Monthly Archives: March 2004

Aaron's Birthday '04

Thumbnail: Aaron's birthday '04 1
Thumbnail: Aaron's birthday '04 1
Thumbnail: Aaron's birthday '04 1

On Saturday we end­ed up at the Highlander Pub, appar­ent­ly the only place in the city to get good hag­gis, as a belat­ed birth­day cel­e­bra­tion for Aaron. We con­vinced the man­ag­er, a black man in a kilt with a brow bar, to give us three tables. We took part in the home­land toast, in which the wait­ress­es hand out free shots of scotch every day at nine and every­one drinks to the ring of a bell.

Trolley, Nick, and Aaron par­tic­i­pat­ed in some speed drink­ing com­pe­ti­tions. None of us are heavy drinkers; rather, we’re on the heavy side of casu­al drinkers, so being able to down a mug as quick­ly as this was wor­thy of a OMGDIDYOUSEETHATWHERESMYPROPS?!?

16% Win Ratio

I end­ed up los­ing all my match­es yes­ter­day. Out of 18 games, I won three. Two match­es should have been easy wins, and one was tied at 2 games, 12 points. I get too ner­vous when I’m play­ing new peo­ple. I’m not quite used to the entire idea of com­pet­ing, espe­cial­ly for rank, espe­cial­ly with oth­er peo­ple depend­ing on me. My team­mates told me that it was notice­ably affect­ing my per­for­mance because it seemed as if my shoul­ders were stiff and I was try­ing too hard. I’ll be accus­tomed to every­thing even­tu­al­ly.

A Good Experience, I Tell Myself

I have anoth­er five hour league meet today. My team is matched up against two oth­er teams of inter­me­di­ate play­ers. When I first played in the league at the begin­ning of the year I had no hope of beat­ing these peo­ple, but now I’m not sure. I think that if I can con­cen­trate well enough, and play smart enough, I’ll have a good chance. The prob­lem is that being ner­vous always puts me at a dis­ad­van­tage; I usu­al­ly only win when I’m calm and focused. I’ve only played two of the sev­en play­ers, so there’ll def­i­nite­ly be some styles that I’m not used to, and that’s what scares me. Either way, it’ll be good expe­ri­ence.

The Snake That Swallows Its Tail

Soul Mountain ends with the nar­ra­tor con­vinced that God is com­mu­ni­cat­ing to him in the form of a frogs’ blink­ing eye, and that’s become my favourite part of the whole book. I always read the intro­duc­tion both before I start the book and after I fin­ish the book, and this time the intro­duc­tion tied every­thing togeth­er in the end. I final­ly under­stood the big pic­ture in what was a mot­ley, slow-start­ing nov­el. I want­ed to read Soul Mountain again, almost imme­di­ate­ly after I fin­ished it, but I decid­ed to start on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, even though both are rel­e­vant right now.