Been a long time. It was, specifically, a time filled with a tremendous amount of crap. I will go briefly through the major events that have occurred from September 20th until this evening. I'm sure sme things will get filled in at different levels later on. Anywho.
A couple days after my last posting was the departure for Wilkes-Barre, King's College, and as such my return to the debate coaching ranks. All three were pretty decent experiences. I drove a mini-van full of college kids (full being a generous term) about 4 hours into the Pennsylvania valley. My van arrived first of course, so after checking in to the Holiday Inn and the like I managed to cut at least a couple pages of cards. Katie and I combined to put out 41 pages by the following day at 11:00, which included my contending with the old people in the tour group to get a couple waffles from the deluxe continental breakfast. While I recognize that not everyone spends as much time as I do in mid-level hotel breakfast areas, the inabiility to work a waffle iron with instructions clearly printed on the base makes you an idiot. Not only was this old chick a waffle-iron illiterate, but she had actually jumped in front of me in line. I ate a bowl of frosted flakes standing up behind her just to demonstrate how unhappy I was with the situation. I think my message was somewhat undercut by helping her to work the damn waffle machine, but I couldnt risk her trying to make another one when the first came out raw on one side and burnt on the other.
We coached some rounds, I judged a couple blah blah. We cleared 4 teams, two in jv, an open, and a novice. I didn't coach any of those in prelims, notably, but regardless. It was a pretty good showing for the first weekend of the season, of Ken's tenure as Rochester's DOF, and mine as a college debate coach. Drove back just barely in time to get my car from the rental joint and drive back to Buffalo. Hippo was very excited to see us, especially since she had gotten used to us not going out of town for 4 days every couple weeks. She jumped up onto Katie's lap, read some blogs and checked email with her, then meowed around the house for a little while. She really does enjoy the crisp fall air thats developing here in Buffalo, so the windows are of even more interest than they used to be. That got messed up yesterday afternoon when Katie and I decided to turn the air conditioning back on, in response to 80+ temperatures in the first week of October, but she digs a last taste of the human induced freeze for 2005.
The week that followed was pretty much all prep for the Buffalo tournament all the time. I got a good amount of work done on several of these days, finishing and sending off an article I had written on the premiere of CSI: NY and approaching completion on the paper I'm presenting in Rochester on the 15th. The dissertation hasn't gotten quite all the attention it deserves, but still working on the whole multi-tasking affair. Still on track, but a little sidebar for the week. Jonathon Culler, whose book On Deconstruction is really quite incredible, came to UB to speak on Thursday. His talk, which notably had a great title "The Most Interesting Thing in the World: Derrida and Literature" was pretty informative and admittedly did alot with material I am far from familiar with. If you ever get the chance you should drop by and hear him speak. He may end up being unfairly overshadowed by Jean-Luc Nancy's appearance in November, but the point being that it was good. In many ways it was a break from the avalanche of activity which was to come soon afterwards.
Friday was technically my birthday, though I am not quite sure why I inserted the word technically in there, since it was my birthday by all accounts. Katie was obviously more than slightly occupied by the tremendous amount of crap involved in running a debate tournament for 180ish people, but managed to make it a very happy day nonetheless. The first part was really quite wonderful by all accounts, as we left at 10:00 and drove out to the apple orchard to pick a bushel's worth of Cortland, JonaGold, and Crispin apples as tournament snacks. It was a beautiful fall morning, cool with a bit of a breeze and bright sunshine. We got some fresh baked cookies and were able to drive ourselves right into the orchard. The Crispins were not my favorite, but had a good balance of sweet and sour. The Cortlands were at the very end of their season, as the trees were nearly bare, but were incredibly sweet, like candy almost. The JonaGold's were incredible however, only a step away from the Golden Delicious which I adore. They were tart and delightful, so I think I ate at least 3 of them standing amongst the trees. Its a little ridiculous how odd an apple orchard feels, like I don't really cognitively understand that apples grow on trees until I am removing them from said trees and eating them directly. We only had that 30 or so minutes to enjoy the morning and then it was a mad dash towards Monday morning.
I will accomplish only one more event, and hence one more rant, on my attempt to blog at a reasonable pace. That one will involve the grocery store. We stopped at our friendly neighborhood LaPerna family Tops to pick up certain amounts of condiments and the like. Beyond just mustard and chips and such, we also had to purchase all the things which would ostensibly enable the vegan folks to "eat reasonably" for the weekend. That included vegan cream cheese, vegan cheese slices, soy milk, and possibly a couple other things I don't remember. My rant is simply this: I hate being considered a dirty hippy for dirty hippy elements I don't even subscribe to. I have no problem with people eating whatever it is they choose to eat, those choices, to my knowledge, have no impact on me at all. I can even understand not wanting to eat meat. What I don't really understand is the decision to not eat animal products for ethical reasons, but to eat things that "taste like" animal products. I recognize that it has no effect one way or the other, but it doesn't feel right. My obviously somewhat inaccurate analogy was that if you thought that killing people was wrong, but you really liked killing people, and they started making cloned psuedo-people whom you could kill and it would sort of seem like killing a real person, would you be killing them. I think the point in both situations is to confront the fact that there is something that you like which you shouldn't like, rather than to just find ways to eat it that don't hurt anything. I'm sure I would feel differently if I was a veggie, but pork, beef, and chicken taste good. Hippo agrees, though she would like to add that whatever additional ingredients are used to flavor Cat Chow are just as tasty as any prime rib.
Peace,
MB-K
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