In Freeport, Maine, about to dock. Minibreak: successfully almost completed. Tonight I get to eat my first Maine lobster. It’s embarrassing, but I actually have no sense of where anything is on the East coast, so I had to go look up what order the states came in, north to south. When I was in 4th grade I coulda told you…
Here I am! Dallas, TX - Portus 2008!
Highlights:
More later.
Things I will miss about Portland, Oregon:
Things I Won’t Miss About Portland, Oregon
Here’s a word I never want to hear again: splurge.
It seems like it’s everywhere in women’s magazines. I splurged (money) on the Marc Jacobs dress. I splurged (calories) on the chocolate mousse for dessert. “Splurge” is a word that plays on our insecurities about control, control over our money and over our weight. If we splurge on something, we relax our (presumably iron) control, we revel in our laxity, we indulge (there’s another bad word: indulge) in something we oughtn’t do.
But that only reinforces the idea that our lives circle around our willpower to not eat, not spend. The idea that if we have money - if we have uneaten calories - then we will be thin and rich and perfect. Like one of the celebrities in those women’s magazines. The ones who constantly splurge - rather, through some freak of genetics and talent and luck they have enough money and enough innate thinness that they can afford to buy the Marc Jacobs dress, can afford to eat the chocolate mousse without splurging.
Splurge: it sounds like “binge” and “purge.” They’re the same idea, essentially, all three of them. I don’t want to do any of them. I want to follow a middle way.
New haircut: what girls do when they’re entering a new phase of their life.
If people want to say good-bye to me, I’ll be at my house on Wednesday night from 8 to 10 PM. BYOB, if you want a B. If not, just swing by.
Well, I’m back from the team trials! I took 4th place in my division. The 2007 team member, Young-A Kim, won her spot back for 2008; Adrienne took 5th place and Eira (my training partner) took 9th. So Young-A will be going to the World Championships in Izhmir, Turkey, and we’ll be going home to train more.
In the preliminary round, we did Keumgang, which is neither a particularly good nor particularly weak form for me. There were some startling changes to the standard a few minutes before we went on, which really threw a lot of people off - I’m curious to see whether those changes stick. Anyhow, the final was Taebaek and Sipjin, both of which are fairly good for me - my favorite form is Koryo, but if I couldn’t have Koryo, I’d have picked Taebaek and Sipjin. So that was an excellent, comfortable set of forms to do for my first Team Trials.
Seriously, though, I’m over the moon at my results. I’m not foolish enough to think that they mean that I’d always win 4th place out of the draw we had - I’m sure that on some days I’d do worse and on some days I’d do better, same as everyone there. But the competition was close enough that I feel 100% certain that I belonged at the Team Trials - and that’s not a feeling I had before I went. Before, I was unsure of myself. Now, I know that I can do it.
So. Back to the grindstone I go, with a better heart now and more fire in my belly. I told Young-A “Congratulations, and I’ll see you next year,” and I meant it - on both counts. She certainly was the best competitor in our ring this time, but I’m in the hunt now, and I’m coming back stronger than ever, both technically and physically.
My teammate Jim Null did make the national team, as the Senior 2 male. It’s particularly exciting to me because he was in a similar position last year to the one I’m in this year - hopefully I can show similar improvement (and get a similar result). Another teammate, Matt Dunlap, also made the team as the Junior male.
Oh, and - Detroit had some gorgeous buildings, but they were all abandoned and therefore depressing. I’m too tired to stay up and watch fireworks displays tonight, sigh. Happy 4th!
Nick S. did this first (and better, because he had electronic copies which could be put through Wordle) but I got out my big binder of college papers and looked through them. (Note: it occurs to me that I need to figure out a better way to distinguish boyfriend-Nick from CMS-Nick. The most elegant way, I think, would be to give boyfriend-Nick a terrible nickname, for instance “Lulubelle.” So if you hear about Lulubelle from now on, you know who I’m talking about. Since he never reads this blog, we’ll see if he ever catches on to the fact that I’m calling him something mildly embarrassing.)
Anyway. In no particular order -
“Representation and Reality in Virtual Worlds”- Good paper, dry title.
“Mother and Wife: Penelope’s Representation in the Odyssey“ - Oh, subtitles. I’m pretty sure that I just added the first bit because “Penelope’s Representation in the Odyssey” was dry as dust.
“Cicero and Terentia: What’s Love Got to Do With It?” - Okay, I’m proud of this one.
“The Care and Training of Child-Wives” - I like this one, too (it was for a class entitled “Women in the Ancient World”).
“Greek Temptresses and Philhellenes in Plautus’ The Bacchides“ - Boring.
“Our Bodies, Our Selves: Power, Effeminacy and Medicine in the Catilinarian Orations” - Okay, I am super proud of both this paper and this title. It was my junior qualifying exam for Classics (back when, yknow, I thought I was a classicist - ha ha ha)
“Sexuality in Defixiones From the Athenian Agora”- Another rad paper topic not done justice by its title.
“Inward and Outward: Paul’s Concept of Circumcision in the Epistle to the Romans”- This was my first real college paper, not counting the freshman foundations course, and it was pretty dang good for all that, even if the title was uninspiring.
“Effing the Ineffable: the Zhuangzi’s Method of Teaching the Way”- Oldest joke about Zhuangzi ever, but I couldn’t resist.
“A Short Rejection of the Knowledge Argument” - To the point.
“Economic Homogeneity and the Well-Functioning Democracy” - Not only do I not remember what this paper was about, I don’t even know what it meant. I’m not sure if that means it was incredibly poorly written, I didn’t understand the topic then, or I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about comparative politics. Or all of the above.
“Tyrants Breed Worse Tyrants: Herodotus’ Opinion of Dynastic Rule” - Well, with that title, do I even need to write the paper?
“Plausibility in Lysias 1″ - This was a translation paper, no point in trying to make a fun title. Lysias, though, is fun - he’s the Jerry Springer of the ancient world.
“Give The People What They Want: International Relations Theories in Wag the Dog” - International Relations was not exactly a class I spent a lot of time thinking about, and assignments like this one may have been the reason. Who assigns this kind of thing after high school Government?
“Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid“ - This was for a Latin class where I took a passage from the Aeneid and traced all its ties to the Iliad and Odyssey. Don’t know why I couldn’t think up a better title.
“A Doubted Future: Freud’s Heavy-Handed God versus Mystic Experience” - 1. Bad title. 2. Who gave me the idea that it was okay to write a compare-contrast paper about Freud and William James?
“Eliade’s Debt to Durkheim” - At this stage, I’m just amazed I managed to take Eliade seriously enough to write a whole paper about him.
“Applied Pragmatism: James, Rorty, West” - This was the paper that largely shaped my current academic lens. I loved Religion 301 basically because it forced me to spend time on Pragmatism.
This exercise has basically shown me what a terrible religion major I was. Almost all my classes were Classics! I guess that’s fair, and yet - wow, how did they ever let me just do the straight Religion major? Weird.
Our second session of Nobilis went really well! Again, we met in costume; this time, I provided somewhat-themed refreshments (fruit and honey; sangria; bread - the idea being manna and ambrosia, though the bread got eaten by my roommates before the game even began because I didn’t mark it well, oops). We did costumes again - I wore all deep brown and did my makeup as on the right, because even though I don’t really have a character to represent, I wanted to do something to feel in line with the rest of the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, we were cut a little short, but I did get to introduce the main plot thread: there’s an Imperator whose Chancel has been infiltrated by the Excrucians, and he might be collaborating. Unfortunately, he’s Sacrosanct, so no one can directly move against him without dooming themself to some kind of terrible consequence. I also introduced a sub-plot: the characters’ actions caused the Power of Division to challenge the Power of Apathy to a duel. It’ll be fun to play it, I think.
After the jump: the “cut scenes” I wrote for (1) the beginning of the game and (2) when the characters arrived at Churchill University, the aforesaid possible collaborator’s Chancel. Read the rest of this entry »
French Women Don’t Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano. Common sense advice sexed up by the magical word “French.” Still, has some funny memoir elements, and some truly great recipes (carrot soup? Not something I would have ever tried without this prompting, but damn, that is excellent). I really appreciated that, despite being essentially a diet book, it doesn’t treat food as something to be avoided but rather something to be fully savored and appreciated. At the very least, it models a pretty healthy attitude towards eating - something you don’t see a lot of these days.
Oh, ugh, the above is so true.
Coming into this summer I had some fantasy of a glamorous athletic life - as if somehow I was going to suddenly feel like jaunting out of bed for a ten-mile run every morning, then on to my healthful oatmeal brekkie, etc. etc., all because once you are a national competitor you are magically put-together! And training comes easily!
Oh no, oh no. I have various thesis-related items piling up in my mailbox (a true love-hate relationship, that: on the one hand, “I am honored that you read my entire thesis! That’s amazing! Excellent and perceptive comments!” and on the other hand, “I thought I had washed my hands of that damned paper forever, and now this?!” Fortunately response #1 seems to be winning out at the moment) and never seem to get a chance to read them, and due to poor planning, there was (earlier this week) no fewer than four pizzas sitting in my fridge looking cold, lonely, and full of saturated fat. Oh yes, pizzas. Oh yes, you will be warm and convivial in my belly!
But all that said today has been a good day - that is, a day of the sort where I feel like I am perhaps indeed living the athletic life to which I aspire. Up at 6 with a minimum of bleary-eyed bitching; hymns on the iPod as I cooked my steel-cut oatmeal (look! Look how virtuous I am! Slow oatmeal, because it supposedly is better for you! My piety knows no bounds) and the Cello Suites as I walked to campus and got the one good space in the sports center (dance studio with both windows and mirrors, joy of all joys) to practice in. Go, little black belt! Go!
Unfortunately nobody else is apparently having a good day. My coach texted me: “As we get closer to the trials, pressure may seem to increase but it’s not. BREATHE & RELAX!” Wise words, O Yoda-san, but out of the blue probably caused more stress than they relieved. C’est la vie. Six days till I leave for Detroit and the Trials.