Extreme Makeover Home Edition makes me cry every single time I watch the ending. All it takes to get those ribbons of tears to curl their way out of my eyes is Ty's first steps into the episode's new house. I just know what sort of sap is coming and I can't handle it.

After getting a quick Home Edition-induced cry out of the way tonight, I flipped over to 60 Minutes only to be frustrated by a story on the Duke rape case. Granted, all I know if it is from the highly biased reporting of major media outlets, but I think the whole situation has done a disservice to the support for women to report rape. It seems to me that this case is a bunch of blown-up baloney, that the guys probably aren't guilty (but again, who am I and what do I know) but because of the craziness that's surrounded the case I can see it being one more point of dissuasion for a woman contemplating reporting rape.

Anyway, this weekend was amazing. I experienced my first ever NFL game -- the Saints' divisional playoff game on Saturday. It's cheesy and trite and cliched now, but the emotion of the city and that Dome was palpable. The people, the team, the city wanted the win for so much more than one more tally on the "W" side. It was about more than marching one step closer to the big dance of pro football (am I allowed to mix my sports like that, calling the superbowl the "big dance"?); instead, the Saints were carrying the hopes and dreams of a people ready to be "recovered" and not still "recovering".

The Saints were representing the perseverance of a city sticking it out through meteorological butchering, government oversight and neglect, and season after season of heart wrenching disappointment. This team was showing us all that you have to keep trying and looking to the future. That pig skin flying around the Dome was the weathered hands of residents putting hammer to nail and the morale of a city that refused to go away.

Even better than the game, though, were the friends I spent it with. I especially enjoyed remembering what it was like to hang out with friends I hadn't seen a while, meeting new people whose laughs made me smile for different reasons than usual these days, and spending QT with a, relatively speaking, old friend who always makes me smile. There's more to be said on the second one there, but it'll have to be saved for ellipticalling and not the whole wide internet world.

Oh! Why is it that every time I'm at Pat O's I end up talking about Poverty with a big "P" and how to save the world? Because it's a guarantee that if you go there with me and we have a hurricane, you're going to have to explain to me your views on global poverty and how you're planning to help. I won't ever forget the one poignant time Tom and I talked for what seemed like hours in front of the water feature about my desire to change the world. It ranks up there on the "defining personal thought moments" with sitting under the stars in the Keys with Jonathan, bawling my eyes out with Jody in his car in Curran parking deck after getting a particularly atrocious score on a hand-drawing for an ME drafting class, and the time my mom told me she didn't know how I was her daughter because I was so emotionally cold. But anyway...

Who dat? Who dat sayin' they gon beat dem SAINTS?!