that nifty first-down line you see on TV works? I did, and today, I looked it up. It’s even more complicated than I thought. Pretty neat.

There are three reasons I dropped off the face of the earth during October, three things that ate up all my free time. Well, really, it’s one: Squaresoft/Square-Enix. I’ve logged more hours on my PS2 in the past two months than I have in the last year cumulatively, on three different Squaresoft/Square-Enix games. In chronological order, they are:

• Final Fantasy VI. Everything old is new again. You old-timers may remember this game from the SNES. A few years ago, it was ported and released, along with Final Fantasy V, as a PS1 game. I finally decided to replay it, and had great fun (I got about 60% of the way through it) until I got distracted by the next reason.
• Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria. This is one of Square-Enix’s newest RPGs, and is intensely interesting. It’s got a fascinating story, gorgeous graphics, and an intriguing battle system.

  I have a confession to make. I haven’t actually been playing this one. My roommate Matt has, and I’ve been doing some backseat driving/heckling. Our conversations usually consist of the following:

  me: Dude, you better heal your guys before boss X does his special attack and kills them in the next turn.

  Matt: Whatever, man. I can take him. Look how low his hit points are!

  and, finally, one of the two of these:

  me: I told you. How are you going to beat him with one live guy?

  or

  Matt: Ha! You’re going down, punk.

• Last but most of all, Final Fantasy XII. This was my birthday present to myself, and I am as enthralled with this game as I can’t remember being since I got X-Men Legends as a gift last year. This is the second complete overhaul of the game in as many releases, and they got it just about perfect this time.

  The battle system is totally different but fun, the leveling-up system intricate but not excessively so, and most important of all, the story is interesting. Though the game (from some plot points to the visuals) bears an uncanny but not uncomfortable resemblance to Star Wars—from Balthier (Han Solo) and Fran (a sexy version of Chewbacca), to Ashe (Leia) and Vaan (Luke Skywalker’s annoying little brother)—its got enough dimension and high enough production value to remain original. A must-have for any RPG-lover, which I am. Speaking of which, I hear the game calling me; see ya.

I’m no expert—definitely not of the same caliber as my fantasy-football-playing sister—but a few important things happened yesterday in the world of football:

• The Bears won a cleanly-played, hard-fought game against Eric Mangini’s formidable Jets.
• The undefeated Colts lost a game to Tony Romo and the Cowboys, which brings them back on par with the Bears, tied at 9-1 for the best record in the league.
• Both Green Bay and Minnesota, tied for runner-up in the NFC North, lost games yesterday—Green Bay in humiliating fashion, along with suffering a potentially debilitating QB injury—keeping that competition alive and creating a more-than-comfortable buffer for #1 in that division, the Bears.
• Donovan McNabb is out for the rest of the season with a torn ACL, probably taking Philadelphia out of serious playoff contention. Poor guy.

What does this all mean? Good news for the Bears, that’s what. Regardless of this information, though, next week’s game against the ever-dangerous Patriots will be hugely important.

Speaking of which, I was down on my knees thanking the NFL gods yesterday for the new flexible schedule. I had originally, due to high air travel volume, only been able to get a post-Thanksgiving flight back to SF from Chicago smack-dab in the middle of the early game, which, wouldn’t you know it, was when the Bears-Pats game was scheduled. In a stroke of divine intervention, though, that game has now been moved to the afternoon slot, which means that while I may miss kickoff and the first few minutes of the first quarter, I’ll be able to catch most of the game instead of missing almost all of it. Game ON.

That is all.

but I didn’t realize when I woke up this morning that I’d be plumbing the depths of mine today. Let me explain. It all started a few weeks ago, on my birthday. Being the bookworm that I am, I’m a member of the Borders frequent buyers’ club, and they’d very considerately sent me a 15% off one item coupon in honor of said birthday. It was set to expire today, November 12, and of course I hadn’t gotten around to using it yet.

A few weeks ago, they opened a brand new, ritzy shopping center—called Westfield—in downtown San Francisco, which happened to have a brand new Borders in it. So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone. Well, three: check out the new shopping center, go spend my coupon, and eat lunch at the fancy-schmancy food court in Westfield’s basement.

But I didn’t reckon on three things:

1. Today is a Sunday.
2. In November, which is the month before December, which in Latin means “shopping madness”.
3. “Shopping center” is a euphemism for “mall”.
4. I hate the mall.

Okay, four things.

My first clue—that I should just turn around and go back home, that is—should have been the massive crowds pouring out of the Powell Street BART station. But I remained stubbornly optimistic; they couldn’t all, or even most, be going to the brand new shopping center in downtown SF on a Sunday just before the holiday season, could they? They could.

My second clue should have been the throng, the absolute throng, that was in front of every food court station when I passed through. It’s just the lunch-time crowd, I thought; I’d just come back down in an hour or so, when it was less crowded.

My third clue, after a little more than an hour spent in Borders, by which time I felt I was starving, should have been the very pleasant and very color-coordinated Filipino lady at the register, who nevertheless was obviously new and couldn’t seem, for the life of her, to figure out how to scan my 15% off coupon.

My business finally concluded at Borders—the lavender lady, never having figured out how to scan my coupon, just gave me a 20% discount off each item instead—and my stomach gnawing at my ribs, I made my way back down to the “Food Emporium” (I am not kidding; that is really what it’s called) in hopes that the crowds would have thinned a little and I’d be able to get my lunch and and an empty table in short order.

The crowds had thinned somewhat, but that just meant that the volume of people was such that I wasn’t forced to apologize to someone every two seconds for bumping into them. It was every four seconds, instead. A few minutes later, as I sat at a table eating my chicken sandwich, serenaded by the ear-splitting shrieks of an infant in the arms of his grim-faced father at the next table, my fourth clue arrived. I don’t know why I should have paid attention to this one, when I’d ignored the three perfectly good ones that came my way earlier.

Anyway, as I sat there trying to finish my sandwich as fast as humanly possible while still taking time to, you know, breathe, all the while mentally composing this blog post, I realized that I’d found suburban hell, right in the middle of downtown San Francisco. Right on the heels of that thought came this one: Oh my god, make it stop. So I finished my sandwich and got the hell out of Dodge.

Outerbridge Horsey. No, really.

PS – A lot of people would have taken the high road on this one. But not me, oh, no. Who am I to assume that none of my readers are as juvenile as I am?

but for now, check out the new (to me, at least) Economist blogs, Democracy in America, whose name is self-explanatory, and Free exchange, their economics blog. Rockin’.

Also: nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, heh heh heh heh heh heh. Lieberman won the Connecticut Senate race. Decisively.