Pre-Post, followed by a Post

Five things that I'm going to cover by some point in the near future (today, if I can help it):

1. Last Wednesday's "Ultimate" and the lead-in to it
2. Last Friday
3. My last few nights' dreams (at least since Friday night/Saturday morning, but maybe since earlier)
4. A comic which made me think briefly (although if I can't draw up anything longer or more interesting than a few sentences, I may just omit this...list item)
5. Grinnell, via the Chronicle of Higher Education. If I finish reading the article, even, it'll be an entry even more fair on my part!

Alright...so Wednesday, of course, is Ultimate night, and last (and next) Wednesday are also Grinnell admitted-student-chatroom evenings. Well...regarding the chatroom, suffice to say that it was a single cgi. That is, a tiny little script which was nicely simplistic...but had to refresh to show new messages. Read: AJAX is good for something.

The people were pretty cool, though. I know that I've told a few people who unimpressive the UI was but how interesting everything else was. There were financial aid people, admissions folks, athletic coaches, a handful of current students, and a bunch of us prospectives. A couple of other various people dropped in here and there, but it was mostly the same group of about...maybe...a dozen or so high-schoolers. Of these people, we were split into about three or four major categories: say, those just there to sit around and see what happens and glean what bits of useful/noteworthy topics come up, athletics-oriented people, and maybe extracurriculars-/facilities-/academics-interested kids. I mostly floated between the latter two kinds--you know, just one room, so everyone sees what everyone writes, right? Except they did have a sort of whisper-function (I can't remember what it's supposed to be called, but it's that nice little function where you may message only one specific person) and I guess that a few things happened there. Well, I guess that a lot of people were interested in swimming--the swim coach who was there had to keep asking newcomers for times, interest level, etc. and encouraging them, telling them that they'd have no problems swimming at Grinnell. I asked, but he didn't actually give me much that I wanted to know to that end; practices divided between "red" and "black" swimmers (or maybe "scarlet", since that's how Grinnell calls that of its school shades...) practices for stronger/weaker swimmers (presumably); I didn't get much more than that, nor approximately yardage, size, many record times, or whatever. Can't blame the guy, though; there were no doubt a bunch of other less active people in the chatroom who needed his attention. Oh, and with each refresh (about once a second, I'd guess), there were anywhere from no to five new messages, the vast majority of which took up only one line. And that's in a UI which only displays about ten lines at any given time. There was a blacklog option, to view everything said that night, but that was a problem--indiscriminately everything. That refreshed at about the same rate, too. The only other buttons were to view current users in the room and to log out.

Meh. Oh, and, of course, I asked briefly after independent studies, a fair amount regarding languages, extensively about Ultimate and other extracurriculars, campus events, and...off-campus events. 'Twas all pretty interesting (especially the interaction, IMHO), but I don't think that anything came up that really would have swayed my opinion too much about it--especially nothing that I couldn't've learned from visiting (i.e. next Thursday through Saturday) or just reading all of the literature sent my way or listed online.

(Oh, and Betsy? You have a friend, Andrea Rissing, right? And her brother just got accepted to Grinnell and will be going next fall, right? Well, he was one of the...maybe five people all night who used a facsimile of his name: Jonathan Rissing. Sound right? I would have tried to ask after him, but he left just after I arrived. Meh. Just...interesting if it's the right guy.)

Oh, well. Worth it.

Especially when, at about 9:17ish, I had to apologize and excuse myself hastily, begging Ultimate. =).

...But it actually wasn't that hot that night. John, Petey, and I were around, took a brief campus trip trying to gather some others who were, evidently, three-strong and throwing a light-up disc earlier, failed to rediscover them, and just threw for a while. But Haley showed up and joined us for another half hour or so (probably; but then, my time sense sucks), so it wasn't strictly high school kids there. And it was too bad, too, that nobody else came, since I definitely had a strong throwing night. Both my forehand and my backhand, that is. My hammer was about average (I could get it within a yard or so of my target every time, and each one which I threw was easily catchable), but I was really throwing everything else in a manner nearly perfectly straight and just as hard as I wanted to. For once, both my power control and placement were right on. But no game. ='(. Well, it almost made up for that extremely windy day towards the end of spring break when we tried to disc on which I definitely failed miserably and repeatedly; inexcusably, even due to the wind. Meh. Hopefully this Wednesday (and Friday! At Grinnell!) will be better...If not, I'll just stress or something.

Let's see...list item number two? Ah, Friday. Meh. I guess that I don't really have anything interesting to post aside from factual stuff; my mother gave a talk in Texas Thursday, so I had to pick her up Friday after school. We ended up hanging around the Avon/Plainfield area instead of coming home very shortly afterwards (I had meant to make a choir/band concert (Mr. Price's last, as I learned post factum! No!)) doing a bit of shopping, getting me some new clothes, taking a bit in Jo-Ann's picking up some frames and a newly framed scroll--and with my realising that the store actually has a lot of nifty stuff...More on that later. But after all of that, dinner at Charbonos (pretty tasty, but kind of pricey) and back into town. It was relatively nice.

So...It may very easily be since that last Wednesday night's failed Ultimate (although I don't think that I slept very well that or the next night due to going to sleep earlyish and waking up early to do homework...) that I've been dreaming about it. I know that, if not since then, at east since after Friday. And it's been heavily CTY-esque. I believe that I've played (dreamingly, this is, of course) on Johns Hopkins's (Maryland) "gentle slope" Ultimate field (because *any* space can constitute an Ultimate field), Loyola Marymount's (California) fields, and even in a few of the pictures of Grinnell's fields. I suppose that it's just a bunch of things coming together: thinking about Ultimate, thinking a lot more seriously about college (now that it's nearly tangible and everything), and what I've learned about Grinnell. In my mind, I've always seen the idea of college as living at CTY, ish. Classes at various times throughout the day, homework between, and a lot of social time during which to do stuff such as throw mostly-circular pieces of plastic around. Everything but the extent of organisation outside of my influence at CTY seems very similar to me, but then, of course, that's coming from not having actually been in college yet.

Just a note, I hope that I don't sound like too much of a hack, always spewing out all of this junk about "moving into the next stage of my life", "assuming more adulthood/responsibility", "growing up", "going to college""going to college""going to college". If it's bothering, as it probably is, then just...give me another two months, listen for a bit during the summer, then don't even come close between mid-/late-August and January. This blog, if it's still around, will probably just make you vomit.

Anyways, the people (what little I can recall of them, and what little depth there is to anyone in a dream) were...a few people from past CTY, a few more of my current friends (I believe mostly friends like Petey, John, Betsy, Aden; people with whom I often (or recently have) play(ed) or much associate with Ultimate), and a lot of college kids. Of the CTYers, I think that there were one or two of my actual friends, but mostly big-time discers--I distinctly remember one exceptional player who was on a team and everything but a total jerk (of course, I was better than he in my dream, but not back when I was twelveish), another few guys who were about my skill-level back then, so about as good as I now, etc. But the college people whom I didn't know held the overwhelming majority. Every time I came up onto a field, there was just a huge mass of bodies--maybe a hundred--which would, when we got down to the game, move towards the edges of the field and quickly disperse. Then we'd either throw for a while or game, and it was hardcore.

Hmm...of course, even though I talk about Ultimate all the time (read: probably more often than college itself), I'm not actually going to go insane over it in college; I hope to travel with whatever team and play games as often as possible, but it's probably pretty hard to obsess over an intramural sport. So don't worry. Thanks for the sentiment, though. *Cough*

Comic? Meh. Today's Sunday comics included one which featured a disc and another which was exceedingly optimistic. That is, one character asking another why he was always in so sour a mood; the second responded that the problems of the world did it to him. The former commented on the beautiful sky, green grass, and mild weather, but the second just gave up, saying that he'd never see the truth. In fact, they both thought that last thought. It was kind of nice (quaint), but at least after a few seconds' reflection, I realized that that mode of thought, especially in such cute terms, rather promotes the "ignorance equals bliss" thing. Not that this's anything new, but I'd've felt bad still so often saying that I'll write about things maybe then not. That is all on this topic thanks.

...And Grinnell. Did'ya' know that it's the richest friggin' liberal arts school in the States? I certainly didn't. I knew that it was pretty darn wealthy, but not that it's quite that wealthy. Something like $900,000 per capita endowment, and at 1500ish students, that comes out to about $1.4 billion. So, in this Chronicle of Higher Education article on it (the first in a series highlighting the deepening cleavage between higher-end and lower-end schools, as analogous to the social and economic classes) and Clarke, some Roman-Catholic school some 150 miles westish of Grinnell, there were, of course, all sorts of interesting statistics: Grinnell with its nearly 100 times more in endowments, bringing in more from its students' tuition--less than a third of its total annual cushion--than Clarke gets total.

I guess that it's pretty cool (in a self-centered, opportunistic sense) that I'll probably have such facilities and chances for internships, going places, and generally doing things, but that huge difference also makes me feel kind of guilty taking advantage of it. The fact that Grinnell's president said "If we had a lot of truly poor peple, I guess I'd be a little more proud of it," and that they're increasing their tuition by 12% because they "don't want to seem like a bargain", or something; to compete with other similar schools such as, as they cited, Macalaster and Oberlin. Hmm...Something like $5,000 already, if I'm not mistaken. These whole "truly poor" and "bargain school" ideas seem pretty questionable to me, but...whatever. Things like this always make me wish that I could do something, but not quite enough for me actually to. Perhaps when I am older, but everybody says that. I guess that I'm no different; stuff like this is just...odd and slightly unsettling.

Two more things, then, I guess.

First, on April 7, Friday, I made a note:
9:57: My Google quote of the day is Martin Luther King's:
"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."

I like to think about what that entails, but I'd prefer the quote, "A man who won't die for anything (will die for nothing) is not fit to live."

Second, I wonder how long it takes people like Guy Kawasaki, a pro blogger/consultant or something, John Kricfalusi and Katie Rice, two really beautiful artists, and Ziggy, a music informer ish, to write and finally submit an entry. I know that it takes me usually at least an hour to post here, versus as little as a minute or two on my Xanga, spanning across the entire day. Meh.