bruised

As soon as I got hit I knew that this one would be a good one. The puck came flying out of nowhere, Adam on one of his semi-coordinated wanna-be NHL odd man rushes during that five-minute window before true practice starts, taking a slapshot that whistled in just over my right knee and ricocheted off into the corner. I don't really know where it went precisely, because I was too busy squinching my eyes shut in silent pain. You'd think goalie pads might do their job once in a while, but I guess not.

I checked it while changing afterwards. It had that reddish blanched look that denotes impact, and I fancied I could almost see the ridges on the side of the puck embedded in my thigh. It took two full days for it to really color up, but it was gorgeous when it did. Just in time to show off this weekend during the sketchiest tournament we've ever had.

It was in Syracuse, and we were wrongfooted almost from the start. We'd calculated to get down there about two hours early, which turned out to be a lucky thing since our first game had been rescheduled (unbeknownst to us) to two hours earlier than we thought, as well as being at a totally different rink. Half our team wasn't even there yet though, so as the other half of us were frantically ripping off clothing and throwing on gear in the middle of the rink's public area (there were no locker rooms), our coaches managed to get things reorganized so the teams were shuffled up. Even then we kept hearing conflicting messages - get dressed, we're on right now, get half dressed, we're on next game, don't get dressed, no, get dressed, we're up - eventually it was established that we would be going on at about the same time as we had originally been scheduled for, and so we sat around in our equipment for two hours. The whole no-locker room thing was interesting, as there was some sort of high school football thing going on in the building across the parking lot and random people kept wandering into the rink to see what was going on. What they found was three or four teams' worth of hockey players wandering around in varying stages of undress.

After three games, two of them back-to-back, my knee was throbbing like a drum even though it hadn't sustained another direct hit. Somewhere along the line natural circulation had begun to spread the color as well, so the original puck-sized rectangle had grown four or five times larger and was migrating around my thigh almost to the back of my knee. When we finally got home at 10 last night, I made a beeline for the shower, where I noticed that it had changed color as well, from a spotty green-purple to big blotches of deep red and plum. What's weird is that it isn't just the color that spread either; it hurts all the way around. The red badge of whatever type of courage it is that makes you stand in front of a net to have hard bits of vulcanized rubber impelled at high velocity towards you.

dream

Last night I dreamed I was in the palace of a character from one of my as-yet unfinished stories - a semi-mythical Northern being whose sled is drawn by wolves. I was in a long, dim hallway, the walls made of packed snow, and standing before a door behind which I knew the wolves were waiting. A faceless person was telling me we couldn't enter until they wanted us to, so as we were waiting we began to practice catching snowballs. Only we didn't make them ourselves, they seemed to simply appear on the floor of the hallway. And they weren't made of snow - if I had to guess I'd say they were something like memory foam, which compressed into something like a packing peanut when I squeezed one.

Given that there were things being thrown at me, I had moved into the recessed doorway for cover, and noticed that the door had gradually begun to open by itself. This I took as a sign that entry was now acceptable, and walked into another dimly lit room full of couches upon which sat the men's varsity hockey team. Various girlfriends were there as well, snuggled into the sides of their significant others. This made perfect sense, as I knew I was there to audition for some sort of position related to them. I was also carrying a standard store envelope of photographs, which I knew would have something to do with my audition. This too made perfect sense.

There were two other girls there as well, fellow auditioners. One appeared to be completely covered with stubble, except for her face - the other was quite attractive, but went immediately to the front of the room to begin her audition. There were people in the way, and I couldn't see what she was doing, or hear, because one of the guys on the couch nearest me had begun talking to me. I looked at the first photograph in my envelope - it appeared to be a vintage storefront, big glass windows and a wooden porch extending outwards. The ground below was flooded almost to the level of the porch, and a man was standing in the water, facing the camera. Next to him sat a young girl on what resembled a miniature lifeguard chair, which raised her just enough so she appeared to be floating on the water's surface, her head a couple of feet higher than the man's. I immediately identified it as a scene from Hurricane Katrina, and wondered if perhaps that was the audition, to have to identify all of the photographs. I was about to look at the next when I woke up.

droopy

It's been raining for about five days straight now, each morning marked by that depressing gray edge around the windowshade that tells you even before you've blindly slapped at the alarm that today is going to be as dim and dark and droopy as the saturated branches of the trees outside. October is still clinging to the last vestiges of color, but can't hide the fact that it's slowly succumbing to the bleak no-man's-land that is November.

I've never had a problem with rain, even extended periods of it. My tolerance, however, varies in direct accordance to how much time I'm able to spend outside, which, as you might not expect, means that the more I'm out in it the happier I am. Sadly though, this week has instead found me boxed in white-walled rooms with the sort of cubicle-esque fluorescent lighting that exhausts you via osmosis when it isn't stabbing your eyes out. My sister gets migraines if she's exposed to it for too long. I just get grouchy.

The marathon four-hour shift working at the Writing Center today - nothing burns you out faster than getting the one impossible paper right at the end of the day when all you want is to get home. The first few sessions weren't so bad; I'm currently acting as a conversation partner for a Ukrainian woman visiting her Ph.D. candidate husband here. She'll be in America for three months and wanted to work on her English. The trouble is that when she can't think of a word (which is often) she will simply stop talking, so I have to constantly come up with new topics. And because she seems to have no activities outside of occasionally doing things with her husband, it's as exhausting for me to be imaginative as it must be for her to translate. Ran through a few standard freshman bio labs, reminding the kiddos to put Figure captions on the bottom and Table captions on the top and never, ever list the materials used, proofread a few more of the never-ending stream of endowed scholarship thank-you letters, and just as I was getting to the point where smashing a window, leaping out into the rain, and running down the street yelling "FREEDOM" in a passable Scottish accent (sans blue face paint), in comes an ESL student with a five-page paper on Plato's Republic with no discernible organization whatsoever, and so riddled with tense and grammar errors that it was barely readable. And I didn't even have the option of shuffling it off on one of the other tutors since we were full up. Ye gods.

Interviewed with ExxonMobil yesterday afternoon in lieu of sitting through Design lecture. Not too harrowing an experience, mostly the standard "describe your problem-solving technique," "what was an experience that challenged you, and how did you go about it," "what are your greatest strengths and weaknesses" sorts of questions. Possibly the comfort of having two job offers already on the table lulls me into a state of complacency, but I also like to keep my options open. Another two interviews scheduled for later in the month - it's that time of a senior's career. As if the joys of HYSYS programming and acrylic acid plant design weren't titillating enough.

Live music and dollar drafts at Open Mic night, preceded by repeatedly impaling a variety of foam targets with arrows at high velocity, make Wednesdays bearable. Tonight, however, I have only anchoring the news and getting beat up at hockey practice to look forward to.

And once again with the resurgence of classes, work, and the myriad distractions that arise with the coming of the school year, Paideia becomes neglected. Perhaps in another life when I spent more than an hour a day in front of the computer screen (note: this is free time we're talking here, no modeling or schoolwork involved), I could be one of those bloggers who maintain a daily stream of anecdotes, fiction, and news. Perhaps. The material is there, just not the leisure to record it. So as it is, I must content myself with intermittency.

Be that as it may, I've also decided to keep this site functioning, and to do that I am going to have to inject it with a far more personal flavor than it has had thus far. Not too all out, of course - how much more frightening is it to consider that people you know well might be reading all those gory details than it is to think of total strangers doing the same? how backwards that is? - but more than the odd song lyric every five days. Henceforth, all song lyrics shall be accompanied by a comment at minimum. A sharp increase in the amount of random fictional shorts, pointless rambles, and interesting-things-that-happened-to-me-today shall be manifest.

All this being said, it's also almost tomorrow and I have an early class. So that's all, folks.