The Game*

Wow, this semester has gone by fast! This afternoon I’m hopping on a plane back to Texas for thanksgiving, and next week is the final week of classes before reading period and finals! Perhaps because last semester was about a month longer than usual, this semester feels particularly short. Or maybe it’s just because there’s been so much less stress involved than previous semesters. Either way, time has flown, and I’ve learned a lot.

The past week has been fairly eventful. The first bit of excitement for the week started at around 5:40 Wednesday morning, when the Harvard ROTC students showed up at our zipcars** only to find out that Harvard hadn’t paid for them and our accounts had been frozen. After a panicked flurry or two, my carpool called a taxi (there’s an app for that now, of course) and arrived with time to spare. Of course, other people weren’t so lucky, and for about the first fifteen minutes of lab the auditorium received various groups of out-of-breath Harvard midshipmen. As soon as everyone had finally found a seat, the fire alarm went off. It was quite a morning, and all this before 7 AM had rolled around.

This weekend involved more enjoyable activities. The Harvard-Yale game was at Yale this year, so I headed down to Connecticut for the day with friends. This time we didn’t even see Yale; the bus dropped us off across the street from the stadium, and there we stayed. We went through the various security levels (people have gotten extra-careful lately), found food, found seats, and enjoyed watching Harvard win for the ninth year in a row and become Ivy League champion once again. The scheduling of our bus required us to leave a few minutes before the end of the game, which was disappointing, but we didn’t miss any game-changers, and we got home on time.

Watching the game made me quite nostalgic, and I’m looking forward to heading home. I like football, I’ve watched many games, and I know a lot of great people who have played or cheered. Still, college football (Harvard-Yale in particular) seems primed to bring out the silliest sides of human nature. The boys spend months training to run and knock each other over, so that they can say they’re the best at running and knocking people over, and maybe even make a career of it. The girls line up in cute, tight, short little outfits and jump around and smile and scream about the boys in tandem. And everyone else gets obnoxiously, dangerously drunk and makes out and watches so they can yell directions at the coaches and players. One can only imagine what an alien observer would think of us upon observing a college football game.

In any case, the weekend was fun. On Sunday I made it up in time for church, and then Helen did my nails – you might as well know her name; you’re going to see a lot of pictures of her in just a minute. I did what little work had to be done for the week on Sunday, and then went to bed fairly early in order to wake up for the final ROTC PT of the semester Monday morning.

I ended up driving myself to ROTC yesterday – they did unfreeze our accounts – but I was going to a new place, from a new place, in a new car, on a new road, so getting there was a minor adventure. I did manage to arrive on time – just barely – and complete the semester’s physical fitness test, which has been slightly worrying me on and off as the first real fitness test I’ve had since last fall, when my ankle was still recovering and my run time was suffering for it. I am happy to report, though, that I have recovered my original run time while maintaining my push-up and sit-up scores, so life is good. Besides which, the standards only get easier as you get older; apparently the Navy figures that after you turn 19, it’s downhill from there.

Running the PRT, because it’s the only time I put out all my energy, usually leads to my immune system breaking down, so I was a little sick the rest of yesterday, but I went to bed very early, and things seem to have improved since then. A couple hours of class, and then I’m headed back to Texas for the holiday! Talk to you next week, on the last week of school – Happy Thanksgiving!

*Harvard vs. Yale - the only game the majority of the student body cares about. Incidentally, it also sealed the Ivy League Championship this year, since we lost a game.

**It's a company that has set cars in set parking spaces around town that you can reserve for certain times. Harvard pays for the ROTC students to use them in order to commute to our MIT ROTC classes.

Pictures:

The leaves have finally fallen, but the Yard is as pretty as ever.

 'Cause we're cool.

 We may or may not have pretended to be freshman to get these, but we didn't get one when we were freshman, and they're good for pictures.

Temporary tattoos!

The tailgate (we didn't spend much time there; it was a tad frightening.)

 Our boys

 Entering the stadium:
Also, everybody say hello to Helen! (And also thank you to her for taking some of these pictures.)

 Before the game:

 The cheerleaders were really good, actually.

 And then the sun set, and it was freezing. Or possibly below. As you can see, people did eventually show up.

 This is actually the security line to get back the bags we weren't allowed to take into the stadium, but the nice (and seemingly random) pillared gate also spawned some nice philosophical reflections on retaining the form and losing the content/purpose of something (like religion).

 Back at home, I wanted a last picture before washing the face paint off for church the next morning.

 Fall/Thanksgiving nails!