More Than a Feeling

Yes Rachael, this is us racing two days ago.

Get it? Boston? No? Whatever.
On Saturday I participated in the Open New England Cross Country race in, surprise, Boston. I say "participated" because it would be inaccurate to say "raced." This is because I was, and indeed still am, rather sick, and therefore ran an awful time. So I'm not going to talk about that. Or the fact that Austin beat me by three and a half minutes. Honestly, if I was healthy, he would have still probably beat me by at least half a minute. But anyways, I think Rachael demanded some pictures of us. Unfortunately, I forgot about this request. Sorry. Just imagine the two of us in a sweaty embrace. Or look at the year-old picture that you've already been looking at 'cause it's right in front of you, and pretend we're wearing racing singlets. One other item of note regarding Austin: he hasn't shaved since he got to Wesleyan a month ago, so he has this disgusting (or cute, whichever tickles your fancy) goatee that he's really fond of.
That picture reminded me of something else. See that shirt I'm wearing in it? Yeah. That's the nicest shirt I have with me here at Middlebury (mere coincidence has it that I happen to be wearing it in that picture). I think it's the only one I have with long sleeves and a collar that isn't flannel. So when we took the bus to Boston and it was announced that we were to dress nicely, I wore that shirt with regular brown pants. Now for me, that's pretty damn formal. But of course, I ended up being the only guy not wearing slacks and a tie. And seeing as I don't own slacks or a tie (at least not here), I've decided I'm just gonna go full on SoCal for the rest of my college career and never wear one. And Eriche, if you're reading this, A) be happy you finally go your shout-out, and B) hold me to what I just said. (Eriche went to the same boarding school as my roommate, and therefore spends more time in our room than I do. And she stalks all of you. True life. (She says that a lot.))

I love Akie.

Jack (My roommate, if you've forgotten. Or if you haven't.) and Eriche say they've never met anyone as quiet as I am. If only they could meet Akie.

Ladies and gentlemen and Rich, it is my immense pleasure to announce to your apathetic ears (okay, eyes) that, as of Thursday last, the National Hockey League regular season for 2011-2012 is officially underway! And now I'm going to (vainly attempt to) convert all of you to being hockey fans. From this point onward, I'm going to teach you a little bit about the game every week, in addition to an update on how the Ducks are doing. I'll try to keep it brief so I don't bore you. And here we go.

This week we'll deal with the bare-bones basics. An NHL hockey game consists of three periods, each of which is twenty minutes long. Between each period is an intermission. These sixty minutes of play time and three periods are collectively called "regulation time." During regulation, each team puts five players on the ice at a time, plus a goalie.  If the game is tied after the third period of play, it goes into overtime. Overtime is played with four players a side, plus the goalie. The "extra session" last five minutes, unless one team scores, in which case it ends immediately, which is why we call it "sudden death" overtime. If, after five minutes of overtime, nobody has scored, the game goes into a shootout, in which each team, in alternating order, takes three penalty shots. The team who converts on the most penalty shots wins. If it takes more than three shots per team, then they keep going.
The Ducks have played two games thus far. They lost the first one in regulation, 4-1 to the Buffalo Sabres. They won the second one in a shootout (Hey, you know what that is now!), 2-1 against the New York Rangers. That means each team scored one goal in regulation, nobody scored in overtime, and the Ducks scored more goals than the Rangers did in the shootout. The number of goals scored in the shootout is irrelevant; a shootout win adds a score of one to the score as it was before the shootout.

 

In case you still don't understand the shootout, watch as Bobby Ryan wins Sunday's game and you will understand. It won't kill you intellectual elitists [lighthearted, not accusatory] to watch twelve seconds of professional sports. Only twelve. Do it.

This is obviously a very basic outline of the game of hockey, and I know there are lots of holes in my description, but I will fill them in over the coming weeks. And for those of you who are thinking "The purpose of this blog is to talk about college, and this has nothing to with that," well, you can skip over the weekly hockey section. Okay, back to college. I had a seven page paper on the Iliad due today. I didn't start until yesterday. Which is why I spent eight hours working. Yeah. Don't procrastinate. And now for a brief reflection of home. The aforementioned Eriche made me watch an episode of "Laguna Beach" in order to teach me what my life actually is like, because the show is, of course, an accurate depiction of everyday life for every Californian. So I'm watching the show, and by that I mean barely focusing on it, when a couple of the characters walk into a pizza place. And I saw the name on top of the building. And it was Gina's. Reminded me of home. Very exciting.

Hold the jelly.

And since we're on the topic of food, allow me to talk a little bit about breakfast. Every day the dining halls serve either waffles, pancakes, or French toast. Every day I have either waffles, pancakes, or French toast. And every day I coat my waffles, pancakes, or French toast with peanut butter. Now, as you all may or may not know, this utilization of peanut butter is in no way a novelty. I have always held the philosophy that peanut butter goes well with everything, including more peanut butter. So I think it's perfectly natural to lather everything I eat with the stuff. Surely you've seen me do something of the sort before? Anyways, apparently spreading peanut butter over every conceivably edible surface is not in vogue at Middlebury. Nothing I do, including not dressing up fancily (i.e. preppily) enough, draws more looks of judgement and disdain than my apparently excessive use of peanut butter. Which of course only strengthens my resolve to put peanut butter on even more things than I would have otherwise. Next stop, pizza! Let us now embark upon an epic quest to find my physics/astronomy textbook! And by that I mean, let's read about why Derek doesn't have one!

Me with half a head. So everyone else can keep up.

The textbook costs about $140 at the college bookstore. I found it for around $70 on Amazon. Okay, Derek, let's order it on Amazon! Yay that. Except it never showed up. So eventually I did some research, and found out that the bloke I bought in from off Amazon never delivers, so say his malcontent customers. So I filed a claim with Amazon, and hopefully the money ends up where it's supposed to. Anyways, I thought about buying the book from someone else on Amazon, but that would take another couple weeks to deliver, and we're already part way through the term. I didn't want to spend the $140 at the bookstore, either. So I've resorted to Plan C. Use the library copy. Of course, the textbook happens to be in the reference category, so it can't leave the library. This means I have to do all my studying for that particular course in the library. And did I mention that when I say "library" I don't mean the main library which is really close to my dorm but instead the science library which is about as close to Nicole's dorm as it is to mine? Yeah. So basically, I've been completely neglecting the reading for that particular class. AND THE MIDTERM IS TOMORROW. But blogging is more fun than studying anyways. Jason, I now direct my attention towards you, because I can't remember if anyone else has read the book to which I am about to allude. If anyone else has read it, please tell me so I can automatically think higher of you as a human being. Remember in The Golem's Eye when Bartimaeus, in his footnotes, discusses a former master he had in Prague by the name of Tycho Brahe? Well, Winkler was talking about him today. I guess he observed the cosmos with great attention to detail and wrote down all his observation, and after his death his student, Johannes Kepler, studied his records and thereby deduced that the planets' orbits are elliptical rather than circular. And remember how Bart mentioned something about Tycho having a fake nose after losing the real one in a sword duel? Yeah, that's true too. While we're on the subject of good reads, I would like to point out that Jason and Rachael are now alone in this group regarding their ignorance of the world of Kvothe. That ought to change. (Yes, I know you're all really busy with school, so no, you shouldn't feel pressure to read The Name of the Wind right now or anything. Unless you want to. Then you should.)