Where we sat on the 15th green! Such an awesome view!

A tradition unlike any other, The Masters is not only a symbolic event in golf, but in all of sports and culture as a whole. When my boyfriend told me two weeks before that he had scored badges to the Masters, which is pretty difficult to do, I couldn’t have been more excited. Every middle-aged man I told was incredibly jealous and one of my friends was quite confused that I was so excited, she thought I had been invited to play.

I was already planning on going to Georgia for Easter and the dates worked out perfectly. We were originally going Sunday but when we got at a call early Friday morning asking if we’d like to go that day instead, we decided to ditch our plans and drive the 3 hours to Augusta.

One last picture before leaving the phones in the car

Plenty has been written about Augusta National and while I was a bit hesitant at first, I do not mind the way this tournament is run. Once I finally got over that it’s nearly impossible to sneak a phone or camera in, I realized what a freedom I felt from technology. At Augusta, you play by their however old-fashioned, rules but they reward you with great golf and $3 beer! In fact they don’t even tell you what type of beer you’re drinking. You get three choices: Domestic, Import, or Light beer. I can pretend for a few days I don’t care about women being members as long as I’m allowed to come to this magnificent event.

The greens are immaculate, the scenery picturesque, and the crowds with an air of Southern prestige they are completely unapologetic for. I even found myself judging everyone who filed passed in the aisle: “I can’t believe that guy is wearing a patchwork belt. Pleasseeee, he probably got that on sale.” It might have been the beer and pimento cheese, but hey, I was having a hell of a good time.

We spent most of the day perched on the 15th green but made our way walking across a majority of the course as well. No visit to Augusta is complete without a stroll passed their gorgeous clubhouse (that I’ll absolutely never get to go inside). I walked away with no pictures of the day, no souvenirs for myself, but have some wonderful memories which are even more valuable to me. I cannot wait to go back!

In Arizona, January 2012

There are an infinite amount of ways to meet your significant other but I never thought mine would be through twitter. What started as a series of semi-professional DMs, blossomed into a full-blown romance. The reactions I get from people are totally mixed, but I don’t care because sometimes there are things too crazy to even try to explain.

Many of you know that I work as a part of a social media team that operates under Darren Rovell. We are constantly telling each other to follow certain people on twitter who we think are similar to the group. In mid October, @EliFromBrooklyn sent the team an email telling us to follow @Bairet. As with most of my new follows, I try to establish some sort of relationship (because you never know how these people are going to be able to help you in the future). I sent him a quick DM in response to one of his tweets and we started chatting back and forth.

This went on constantly for a few days until we started texting instead. A few weeks later, I was on my way to @AmandaRykoff’s birthday party at a bar in the West Village. I was underaged, alone, and had never met her before. I was so nervous that I called about 7 different people, none of whom picked up the phone. Finally I called Bairet and he calmed me down. After that night we began talking every day for several hours.

A week later I went home for the weekend and hung out with a new guy who I really liked. Whenever I wasn’t with this other guy, I was on the phone with Bairet. By this point we had become really good friends and could talk for hours without getting bored. Little did I know that we would talk until 2am and he had to get up for work at 4:30am. How he survived on so little sleep for that month, I’ll never know. My interest in this other guy slowly faded and I began to realize how much I was falling for Bairet. For weeks we played this game of saying we were “just friends” even though we knew deep down that it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

One Saturday in early December, I was working and incredibly bored. I started to look up flights to Atlanta, where he lived. Suddenly I realized how feasible this trip would be. I sent him a text asking if he’d like to have dinner that night. He said he wished we could and then I posed the idea: “so I have this rental car I have to return to the airport anyway. I was thinking that since I’m already there I might as well hop on a plane to Atlanta”. He was either going to think it was incredibly awesome or creepy, but I was hoping for the former. He was so excited by the possibility that we were determined to make it happen.

I was working until 5pm in Newark, NJ and trying to get on a 7:05pm flight out of LaGuardia. By the grace of God, in those two hours I managed to drive all the way back to Queens, shower, pack, and get to the airport in time to buy a last-minute plane ticket. I ended up pleading with several ticket agents to let me buy a ticket, even though it was only 30 minutes before take off. There are few times it is acceptable to run in an airport, but this is one of them. I made it on board.

He met me at the airport 2 hours later in Atlanta and it was even better than imagined. I was only there for a day and a half but I knew it was the start of something very special. Plenty of my friends back home thought I was going to get murdered, but that had never stopped me before. We’ve seen each other multiple times since then with plenty of trips planned out for the future.

Being in a long distance relationship is never easy, but that’s what telephones and airplanes are for. I’ve heard every joke you can think of, “OMG WAS IT LOVE AT FIRST TWEET?!?” There’s plenty of speculation as to how this could ever work, especially from people who aren’t receptive to social media but I don’t care.

Sometimes “doing it for the story” is a good enough reason.

BONUS: He’s probably going to kill me for posting this, but he made me the most adorable video for Valentine’s Day: http://vimeo.com/36744843

Exhibit A

I’m a 20-year-old female and I genuinely like golf. I know you don’t usually hear those two things together, but it’s true. I grew up in Scottsdale, AZ, a notoriously big golf community. From when I was 9-14, my official mode of transportation was my family’s golf cart and I’ve spent countless nights over at former Ryder Cup captain, Tom Lehman’s house (I grew up with both his daughters). I live 5 miles from the most attended golf tournament on the PGA Tour and my dad is a golf fiend, so for me, liking golf is only natural.

That being said, WHAT THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO WEAR GOLFING?!!? My largest complaint with women’s golf attire is that there is no way to be comfortable, functional, and attractive all at once. Grantland did a great post on this in August but that got a bit wordy. I’m back in Arizona and my dad wants to go to the driving range. I’ve got plenty of pairs of khakis, but it’s sunny and 77 degrees so that’s not going to work. When I tweeted about this problem, one of my followers suggest capris but where is the sex appeal in that? As one of male friends says, men don’t like capris because they make women “look like they have short legs and big feet.” OK, so capris are out. Well then what about shorts?

“Men wear golf shorts all the time, let’s make the leg slimmer and we’ll sell them in women’s sizes!” -golf shorts designers. 

I’m pretty sure women’s golf clothing designers (who absolutely must be men) are responsible for the fashion disaster known as the “Bermuda short”. It’s that awkward looking leg piece that looks like pants — but they stop at the knee. It’s a giant question mark of fashion, yet people continue to wear them. For women, there is very little way around the Bermuda short because once your shorts get much above the knee, you are entering into a dangerous question of “how short is too short?’

Bad, bad, bad, bad.

Options for tops don’t get much better. For as much as I love men’s golf polos, women’s polos are a disaster. Whomever okay’d these shirts never tried to swing a golf club. Why are the sleeves so tight? Why is the shirt so boxy? Why is it so short, you can see half my stomach when I swing? Just as the designers learned for the men 20+ years ago, you can have style AND functionality. All I’m asking for is a polo that somewhat alludes to the idea that I am a woman and is longer than my belly button.

As much as I enjoy watching and playing golf, I realize the potential it adds to my future. People in business who play golf get promoted faster than people who do not, purely because it is an extra networking advantage. I want to show my peers that not only can I kick their ass on the course, I can look good doing it. All I’m asking for is a little help. Here’s my suggestions on how to make golf attire for women better:

Fix the polo: Clothing should always be tight enough to show you’re a woman, but loose enough to show you’re a lady. Cinch in the waist a bit, make the sleeves more flattering, add another button in the chest. Some simple measures can go a long way. If you are already charging us $60 for a polo I hate, I’d rather buy one that at least makes me look good.

Give us colors that aren’t pink: If men can wear golf attire that is every color/print, then so can women. Golf attire stylists seem to think that women only want to buy black, khaki, white, and light pink. Throw me some orange, blue, green, yellow, red! I’ll buy it! And I’m not just talking about pastels, I want bright, vibrant colors. Gone are the days of polite on the golf courses, I want people to notice me!

Lower profile shoes: Stop making women’s golf shoes so bulky! Goofy white golf shoes do not look nice with my pink pastel capris!

Ok, maybe this is a little extreme.

Shorter shorts/more skirts: give us more options (that are not khaki) but please, please stop making us look stupid.

Ditch the visor: Dear God, this one applies to all of humanity.

MARKET: There are a lot of women golfers out there with the same gripes as me. When a company finally gets their act together for women golfers, they need to market the hell out of it. Magazines, TV, internet, everything. There are a ton of serious female golfers out there who want to look attractive on the course, and we shouldn’t have to choose between style and function.

Or maybe we just want to show off for a guy, but hey, they won’t complain!

Do you golf? What do you wear? What do you want to see women wear? Is it about sex appeal or comfort? Comment below or tweet me @MerKenyon!

Top of Camelback Mountain, facing west

My family has never been outdoorsy people (truthfully, I’ve never been camping), but we’ve always been avid hikers. Whenever a friend comes to visit, I do two things with them: take them to In-n-Out Burger and take them hiking. While there are many other (and closer) places to hike in Phoenix, nothing offers quite the views of Camelback Mountain. While I had this whole blog post planned out about how I would talk about how climbing a mountain is a metaphor for life, instead I’m just going to post the picture and be done with it. Another day, friends.

I was a baby fetus in this photo.

I’ve always felt a bit lost in terms of college football. Having grown up in the Phoenix metro area, my dad’s company had a suite at ASU football games which we used frequently. This was great when I was younger, until the Sun Devils became just awful a few years ago.

Now, as a St. John’s student, I attend a school that got rid of its football team 10 years. The Big East is notoriously awful at football so I’ve struggled to follow along when I’m not really that involved. When you don’t have a team, it’s hard to care, no matter how much you like the sport.

Today, as I watched some great bowl games I was reminded that I’m still searching for a college football team to call my own. I refuse to jump on a school’s bandwagon because I’m a big believer in justified fanhood. So someday I hope to have an NCAA football team to call my own, but until then I will continue to watch impartially. Sigh.

P.S. My fan-dome is absolutely for sale. Want me to support your school? Feel free to bribe me (in a way that definitely violates NCAA rules).