Charge Me With WTUIH--Writing A Thesis Under the Influence of Hockey

I have returned. With my thesis nearly finished and part one of my theory and methods project over, I now have time to write here.

I'll miss the constant stress of my thesis, and how I always worked best on it while either watching or listening to hockey. In case you don't already know, my honors thesis is about the Metis People of Canada and their relation to the issue of Quebec separatism. And in both of its forms (the senior seminar paper last spring it evolved from, and this version), I always got the most work done on it while being under the influence of hockey. Take last night, I'm typing away, listening to game 7 between the Leafs and Senators, and I finished roughly eight pages in an hour and a half. That’s prolific if I do say so myself. I guess I need the hockey to get in the Canadian mindset.

Now, mind you, my thesis was due a while ago. And I've never ever ever turned in anything late in my life. However, seeing that I've been wicked sick this semester, it kind of got delayed. I no longer know if I will get the honors designation--but at least it's almost done. I had to finish it to make myself happy--and for the three people who have asked to read it when I’m done. It’s very weird to think that people want to read my dinky little thesis, or that if I do achieve the honors designation, it’ll be in the Bartle Library forever. It’s just a little….unnerving? I mean, there was a time in my life where I aspired to be a writer, and here I am kind of, sort of fulfilling it. But then I think, “Wait, who the heck here at Binghamton is ever going to want to read about this topic? That book is going to sit on the shelves and collect dust for 20 years until they decide to move it to remote storage.” Eh, oh well.

On that note, my quote of the week comes from that Leafs-Senators game last night. I was listening to Toronto’s coverage of the game, and the announcer yells before the start of the game, “If you have lucky underwear, put it on Toronto!”

If you have lucky underwear?

I guess they did, they put it on, and it worked--they scored 3 in the first period to go on to win 4-1. Complete blow out. “I’ve never seen worse plays by a goalie IN MY LIFE!” exclaimed underwear man about the Senators goalies at the intermission between the 1st and 2nd. He then proceeded to talk for at least 10 minutes about how the OHL (Ontario Hockey League for you non-almost-Canadians) has 8 game series instead of 7 game series (the games don’t go into overtime until game 8...I’m still a little unsure as to how this works, but the minute I can do mindless research on stuff that interests me, and not stuff Binghamton tells me interests me, I will look more into this.)

I love hockey. Luckily, I am moving to a city that holds its hockey close to its heart--even if they lost to Montreal on Monday. Montreal=where my great-grandmother was from, or so I have been told. Boston=where I am moving. Very interesting…for a few seconds.

Speaking of moving, I have reached that point where I lack any motivation to do anything for the next, oh, 25 days. You know, senioritis? The fact that nothing I am doing right now has little bearing to anything I’ll be doing starting on May 19th? Well, I mean, working in the office and store has to do with it, but that’s it. Nothing else does. It got really bad last week, when I actually had the physical Harvard rejection letter in my hands, along with 2 letters saying I lost out on roughly 7 different senior campus life awards here. I was thinking, “Well, I worked my tail off for years, and it meant absolutely nothing to anybody.” And that is definitely not true--I did get into the other 4 grad schools I applied to, and I got a lot of my grad school costs taken care of--but it all came at once and it seriously stunk. Add onto that the mess that was elections, and I was in a serious funk where I just wanted to go to bed and sleep until graduation. But it worked out. I may not have gotten into Harvard, my dream since I was 10, and I may watch every other senior student leader out there get awards except for me, but you know, it was fun while it lasted. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. It’s like that saying they tell you at every leadership conference ever, “Don’t do stuff for the recognition, do it because you like it.” Very true.

But on to less depressing things…
-No, I don’t care what they were saying on SportsCenter last night--Kurt Warner SHOULD NOT go to the Niners. That’s just wrong! Like say the Bills had had a chance in 93 or 94 to sign like Nate Newton from the Cowboys or the Niners had had a chance to get Brett Favre--heck no. That’s fraternizing with the enemy right there!!!! It’s wroooonnnnnnngggggg. I hate the Rams, except for the fact that Marc Bulger is hot. The Rams are evil. Their former coach (Vermeil) cries more than my mom does at TV shows, their current coach doesn’t know what he’s doing, and they always have to beat up on the Niners. I don’t care that Warner doesn’t like the Rams anymore--he’s still a Ram. He can’t can’t can’t can’t go to the Niners. I’m sorry, SportsCenter guys, but that would be a bad catch. Never mind that Rattay is really not all that proven and Dorsey’s even more unproven. There are principles.

And Carmen Policy should come back to the Niners, now that he’s left the Browns. While we’re at it, how about the whole 1994-95 team and office come back, in the same shape as they were then? Works for me!

-Fantasy baseball is fun. I rather enjoy it. My dad wants to kill me because I do. “Katie, you’re playing fantasy baseball? Why? I didn’t raise you to like baseball. That’s not a sport.” Sorry, Dad. I actually might be good at it--well, either that or I’m a fluke.

Oh, and on the subject of baseball, I now have a baseball player to add to the pantheon of hot athletes. However, upon telling a certain boss of mine who it was, that certain boss made fun of me. So I’m thinking I will not say who this player is, to avoid further ridicule. However, think about what kind of guys I like, and then if you also know baseball pretty well, take a wild guess. Yeah, I’m that predictable. Winner gets…to make fun of me.

-It’s dorm wars week here at good ol’ Binghamton, with Newing Navy, Hinman Hysteria, Salamander Days (Mountainview) and, the one nearest and dearest to my heart (sorry Mountainview), Mutant Mania (Dickinson) going on. And I’m judging a few Mania events, since I have no bias because my hall no longer exists. However, kudos to Whitney (sorry about that--I had it down as Champlain at first, then I remembered it was really Whitney) for mentioning Holiday in its alma mater--we may be hotel rooms now, but it’s nice to know that our spirit is not forgotten. So if you visit Binghamton this week and find random people in different colored t-shirts running around like chickens with their heads cut off, don’t worry. That’s dorm wars for you.

-I’m going home this weekend to see my sister’s lighting and tech work in SOTA’s production of Ragtime. If you’re there, go out and support the show--there are rumours going around that next year’s production season (my sister’s last) is going to be drastically cut because of lack of funding. This very well could be one of the last huge musicals (and trust me, this one is HUGE) SOTA puts on. But the other motivation to go home this weekend comes from the fact that I don’t have ESPN2 here, but I do at home, and the draft is on.

Till next week…

Note: I wrote this on Tues. the 6th while I was home on spring break. Home=bad internet, therefore I wasn't able to post it till I got back to school today. It may be a little dated, but try to take yourself back to last Tuesday and enjoy. And to tell you all what ended up happening: I did come back to school to find a rejection letter from Harvard in my mailbox. Fortunately, also in the mailbox was my new Boston University sweatshirt.

Motown Philly, Back Again

Greetings from the futon in my house! It's Spring Break and my laptop, the TV and I are having quality time while I work on and procrastinate from my honors thesis. I returned to the "Rochester metropolitan area" (Tricia's words) late Sunday night, after attending the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) Conference in Philadelphia to start off my break. My big plans for break included having sinus surgery, however not only do I need to have more tests done before they do it, I now have my third sinus infection this year and am on new antibiotics. These ones are pretty interesting--I usually don't get side effects, but I'm definitely feeling them with these. So bear with me.

This weekend was supposed to be full of career exploration, networking and fun. It was fun, but it was full of all of that fun inner turmoil that comes with being 40 days away from graduation. Saturday afternoon, I'm sitting there thinking, "Wait, I don't know if this is what I really want to do. Do I want to deal with college students my whole life?" Saturday night, I was depressed at that thought and the one that I had spent two sessions hearing that two year programs are preferable to one year programs (and Boston University is a one-year program.) BAH! What am I doing? But by the end of the day on Sunday, I had settled down a bit. I like academic advising, I like alumni affairs, and the best thing about higher education administration is that if I need to get out at anytime, I work at a college and can take classes for a reduced price towards another degree. I just don't know if student affairs (student activities and residential life) is where I want to spend the majority of my time. I can't be workaholic me forever--I need to be able to separate work from home at the end of the day, and with that you can't always do that. But I'm still young, and I'm willing to do that for a while. We'll see what happens.

But the big news is that I've pretty much decided (99.9% sure) that I will spend the next year of my life as a Terrier, trading one BU for the other. I'm mostly excited because if you read my journal from August, all I did was gush about Boston University. Still, I am a little disappointed--I still haven't received a letter from Harvard or BC, but I'm assuming they came yesterday to my school mailbox and were negative. I have to give BU an answer by Friday, and I have to assume by what I heard this weekend that I would of heard weeks ago had either one accepted me. BC I'm not sad about--sure, it would be a fun sports school, but I think a closed Catholic campus isn't quite me right now. But Harvard I'm a little in denial about. I know there are people who have more qualifications in the world--many more--but I thought I was Harvard material. Maybe I'd fill some kind of quota for them--the poor girl from Western NY who has a 3.7?--but I guess this wasn't my year. Oh well, BU wants me, likes me, and I like them. And really, my real dream was to move to a big city, get a Master's, and be in someplace that I enjoy. And that's what I will do in 40 days.

And from one big city to another, there are some peculiar things I noticed about Philly. One, it has all one way streets (not that that's really unusual to me anymore) but they all have random "NO TURN" signs at the lights. Well, in order to get into the parking lots, you have to turn at the light. Maybe it was just that you weren't supposed to turn right. But the signs gave no other directions, not even an arrow, so I assumed it applied to both. I'm glad I wasn't driving. As evidenced by my driving to my appointment Monday morning (where I got lost on Westfall Road, and nearly hit a few mailboxes in Pittsford, where you really really don't want to hit anything because the residents are SUPER rich), I should probably not drive in a major city. I probably shouldn't drive in anything bigger than Rochester. Also, in Pennsylvania, when you enter and exit the tolls, there are no lanes. It's a wild free-for-all until the lanes start up again. And there are apparently no cops in Pennsylvania, and the few that there are all hang out on the NY-PA border, catching the "crazy kids" who speed on 81. I hadn't been in Pennsylvania in four years, and that was when I flew there to connect flights. The last time I had really been in PA, I was 15 and going to Hershey Park. Erie when I was 17 doesn't count because Erie is not Pennsylvania, no matter how much you try to convince me otherwise. It's just Western New York, which in turn is just Southern Ontario, which makes Erie just a town in Southern Ontario, not Pennsylvania. But my point with that all was to say is that I don't remember all of these driving peculiarities from my previous trips because of my age and subsequent driving naiveté.

Speaking of naiveté, I am convinced that I'm really not an idiot, I'm just naive. That's going to be my excuse for everything from now on. "I'm not an idiot, I'm just naive." I think if Jessica Simpson said that, her stupidity would all make sense.

And on to more naiveté...
-This morning, I got to sit in my pajamas (not the football pants, but the "cat's pajamas" pants--get it? "The Cat's Pajamas?" I am Kat, I wear pajamas, they're the "cat's pajamas?") and read a new Bill Simmons article followed by Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback from yesterday that I hadn't gotten the chance to read yet. If I had a peanut butter cookie from the Hinman Night Owl and an Oreo cookie milkshake from the CIW Night Owl with Barenaked Ladies blaring on a stereo and a hot guy was lying next to me (Dream Job Mike?), it would of been the most perfect fifteen minutes of my life. As it was, the reality was pretty good. I feel okay about abandoning sports writing as a career three years ago as long as those two are writing.

-Mike from Dream Job is THE HOTTEST GUY EVER. HANDS DOWN. AMAZING. I only was able to see the last two episodes of Dream Job, so I know I missed out on a lot. But still, those two episodes, and his SportsCenter appearance the following night left me drooling. I don't even care that he agreed with Tony Kornheiser in saying figure skating isn't a sport, that's how good looking he is to me. Sense of humour with knowledge of sports and amazing good looks=SUPREME HOTTNESS.

-My father is in denial that I like baseball. We come home Sunday night and I hurried to turn on Sportscenter to see the score of the Red Sox-Orioles game. It flashed on the screen, Red Sox 2, Orioles 7, and I groaned (ever since the Orioles treated the Rochester Red Wings so poorly before we broke our association with them, I hate them). My father shook his head. "I thought I raised you better than to like baseball."

In other baseball news, Peter King's article in Sports Illustrated two weeks ago about what was wrong with baseball is nearly identical to the point of my Power Point presentation in Intro to Sports Management back in Fall 2000. Except of course that it's almost four years later and he's more knowledgeable on the subject than 18 year old me was. Right on.

And my fantasy team rocks, especially my pitchers.

-The Patriots play the Niners at home this upcoming season. Can the 98 Niners play the Patriots instead? Either way, I'm going. Coincidence that my favourite team is playing in my new residence the fall I get there? I think not! Okay, maybe. But it's a nice one. (But if it's Homecoming weekend, I can't go. This would be a tough decision for me if the Niners were going to be any good this year, but they aren't.)

I am off to the post office to mail forms to my new school! Till next time...