Back from my Spring Break in Georgia, where I was Frisbee Mom to forty-odd Ultimate Frisbee players.

It was a symbiotic -- or at the very least epiphytic -- relationship. I stayed with the A-team (which was half-heartedly masquerading as the B-team for the weekend, the real B-team in turn pretending to be the "C-team") for most of the High Tide tournament, snapping pictures, keeping stats, and refilling waterbottles when necessary.

In exchange, I got an inexpensive vacation in Georgia with a bunch of my fellow Lawrentians.





That's me on the sidelines, in my very own "Soft in the Middle" ghetto-jersey. People from other teams would see it and address me as "Soft."

Some team members addressed me as "Mom," a few tested "Dad" but it didn't stick. One home-schooled kid in my freshman studies section insists on calling me "Tutor."

I also cooked. I wasn't given any official U-Frisbee funds, but I could usually find about twenty people willing to pitch in a dollar or two for a share in a cheap homemade dinner. Then I'd leave the fields a bit early, go grocery shopping, catch a ride back in Colin's van, and try to have everything ready by the time our bus got to the beachhouse.

For the pasta dinner and the first pancake breakfast almost everyone on the team wanted in.

With occasional help from Grace and others, I cooked 6 pounds of pasta, 8 pounds of lasagna, 40 hot dogs, and several hundred pancakes over the course of the week. I sold PB&J sandwiches for a quarter when it looked like people had skipped breakfast.

More tomorrow. I'm exhausted. For a more sports-oriented recap, read Ben's blog.

Painted shirts for Georgia yesterday. Yes, I'm going: the most nervous Frisbee Mom in history. So many people, so little in the way of defined responsibility…

My shirt has an apron on it. Or, it will after I'm done with this post.

Of course, frisbee will never be enough to get my excited on a given night, but luckily is was St. Patrick's Day yesterday and Amelia II brought a backpack full of Irish-themed alcohol to our room. Best roommate's girlfriend ever.

Especially delicious was the St. Brendan's (read: cheap Bailey's) and hot chocolate. Two shots in a mug. Alan changed things up a bit, adding a shot of Creme de Menthe to his special blend. I'm tempted to get on this particular bandwagon and make it my favorite winter drink. But I must be strong, for eggnog.

After as much ultimate frisbee socializing as I could stand, I let the Politician and Frisbee Matt drag me to the Firefly Lounge, inexplicably my favorite Avenue bar.

Zack, my designated donkey, was there. I'm all for originality, but sometimes I just want to relax, and it was wonderful to trade "Simpsons" quotes with each other. We even devised a list of the episodes you have to see before talking to Zack.

Some guy dyed our obligatory pitcher green, and it tasted worse. Finally, uncertain whether or not there was a free bed left in my room, I ended up sleeping at Jinx's. No girl talk (the Politician and her had plenty of that at the bar), just the usual study-abroad conversation.

Leaving for Georgia on Saturday. God.

So there was a big poker game in our room last night. Like 17 people or so.

I didn't play, because I've played enough games of Texas Hold 'Em here to know that I don't enjoy it. Some people, Jonas for example, seemed to misconstrue my disinterest as willful unsociability, and in truth I did feel a bit antisocial watching the excellent Samurai 7 while people were laughing and losing money in the next room.

I spent my money on books and booze. One book, Between Time and Terror, has a cover so ugly I'm embarrassed to be seen with it in public. Another oddity: though the collection features Lovecraft, Asimov, and Bradbury, among others, the spine identifies the author as "Dean Koontz and others."

Jubb, whose method of avoiding poker was a bit more adroit, he alternately watched the activity in our living room and drank beer with me (a friend of his was having a "tasty beer night") and my loyal computer.

Eventually Alan and I headed off to the VR, and others soon joined us for the 100 Days party. It was the most crowded I've ever seen the VR.

Also, that was the last time it'll be open this term. Well, I've got other places and ways to entertain myself.

Watched The Forgotten with the Politician. I've mostly outgrown "Mystery Science Theater 3000," but I still appreciate a bad movie. And this one was awful.

Bad actors, bad directing, bad script. Pi cost less than a million to make. Super Troopers around three million. Napoleon Dynamite, which I have yet to see, cost $400,000. This movie spent about that much on its "whisking people up into the sky" effect. Just saying.

I haven't intentionally gone to a bad movie since Dylan and I saw The Day After Tomorrow this summer. But back in the day we used to see bad movies all the time. Crossroads, Dungeons and Dragons, Reign of Fire. The lower your expectations, the funnier the movie will be.

Once I went to a movie expecting it to be awful, and it wasn't. I fell in love with Josie and the Pussycats that day. I didn't go with Graham, but I think I heard him laughing a few rows back.

Best bad movie experience: The Skulls with Manney, Graham, and Graham's sister Erin, curator of the famous "Erin Lampa collection." These are the people who taught me to talk during movies, a habit I find hard to break.

I needed to see a bad movie. The last one I rented was Van Helsing, and that was months ago. So I was due, and I needed to relax after getting rejection letter nummer drei.

I'm starting to agree with everyone: I should've applied to more schools. More importantly, I probably should have used the essay that's indisputably my best (a thing I wrote last year on modernist solitude) instead of the one that "deals with jargon effectively." Everyone likes clarity.

I'm still waiting on the University of Chicago, and while that's always been my first choice, my chances are statistically slim.

I want this week to be over, not because I'm looking forward to the spring break Ultimate Frisbee trip with the same wide-eyed giddiness as the actual team members (though I am going officially now, as a "Frisbee Mom"), but because I'm sick of spending four hours plus a day in the library.

Can't decide whether knowing I won't be in grad school next year makes all this homework more important, or pointless.

As I've written before, the only novels I've ever quit halfway through — "quit" being something more definitive than "stopped reading but plan to pick up again someday" — are A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Gump & Co.

I don't think that has anything to do with their difficulty. I've read Gravity's Rainbow and The Ambassadors and enough other classics to feel secure in my reader cred. And I've read Spares and Desperation, which proves that I can turn off my brain if the book so requires.

I hate you, Maxine Hong Kingston. Or rather, I hate The Fifth Book of Peace: it's boring, it's excessively preachy, it's narcissistic, and the politics embedded in the book are alternately disturbing (she implies that the victims of the Oakland fires deserved to burn in their homes for supporting the first Gulf War) or irritating — in an unconscionable moment of political correctness, she writes that "the waitperson is a Black woman my age."

The capital-B in "black" is an added insult.

So now there are three books I can't finish. I tried, for hours I tried, and I can't slog through this crap. Or pap, rather, because critics can recognize crap. The Fifth Book of Peace got good reviews.

Staring a website soon where I can stick this stuff. I've been planning this for a while, and it seems like a good project for next term.

Feels like Easter Sunday today. Sunny, bright, with melting snow covering most of the ground. Patches of wet green here and there.

That's my house at Easter, of course. Easter morning. By the afternoon we were usually in Coon Rapids, my Gramma's house, where there was less snow.

This weekend: low-key? Sometimes I say "low-key" when I mean "boring," because describing any period of time as boring makes me feel like a failure. I can make my own fun; that's never been much of a problem. But then I have to explain the boredom.

As fellow Brainerdites and other small-towners already know, there's a big difference between sitting around by yourself and doing something relatively pointless — I spent most of Saturday working on the Dan Digital Archive Project — and sitting around with a group of people who all want to do something but can't think of anything satisfying. The latter is incredibly frustrating.

I'm fine sitting around and watching something or talking, but there's always someone sighing and wondering aloud what we're going to do. It's contagious. Soon I'm dissatisfied, brainstorming.

And brainstorming only exacerbates the situation because you have ideas, and you're throwing them away because yes, they don't seem good enough, but if you're throwing away ideas there's more pressure to do something really great.

At one point, for a few months or so, I tried an experiment with Jenna. We would have default activity and unless we came up with a better plan, we'd do that. Sometimes we'd try to make it really boring, so we'd be pressured to come up with something better. Playing GTA, watching tv at Graham's, hanging out at Rafferty's Pizza in the mall.

(Flo, my goth German-exchange student, once told me that "Rafferty" was Italian for someone who steals your money. Good pizza, though.)

Friday we did nothing. The Politician had tried all day to organize a poker game, but I was apathetic and at nine only one other person showed up to play. We collected another (uninvited) guest, and sat around for a few hours drinking and half-talking until everyone left for bed.

Everyone else asleep or gone, Jubb, a few of his climbing friends, and Our Bold Hero watched "The Village" on my computer. Better than "Signs," at least logically, it would have been more enjoyable had Climbing Matt not dropped hints about the end.

I still felt like I'd done nothing, afterwards. Most of that night was boring.

Saturday, however, was low-key; I spent a few hours sitting around, contentedly watching old episodes of "The Simpsons" and scanning old notebooks for the DDAP, with no one peeping in my ear about activities. Enjoy life as your expectations dictate, kids.

Jubb and I watched another one of my recent acquisitions, a good suspense film called "The Machinist," and ended up at the Viking Room with the Politician and Zack, who I'm tempted to start calling "The Apologist" because it was an apt suggestion. I miss making characters.

I don't think I can understate the importance our campus bar, the source of so many low-key nights this term. The days of Wednesday-night Mariokart with Ben and Rock Show Girl are over, as are the big Halo 2 games on the campus network. We don't watch very many movies anymore; this weekend was an exception.

The VR is to Lawrence what pot was to Brainerd. Everyone is still sitting around, but magically, all the whining is gone. We're "doing something." It's like a social loophole, where you can just sit around and talk without being bored.