Random stuff

I don't have much to say other than my normal daily activity updates. You already know about Saturday morning, and it turns out the rest of that day was mostly just me sleeping. It turns out that when I don't have anything better to do and I wind up horizontal, terrible things ensue. I must have woken up three times and thought to myself I have had plenty of sleep, I should start doing things. And then I didn't. I think I lost a bit too much motivation when I knew I did that poorly on my quiz. But eventually I made it to frisbee on Sunday, with very little happening in the intervening time. Unfortunately, nothing really awesome happened at frisbee. I did have one pretty ridiculous sky, but it loses something in the retelling because I know the person I skied probably wasn't very good anyway. It was sort of cool though, because I went up for it pretty early, and then it got caught a bit by the wind and hovered a little longer. In what the press is calling a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, I had jumped even higher than I needed and barely got a hold of the disc before beginning my descent. Or maybe I got high enough that the guy underneath me supported my weight briefly. Either way, it felt awesome. (I'm going to gloss over the part where I threw really, really poorly (blaming it on my sore shoulder from handball) because it turned out that almost every time I turned it over, I wound up getting the D back. It was actually really funny, because I know I'm not good at D, but my intramural teammates have no clue. Yay for low standards!)

Yesterday I got my quiz back, and it turned out I did even worse than I thought, so that was pretty awful. It's even more frustrating, because I sit in class and shake my head and facepalm when my classmates just can't get to the conclusion the teacher is fishing for, but I also know the person saying wrong thing after wrong thing probably got a better score than I did on the quiz. I know it's hard to believe, me being level-headed and totally noncompetitive, but it actually does get under my skin a bit. I didn't really do much else yesterday. Which explains why I didn't post here, I suppose. I did have a nice talk with Sarah S, which was especially awesome because she hadn't talked to me on the weekend and I was sure she would be too busy studying for her huge tests she said she had this week, but she made time for it and I was very grateful. (I know she's reading, so I just wanted to emphasize.) I'm probably pretty obviously hard up for company, so an apology in advance to all the people I'm bound to annoy while avoiding getting to know people here.

One thing Sarah said was that she was surprised about how much I had written and how hard I seemed to take the break-up. I forget exactly how she put it, but the gist of it was that I didn't seem invested/committed/in it for the long haul, at least to her. I said I was also surprised how hard it hit me. I had been bracing for it for a while, since it was obvious things weren't going well and I couldn't think of what to do. But maybe that was also part of the problem. When I said that I didn't think it mattered at that point since Rebecca hadn't felt attracted to me for quite some time, Sarah mentioned that she knew she didn't feel attracted to someone unless they were also obviously invested in the relationship. So there's yet another perspective to add to the collection of viewpoints I'm amassing regarding where things went wrong.

Today, school was boring. I made a pancake for breakfast, which was delicious, and then to top it off, my morning instructor brought in breakfast for the whole class! Now, I wasn't that hungry, and I knew I didn't need to eat a delicious bagel, but I'm reverting back into college mode, where you don't think twice about free food. So I grabbed a bagel with some sort of fruit pieces sticking out of it and started spreading the nearest cream cheese on it. I was marveling at the awesome coincidence that I had, by pure chance, grabbed a cream cheese that also had fruit in it when I realized... I was putting garden vegetable cream cheese on my fruity bagel! I went with it, because I do not admit making mistakes. And you know what? It wasn't that bad. It wasn't fantastic, but the zest sort of complimented the fruitiness. Or so I shall continue to tell myself until the end of time.

Class happened, which is all I can really say about that. We are talking about some interesting cases, but the fact we keep dragging things on overshadows the thought-provoking things that could potentially be happening. We're discussing negligence in Torts, which from what I can tell is basically the basis for every single lawsuit brought ever. We've had cases where kids die from being hit in the head by a backswing of a baseball pitch, cases where people get hit by cars while pushing buggies full of junkyard debris, cases where horse and buggies get hit by cars, cases where garbage trucks run over children playing under gigantic sheets of paper, cases where people are liable for untying boats, cases where people are liable for tying boats, cases where people let barges drift free and sink. The whole gamut of things, really. And it turns out every single one boils down to whether or not a reasonable person could have been expected to act differently. What changes are the things we take into account when deciding how a person should have acted. So all sorts of "excuses" come into play, like age, handicaps, even the weather. The boat examples, for instance, were both predicated on the weather conditions, but one was exculpated because it was in protection of human life, whereas the other was found liable because they prioritized their own property over the dock to which they anchored their boat. The garbage truck was found liable, not because he was irresponsible in running over a kid, but because he tried to avoid it (thinking there might be glass or something else bad for his tires) and his failure to do so pointed toward negligence (not taking proper precautions) in a transferable way.

In contracts we are talking about the concept of consideration, which is a necessary component of every contract. Basically it's the collateral that holds the contract together. In a court's eyes, if the parties aren't giving something up as a way to make sure the promise is kept, they aren't serious enough to be bound by the contract. The weird thing is, a court can basically find consideration anywhere when it suits them, and fail to find it when they don't think the contract should hold. In one case a business gave away some treated ash to a construction company whose project wound up going poorly and who then had to pay to dispose of the ash. Now, if the ash was a gift, there wouldn't be a contract and the construction company couldn't recover the cost of disposal they incurred by taking the ash, but the court found consideration in the fact that the original ash people (I think we should just start calling them that. It's easier to type, and pretty hilarious) were looking to dispose of the ash, and thus benefited from the resulting "contract" to take it away. Because they advertised for people to take it, they induced the company to do so, and the court somehow found that to be enough to find in favor of the construction company. So basically the court makes up its mind about what they think happened and who should have to pay, and then justify it however they can. Law is weird.

Anyway, school happened, then I played handball at a new place. It's called St. Anthony's, and it's handball/racquetball specific! It's sort of a hole in the wall (as much as a place with huge racquetball courts can be), and consists of three courts, a locker room, and a hangout/bar/lounge area. It's sort of like a huge man cave for handball players. It's pretty great. It's nice to not have to walk to some unused area of a rec facility, passed all the people using exercise equipment to play a sport nobody really understands. Everyone at this place is interested in what's going on. I liked the atmosphere a lot. Also, the back walls are opaque, and boy have I missed that. I got to make some pretty incredibly, floor-scraping gets back there because I didn't have to worry about losing the ball in the glass. Brian was even more frustrated than usual, at one time even saying "You're going to miss something some day..." Then we played doubles, and I got to play on the left because I was playing with another right-handed guy. And I was killing it! (Handball joke! I'm hilarious...) I'm just way more comfortable on the left side. Shots off the right wall are setups, shots that come around the corner are more setups, and shots down the middle are to my dominant hand, making it easier to cut more things off. Then I paired up with the guy I'm playing with this weekend and things just felt incredibly awkward the whole time. I missed pass shots, I didn't know what to expect because his style is a bit different than mine, and I wound up having to leave shots to him that he couldn't put away, but that I couldn't take without putting us both way out of position.

So it was a mixed night. I destroyed all my singles opponents and felt amazing on the left side, but I'm apprehensive for this weekend. I think my plan will just be to focus on singles and play doubles by ear. It should be fun no matter what.

Well, I hate to say it, but I have homework to do, so I'll have to cut this short before any poetry manifests. However, I would like to say that my professor wore a suit jacket thing with a zipper instead of buttons. It was very distracting. She made a valiant effort, but I don't think anyone could pull it off. It's weird how a small variation (what fastens a jacket) can look so weird.

Oh! And I was passed by another bicyclist for the very first time yesterday. And in the classic way these things always seem to go, he pulled away for about ten meters and then slowed down significantly. See, it was pretty windy while we went over the bridge (slight change in elevation), and I guess he's competitive in the same meaningless way I am. So, naturally, I burned him. And I passed him riding no hands just to rub it in because I'm a jerk. Satisfaction in the silliest places, I suppose. And with that, I'm off. Thanks for reading!