What I Got Going On Recently, And The Like

Seriously. First off, I want to describe the RA retreat I went to. It was thirty-three of us in a big room with a bunch of RAs, various staff members, and a supervisor. We went around and did various little team-building exercises that were designed to, I don't know, let us get to know each other better.

Some were mystifying. We were divided into groups and made to come up with the name and genre of a band and a song by that band, in an exercise the point of which I still do not understand. It was pretty cool, though, we made a band called MENAL (a combination of the first letters of our first names, and some of our middle names, when we discovered just first names would have made MJNDL) and a song titled Bleeding Orange and Blue. My character was the drummer and backup vocalist who got pissed off when someone handed him a line to rhyme with that ended in "orange."

Some made slightly more sense. All our groups had to come up with properties that made a good RA or staff member, whatever...but then we had to draw a picture of an RA that symbolized all this. So this ended up with goofy nonsense like for "level-headed," we drew a level balanced on his head. For "inspiring," we drew him wings. For "knowledgeable," we gave him Yoda ears, since Yoda is wise and knowledgeable. I don't recall what the halo, the outhouse, and the yoga mat were for, but no doubt they had a purpose as well.

There were other things, but it's mostly more of the same. We had to pick ideal candidates from a list, discuss how we'd resolve certain situations, etc.

I did go running yesterday, with a friend of mine, who has promised to take me running every other day from now on. Since I'm running with someone:

1. I'll actually have the incentive to do it, since he said he'd beat me down if I didn't, and he's pretty buff, also
2. He keeps me going when I feel too tired to continue while we're actually running.

This second part was manifestly necessary. We ran two miles, which isn't bad for my first time in over a month, but I was nearly dead by the end of it. I am so, so out of shape, it is not even funny. Hopefully, this will fix that. Seriously, I was wheezing and sweating and my mouth was dry as a bone from all the gulping down air, it's ridiculous.

He'll be a big asset to me in the coming weeks and months, if I am to actually whip myself into shape. I have been eating better, though, and though I backslide occasionally and get fast food, I really feel that I have been making a difference. I feel better, less lethargic, sometimes.

This is sort of small, but I'll add more to it when I get back from the club I'm going to tonight with Vic, Kait, Mike, Kevin, and I think a few others.

Okay. So, the club. The club was pretty much exactly how I thought it was going to be - crowded, smoky, dark, and loud enough to pulverize iron. I had a few conversations with girls, which for a club newbie like myself I suppose is at least something. I asked two to dance, but one said she wasn't dancing at all on account of her feet were hurting (might have been a pushoff excuse, but whatever) and one said she had a boyfriend (more believable). Eh, if it was easy, it wouldn't be any fun.

I've made some observations as to the social structure of the place.

- Girls generally travel in clumps of two to five.
- Guys stand in lines of one to three, or at the bar. In the lines, they silently observe the clumps of girls.
- Of course, there are the requisite couples, and the rare mixed-gender group, but I've found that that often is a case of a couple grafting itself onto an existing clump.
- Penetrating these clumps long enough to make decent conversation is difficult. I haven't figured out the optimal way of doing this yet. Just saying "Hi, wanna dance?" may work sometimes, but I'd think it would be generally ineffective. Effective icebreakers are hard to come up with.

All right, that's that. I may give it a few more chances.

On Sunday, me and my theater class went to go see a production called An Evening with Tom Stoppard. If you've never heard of Tom Stoppard, he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a spinoff of Hamlet starring possibly the two most minor named characters in that play. Their function in Hamlet is to arrive, be made to look like idiots by Hamlet, and then killed off-screen. Stoppard's play goes into depth about their personalities and their motivations, and their off-screen conversations, and it's generally pretty good.

He also, apparently, wrote a whole bushel of other plays. The performance we saw (directed by our teacher, I noticed, no wonder he had us go to see it) was a selection of twenty-two scenes taken from various of Stoppard's plays. At the end of it, I was so filled with Stoppard-esque material that I was inspired to write my own one-scene mini-play, done in Stoppard's style. This is Tuesday's post. Though if you're reading this, it's probably Tuesday anyway.

I went on my date with Rachel. It was quite nice. We went to Leonardo's By The Slice, a little pizza place just off-campus, and had lunch and talked for about an hour and a half about our families, our backgrounds, what we did for fun, etc. She said she had a good time, and later that evening she called me and asked if I would like to meet her for lunch on Thursday as well. I gave her the obvious answer ("Yes"), and it remains to be seen how that will go over. Oh, as well as that, we set up another date for next Monday, same time. So both the second and third dates are already planned out, assuming I don't really, really blow things on the second. Time for my compulsive overanalyzing of every word and every gesture on our first date, tally-ho. (Though I am told this is a bad idea.)

I ran another two miles today. Perhaps next week I'll start trying for three miles. I went alone, for the first time, as Marc, my running buddy, was too busy to come out with me. So instead I brought my mp3 player and set it to play "Artist - Dragonforce." If any kind of music will inspire me to run and keep running, it's them. I can't even sit still as I listen to their jammin' tunes and melodies. Yes, all their songs sound basically the same, but minor variations on an awesome theme = still awesome.

I had to rage at myself mentally to keep going for the last half-mile, as I was getting pretty tired. Fortunately, I was inspired by the presence of the nearly-full moon hovering in the sky. "All right, Luke," I said to myself. "If you stop running before you reach the end, the moon is going to plunge out of the sky and smash into Earth, killing billions. Are you going to accept a near-global apocalypse just because you're in a little pain? No? I didn't think so." I got through the whole thing, although my left leg kind of hurts now. Eh, I'll walk it off.

Ooh, an amusing anecdote. Last week in Sci-Fi class, we started to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Our teacher, who is the straightest-laced professor I've ever had, shared with us a story of the first time he and his friends, as college students, went to see the movie. "We decided to commemorate the occasion with some...special brownies," he told us. "We ate heavily of them, then went in to watch. I need hardly tell you that it was the greatest cinematic experience of our lives." I was agog to hear this, but he was not yet finished. "During the intermission," he continued remorselessly, "I was so out of it, that when I saw people walking around the lobby I thought 'How can they be moving around without their space-suits on??'" Quite hilarious. Yes, I know celebrating drug use isn't the best thing ever, but come on, it's funny.

The long and the short of it is that I'm going to bring in some brownies to the class on Wednesday. I'll really want to see my professor's face when I bring them in. I can just imagine the conversation...

Him: Lucas...are these?
Me: Brownies? Yep. Made 'em myself.
Him: No, I mean, what's in them?
Me: *shrug* I don't know. Try one and find out.

Obviously, they're going to be regular brownies, as I don't know how to get my hands on any special ingredients and consider bringing drugs into a classroom in the form of delicious baked treats (and sharing them with the professor) to be just about the stupidest thing I could possibly pull off, short only perhaps of bringing in a gun in a pie.

That's about it. (I say that too much. Whatever.) The Luke-Approved YouTube Link of the Day is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nid2IZ0h0yk It's called "Ashley's Song," originally from Wario Ware: Touched! but remixed for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I like that jazzy style, and the lyrics are kind of wacky. It's about a, er, probably 9-10-year-old girl who's a powerful sorceress, but in the cutest possible way. You know.

REPLIES.

Mom: Thanks. And I seriously was joking about the lonely bit. Besides, everything seems to have worked out well enough. RA meeting went okay.

Jake: Here's hoping. You're running too? Do you really need to lose any weight? You weigh like six pounds as it is. Mono sucks, and now I get to blackmail you with Dan. Travis had knee troubles?

Dad: I know, I know, but it seems to have been taken in the spirit in which it was intended.

Steve: Come on, man, am I really going to marry a girl because of StarCraft? No. She'll have to have at least a commensurate knowledge of the Mario, Zelda, and Metroid series as well, as well as a fair experience with WoW. I already described her - athletic. Brown hair. And I'll probably be in Gainesville for the 1st.

Bye.