Happy St. Taddy’s Day!

Did anyone catch that clever joke in the title?  No?  Nice.

I’m having an inner struggle today.  I can’t wear green because the alma mater is playing a green team.  But I have to wear green because Larissa has demanded green for her birthday.  Also, everyone else will be doing it.

So first the obligatory holiday post.  Happy Pats to all and an especially happy birthday to Larissa.

Now to talk about the alma mater.

We won.  On Thursday, we really won.  It was so exciting and so nerve-wracking all at once.  It’ still unbelievable that we were slotted to finish eleventh in the conference and ended up in the NCAA tournament with an eleven seed instead.  The universe works in mysterious ways!

I went to the young alum bar again and they brought our mascot down, so we took a picture together.  (I love our mascot with all my heart, even if she could headbutt me across a parking lot.)

At the bar, everyone asked me again if I was watching it there or elsewhere.  Larissa went with me and we met up with Cam again.

During the game I heard from Keith (who was working, boo), Colin (who graduated from basic training on thursday, yay), and Rich…

Yes, Rich texted me to let me know he has the alma mater to the sweet sixteen.

So do I.  In fact, in the end, I decided that my bracket was for pride.  As unlikely as it seemed to everyone else, I really do believe in the abilities of the team.  So, it only seemed fitting to put them through to the championship.

Rich also told me that the game was making him nervous.  Meanwhile, I was having a heart attack while watching it through my hands again.  Nervous, Rich?  You have no idea!  That’s exactly what I told him.

But against the odds, we thrive another day!  I’m excited for the game tonight.

You’re Only Allotted Two Sports Cries!

So as you know, the alma mater is dancing (or you would if my schedule function had been working, more on that in a separate post in a moment) and I am ecstatic.  Truly, truly ecstatic.  So I want to talk about my reaction to this news on Saturday when we won the first ever Pac-12 championship in men’s basketball.  (Yes, yes, there were Pac-8 and Pac-10 versions before this and it’s basically the same conference, but we were predicted to be eleventh, okay?)

So I spent the end of the game watching it through my fingers.  Kind of the same way that watching a horror movie through your fingers makes it less scary, watching a nail-biter of a sporting event through your fingers prevents heart attacks.  This is clearly proven!  Well, when the game ended with us winning by two points, a raucous cheer went up from the crowd and we all stood up and screamed.  I jumped up and down.  And then…  I started crying.  I wasn’t sobbing, but I teared up quite a bit.  I was with Cam, Steph’s boyfriend, and some his friends.  They didn’t say a thing, and opted to continue the celebrating again.

This morning, I was talking about it with a co-worker.  I asked how many sports cries someone was allotted.  His response: “You’re a woman.  You’re allowed to get as irrational as you like, we’ve kind of come to expect it.”

Sexism aside, “Okay, so how many sports cries is a man allowed?”

“Two.  One when your team loses a season that was especially important.  And the other when your team wins a season that was especially important.”

“So is that two per sport then?”  (A reference to the law “you can like any number of teams, but you’re only allowed to be a fan of one.”)

“No.  Two.”

“So you really have to save those then?”

“So most men never use them.”

“But what if you use it up and then something more important happens?”

“You stand by your earlier cry.  ‘That was bad, but not nearly as bad as that time that’…”

“What about that LSU-Alabama game during the regular season?”

“You can’t cry during the regular season.”

I asked a few more examples like if Kentucky won the NCAA tournament, would that be worth crying over?  No, because they wouldn’t have had to fight and claw to get there.  How about if the alma mater won?  My co-worker said no, but conceded that he wasn’t a fan of college sports after I recounted our road to the tournament this year.

So, anyway, guys are interesting, right? (This reminded me of the Miller Lite Man Law commercials, and I referenced one earlier up there.)  I’m a big fan of being able to cry because I’m so darn happy.  I also cried on Saturday because I reached the opposite end of the spectrum in one night.  But, these things will have to wait until after I get my March Madness musings out of the way (and if you remember last year, you know it will take a while).  But, I will probably have a usual personal post up tomorrow, so hopefully then?

Counterproductive Success

I like to talk about social quotients and social laws of proportionality sometimes here at Help!   I’m Post-Grad.  I haven’t thought of a good name for these as a whole…  But maybe something like “social mathematics” would be an appropriate term?  Social statistics?  I don’t really ever go into stats for anyone, so I don’t know if statistics are an apt description.  I think social mathematics is a good way to describes these things.

Anyway, today is another social mathematics day.  We’ll be discussing counterproductive success.

Steph is the perfect example of counterproductive success.  At any given time in her life, she is unable to be successful on all fronts.  She either is successful in her academic/professional life or she is successful in her personal life.

Steph is very focused on school and career, but during the last few months of 2010, she was in Arizona with Cam.  Now that she’s back in grad school at the alma mater, she is now a good sixteen hour drive from Cam.  This is a bigger picture version, but small things happen in similar instances.  Such as when she was applying for grad schools, she and Cam had a huge fight.  Things like this happen all the time.  I’m curious,  but terrified, to see what happens when Cam eventually proposes…  It’s the way the universe seems to work in this case.

Bree has a similar version of counterproductive success

I don’t really fall under counterproductive success scales, unfortunately.  I don’t know what it is about me, but I’m pretty much an all or nothing kind of girl.  Either everything is amazing or everything is horrible.  I don’t get that nice compromise.  I’m kind of jealous, actually.

What I do get, though, is that whenever I’m either all up or all down, someone else I know is in the exact opposite situation.

There are those people who seem to have their lives completely together and may or may not be ignoring the “personal” aspect, which is probably why their life is all “completely together,” since they’re ignoring half of the total package.  Most of these people are men, so I’m ignoring that, because I’ve been discussing male behavior with Steph and Bree lately and I think it falls into a completely different social mathematics category.  Next time.

I’m pretty sure that ninety percent of the time, counterproductive success only applies to women anyway.  So there’s that too.

But I digress.

Take for instance, Larissa.  Right now we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.  I’m basically all down and she’s basically all up.  I don’t know how though, and that’s what bothers me.  I think a lot of it is luck, honestly.  But this is the “grass is greener” subtext of counterproductive success.  Some people make things look easy.

I’ve been the one who makes it look easy before, so I don’t really know.

But, I guess the nice thing is that everything looks up eventually.  So I’m putting in the effort now, to be up flawlessly later.

I think that even in this case, success isn’t really just spontaneous, so it does take a lot of hard work.  Except with Larissa right now…  I really think this is all luck or the planets aligning.  I don’t even know.  She seems to be on a lucky streak right now and I am just at a loss.

BYOB (Bring Your Own Boyfriend?) part one

This is one of those times where BYOB doesn’t mean “Bring Your Own Beer” (“Bring Your Own Beverage” just isn’t enough, sorry) and is a clever play on words…  Well, I though it was clever when I told it to my friends to set up the event.  So I was talking about how Evan and I discussed possibly going clubbing and I got all my friends in on the actual event.  There were a couple of events during it that stick out in my mind and I don’t remember which ones I’ve talked about already.  Two involved rain and me tripping down the stairs and the others revolved around Evan’s Californianess.  So, here goes.

So we all went out to dinner (the one mentioned in “The BS Quotient“) and then headed to Blake’s place in our separate vehicles.  Blake and Bree drove together, Evan and I were together, Steph and Cam were together, Amy drove herself, and Larissa headed over later.  I think she had been trying to convince Jason to come with her.

Blake and Bree gave everyone directions and we all hoped for the best.  Since I’m terrible at directions and Evan wasn’t very familiar with the area of town, we decided to stay as close to Blake’s car as possible.  Blake ended up speeding like a demon, and yet, Evan was able to keep up with him.  Once we all reached Blake’s apartment, Blake came to the realization that we had followed him and not a random stranger.

“I didn’t know that it was you two that were so close behind us.”  Blake protested.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize, “I called Bree, but she didn’t pick up.”

Bree looked at her phone and confirmed that she had a missed call from me.

Blake crossed his arms and turned to Evan, “I’m surprised you kept up.”

“It was a little hard…”  I think that was a large confession for Evan to make.

Bree turned to Blake, “How fast were you going if it was hard for them to keep up?  I know you were trying to show me how fast your car could go, but I didn’t think it was that fast.”

Blake shrugged.  “Hundred twenty.”

Bree gaped.  “You were going one hundred and twenty miles per hour?”  She hit him, though it was a light hit.

“You said you wanted to see how fast she went…  And there was this guy tailing me the whole time.”  Blake rolled his eyes.

“Following you to your house because we were going together.”  Evan corrected.

Blake shrugged.  “It’s no surprise he was able to keep up.  You know they all drive crazy in California anyway.”

I grinned, “And have fewer accidents to boot.”

Blake was not happy about my interjection.

We hung out at Blake’s place for a bit while everyone congregated and then we sorted out carpools.  Evan and I offered to grab whoever wanted to come with us.  Steph and Cam declined to join a carpool because they were thinking of heading back to the alma mater’s town earlier in the night than Evan and I were.  Blake and Bree decided to be in our car, we also offered to take Amy, but she ended up riding with Larissa.

As we were leaving Blake’s apartment, there was a cascading water sound outside.  I had taken the time to curl my hair and was wearing an adorable sundress, which Evan had told me wasn’t very proper clubbing attire, but I was adorable, so I didn’t really care.

I put my hands over my head and then grabbed on to Evan with one of them instead.  “Oh no!  It’s raining outside!  My hair and dress will get all wet!  And my dress is white!”

By the time I finished talking, we were already outside.

“Are you covered in water?”  Evan asked me.

“No…”

“Then it’s not raining.”

“It’s actually a fountain,” Bree commented, but only after I had already sounded like an idiot.

Part two tomorrow!