Thursday, December 4, 2014

Defeat at the Hands of the Blue Devils


I realized today that I completely forgot Cashmere’s birthday last Friday, when I was busy posting a tirade about racism. Perhaps tomorrow I will rectify that and post a birthday poem to her. It’s useless actually doing anything for her; she just runs away when I come toward her. Unlike Charlie, who LOVED his ninth birthday party, she doesn't want any commemoration of reaching this milestone.

Last night Travalon, the Other Couple, and I met at some sort of VIP thing at the Kohl Center before the big game. There were all sorts of hors d’oeuvres, like tiny quiches and bacon-wrapped shrimp (oh my golly, it’s as wonderful as it sounds), and lovely raspberry-and-dark chocolate chip bars. From up there Madtown looks like a booming metropolis, with all the tall buildings lit up around it. I think they’re mostly freshman dorms, but they still look impressive, like you’re in downtown Chi-town or something. The female half of the Other Couple took photos of us and posted them to MyFace. Then we watched the game, which was actually quite a lot of fun. Lots of pomp and pageantry, like three kinds of cheerleader type girls, and some members of the football team came out to show off the Paul Bunyan axe they won against the Golden Gophers last weekend. The halftime entertainment was a very flexible girl named Stephanie who stood on her hands and shot a bow with her feet, hitting the bull’s eye on a target. The game itself was quite close at first… and then it wasn’t. We kept missing shots, while Duke was on fire. They were getting everything in. Prairie Man must be ecstatic, since he was rooting for the Blue Devils. But that’s the danger of a Big Game: the whole reason it is such a big deal is because you are playing a worthy opponent, which means there is a good chance they could beat you. And in this case they sure did, by ten points. Still, it was a lot of fun. I guess I do like basketball, at least live, although it doesn’t seem to have as much strategy as football, but that could be my lack of knowledge.

Travalon and I also had free passes for the parking garage next door, which was handy before the game, but afterwards we were stuck for half an hour while everyone poured out of there. We got home close to midnight, and I kind of overslept a little this morning. I was having a dream where Travalon and I were taking Croatian, or actually some ancestral language like Old Church Slavonic, and we were studying verb conjugations. In my dream they had not just the first, second, and third person singular and plural, but a special form of the verb meaning everyone. You know… I go, you go, he goes, we go, you guys go, they go, EVERYONE GOES! Then I asked about the subjunctive, and the teacher said she wasn’t going to teach us that yet, but then she realized she had accidentally given us that form in an example sentence. The A changed to an E, but I think my subconscious mind stole that right from Spanish. This is undoubtedly influenced by my Irish class, where we are learning the present, past, and future of common irregular verbs, and I keep forgetting to ask if they have a special subjunctive form. Leave it to me to have nerdy linguistic dreams. 

Famous Hat

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