"The Good Land"

So last wednesday I headed south on a strange and wonderful journey that would eventually find me at my father's house in Waukesha that very evening. There I saw my stepmom's parents who are my only living grandparents and whom I had not seen in two years. I had several conversations with them over the next few days and while sitting and discussing things with my grandfather he asked me two, rather pointed questions. The first was, "So what are you going to do with your life?" To which I replied that I didn't know. The second, asked in almost an accusatory tone was, "So you're not married yet?" I admitted that I was not as of yet, though someday hoped to be.

On friday jason, sasha, and wrenn picked me up and we proceeded to Josie's residence in milwaukee. There Jason and I discussed life over 2 liters of jobber juice (~300 ml of gin to 700ml of gatorade) Some highlights that night and morning were watching two squirrels have sex, catching snippets of a man's sex life as he discussed them on the phone as we tried to sleep, and a rather voyeuristic moment when I looked across the street and realized there was a naked woman by the window. This led jason and I to wondering what made voyeurism so interesting. After thinking about it a little my answer is as follows, when you watch someone and they think no one's watching you can catch a glimpse of the unguarded self. You can see how a person acts when they feel safe from social censure. How odd that moments like that so-often end with nose-picking. I suppose I should note that I think my take on voyeurism at the time we were drunk was shall we say, less cliched but more because-she's-naked-damnit oriented in its arguments.

Saturday morning we arrived at the fields right about the time the games were slated to begin and I saw rachael and rob whom I had not seen in some time, which made me very glad. Being hungover on saturday was an odd way to start a tournament but it seemed to work out ok, I also had that odd sense of superiority to everyone else at the field who was feeling fresh and youthful; the new mantra or shall we say guiding principle adopted that morning was that you could not win the party saturday night if you weren't hung over saturday morning. We finished 0-4 on saturday but we lost 3 of those games by a combined 4 points, which was a little frustrating. The Jobbers is an interesting team. I feel that we have a discrepancy on the way certain people view the team. I just want to have a good time and winning is secondary to that, hence I don't really live and die with every play on the field, don't take speeches too seriously, and wonder where my sippy beer is. I felt that on the whole the team felt this way and as a result we played really well at the beginnings of games because we were pretty loose. This is opposed to my college teams that opened games poorly. Now though, we get this O'shit thing, like we're tied with CLX at 5-5, or we're up 7-2 against a team that's probably on the same level as us, we must be good, we should start trying and it all goes to hell. Where as in college, being down took the pressure off and we either played respectable the rest of the game, stormed back and lost when it got close again, or very rarely came back and won. I feel if we could just hang loose more we'd do better. I don't know how to do that. The answer though probably is not trying to catch a quick 30 second standing nap on the line, like I was trying to on saturday when I started to feel a little funny from the gin. The other thing I didn't like was too much sideline assistance, specifically what I should do with the disc every time I catch it.

I bumped into kevin tucker on saturday and after the games we joined my family for the brewers game where we got complimentary Bob Ueker russian dolls. That was pretty sweet. We then managed to beat kevin's team the next morning and then we won our last game as well, we finished 13th which means we were at least even with our intial seeding. I also saw some polo, it looked like a really large version of a little kids' soccer game where they all follow the ball around the field.

Then an uneventful trip back here. Not a bad few days, hopefully I can get down for CHC and we can improve a little from cooler.

Since writing the above I attended the Great Minnesota Get Together, which in other states is called the "state fair" I believe. Was interesting to see some of the exhibits, though the orchid and bonzai exhibits deserve special mention. The food was crazy, they must have had about 200 food vendors there. I ate a scotch egg on a stick which I couldn't pass up after hearing of Raz's ill-fated encounter with them. For those who don't know, a scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage and cooked (read deep-fried) to "perfection", Raz threw up on a bet to eat five of them. I also had a belgium waffle dipped in choclate with whip cream and sprinkles on a stick and some delicious deep fried cheese curds. Incidentally the "on a stick" selling point extended to everything there for sale practically: pickles, origami, t-shirts, and so on. Well that's all I got for this entry. Ciao babes.