A Happier Remembrance

Unfortunately, I don't think I succeeded. Worse yet, last night I think I pulled both of them.

It was chilly last night, and had been raining most of the day. Actually, the rain wasn't a factor, but I don't think I warmed up or stretched enough. On my first point of the night, when I had to accelerate to a sprint, I could feel that painful feeling in both thighs, and I though, "Oh, crap."

Actually, neither quad felt as bad as when I pulled one quad last year, and I played the full first game. I probably could have kept going through the second game, but it was clear that I had to be careful, and that it just wasn't going to be a whole lot of fun even if I could nominally keep going.

Shoot.

It turns out that Subrata pulled one his his quads, so we both ended up leaving early. Plus, a woman on our team apparently threw her back out. So we were just a bunch of ambulance cases. (Besides which, we got soundly trounced by our opposition in that game.) Not a banner night all around.

On the plus side, my quads felt much better today, so I'm not sure if I really pulled them, or just strained them a bit. Hopefully I'll be all ready to go for next week's game, whereas last year when I pulled my quad I had to sit out the next week.

Yesterday I also received the latest issue of my college alum magazine, Tulanian, where I read that my college freshman roommate, Tony, got married a little over a year ago. Congrats, Tony!

It probably hasn't escaped notice of my long-time readers that I don't talk about my college days very much. I'm actually only on semi-regular contact with three of my college friends. I actually felt like a fish out of water at Tulane for much of my time there, and I think my lack of ties to that period of my life bears that out.

Tony was actually an interesting roommate for me, though. We had very little in common: I was your basic comic book and science fiction geek, while Tony came in as an architecture student and then went into the business school and joined a fraternity. That said, we actually got along really well as roommates. I think a lot of it was because we were both pretty easy-going people and we respected each other. A pretty good deal for a completely random roommate situation. (There were a few roommates on our floor who were absolutely incendiary. One guy got kicked out of the dorm due to his problems with his roommate.)

My favorite Tony story is this: I came to college pretty much terrified of women, at least those in my peer group. I felt like I had no basis on which to relate to them, and they just generally made me feel intimidated. One evening during the fall semester, Tony apparently decided to try to 'fix' this. So he invited five women from the floor below ours to hang out in our room for a while. (No, nothing X-rated about this story. Sorry.)

Needless to say, I spent the next hour or so torn between curling up into a ball and trying to act like an actual human being. (Uh, the jury's still out on that one, by the way...) In retrospect, of course, it's pretty damned funny, but I wasn't sure whether I wanted to throttle Tony, afterwards!

I've never been sure whether he really wanted to do me a good turn, or he was teasing me, or whether it was just an excuse to have five good-looking women in our dorm room for an hour. Truth to tell, I could believe any or all three of those.

He was a good guy, though. I think I last saw him at graduation.

The West Wing has had an erratic season so far, I think a little too self-conscious of its newfound Emmy-validated success, and some of the brickbats thrown at it from the political right. But it got back on track with tonight's Thanksgiving episode, which had its fall-down-funny moments and its genuinely moving moments. What a great series.

Oh, and I also finished Lois McMaster Bujold's novel The Spirit Ring tonight, so I've now read all of her books. This one, in a nutshell: A nice diversion, but one of her weakest novels. Not really worth it. It's a completely stand-alone fantasy novel, so it's not even necessary as part of the Miles Vorkosigan series.