The NFL is ruining my life.

I didn’t always feel this way. Rewind to 2010. Freshman-me is probably drunk and knows nothing about football, but The Doors on Maple knows nothing about checking IDs, and I am well-studied at knowing how to scream when other people are screaming. This is how girls who hate football pretend to like football, and, in the process, accidentally fall in love with football. Or maybe it was just the Saints.

Then we won.

If you don’t remember, trust me: it was epic. I was epic. You were epic. You dragged furniture into the streets and set it on fire. You flipped cars with your bare hands, your champion hands. Hell froze over, but you didn’t need a jacket. It was the happiest night of your life.

So now we get to host the 2013 Super Bowl, and that’s cool – I GUESS. It’s actually economically beneficial that the Saints won’t be playing this one. Having two visiting teams means twice as much fresh tourist money flowing into the city.

Where it gets annoying is when the NFL starts trying to pull nonsense like copywriting “Who Dat,” or regulating where attendees may acquire Saints gear or how Bourbon Street businesses do their thing. Firstly, Who Dat cannot be owned, and the NFL does not make fleur-de-lis bomber jackets and bikini sets tacky enough to accommodate our local tastes anyhow. This isn’t Micky D’s. Our nuggets are not the nuggets of America.

I just feel played. We’ve sacrificed our mobility in spit-shining our archaic streetcars, all so tourists can come puke on them. Piece-by-piece, we’ve restored these dinosaurs, filling in the blanks with a shuttle that runs faster than the streetcar, and yet makes up for its speed by waiting a good ten minutes to show up and take off where the streetcar left you. This isn’t even the annoying part. What annoys me is how the tourists get annoyed, always in the exact same way: same confusion, same stupid looks and questions. Don’t they know we do it all for them? Because they think streetcars are “cute?”

The NFL is making me late for everything. If you feel inconvenienced now, just wait until we get that Super Bowl traffic: non-local license plates, far as the eye can see. It won’t be the traffic jams of 2010, when we all carpooled our way toward the Quarter, bumper-to-bumper. Worst traffic ever, but nobody road-raged. Our Saints won. We turned up our sound systems and danced out the windows.

2013 won’t do that for us, so let’s make that tourist dollar count. Smile big. Waiters, you wait. Bartenders, pour hard. Let’s rob them blind. NFL’s got nothing on the service industry.

Chacha Murdick can be reached at [email protected]