Some other stuff.

I actually ran out of time before I had to leave for class, so I came back to the library to toss up some stuff that I hadn't been able to chronicle during my last type-sesh.

As a team, we have quit drinking, smoking, and otherwise abusing substances for the duration of the 2009 season. This is official as of last night, the final weekend where drinking was allowed. Our team celebrated this final weekend with a fair amount of the aforementioned soon-to-be-banned activities.

Several of us drank Thursday night while we watched indoor pickup - when Clayton showed up and asked for money, we quit playing and I went with Mitch to the local liquor store. Indoor pickup is kind of stupid and boring, and I'd already been able to play for an hour before Clayton even showed up. I couldn't bear to go from free shitty ultimate to ten dollar shitty ultimate and, anyway, that dude is a douche bag and I love to just stick it to him, so several of us moved to the sideline and watched from the bleachers. I really only went because we wanted to give Gaylon a try-out, since he had transferred to Umass just this semester and has yet to miss a practice or workout. He seems like a really nice guy and he's a very hard worker, even if he is quite inexperienced as an ultimate player. It was almost as if he was not yet good enough to take but not bad enough to justify cutting - another one of those bubble newbies of which we have so many. Hopefully a few more weeks of practice will sharpen his skills and his field awareness and make him a viable addition to the team, since we decided in the end to take him.

Friday afternoon, I started drinking at about 1 o'clock. Ryan swung by my house to wait for his bus to leave for Needham - he was going back for the weekend to hang with his girlfriend - and we decided that a drunk bus ride was far more exciting than a sober bus ride. I also wanted to get a little liquored up before class, since I wouldn't have the opportunity again this semester, but I ended up drinking 6 shots and deciding to play Babbitt's zombie video game instead. That night we had an early birthday party for Babbitt, who turns 21 on March 5 (in the no-drink zone). It was a really fun party, actually. A lot of the team showed up, so there was a pretty decent crowd, but it wasn't enough people to make moving around uncomfortable or to make us worry about a noise complaint or something. And we got capital h Hammered. I was short on cash, so I only bought myself a growler of Opa-Opa Porter to drink, but the profusion of available hard liquor actually caused me to forget about my beer about 3/4 of the way through the growler. Mitch had bought a handle of 100 proof vodka for Bonta and her friends, and those silly girls got too drunk and left it unoccupied on my kitchen table. A bunch of us ended up standing around that table, slamming shots of vodka and yelling at each other. Kasarah had made a rum and coke in a giant punch bowl, using half a handle of rum. I started chanting, "Drink from the well! Drink from the well!" and insisting that people drink directly from the ladle that I was pulling from the punch bowl. I soon dumped the rest of the handle of rum into the mix, and when the level started to drop I added the rest of the handle of vodka. By the end, it was a caustic mixture of almost pure alcohol with just a little coke coloration. Awesome. That's pretty much the last thing that I remember; apparentely, we all got high and both Jesse and I blacked out and threw up on my bedroom floor.

I was hung over all Saturday, a wreck collapsed across the living room sofa. We watched a couple movies on television, and then Jesse, Patuluk and I went to watch Taken in the theater. I thought it was excellent. We went to bed early to prepare for plyos the next morning.

Plyos yesterday went alright, though there were some hitches in our plans. Babbitt, Patuluk and I were about to leave when Robin called, having left early by himself. Apparently, Boyden was filled with some convention of future women athletes (a.k.a. little girls being taught rudamentary field hockey techniques), so that space would be unavailable for a while. I wanted to move practice to our parking lot, but it was cold and there was a steady downpour of freezing rain (it later became snow, and we accumulated about an inch and a half). On the way to Boyden, we decided that we would tell everybody that we were going to lead them to a secret field where we could practice outside, get everybody's hopes nice and low, and then take them bowling instead. Of course, once we got there with this plan, the women in Boyden told us that they would only be there for another half an hour, so we had to just wait it out and then hold our workout. It was really disappointing. I had gotten excited to bowl!

Our workout was alright. In the interest of time, I really dropped down the number and the duration of our rests, which made the workout difficult even though we actually did fewer sets. We did two plyometric circuits with only a two minute break in between each one and limited our in-set recoveries to 18-21 seconds. We also did sprint and backpedal shuttle runs instead of suicides. Individually, I didn't find these shuttles too difficult, but they definitely were tiring by the end. Afterwards, a bunch of us stayed behind and played basketball. While I was too tired to play hard, I think that this was the first plyo workout that didn't leave me too dead to even attempt to play basketball. It certainly wasn't as hard of a workout as some that we have done, but I think that it was okay.

Last night, our final night of drinking, all the people in my house except Robin got together to drink white russians and watch The Big Lebowski. Babbitt initially tried to keep up with the number of white russians that The Dude drinks over the course of this movie, but that quickly proved impossible. I think I drank six or so, and I was feeling pretty drunk (and sick) by the final couple. Maybe we'll get through the Big Lebowski Challenge, but last night was not the night. We then watched Annie and some other stuff on television before a late bedtime.

I'm pretty content with that as my last drinking night of the spring semester. It was a relaxed, pleasant evening where I got pretty drunk but kept things pretty. I mean, I'm glad that Friday night worked out the way that it did, but I'm equally glad that things didn't get as ridiculous last night. We're going to be able to drink a bit on Spring Break, so we can better bond as a team and all that, but I think that I'm going to try to keep it fairly reasonable. I'm too old to drink hard and play effective ultimate, and I'm old enough to understand that.

Ho, Shit! Oh Holy Day! I just got an email that my cleats were delivered to Needham! This is an exciting day for me, even though I don't know when I'm going to actually have them in my grubby little hands. I designed the most audacious, outrageous, stupendous cleats this past winter, and Nike has taken their time putting them together special for me. My dad said that he would buy me a pair of customized cleats for Christmas, so I went online and found Nike's top-rated cleat and ordered it in some funky colors. They cost $180 and look, in my mother's words, "very interesting", "like a five year old got at them with a set of poster paints," but it's my last year playing ultimate so I decided to just fucking go for it.

I'm fucking pumped. I can't wait to put them on for the first time!