Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about flouting the law, botched first dates, jealous dickheads, and more.

Drew is off today. I have seized the means of funbagging and, as is my custom, forgotten to make use of them until the last second. With that in mind, let's get to...

Your dang letters:

Dan:

I was in a minor car accident back in June. Immediately after the accident I felt fine, but around two weeks after I started getting headaches and dizziness. Turns out the accident had given me a concussion, and I'm still dealing with the effects of it at the current time. It got me thinking, I know that I'm not a freak athlete and I don't have access to cutting edge healthcare, but how can they rush a guy back onto the field a week or two after suffering major concussions while I'm taking forever to recover from it?

I think the answer to this question pretty clearly is: Everyone everywhere knows that athletes are rushed back from concussions all the time—that the timeframes in which athletes return from concussion have basically no relationship whatsoever to the medical reality of a concussion. At best, what concussion screenings do in big-time sports is give the athlete a diagnosis, so that in theory their decision to return to play is an informed one and they share in responsibility for its consequences. In practice, even that seems like a sham to me, for the simple reason that a person who had their brain puréed 10 minutes ago is in no condition to make an informed decision about something as pressurized as whether to get back out there with their teammates. And that's not even getting into sub-concussive injuries, which might not meet some threshold to trigger a formal concussion protocol, but can and will fuck your brain up nonetheless.

Anyway, at times like this I like to remind myself that some of the most thrilling sporting events I've ever watched in my life involved one or more athletes repeatedly clambering to their feet after traumatic brain injuries and, within 20 seconds, scarcely able to stand and incapable of meaningfully protecting themselves, going right back to getting punched in the head. Makes me feel real good about myself.

Monte:

As a veteran of Downtown Living, I blatantly and unabashedly jaywalk all the time. Obviously no one really cares so long as there are no close calls and this includes the local police, but I still feel that hesitance when I am in plain sight of a cop.

This got me thinking about what other small offenses I will commit in front of a cop. What is the most you are willing to try to get away with while The Man is present?

I think I sowed most of my doing-illegal-shit-in-front-of-cops oats before I was even 24 years old, just due to the various beater cars I drove to and from shitty minimum-wage jobs fucking always having expired registration, or dead tags, or a busted taillight, or no headlights, or all of the above. Half of the time my license was suspended due to failure to pay the fines associated with getting constantly pulled over for that type of shit. Going to work was an illegal thing to do in plain sight of a cop. Being visible felt like committing a crime.

If I saw a police cruiser 10 cars in back of me on the Beltway, I'd break out into a cold sweat, start praying, and begin creeping over to the right as inconspicuously as possible so I could take the next exit. I avoided certain known bottlenecks around the D.C. area because I knew sometimes cops would park on the shoulder where traffic slowed and flag down cars with visible violations. One time when I was like 22 I got pulled over by a Virginia State Trooper (nightmare) on my way home when I knew my license was suspended, and by the time he'd even made the walk to my driver's side window I had to get out of the car and barf on the ground from stress. Those years were super fuckin' stressful! Being poor is exhausting and you get punished for it everywhere you turn and cops are the punishers.

In my adult life I give cops a wide berth, even now that I am a middle-aged white guy driving a minivan and thus basically invisible to them. They're juiced-up militarized creeps and the sight of them freaks me out. Hell, the sight of a late-model white Ford Explorer, the cop car of choice around where I live, kinda freaks me out. I don't even want help from a cop. If I know I am in a cop's line of sight, the only thing I want to do is get out of it.

Aaron:

I am a decent cook, as in the food usually tastes good when I make it. I can follow new recipes, make some from memory, and do a decent amount of experimenting for my vegan partner with results ranging from "really fucking good" at best to "eh, it's fine" at worst. But, I am the slowest cook of all time. If I'm preparing a meal for 3+ people it is going to be a three-hour ordeal at minimum. Everything takes way longer than I think and I can't ever get the timing right so that everything is ready at the same time. Is this a case of being too exacting, or are there some skills/techniques to speed up the cooking?

Without knowing what you're cooking I can't diagnose your issue. For this reason you must host me at your home for dinner. Several times. To avoid sample-size problems.

Cooking simpler stuff might shave some time. Cooking the kind of foods that you sear or grill over insane thermonuclear heat will go quicker than, like, stirring a pot of polenta for eternity. Cooking one-pot meals so that there aren't three different things that need to be ready at the same time can cut down on the time spent actively doing cooking tasks, since you won't have to work out how to stagger a bunch of disconnected processes in limited space. Nuking a hot dog will take less than a minute.

But also: It's fine for cooking to take a while. It's fine! I will just plan on arriving a little later. Your effort is worth it to me, whereas I do not care about your time at all.

Luca:

So I work for this restaurant as a host and I often find myself walking around the restaurant, grabbing take out orders, checking for empty tables, etc. The other day I was walking around the restaurant and I noticed a couple sitting. They seemed to be on their first date, but I couldn't really tell, but let's just assume they were. The guy was probably 28, the girl was maybe 26-27.

I was walking back to my host stand when I noticed the guy had pulled out his phone and was showing the girl a clip of his old high school football highlights. Not only that, he was giving her a step-by-step analysis of what was going on and obviously pointing himself out in the video. The classic skit where the guy is stuck on his high school memories, showing off his highlights that no one cares about.

Now, I couldn't tell you the context of how this occurred because I'm not sure, maybe she asked about it and was truly interested. But to me that blew the guys chances of a second date. What do you think, is that standard first date etiquette that I'm not aware of or should I have snatched his phone and dumped it in water to help his chances?

In 2002 I was absolutely crazy about this gorgeous, brilliant, inconceivably cool girl who worked at the same bookstore I did and was like 50 million miles out of my league and had a boyfriend who was tall and charming and handsome. After we'd worked together for a few months she broke up with her boyfriend and we went out on a date in D.C. and when we came out of the movie (Bowling for Columbine, which was already an F-minus first-date choice) I couldn't remember where I'd parallel parked my car out there in the weirdly angled streets radiating out from Dupont Circle. Like ... at all.

This was in late autumn and it was cold and dark and she started having (and trying to hide) an asthma attack while we were walking around looking for the car and I was silently cursing myself to burn in hell for eternity. After what was probably less than half an hour but felt much longer, I happened to glance to my right and like ... way the fuck over there, halfway around a corner, I saw the car in a spot where I had not even considered looking.

An hour later I was dropping her off at her apartment, and we kissed, and for no reason at all I started laughing mid-kiss. Laughing.

We've been married for more than 18 years.

Let the man cook.

HALFTIME!

Joe:

I'm a huge baseball fan and I'm always perplexed when someone tells me to my face how much they hate baseball or how boring it is. I mean I can't stand soccer but I would never tell someone who is a huge fan to their face how much I hate it. I have the social skills to change the subject or end the conversation. How come this is an exclusive problem to baseball? I'm a huge basketball fan as well and no one has ever told me to my face the NBA regular season is too long or the sport is boring.

Faulty premise! Americans do this constantly with soccer. People get outright disgusted about it. Like they think you're lying, or like you told them you like to eat hair. Ugh, really? It's like watching paint drying. How can you stand all the flopping? If I want to watch guys do nothing for 90 minutes I'll go to the DMV.

I do think in some cross-sections of the populace it feels a little safer to bag on baseball, for a few different reasons. One, baseball is more regionalized than the other huge sports in the U.S., so there are places where it might seem like some weird Texas curio or whatever, an artifact of some far-off and vaguely alien Americana.

Two, baseball genuinely is kind of a weird game relative to the other major sports! To people who do not understand it, it can seem like the game where a bunch of guys in pajamas stand perfectly still for three hours and old people get mad at some of them for no reason.

Thirdly, there is the perception (continually reinforced by institutional baseball treating its sport like it is its own worst enemy) that baseball is on the wane in American culture, which makes it seem like a safer target for derision than, for example, soccer, whose most fanatical haters must concede at least seems to be growing in popularity. People are front-runners sometimes. They want to like the thing that is on the rise, and they like to scoff at the thing that is on the decline.

Fourth, institutional baseball has been, for longer than any American has been alive, incredibly smarmy and sepia-toned about itself and its history and its place in American culture, and people resent that as hotly as they hold any complaint about the sport itself, and they want to see it taken down a peg.

And finally, many of baseball's most famous guys are wet and gross-looking and have disgusting hair situations and have the personal charisma and magnetism of a tub of creatine and people who are not dedicated baseball fans can't even name any of them.

Anyway, baseball rocks.

Robert:

A couple months ago my entire department was laid off. Don't feel too bad for me, I got a decent severance package and I found a new gig already. I know I'm fortunate and that's not why I'm here.

My problem is this: For the past few years I had a work friend who I talked to every day, we sat by each other at work, we'd eat our lunches together, occasionally an after-work drink. Our coworkers would joke that she was my "work wife" but it was always platonic.

Anyway, she recently got engaged and she let me know that her husband-to-be doesn't want us hanging out anymore. He didn't mind us being work friends, but when I asked her to meet for a lunch one day during the time we were both unemployed he became upset.

I guess my question is, is this to be expected? Is he an asshole? Should I just let this go? It really sucks to lose a friend like that but I don't really know what to do about it. I was thinking maybe I'd invite both of them to do something, all three of us, so he can get to know me and see I’m not a threat. Is that weird?

Stipulating that I don't know what the deal is between your friend and her husband-to-be (for the sake of due diligence, I have to allow that there could be some kind of complicating but un-fucked-up circumstance, even if I can't think of one), this is a big red flag and this dude is a huge asshole.

If he doesn't trust her enough to be OK with her having a platonic friendship—if he doesn't trust that when she says it's platonic, she's telling the truth, or he doesn't trust that she has the wherewithal to maintain healthy boundaries around a friendship—then he has no business marrying her. And in no fucking case whatsoever is it appropriate for him to ask her to drop a pre-existing friendship that hasn't harmed him in any way just because he's a jealous, paranoid little baby. That's his problem and he's making it hers. That will be a pattern for as long as they're together.

I'm a little bit disappointed in your friend for apparently agreeing to this bullshit, but people do foolish things to appease dogshit partners. By all means, invite them to do something together, in a good-faith effort to assuage this dickhead's paranoia, but it isn't going to work, because his paranoia isn't based on anything empirical or defensible in the first place, and if it was, the thing for him to do would be to break off the engagement.

What I think you should do, as a true friend, is express to your friend that you're concerned about a guy who deals with his feelings of jealousy by restricting his fiancée's friendships, and you're worried about her, but you'll go along with whatever she thinks is best. Tell her you'll be sad to not be able to hang out anymore. Tell her also that even if you're not allowed to hang out anymore or whatever, you will still be available if she ever needs to talk about anything, because (don't say this part) this dude's controlling bullshit is going to swell and swell and crowd her even further into the hinterland of her own life and someday soon she will need all the friends she can get.

And if you get a chance, spit in this dude's coffee. He's a sack of shit.

It's Lightning Round Time:

Nick:

What do you think about audiobooks? There are so many books I want to read, including many classics I had to read in high school. I mainly just don't love to read, but also I can't find the time. So I have been squeezing in audiobooks while driving or doing work around the house, sometimes an hour, sometimes 10 minutes.

So, I know an audiobook is better than no book, but do I miss something by not actually reading? Is there a case to be made that someone else dictating the pace and inflection is better? Especially if the author is the reader?

Fun fact: "The Count of Monte Cristo" audiobook is 43+ hours long!

Eh, I'm sure you're missing some of the value of reading the text yourself, which forces you to do all the work, both of comprehending it as language and of imagining it as a story. But if the alternative is simply not experiencing that book, then listen to the dang audiobook! What am I, your English teacher? Go to hell!

Pete:

In the summer, I use a clothesline to dry my clothes. Just my clothes, not wife's, nor kid's clothes. Backyard is a typical suburban yard, with houses on each side, and back, of ours. My wife is horrified that I do this. She said that she couldn't ever do it, because everyone would see her undergarments, to which I responded, "Who cares if people see my boxers?" Is this unreasonable? My arguments are that it saves money and it is a better use of environmental resources.

Insofar as I understand your wife's argument to be "I, personally, would not be comfortable doing this," and yours as "I, on the other hand, am comfortable doing this," and you are not clotheslining her clothes and she is not stopping you from clotheslining your own, I have decreed that you are both right.