Some stuff and some pictures

Desperation breeds creativity.

I am almost never desperate. I think I've gotten to the point where I don't stress that much over things (yes, this statement is too general and there are plenty of exceptions; let's keep it in context), and this has led to this problem where I don't feel like I'm brimming with creativity. I usually just assume things will work out. I also think it contributes to my procrastination. That feeling of desperation, that knowledge that I have to think on the fly and be correct the first time is quite appealing. This weekend will be a test for me, I think, because I have resolved to read sections of the USC until my eyes bleed. I have my second quiz on Friday for Civil Procedure, and now that I know it's all memorization and not based on theory or case law, I will prepare accordingly. It's annoying that I am still being tested on things in this manner, but I suppose when it comes to procedural guidelines, there might not be a much better way. It doesn't really matter why the guidelines exist so much as it matters that you know all the applicable laws and the ways they interact. There are so many ways to get a case thrown out of court! It's crazy.

So after I play handball on Saturday, that's my plan. I'm going to curl up with a nice book (a really bad book) and a nice glass of cocoa (orange juice) and wile away the day (try as hard as possible to not use my phone every five minutes to distract myself). I've actually been doing that a bit recently, though. On my way back from Fargo I only had my civil procedure book, my phone, and my iPad for entertainment, and my phone was low on batteries. Then I remembered that when I was in Toronto I had a lot of time on my hands without internet. Fascinatingly enough, there are these things called "fiction books" that people have been using for entertainment for quite some time, and I still had the next book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series that I hadn't finished on my iPad. So I read. And you know what, it was great. It's almost like I used to do that all the time of my own volition for a reason.

The only interesting thing that has happened in Civil Procedure recently is that one of the defendants in a case was... Valley West Mall! From West Des Moines, Iowa. In the 70's. Unfortunately the case itself was really boring again, but at least I'll remember it. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it so you can be as bored as I am! So the mall told a jewelry store they wouldn't allow any more than three jewelry stores in the mall. Then they were about to let a fourth jewelry store in the mall. Then the original jewelry store sued Valley West. Valley West tried to use a rule 19 defense, saying that the first jewelry store had to also sue the last jewelry store because of a technicality. Then the court said that that technicality didn't apply, because it would be stupid for them to also have to sue that last jewelry store (which would have gotten the case thrown out on jurisdictional grounds). The rule basically says that you have to sue everyone involved in a particular matter at the same time. Because Valley West losing this case would have direct consequences on their contract with the last jewelry store, they tried to claim that party was essential to the case. The court told them that it was none of the court's business that they had been irresponsible in entering into two stupid contracts at once. So Valley West Mall relied on a technicality as their sole means of defense and lost when that didn't work. Silly Iowans...

I'm watching Day[9] play a video game called Mirror's Edge while I write this. It's a game where you play a parkour runner and you die really easily (which means realistically (which makes it very distinct from most video games)). It looks fun, but it's also sort of distracting when he's falling off buildings all the time.

I made biscuits for breakfast on Wednesday!




They were delicious. The box said to leave them in the oven for 10-12 minutes, and I just opened the oven and they were perfectly done. And came off the pan perfectly! No spatula or anything required! They crumble really easily, but I managed to cut some in half and make egg and cheese sandwiches (last picture). (I took that picture before desecrating it with sriracha.) So I had two and a half biscuits with eggs and cheese, half of one with butter, and one with strawberry preserves and honey. Then I packed two with butter for lunch, and ate the last when I got back from school. An entire (almost) day's worth of food! They are so versatile too! They go with any dish, and about any topping. It's cool to be able to put rich food on them or sweet stuff, or just whatever. For instance, this morning I made them again due to lack of other options, and I put maple syrup on them. I figured it was still just pancake mix in a different form, and sure enough: delicious.

While we're on the subject of food, I guess I'll mention that I am completely out of it. All that's left is pasta and biscuit/pancake mix. Yesterday I ate the last of my tuna and, well, basically everything else. And peanut butter. Just plain peanut butter. Which I was eating with a fork, obviously.



Yesterday at handball there was a new guy. He was pretty athletic-looking and asked for a game. Everyone was getting ready to leave to watch hockey, so I said I'd stick around (a good excuse not to go out? don't mind if I do!) and give him a game. He said it was his last day of working out before the twin cities marathon this weekend. I tried not to win too easily, and found myself down 10-2 or something after not paying much attention. I served five or six aces in a row to put myself back in it and wound up winning 21-17 after trading points most of the rest of the time. He got out of the court and immediately laid down and made a show of catching his breath. I had been there for five hours at this point (granted, there are a lot of breaks between matches when people are feeling lazy (they are generally feeling lazy)). I asked why he didn't come more often and he cited his participation in break dance club, parkour, some sort of martial art, and the marathon, as well as night class. Quite a list. He's like 6'3" or taller, so I know one person I don't want to ever fight ever. He reminds me of this time a freshman showed up to our frisbee practice and was obviously just completely ripped. He was terrible at frisbee, but he was a shoe-in for if frisbee ever spontaneously morphed into a gladiator competition. This prompted a debate about our best seven players if we ever had to throw a gladiator line on the field. Frisbee was fun. Anyway, this new handball guy basically just is our gladiator line for handball. Luckily, handball players in general are a collection of people who would make terrible gladiators.

While I'm still thinking about handball, I figured I'd mention a nice little side effect of being good at something: I can wear whatever I want without people making fun of me! Nobody picks on the guy who just beat the other guy 21-2, 21-4 or whatever, even if his clothes don't fit. So with that in mind, this is what I wore to Fargo:

A women's large Great Britain frisbee jersey and Japanese shorts. I felt so foreign! And you can't see, but my shoes are also blue, and my socks are white and red. Just for good measure. I even brought along two pullovers, my grey one and my colorbiotics longsleeve warmup. The cycling warmup is actually awesome for handball because I can listen to music without having something flopping around in my pocket against my legs (because the pockets are in the back of cycling gear (for those who think I talk too much about sports and can't follow along (Sarah))). And that is white and red. So I was either a baller, or a huge jock-looking jerk...

I got to talk to Sarah for a decent chunk of time today finally, which was fantastic. And while I was doing that (since I can't really focus on typing and talking at the same time), I uploaded the pictures here. Then I got bored and got on facebook and unfriended a bunch of people I never talk to anymore. I dropped from 130-ish friends back down into double digits. It's weird which people you don't actually keep in contact with. And also weird which ones I still consider close enough that I might have to contact them again at some point. And which ones post interesting things to facebook enough that I don't want to unfriend them even though we obviously aren't friends anymore (or never were). Those were my basic criteria. It basically fell into the obvious groups of frisbee, handball, and magic, with a very few remnants of high school (and even fewer when you realize that most of those are also subsumed into the other categories). I remember that a lot of these people I added a while ago because I wanted to post a blog entry on my facebook and I wanted to get some more people to read it, and those were some people that were suggested by facebook that I actually didn't mind talking to, but now that this is basically just my journal, there's not really a reason to push for readership. I guess I could post my poetry blog up there every once in a while if I think I've written anything good...

Well, I have to post this and go grocery shopping, because unless I want a dinner of only peanut butter, I am in desperate need of food. Then tomorrow morning I will get my first look at the club I'm playing league for later this month! I'll try and get another something posted here about the weekend (and another poem), but hopefully I'm forcing myself to learn civil procedure for some non-negligible amount of time. Thanks for reading!

I don't really have anything to say

I was going to go home because I didn't really have anything to say. Then it turned out I forgot my keys in the computer, so now I'm here anyway, so I feel like I might as well post. But I still don't really have anything to say...

There are light switches on the end of every book shelf in our library.

My commute is one constitutional conversation long.

The characters on Bones keep saying VIN number. This is incredibly frustrating. It's a vehicle identification number number! Like ATM machines, HIV virus, PIN numbers, and other examples of RAS syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome).

In contracts we are talking more about enforcing promises, and in torts we are establishing the fact that being a doctor is the worst idea ever. We must have talked about at least five malpractice cases recently, and doctors just don't have it easy where the law is concerned. For example, doctors are sued for mistakes all the time, but what makes them liable in a tort is their failure to meet a standard established by others in their profession behaving reasonably. This seems reasonable, right? But in this case where a young-ish lady had glaucoma, her doctors didn't perform the necessary test to figure that out because in their profession that test wasn't required for people less than 40 years old. So they didn't do it, and then she sued them. The court found they were still guilty because the test is painless, so doing it incurs no risk to the patient. So even though they were operating at the standard that was nationally accepted, they were still found guilty because the court decided to increase that standard (seemingly arbitrarily).

This is also a problem for me because it's not as though there is no reason at all to refrain from performing the test. I'm sure the test costs something to perform, and the incidence rate of glaucoma in young people is minuscule, so unless every other young person agrees they want to have this test performed and to pay for it, I'm not sure asserting these doctors did anything wrong. If the court said they should have realized the necessity for the test from symptoms presented or something along those lines, I could see how that would point to negligent behavior, but what they said in their ruling was they "had a choice between finding for an innocent victim of glaucoma or specialized doctors," and they couldn't bring themselves to rule against a victim they knew was innocent, so they went the other direction.

There is an interesting note in my book with which I am sympathetic as well. It basically questions how we justifiably blame doctors. Firstly, the fact that you can't even find them guilty except for negligence is telling. It is just assumed that you can't sue a doctor for intentionally harming patients. By the very nature of their profession they are trying to help, so negligence is the only way to go about taking them to court. Taking this one step further, is it perhaps incorrect to hold them negligent in most situations? In order for negligence to be viable, you must prove a person had a duty, they breached that duty, and that there is a causal relationship between the breach of duty and the harm that resulted. But the book points out that this causation can be questioned, because is it really the doctor that is causing the harm, or is it the disease (or whatever their problem is), which is certainly not the fault of the doctor. The patient wouldn't be in the situation, obviously, if there wasn't something already wrong with them, and we are already willing to stipulate that doctors only want to help. Maybe court cases are actually good at sorting this out, generally, but, like my professor said, "we don't deal with the easy cases." So I suppose my perception could be warped by the stuff to which I'm exposed.

Another topic we are dealing with is what standard to apply when talking about a reasonable expert in a profession. Obviously we want to compare doctors to doctors, but what about cases where doctors just don't have the same access to technology, resources, or other necessary equipment? Do we hold the hospitals liable for not having enough funds, because a person could die for lack of a machine for sure. Originally the courts applied a standard of care that looked at people in similar positions, so a rural doctor would only be judged by his performance relative to other rural doctors. However, this presented major problems in that rural doctors could then get away with anything by just all deciding not to do a particular thing. Or by not testifying against each other if something went wrong. So now we use a national standard, which seems appropriate, but again, if we hold Hicksburg Community Hospital to the same level as Mayo Clinic, we are probably doing something wrong. It's a tough line to draw. Luckily, the court is supposed to look at the totality of the circumstances, and these "rules" can be explained by judges in ways that are supposed to uphold fairness, but that's not a perfect system by any means.

Well, I've watched all the new TV shows, and I am hungry. And I need to read a bit more stuff. And while I could perhaps do that here, for some reason it goes faster when I'm not in front of a computer. Until I get out my phone, of course.

I'm surprised at how little I miss a TV. I only really miss watching football (and probably other sporting events in other seasons), but it's really not a huge loss. I guess you just adapt to whatever you have. I am glad I found this computer lab though.

I played handball tonight, though it was mostly just for fun, since I was never really challenged. I can't wait for league to start later this month so I can be guaranteed a solid match at least once a week. It's pretty cool that I'm incredibly confident playing any of the people at the University though, since when I got here I readily acknowledged they were better than my previous competition, and now I'm beating them with scores similar to what I was winning with in Ames. I beat David 21-3 today, for example, and he's not a bad player by any means. I think I also adapt well to my opponent once I play them a few times, though, so it doesn't really help when you go into a match blind. Hopefully I can just get enough experience among different players here that I'll always have an analogous style to draw upon when I'm thinking about what will work against a brand new opponent.

Music Interrupted

I was expecting your call
while the rapper in my ear
rhymed seamless rhythm
quick and smooth
then halted.

And so did my breath
catch
my pulse
pause
as I snatched, possessive
and began to answer
already forming words
trembling
tongue-tipped
teetering.

I was ready to gush
ready to pour out
exuberance
over the slightest hint
overflowing the bowl
as your pittance
your single cornflake
doused in milk
dissolved
and dipped
over the edge
drained down the sink
as my words fell fruitless
filled excuseless
and meant all the less for it.

And then the rapper
resumed
his hitch a glitch
and I thanked the shoddy
spotty internet
for showing me my sham.

A long time ago in a galaxy as close as possible to this one (And by a long time ago I mean last week, which is a long time ago if you're a short-lived insect or something. Probably. Unless that's not how time is perceived. Because there's nothing to say that just because a thing lives less time that it perceives it as passing at a different rate. Although it certainly feels as though life passes more quickly as we get older (seasons seem to go by instead of individual months these days)), I fell asleep at 7:00 or 8:00. I had set my alarm for four hours in the future, because I wanted to be awake for Sarah's call from California to hear about her big tests, and I needed to do my laundry before my tournament. I woke up about ten hours later. I'm blaming iOS 7, the new download that made my phone ugly and is obviously conspiring against my alarm. I really need to start looking into these downloads! At least there are good features on this one, like a one-touch access to my flashlight, clock, calculator, volume, wireless, bluetooth, orientation lock, etc. But the display is sort of gross. Anyway, I made a pancake (with a moderate degree of success, still multiple pieces after flipping, but done to the point of deliciousness, and only two or three pieces instead of a million), and got my laundry done. It turned out that the washing machines were much smaller than I'm used to (I wonder if they're trying to make money off of that idea), so I did two loads simultaneously. Then I pulled out all of my stuff that dries quickly on its own and threw the rest in the drier. Then there was a lot of space in the drier. So I threw the rest in too! What a good deal. Two loads of laundry for the price of one drying cycle. Then it came out and it was all a bit damp. So I hauled it all back to my room, turned my fan on, and laid it out all over my bed, drawer handles, baskets, boxes, refrigerator, cupboards, sink, etc. I was particularly proud of one mechanism I devised whereby I looped the drawstring for my shorts through the handle of the refrigerator so it would hang at a different height than the stuff already on there, then stuck a fork through the drawstring to hold it in place, then stuck a pair of underwear on the fork. MacGyver's got nothing on me.

Then I did homework for a couple of hours (briefing cases for constitutional law and wishing I were dead rather than reading civil procedure). Because I was up for so long before class I actually didn't have any trouble staying awake. It was pretty cool. And then when I got back I ate a bunch and slept in the car on the way to the tournament. Oh, and I guess I haven't mentioned that I also played handball on Thursday. I lost a game to Brian, then beat him 21-0. It was pretty epic. He didn't even bother playing a tiebreaker. Then I played with the rest of the players (nobody else was very good, but I played for fun and made sure not to injure myself before my tournament) and called it a night a bit earlier than usual. Then the weekend happened, which I've already talked about. Then today happened, which was pretty typical except I had to decide between staying here and going to a lecture, staying here and not going to a lecture, going home and coming back, going home and studying, or some other options that probably existed. I opted to go home, but then realized I needed to mail my entry for next weekend in, so I wound up leaving so I could get that in the mail before 5:00. I got to eat dinner though, so I arrived set and ready to blog for hours. Then House of Cards got distracting (a guy actually died as the result of politics (and murder, I suppose (probably mostly died of murder))), and it took me a long time to write that last post. And now I'm just cleaning out the notes I've made in my phone since I last posted. With that in mind, here's a machine-gun style account of a few of them:

I bought pork chops the other day. I don't usually buy pork because for some reason the idea of eating pigs is less appealing than the idea of eating cows and chickens. Then it turned out I don't like pork chops. It also turns out they are amazing with asian plum sauce. Go figure. So pork exists only insofar as there is plum sauce in my book. (Hot dogs aren't pork, for the record. They are a category all their own, and they are alternatingly delicious and repulsive. But when I'm in the mood for one, it's fantastic.)

I had a choice between pickle varieties a while ago. There were the classic "Kosher Dills," which I habitually grabbed and put in the receptacle. Then, I saw them. For the exact same PPO (price per ounce, for the less obsessively frugal (and less obsessively acronymistic)), I could purchase Polish Dills. I could not resist. I simply had to know what mystery these pickles held inside their bumpy, yet crispy exteriors. What were the Jewish people afraid of? Or were they simply impolite? My interest was piqued. (Spoiler alert: there is absolutely no difference.)

I was talking to Greg about our backgrounds coming into law. He's from the hard sciences (biomedical engineering), and I'm from the opposite. He said it was annoying how vague things seemed with the law, how there wasn't a right answer, and that frustrated him somewhat. I, on the other hand, find it a relief. The clarity is a fantastic change of pace from philosophy. The judges writing the opinions actively want you to know what they are saying! In philosophy it was a guessing game half the time to even get at the point, much less the conclusion (if there was one). And in philosophy you don't even need to be making "a point." You can simply be making an observation about something in a different way than is conventional, showing a new viewpoint but not drawing conclusions for it/from it yet. In law, they have to give a verdict. There is a reason they use to support their verdict, and they need to be sure they set a clear precedent. So while each side may have a compelling argument, at least there is an outcome! I think that's why I'm finding this so easy (except for civil procedure, which is nothing like philosophy). I walk past my section-mates at least once a day on my way to the library computer lab. They have their own table staked out in the library and there's always at least five of them (though which five varies (except for Elliot)) if not ten studying. Some of them wave, and I come in here for hours, but I haven't cracked a book really. I do almost all my reading either right before class or between classes.Then again, I did bomb that quiz... It's one of those things where you wonder if you should be reevaluating.

In Fargo there was an entire, huge warehouse building that looked sort of weird. Then we drove alongside it and in huge letters it said "CURLING CLUB." There is an entire club for that. In Fargo. I can't decide whether or not to be surprised.

Also in Fargo, there was a Roosevelt Elementary made of old brick walls. It was actually a bit nostalgia-invoking, especially considering the last time I was by my old elementary the play structure had been torn down and the fence had been moved and it didn't look like a place kids should ever want to go.

South Wind

My inhalations deepen
the addictive, fulsome smell
cannot be teased, experienced halfway
after crossing the highway
trading the exhaust of a too-close car
for the mellow yeastiness
of new-brown bread
delivered from the oven
with the care of an obstetrician
cradling its crackled crust
and overwhelmed by its freshness.

I can taste its sweetness
the southern breeze,
which when strong enough,
wings wondrous smells
fresh from the ovens,
released from swinging entrances
one succoring, wheaty, exhalation at a time.
Persistent, refreshing, yet insecure,
at the whim of the wind.

Which can switch back from bread
to bearing the stench of downtown's honking
hideousness
like the bread itself
laced with the smell of honey
departed downtown-bound
in big white trucks
yet whose syrupy reminder molds
on my microwave
uneaten, now inedible.

Some explanation for you and so when I go back and edit I can remember what I was going for:

First stanza:

New-brown bread = new born child
fresh from the mother = oven, easy analogy

second stanza:
focuses on sounds, assonance to mimic wind
experience of being intrigued by the new discovery, fickleness of attraction = direction of wind

Third stanza:
reality check, wind does change, bread shipped elsewhere

I bike back from school every day, and when the wind is out of the south, the bakery smells absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, this amazing smell is also identical to the smell of the bread Rebecca used to make, so it's this crazy association game my nose gets to play every time the wind blows a particular direction. So I wrote the poem as a rough analogy for a few things. It's funny, because bread does go bad in my possession because I don't actually eat it for any of my meals. Breakfast is cold cereal, oatmeal, pancakes, or eggs, lunch is pasta or salad or sometimes a sandwich, but most often skipped, and dinner has no carbs (usually meat and fruit/veggies). So I eat a couple of slices of bread a week. So the bread is both a person and the relationship in the poem. The newly-spawned intrigue of getting to know someone, the insecurity of not knowing what's coming, but the deliciousness of anticipation, and the eventual death as it rots away in my possession. Needs work, but hey, it's one less note in my phone. Thanks for reading!

The disappointing weekend that still turned out okay

So I went to Fargo on Friday, got out of the car, warmed up for ten minutes, and proceeded to lose in embarrassing fashion to the second seed of the tournament. I need to learn my lesson. Games were to 17, I wasn't familiar with the courts, my opponent cheated, and I'm sure there are more excuses I could come up with, but the truth is, as usual in the case of individual sports, I lost because I didn't play as well as I should have. I made error after error, and it sucked a lot. That was one thing, but the worst thing was the fact that my opponent told me I was playing well, and lots of people were impressed with my shoddy performance. It was almost unbearable. Mat and I played doubles later that night (scheduled for 10:30, but we started a bit before that), and I was able to take out my frustration pretty successfully on our opponents. In the first game we played pretty strictly on our sides (him on the left, me on the right), and we won 17-11 or so. The in the second game I took over and basically hit every shot. We went up 5-0 right away, then 14-0 on my next time serving, and won 17-1 in rather spectacular fashion. My strategy was to park myself at the front and hit everything I could get to. It turns out I can get to a lot. It was like they thought I was getting lucky, because they just kept driving it at me, and I kept reflex-volleying it into the corners. "Surely he won't hit this one." Well I did. And don't call that person Shirley. In one of the last points Mat hit a pass shot down the wall I was on, so I jumped over the ball, then the guy right behind me killed it in the opposite corner, but I had started diving as soon as I hit the ground and got there. The guy just shook his head and glanced back at where I was (last he knew), a bit skeptical.

So that was fun, but mostly just a venting of frustration. Nothing came close to making up for my poor play off the bat though, so I was still fighting a bit of underlying unhappiness while distracting myself fairly successfully by bantering with my carmates. That is, until I learned that Rebecca would be sharing a car for her ten hour trip back for Thanksgiving with the guy she cheated on me with (twice). I'm not supposed to care about that probably. But I do, obviously. So that's a thing. I watched some magic videos on my phone after the girls turned out the lights and eventually fell asleep to the lulling sounds of obese people cursing their misfortune.

The next morning the four of us went to breakfast, which I skipped in favor of the free food at the tournament site. They had yogurt! So I had a couple bananas and a couple yogurts. I won my singles match 17-0, 17-2. Very few highlights. A mercy killing, basically. Then the tournament had a rarity happen. The matches got ahead of schedule, and we were all left with some free time on our hands, so I challenged the one seed to a game. Neither of us were giving 100% probably, since we were about to play doubles. I lost 19-21, but I felt pretty confident I had figured some stuff out I could use if we ever played for real. It reinforced in my head the fact that we should be the two duking it out in the finals. Mat and I lost our doubles match, but I feel confident in saying it wasn't my fault. The game we won was because Mat finally got back a good number of serves and I took over the front court, but we lost the tiebreak when they managed to get the ball at him more consistently.

At some point Kristina decided she was angry at Mat, which made things awkward for the rest of the trip. Apparently her mood changes about things daily if not more frequently. For instance, when I mentioned I wasn't going out with the group a few weeks ago, she said she didn't drink, and I countered with I didn't eat carbs after 5:00, and she re-raised with the fact she was on a diet like that too. Well, needless to say it has been more than a day since those claims were raised.

We went to a banquet after the matches on Saturday, and it started off pretty cool. There was a tab at the bar, but the fact I wasn't drinking seemed to slow down my tablemates. They got chocolate shakes instead of alcohol, which was actually much more tempting and distracting than alcohol would have been, since while I've never had alcohol, you can bet I've had more than my fair share of chocolate binges. We waited for quite a while for the restaurant to clear out of normal patrons so our banquet thing could get underway. In that time, two guys made their way to our table and started not-so-subtly hitting on the girls. One of them was still under 21, but loved to talk about how much he could drink. Of course, his ideas of interesting topics of conversation were incredibly age-appropriate (which of course means immature), and he was being secretly mocked. Well, not so much secretly as obliviously. Also, the girls kept texting each other about him, a few of which Jessica showed me. Another application of the ubiquity of cellphones, I suppose. Amusing until you wonder what they are saying about you.

The food was terrible. Refried black beans, dry-looking rice, deep-fried doughy pseudo-mexican things, and salad. Nothing I really wanted to eat, but I ate anyway because I wasn't about to go spend money when I had already paid for this stuff with my entry fee. Then there was the raffle. Again, my poverty convinced me I shouldn't partake in what looked like the more fun option. Tickets were pretty cheap and they had a TON of stuff to give away. With every item that went out to the crowd, a brief flurry of bartering took place. Jerseys, t-shirts, towels, and other clothing items were thrown around like confetti, and the obvious trend was that if a person was in college, they were looking to trade anything they got that wasn't alcohol for something that was alcoholic. There were only six or seven things I would have wanted anyway, so it's probably best I didn't buy any tickets, but if I would have gotten a jersey from worlds in Ireland (of which there were two), or this really cool jersey that was a combination of the Irish flag and an american flag/eagle I would have been thrilled. It was pretty awesome looking, and I have no idea where it came from or how to get one. I do take some solace in the fact that I will have an Irish jersey from frisbee worlds at some point in the future. A couple of guys with too much money had bought a ton of tickets and distributed them to those without, so between the three people whose company I was in, there were a total of eight bottles of wine by the end of the night. I even walked away with a new pair of gloves and some R48 handballs (a different brand I've been wanting to try), so I guess it wasn't a bad night. We got back to the hotel and didn't have a corkscrew, which was obviously fine with me. Yet again, my not drinking resulted in a sober night. We still managed to stay up too late, though.

There's a saying in Buddhism that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill it/him. This has been taken to mean that if you think you know yourself or that you have achieved enlightenment, you must immediately discard those assumptions and start from scratch. I'm pretty bad at that. I feel like I've been building a huge network of beliefs my entire life, and to admit I don't know anything (though it seems more and more likely that is the case) is a step I'll probably never be able to take, as nice as the theory sounds. This goes back to the thing I said the other day about not really thinking about people as entities of their own. There is a difference between knowing a thing and acting upon it. We all know abstractly that the sun is huge and we are moving around it, but it doesn't stop us from saying the sun comes up in the morning. I doubt we really think about what's actually the case. If we thought about how things actually work rather than how they appear to work or how they function in our lives, then we would be so bogged down (and overwhelmed at the same time) we wouldn't be able to do what we want with our lives. How are we supposed to worry about which pens to buy when just a few thousand miles away an endless vacuum waits to consume us into it's entropic demise? It's like this video If we thought about how insignificant we are, even compared with the scale of humanity, much less the scale of the universe, how could we be expected to keep it all in our heads? I struggle with things like that a lot. Objectively, I know it's pointless, but I can't really stop. So I fall asleep with my phone in my hand and a video playing.

So when it comes to people, I already know on some level I can't understand myself or the simple facts of the world around me, much less the motives driving the person next to me. Again, using objectivity, I know perfectly well they are as complex as I am. They have as many motives (well-reasoned or not, conflicting or not, subconscious or not) as I do, but if I can't even fully comprehend all of my reasons, can't figure out why I can hold two conflicting beliefs and not explode, how can I think of anyone the way they "deserve?" Can anyone? I actually don't think so. I think the best we can do is admit that we can't know. We can predict. I "know" what my friends will do. I "know" how they will react. I know these things based on our shared history, how they have behaved in the past, the things they've told me that motivate them, but "knowing" someone and truly thinking about them in their entirety as a person seem too disparate to put on the same scale. I can act "knowing" it will bring a smile, and be happy I made them happy, but I can't say I did it while treating them as an individual. I did it because I had good reason to think it would elicit a particular response and that would lead to future pleasantness for me in that we would both express pleasantness.

This is getting a bit twisted and repetitive. I think about stuff like this at the oddest times, so there are notes all over my phone about it. I have notes about groceries with little things at the bottom about how I still don't comprehend what I'm doing with my food, how it's still results-based and biased because for all I know I want it to work and am really losing weight due to portion control. I have notes of unfinished (and unstarted) poems that slide headlong into tangents of how the universe responds to us trying to figure it out. How we are chasing the wonder out of the world gradually under the guise of science, and yet it still persists in the oddest ways, with the silly equations not quite balancing, or the discovery that gravity may not be as constant as we thought. And then there are the simpler poems, the notes that are designed to prompt silly little anecdotes. Those will be in the next post.

For now, let me tell you how my weekend still turned out okay (because I wrote the title before the entry this time, and have been full-bore out of control for a while now): I won my consolation match 21-2, 21-9, making some of the best gets and shots I've ever made. I played better than I needed to by far, actually. It turned out that the guy's left hand was actually pretty bad if you got the ball above his waist, but I was too busy killing and re-killing it to figure that out until the end of the match when my shoulder felt like it was coming apart. I had a point where he passed me on my left, I ran back and dug it off the back wall between my legs and immediately started sprinting for the front, where he killed it only to have me dive past him and keep it in play, at which point he missed due entirely to shock. Multiple times I got just my fingertips on the ball and rolled it out. I felt good. And I won a handball for my troubles, which is approximately one handball more than consolation winners usually get. On the drive back I even got a sandwich and a cup of soup. Total spent on the weekend: $10.00. Oh, and $10.00 for gas. Worth it. Mankato tournament in two weeks. No excuses next time. All focus, and I'm going to play a game for real as warm-up. Except they only have four courts. But I'm going to try!

Thanks for reading!