I have a friend (or mother) for them

The phone rang as I was setting the table on Sunday.
"Can you believe your Costa Rica?" my mom asked, almost breathlessly, "How can those guys stand all this?  I thought [name of specific player] was too tired to stand up, much less shoot the ball."

My mom called as I was cooking dinner yesterday, "Can you believe that?"
'What, did Algeria score?  I need to turn the game back on,"  I quickly countered.
"Yes they did, but it's over.  Germany had already gone up 2-0."

It makes me inexplicably happy that my mother watches World Cup Soccer.  It also amuses me that she assumes she can call at the end of most any game and I will have a comment on it, and startles me a little that I usually do.

My mother does not have cable, has never been to a professional soccer game, and does not follow football on the world stage except twice every four years (we watch the Women's World Cup with almost as much gusto).  It is the world part of World Cup soccer that draws her (and me).  We pick teams based on good stories and being underdogs and non-European and cheer for them until they get eliminated and then cheer for someone else (Germany, most likely, in the end, although since that Netherlands-Spain match the first week, I wouldn't be surprised to watch the Netherlands go far.)

I've been mulling a post about how many different (in all kinds of way) people converge in my life, and I've realized that I'm going to have to separate it into different posts: there is no good way to brag that a former student is the STIHL Timbersports Pro-Champion for the second year in a row in a post about my friends in Ouagadougou* cheering for Ghana while my son tells me to cheer for Germany because of "family rules".

One of the beautiful things about watching the World Cup in the era of Facebook post-graduate school is that not only can I pick teams based on my own tenuous criteria, but that I actively know someone cheering for everyone.  There's an bee-systematist in Turkey cheering for Colombia, a diplomat in Burkina-Faso with daughters screaming for Ivory Coast, and a cnidarian specialist from Chicago in Germany cheering for all Asian countries.  I have an ex-boyfriend for England, a Department Chair for Argentina, a Bolivian colleague anti-Argentina and brother pro-Germany.  A horticulture extension agent in Texas cheers loudly for Ecuador. During the Costa Rica - Greece game, I knew there was a Greek beetle systematist (currently in Tennessee?) rooting against the Ticos that my Kansas ichthyologist friend and I were rooting for.  And my mother, apparently, bating her breath in a motel room in a small town in the Colorado mountains as the extra time ended and the game went to penalty kicks.

It's nice to feel part of the world every once in a while.

*It is a real place with one and a half million people.  I didn't make it up.