A Mind That Suits What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.



Monday, August 01, 2005 :::
 
What to say? Four days of fun and productivity. Ensconced once again in the dorm for Visiting Scholars at a certain red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast, A Mind That Suits has been having a pleasant if unexciting time. This year, alas, said V.S.'s are housed in Xanadu, a house known in early days as 555 Mayfield, on the Row, home to wood paneled rooms and lots of earth-huggy types, where a certain pudgy balding English teacher spent four years of his life. The dorms used the last two years, in what used to be a trailer park, were MUCH nicer, but this year has brought a number of unenexpected friendships with much younger scholars, mainly of the Latin variety.

These new friendships brought a game of shirt-and-sock basketball--you know, where you take off your shirt and socks and use them to sink baskets--at 3:30 in the morning, which marks the first time this year that Your Correspondent has let the kids set the pace, and will be the last for a while. Always fun, always brings a reminder that one is not as young as one's companions.

Pleasant enocunters have also included renewing a long lasting friendship with Ranger Bill at Hoover, and a shorter term friendship with Young Friend Simon, a remarkably smart German who works on the history of the Gulag, which has to be depressing but he says actually isn't. The weather has tended toward hot, but as that is nothing as compared to what he left behind in DC, a certain, pudgy, balding English teacher has no complaints.

His schedule has brought him here too early to catch any scrimmages from his favorite sports team in the whole wide world, the mighty Leland Stanford Junior University Water Polo team, but he did run into one very fit, skinny, and tall young man wearing a water polo tee-shirt. A few penetrating questions revealed that he was indeed the senior goalie on the team, and that he was as self-possessed and intelligent as have been the vast majority of the SU water polo players that have crossed the path of a certain pudgy, balding English teacher over the last 30 years. There is perhaps no water polo in his immediate future, at least until he returns to DC, where he can enjoy the coaching of Friend Mike at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, a school ranked higher academically than the mighty LSJU, although the mighty LSJU likes to ignore that fact. Friend Mike is a great coach, but he coaches water polo on the East Coast, and so Navy, however smart its players, will hover somewhere around 10th place, the first nine probably being Mountain Pacific teams, the first of which will probably be the team for which the pleasant young man is the senior goalie.

And A Mind That Suits must go take a nap.

Later.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 7:17 PM


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