"How does Gentle look?! How do you think?! She looks like a Raccoon!"

I had another softball game tonight. This one was a 10:10 game. I really don't like 10:10 games, and not just because the club bar closes before the 10:10 games finish, though I admit that's a big part of it. I also hate getting home at midnight or 1 AM and being so revved up from the game that trying to sleep is utter futility. Now I'll be drowsy all day tomorrow at work. I feel really guilty that my productivity has fallen off in these last 2 weeks I have at work. To make up for it, maybe I'll go in over next weekend.

We won again tonight, which is really bad for our team. Much like the Minnesota Vikings, whenever we start a season with a great winning streak, usually by the last game we are barely able to walk onto the field without falling on our asses. It takes two hands to count the number of seasons where we have gone into the playoff tournament undefeated, only to lose in the first round to the team that went the whole season without a win.


Ah, Gentle and the keg stand that went horribly, horribly wrong. What a vibrant memory. Jenn, Jer and The Big Nasty are three dear friends of mine from graduate school. After one of our grad student parties, we ended up with a full leftover keg. We stashed it in a laboratory cold room and the next weekend decided to try to kill it before returning the empty barrel. If memory serves, it was me, Jer, TBN, Jenn and this cute undergraduate named Gentle who worked in Jenn's lab. Yes, that's 5 people trying to kill an entire half-barrel of beer. We did not complete our mission. We did however manage to pull off some extreme keg standing. We even got The Big Nasty inverted a couple of times, which is no small feat being that he is about 6'4" and weighs in the neighborhood of 250.

Towards the end of the evening, Gentle decided she wanted to do another keg stand and recruited TBN and I to act as her safety spotters, because when you're keg standing, safety always comes first. So TBN and I were standing there talking to Jer as Gentle was getting ready to mount the keg. Without warning, she hurled herself into a handstand on the barrel, flinging her legs high into the air. TBN and I were taken by complete surprise and lunged to support her so she didn't kill herself. Just as her arms buckled, we completely missed catching her and she fell straight down and hit the bridge of her nose right on the lip of the keg. In our defense, we did catch her before she caromed off the barrel onto the ground. By the time we got her back on her feet, she already had a visible bruise right between her eyes where she hit the edge of the keg.

The following Monday I called Jenn in her lab and asked how Gentle looked.

"How does Gentle look?! How do you think?! She looks like a Raccoon! She looks like two idiot drunks dropped her on her head onto a metal keg!"

Gentle had broken her nose and had two black eyes. I think college is an appropriate time in a young person's life to learn the valuable lesson of Don't Trust Drunkee.


Finally, many thanks to those that made helpful suggestions regarding the move to NY. The "pod" suggestion was a really good one and I may go in that direction. Thanks EJ. To those of you who made smart-ass comments, including the private email suggesting I hitch-hike to NY with my belongings in my rectum: