that the average sports enthusiast spends watching sports, that same person could already be a decent athlete.