LaMarcus works out!

Rose Garden!

Jerryd!

More updates

Sooo....haven't updated in 5 months, but I'm still here. A few key updates:

--Finished my first year of grad school with one more to go. Things are going well. I'm submitting things to conferences/journals, and writing my thesis. All in all, I'm right where I should be.

--The debaters did well at nationals--two teams break at NPDA and one got to quarter-finals, and we had a team in the 3rd elim at NPTE, so a pretty successful run.

--Jessica and I are still happily engaged and I'm wearing her down on the "let's just go to vegas" front.

--My dad died in May. It sucked.

--I went to Holland for the 2010 IDEA Youth Forum, and it was great. Seriously, one of the best debate experiences of my life!

--The Blazers spent their full MLE on Wes Matthews, a sparkplug of a 2nd year player from Utah who's compared to Batum a lot. Love the signing, love that he makes the Jazz worse.

--Our buddies Tim and Megan moved to Florida and we're looking for two fun replacements.

It was a great game

I'm working out now, and it's awesome--I'm feeling better every day. However, what's fun about my gym is that it's connected with the Pyramid, where the 49er basketball team plays (along with other sports I don't care about). I've been to a couple of games this season (which I guess is over now, so last season), and I must say, I love going to a D-1 school. ANYWAY, when I was at Willamette I used to check out a basketball and go shoot free-throws for half an hour just to clear my head. When I was getting my membership at Frog's Fitness, I asked if I could do something similar here, you know, since the gym is in the same building as the basketball courts, and I was laughed at. "We're in no-way affiliated with CSULB." Really? See, I was confused by the giant, floor-length windows overlooking the CSULB basketball team practicing. ANYWAY (really this time), last week I was doing some leg-lifts and I ended up watching a really competitive scrimmage of the 49er men's basketball team, and it went right down to the wire, with a 5 point run in the last 20 seconds for the "black" team to win at the buzzer with a corner three. It was easily the best game I've watched in person, and they didn't even know they were being watched. Like I said, I like going to a D-1 school. GO BEACH!

Updates!

It's been too long, internet. My last update was almost four months ago. Seriously, how is that even possible? Anyway, here's what's happened in my life since then:

--Jessica and I got ENGAGED. It's worth mentioning that in addition to being the most meaningful and awesome relationship in my life, it is now the longest. So, yeah. When people ask about when we're getting married, my answer is "whenever Jess agrees to Vegas." I'm 49% serious about this. The things I hate most in the world are, in order: cross-eyed children, parades, and things that are really about other people but pretend to be about you (graduations and weddings are the biggest two examples, though I suppose funerals also count). We'll see. Maybe next Summer. The lesson, as always--take relationship advice from Beyonce Knowles.

--I applied for and was accepted to be a trainer at the 2010 IDEA Youth Forum in Zeeland, The Netherlands. This means I get to participate in the most intense, awesome and important debate camp in the World. It also means I get to go to the Netherlands for basically nothing this Summer. Yay, debate! To review, this will be the fifth country I will have traveled to for debate. Nerds win.

--Graduate school is awesome. I love teaching, I'm learning a lot from and have developed good relationships with a lot of brilliant faculty members, and I'm finding more and more ways to make meaningful contributions to the speech and debate team.

--David and I went to see the Blazers-Clippers game in LA, and I'm planning on going to one more in LA next month! For the record: LOVE the Camby trade. GO BLAZERS!

--I have a gym membership and I'm working out 4-5 days a week now. Yay for being (sort of) healthy.

I promise to post more often! Hugs!

Academics never die

Yesterday evening I went to library in search of some books for a paper I'm writing on the Rhetorical lives of Tiberious and Caius Gracchus. Since most of their speeches haven't survived, I was left to find the best collection that remains, a translation from the historian Plutarch. In my search, I came across a series of books that were old. Most of the books I walked out of the library with were published in 1909 in England, with frayed edges and water marks in places. The books in my backpack were around during two world wars, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and various natural disasters and historic events throughout the world.

In 1909, someone not unlike me got their book published, and 100 years later, a graduate student they never met, who their children and grandchildren never met, walked out of a library in Southern California with their words. I couldn't tell you who my great-grandfather was on either side of my family. That's probably a depressing commentary on me, but I don't think it's that unique, either. Relationships, even close ones, fade away as generations pass. Knowledge, though, lasts at least a little longer. There's a form of community in graduate school that I hadn't experienced before. I am a scholar, and I hope to be a master in my field. If I'm very lucky, I hope to one day write something that someone I'll never meet, who my children and grandchildren will never meet, will carry out of a library half a world away at 10:00 PM on a Tuesday night, relieved to have finally found just what they need.