With the Seahawks winning the division and qualifying for the Super Bowl game this year, my aggravation grows and festers at the consequences of joy and celebration if they win. Thousands upon thousands of people local to the Greater Seattle area will flock to downtown Seattle to witness our football team parade down 4th Street.
American football is paramount to sports culture in the U.S. The Super Bowl has the highest paid advertisements in the world and its sensationalism dominates conversation including idle chatter in social groups, workplaces and even classrooms on a regular basis. The built up hype that occurred for the Seahawks parade last year was massive and was amplified by the fumble within the first few seconds of the preceding Super Bowl game.
The parade was scheduled for some time around noon so I felt that I had time to make it to midterm exam that morning, but I was so wrong. Between the time that I fell into and arose from slumber, the streets were littered with trash, couches, peddlers and thousands of fans.
The parade was not scheduled for another five hours yet. I needed to weave through a sea of people, streamers and confetti all colored blue and green to even reach the bus stop. I could almost feel the infrastructure weeping as Westlake Square filled with so many people they could barely fit on the sidewalks.
Some roads were barricaded so sometimes crossing the street was no easy matter. Even when I did reach the bus stop at Westlake station, the tunnel was so congested that buses and Link light rail cars arrived every few minutes to eject another hundred or so fans apiece with no normal bus routes in sight.
Within the two hour delay waiting for the bus I met Keli, a programmer from Iceland. I learned that the country‘s population is roughly half of the city of Seattle. Traffic leading out of Seattle was a breeze and I hoped that I wouldn’t miss my exam.
I discussed international current events, Keli’s escapades in Denmark and how he used to do programming work on game engines like Unity. I also learned that a lot of game development becomes successful through hard work and well-timed accidents. I bid him adieu only to meet two thousand people at the Bellevue Transit Center with even more people piling in.
Kids ran around yelling, and lines of people ran around the block to the point where I couldn’t even stand around my bus stop trying my best to get to school. I ended up getting to Bellevue College five and a half hours after leaving Belltown.
I want the Seahawks to win, but I don’t want them to parade because of it. When parades happen on weekdays not only does a massive crowd come to congratulate our home team, but they also ruin jobs, grades, football, video games and football video games.
I arrived to my midterm mere moments before it started but I could have done without waking up to air horns and hungover drunk people. I don’t have a problem with football but it shouldn’t lead to wasting a weekday of hard work.