not falling down

Yesterday I saw a disc hovering in the endzone, juked on my defender, sprinted half the length of the field, saw it start to drop, leapt full-length and grasping, missed, slid a few feet on my face, caught on something and flipped a couple times to end up in a sort of collapsed headstand. Later, somebody spiked my hand with their cleats.

Ah, frisbee at something like my level. I missed you!

I’ve been here for a week! This morning Holly made baby pancakes (which she called something much nicer that I can’t remember) and we ate them on the back porch, and the rest of the house failed to vote me out. I’m glad. This is a pretty great house!

I’ve been to Battersea Park repeatedly, and to the Science and Natural History Museums, and on a Tube Walk (pictures), and today I tried to go to a scheduled pickup Frisbee game at Hyde Park but it turned out not to exist. But still! I navigated to Hyde Park and back all by myself! I also managed to get to Victoria Station and back, twice, to pick up and drop off Caitlan when she visited.

Keen-eyed readers of this blog will note that normally I don’t go outside that much in a month, and will probably guess further that I am deliberately overcompensating to fight culture shock / homesickness / loneliness et cetera. Good guess, keen readers. But it’s working! And given my only other experience outside the country, I think overcompensation is entirely in order.

London is awfully big, but awfully neat too.

Update 03.07.2007 1243 hrs: Pikelets! They were called pikelets.

I once ran competitively, while wearing shorts that were made to fit a girl. More recently, I engaged in the pastime of twirling a disc back and forth over mud, and falling down. I’m not much of a sporting man, it’s true; I don’t play games with life, and it doesn’t play games with me. But those of you who know me–really know me–or who have been reading this journal for the past few days, know that there’s one major-league sport that can really set my blood a-racin’.

That sport is football.

Every year, my alma mater and a certain podunk nobody school in Texas throw down the pigskin over one hundred yards of bloodstained turf. Now, it’s true that Trinity has the better record, but that’s only because its student body is composed of vicious, quasi-sapient goat-mutants.

Perhaps the biggest shock of my life came about a year ago, when I learned that renowned fancy boy Cody Powell was an alumnus of that same mockery of higher education. I did a little checking, in fact, and confirmed that he is the only pure-blooded human ever to graduate Trinity! No mean feat, I must say, and of course I’d never drop a bad word about my good friend C-Po. I do have to point out that he had sex with girls at his school, though. Think about that for a second.

Regardless, my daily exchange with the Picklemeister has been a little strained lately, a little tense, a little shrill and twitchy on one end. The perennial Centre-Trinity footbattle is just around the corner; on October 23, Mister Powell and myself are going to see just which side is really worth its mustard.

If my team wins, I’m going to fax him a copy of my balls.

I quit my improv troupe the weekend before last. I was kind of wary about the whole thing when I joined, late last summer; it turned out that everyone in the group at the time was awesome and brilliant, and I’m glad I spent this something-over-a-year working with them. Unfortunately, almost all of the original seven have left–Greg got promoted to Project Improv, then Leesha quit, then Evan quit, then Rebecca moved to Chicago. Since then it’s really just been me, Nicole and the new kids. When I called Nicole–long the de facto troupe leader–to check on rehearsal status and she told me she’d quit, I knew it was over. As much as I enjoy our teacher Ken’s company, there was no longer any reason for me to stay.

I’ve been trying to get ahold of Ken and inform him of this, but Ken has a permanent residence the way some people have headaches. I never had any real desire to perform with the troupe, so the loss of those opportunities doesn’t impact me, but I did enjoy working with those guys; I’m more creative and funnier as a result of that work.

There’s always the tantalizing possibility of Waterfront Frisbee Wednesdays, too, if we ever get six people together for that again. That’s really the last point of contact I have with my Street Legal people, and I don’t want to lose it.

Went out to deliberately bond over Ultimate Frisbee with the Project Improv Apprentices tonight, and after a few practice rounds, ended up on a team of two (there were only five of us there) with the other Old Guy, Greg. I’m twenty-two, Greg is twenty-seven, Nicole and Evan are eighteen, and Richard is nineteen.

And we beat them, ten points to one, despite the fact that they always knew exactly where the frisbee was going. Old Guys ROCK.

Also, as of tonight PIA (which was temporarily, and horribly, called Red Peanut) is officially named Street Legal. This is pretentious, but it’s like choosing a band name: when it fits, pretentiousness is no object.

Okay! So! Babies!

Actually just one baby. Talking about Zoe reminded me that I still have my Chicago pictures and I’ve been meaning to post them forever; I was saving them for a rainy no-idea day, but lately the only time I’m not posting is when I’m working on stuff I’m going to post. So pictures! (Which open in a separate window.)

• The one that inspired this whole post: There was this baby, and his name was Big Man, and he was the sweetest little bowling ball-sized human I’ve ever met. Naturally, I tried to eat his brains.
• In all my time as a Crummy fan, it never occurred to me what a great band name The Cautious Mad Scientists would be.
• Did you know they make lawnmowers you have to plug in? I didn’t, which is maybe why I find this team effort so funny.
• Me and Eric, in the only extant picture of me playing frisbee.
• Briefly, during one of the big group shots on the beach, I got to make mine a metacamera.
• Something about me takes a deep joy in the vision of a sign that a) acknowledges the existence of and b) simultaneously tries to prevent peddlin’.
• I was taking a perfectly nice close-range picture of my thumb until Kat got in the way.
• Witness my first, second and third complete failures to get a picture of the shot-shy EmilyR. Who then posed quite nicely for all the obligatory group shots.
• Oh, and lastly, having played basketball against stiff competition in inner-city Chicago, I believe I’m allowed to ask it: Who wants some?

Ultimate Frisbee is the new running. I get about the same workout, but it takes three times as long, and the whole affair is a lot dirtier. I also get to publicly embarrass myself, in that I (really, seriously) can’t throw or catch. On the plus side, I keep taking my falls on the same two places, so I bleed a lot!

Saturday night was the First Annual Drama Formal, and also the public debut of DJ Jazzy O’Badkins (that’s me). It was mostly cute little froshers, and they only stayed for maybe an hour of the allotted three, but at least they were there for tracks 6 - 18, what I consider the best part of the mix (on which I spent about six painstaking hours). You can see the HTML version if you want. Yes, I started it with Chumbawamba. I was being retro! I make no apologies! Nobody was there yet anyway!

My baby sister Caitlan, who wields the powers of all Adkinses combined, has decided to go to Georgetown, back in the little hamlet where we were all born. I still would have liked it if she’d picked Centre, but now I can say that our family has conquered all three important Kentuckian smallliberalartscolleges. O’Doyle rules!

Last night I finally had the time and opportunity to update this thing, and our interweb died. Stupid interweb.

It’s been a very busy week: closing and strike of the play, interview for a summer internship that went reasonably well, continued virus-stomping, trying to come up with my four-year personal statement for my drama major in the next couple of hours. Tuesday was my last ever game as a Sumatran Ratmonkey–more on this later, if you remind me. Monday was Uncle John’s birthday, and Saturday is mine, which is also the first annual Drama Formal. I get to DJ, which is a pretty great birthday present, even if we do have to compete with the biggest frat party of the year, which means we’ll have like five people in attendance.

Today I have to draw a Xorph, finish that statement, finish the wallpaper I’m making out of last week’s Xorph, do homework and try to get some work done on my giganto-pants so I can maybe wear them Saturday. I want to play frisbee today, too, but I don’t know if I’ll have time. Which reminds me that I also need to diagram the story of my One Cool Move a few days ago and put that up on the Chalkboard.

May Day. Hmm.