Back on topic: the week/weekend that was/were. Working backwards, am currently sitting on the couch watching the Cardinals trail the Colts. Steak tonight for dinner, as it's still summer-grillin' weather 'round these parts. Dogs are doing well; both got "chewies" today, which is kinda like crack-laced heroin cheeseburgers. Happy times. Beck and I chilled for most of the afternoon in front of the football, hit the grocery store, hung out at a coffee shop doing the Sunday puzzle, and walked the dogs in the opposite of that order. Sparkle / Wrigley were kind enough to wake up at 5:30 this morning, so our Sunday was extended in time if not in wakefulness.
Our neighbors spun the wheel for "how do we decorate for Halloween this year" and the roulette ball landed in "grotesquely / tackily." I'll have to snap a picture of this surreptitiously, but trust that it involves a life-sized headless skeleton bride and groom. To each his or her own, but preferably not when I'm going to spend the next month looking over and saying hello to what I mistake for people only to be scared out of my gourd.
Fell asleep last night early after an evening of Dexter and delicious pizza (from A Slice of Sicily, check it out Phoenicians!) thanks to the nine hours I spent in the blazing Sunny Azz yesterday. The latter five hours were spent golfing with Beck's cooking internet friend Eva and her husband Che; we hit up Papago golf course where I managed to shoot a 105 using my modified golf rules. (My goal was 2 over par for every hole, or 108, so that's cool; and only five balls lost between Beck and me, three of those coming on one hole in which Beck investigated the acoustics of the sound "Splash!"). Fun times, though long, and my one round every five months plan has not exactly paid off with Tiger-like adroitness. Beck was fantastic, just got better and better as the day rolled on, getting really consistent with solid contact by the end. She claims that getting to the green is really the point of the game, not sinking the ball, which actually makes for a much more enjoyable experience. Fun times, though it's still possibly a little too hot for comfortable golf starting at 12:40.
The initial four hours of sun were spent at Sprawl's next-to-last practice before Regionals next weekend. I am getting psyched because 1, after a summer-ful of injuries, I am finally getting somewhat back to form, and 2, some big-time Ultimate 2.0 style concepts - drop passes to huck, attack the breakside for easy scores, play position defense - are finally taking hold. Though it's a long shot based on any objective measure, at-least-shooting for Nationals is starting to look less thoroughly impossible. We've had some great practices of late, and hopefully this will carry over to a solid performance this coming weekend.
I can't reiterate this enough - I'm excited about getting back on the field just because of the stupid duration of this most recent injury, but really I'm just amped that we're getting some gelling going on. I shared with the team recently the idea of Ultimate heroin - those rare games when you go out and it clicks, the other team blinks and it's 13-2 because you're swarming them on D and can offensively do no wrong - and I've seen a couple of glimpses of a capacity in Sprawl to achieve that. We'll see this weekend, I suppose, but I am ITCHING to get on the field with Les Boys Phoenice. YES. I will be sure to keep the excitement-meter rolling through the week. Practice Saturday started at 7 AM, started with a lot of deep throwing and ended with some pretty intense scrimmaging. All told that (plus the golf) was a loooooong day in the sun. I'm appropriately bronze and pretty.
Friday night was fun times, too - Beck and I had butter garlic shrimp for dinner and saw 9, a post-apocalyptic movie about life-force-endowed burlap sacks. It's an animated film with a distinct, thrillingly dark / steampunk look. Beck and I agreed that though it was a gorgeous film, but the plot seemed somewhat tacked on - like they had a great idea for a movie setting and vibe, but lacked anything concrete for them to do. This was entirely instantiated in some pretty terrible, stock dialog (e.g. "I started this; I've got to finish it"). Plus the ending made no sense, always a killer. PLUS we endured some annoying teenagers through the previews - I tell you, every day, my lawn (and the accompanying desire that people get off it) grows a little larger. We did however beat them ... to Mojo after the movie (let's hear it for jokes recycled from Facebook, yeah!). One of the better chocolate and peanut butter-based topping concoctions I've had there in a while, incidentally.
Friday day worked - I had a more-successful-than-they-have-been discussion session with the Bio & Society honors students / Bio & Soc majors in which they finally asked some questions. I still feel like it's too much of a binary discussion - student asks question, Nyet answers it - and I'd rather that something resembling an organic discussion develop. Problem is that even the honors students are operating from a very limited knowledge base - so a lot of the questions are honest "what the heck is going on with bio phenomenon X," and I'm really the only person in the room that has access to the fact foundation in order to be able to address it. Still, getting better, students getting more confident, and it's cool, because it's exactly the kind of thing for which I'm into this business in the firs place. I've got a few with whom I'm making good interpersonal contacts and who have told me that they've really enjoyed the lectures and the discussion class, which gives me all kinds of warm-fuzzies.
Ah, yes, the follow up lecture on Cancer: Genes & Environment. It went well - a little less audience-pleasing than the last detailed account of the horrors of various diseases - but I got a good amount of info across in an engaging way. My big problem was a couple of students who kept asking and asking tangential questions - they ranged from the word association ("Telomerase? I read an article on that once...") to the absurdly complicated ("how does cancer staging work?") to the repeating-what-the-lecturer-said-just-twenty-seconds-ago ("Doesn't the spleen clear red blood cells?"). It's hard to keep momentum when curious peoples keep derailing you, and I tried as best I could to keep things on task. I did, unfortch, have to resort to "why don't we talk about that after class" more than once, which always strikes me as taky because you're all but pointing out the stupidity, or at least inappropriate-for-context-ness, of the question. Ah, well. I was also observed by the Center for Bio & Society director Jane, and she was complimentary afterwards, so hopefully 'twas a good job. Again, I'm psyched that these lectures went well, as this is pretty much my motivation for teaching - you know, moldy minds - though I'd be lying if I'm glad I can focus on my other work and not speak to 200 people audiences for a few weeks.
That's taking it back far enough, I suppose. The only other persistent thing going on is a silly debate from our Applied Ethics class on the existence of timeless, acontextual, universal morality. It's fun to work on developing points of view if a little frustrating to have to backtrack to argue such a naive-take - I don't entirely feel like getting into it, but the general problem with such a stance (a definitive end-all be-all notion of right and wrong) is that it's essentially impossible to articulate how such a thing would be articulated without being subjectively filtered and therefore subject to question of political dynamics, blah blah blah etc. I'm kinda tired of the topic at this point.
Okay, so get psyched for a fun week - one more practice with Sprawl (tomorrow), a league game on Tuesday, the usual slew of classes and reading, and it all comes together in the super-exciting regional tourney in which I should really be working on writing but will instead work on my forehand hucks. Wish us luck...
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