When Will I Leave New Haven?

In comparison, I watch at a bar with three guys from the neghborhood.

Despite the realities of trying to move out of the palace I live in here in New Haven, I am slowly getting sucked into World Cup Fever. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and instantly pushed aside some boxes so I could get down to scanning the internet for interesting material on yesterdays matches as well as something to let me know which contest would be the better to watch today: Spain/Ukraine or Germany/Poland. Mind you, these are four teams I really couldn't care less about.

Actually, I should care about the Spanish team—after all, it was my time in Seville watching Betis play every week that got me into spectator soccer in the first place, but I've been burned too many times by their national team to let out more that a whimper when they lose early and often. Did I mention early? Also, my prize soccer possession, a Athletic Club Bilbao jersey with four-inch red candy stripes, would probably be less welcome in the local bar where I watch these games (remember, home service is still limited to a fuzzy ABC) than most costumes I can think of.

As one would expect (that means you), there has been a lot of Cup related emailing going on. O has dedicated himself to writing a daily summary email in the most florid and purple style, emulating the best of English Football Journalism. The highlight of yesterday's was "That little move by Robinho was a wonderful piece of class." Never mind that he sent me a text message ("Sick!") every time something special happened—I have no idea what he's talking about.

What I do know is that watching Ronaldinho dribble his way through a scrum of three defenders at once is pretty fun. I also like the way half of the Brazilians wear their jerseys untucked, flapping around like schoolboy's t-shirts. Compared to the all-business-all-the-time sides of Germany and England, it looks like these guys are out for a romp in the playground, and for the first forty-five minutes, that was how they played too.

Aside from commentary from the Purple People Eater, we've been going back and forth with some fairly useless tangential information. My contribution was Franklin Foer's article for The New Republic evaluating the ability of various political systems to producing winning World Cup teams. (TNR has actually been a great source of reading material on the Cup with the blog written by Foer, Alex Massie, and others. To wit, their summary of the Brazil yesterday: "It wasn't bad considering that they played the first 60 minutes with only 10 men on the pitch—and one barely mobile globular of fat with buck teeth." Also, their calling for supernatural destruction of the ESPN studios in Bristol, Conn. deserved points for pluck.) Moving back out of parentheses: DC had already offered her favorite source of reading, the entertaining Michael Davies at ESPN's Page 2 (not to worry about him in destruction of Bristol—he's covering this from Germany). Outdoing both of us in sheer volume of material, Swiss Family Robinson emails back with Wikipedia on the Football War in 1969 and a 59-page report prepared by Goldman Sachs on the World Cup ("Brazil is the odds-on favorite with at 12.7% chance to win, according to our model." Thanks guys. Really, good work.) So, I guess his employers are getting their bang for their buck out of him at work these days.

A Cup Between Friends, Sort Of

So this would have been the state of most of my classmates had we been there.

This weekend passed in a haze—my fifth college reunion and tenth high school reunion fell on the same three days. I tried splitting the difference, and it sort of worked. Well, if by working you mean that I had to stop at my parents' house on the way back home so that I could take a two hour nap and not do something stupod while driving. At both tour stops this weekend, it was the men who looked like we were getting older. Bellies and bare scalps were often in evidence, while the women—for the most past—were free of obvious wrinkling or funny bulges.

Both events mostly boiled down to standing around under tents while doing a lot of drinking. In eastern Massachusetts this was done under torrential rain, and my oil coat was the accessory of the evening. I didn't actually see that many of my college classmates, but I did encounter the phenomenon of multiple female friends who only revealed that they were engaged after ten minutes of chit-chat. I'd like to think this is because I'm making them regret their rash decision, but it is probably more truthful to say that it's easier to talk about grad school that for me to notice the giant rock on her finger. I'm really no geologist, not at all.


We could buy our old jerseys from high school for 2 bucks. No towels, though.

The high school folks were better dressed, although the blustery afternoon led everyone down to the stock room to buy sweatshirts and the old game jerseys that were for sale. I now have two soccer jerseys—both home and away, of course—that I may only get to use on the squash court when losing to one of my old roommates. Now back at home, I find they have a certain smell that I didn't notice when I was buying them.

Appropriately outfitted in green and white, our class managed to stay up until three or four in the morning having a party with the class of 2001 in the common room of a dorm at the edge of campus. It was good fun when a classmate showed up with the ice sculpture stolen from the dinner tent hooked over his shoulder, but it got a little weird when one girl tried to play beer games with her shirt tucked up under her bra. In general, when the scene begins to cross over from erstwhile frat party to wannabe den of iniquity, I take my cue and head to bed. I suggest you all do the same.


One of the five-years playing Beirut wore a smiliar outfit.

My plan for physical and emotional recovery today focused on watching the US play the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a strategy as sure of failure as when I tell anyone I'm actually going to be somewhere on time—within five minutes it is always clear that this is a lie. The game was so depressing I had to come back to my apartment and root through my stack of Play Station games until I found my old FIFA Soccer 2003. I replayed the contest four of five times until I felt the US had finally achieved a moral victory. I then went online and obsessively read everything I could find on the World Cup. Finally, after article upon article about how the US was going to win this opening match and the accompanying post-game report that they had blown it royally, a ray of sunshine broke through when I discovered in Michael Davies' World Cup blog on ESPN.com that the German name for the Ivory Coast, Elfenbeinkuste, translates as "Elephant Bone Coast." As in, "The number one goal of today was scored by Saviola for Argentina against the Elephant Bone Coast." This, I love, and I can finally call it a day.

Dee Emm Vee - A Parenthetical Excursion

Everybody in there is an antique.

My six years were up on my birthday, so yesterday I gave myself the gift that never gives, a trip to the DMV for a new license. I've always gone to the ol' HQ up in Wethersfield, but this was a chance to try out a new Circle of Hell in Hamden. The Wethersfield office is a giant brick box that looks like a decommissioned school from the street. After parking at the far end (inevitibly) of the lot, one entered into a basement hallway, climbed several flights of stairs (office employees want to be close to the ground to speed evacuation), and enter a waiting room that has been under reconstruction for decades. Current amenities include a plastic-tarp ceiling (holding back aesbestos?), an LED marquee flashing violently with strings of unintellible code (the wires must have gotten crossed when they ripped out the acoustic tile).

Now Hamden is nothing like that. Instead, one enters from the parking lot through a choice of four (unmarked) doors that let directly onto various waiting rooms. Who can imagine the arctic sensations of these rooms in the winter? In he early summer, though, it was pleasant enough. Signage and directions consist of various panels indicating services and their corresponding lanes. Every other phrase or number, however, has been taped over (a tactile delight: sometimes painters' blue tape, sometimes duct tape, sometimes multiple layers of beige packing tape) with new instructions scribbled in.

I waited on line for about two hours all told (not bad for the DMV) before I walked out with my new, thugg-a-licious drivers' license. It was two hours of acting like cattle, though. No one read (I saw only one book: The Chronicles of Narnia under the arm of a twelve-year-old boy), and there were no iPods in evidence. I had my newspaper, but no one seemed interested in borrowing a section. I was amazed; everyone just stood in line, shifting their weight from foot to foot. The crowd spanned all sorts of ages and demographic groups--I guess no one reads anymore in Connecticut. At least on the subway in New York everyone is either reading or plugged into headphones. It made me think of a comment someone made at dinner last Sunday about the surprise of his jury-duty experience: no one brought anything to read there either. These are places where you are guaranteed to have nothing to do but wait, yet no one prepares themselves. I must have a pretty scrawny imagination, because I'd go crazy if I just had to feed on my own thoughts for all that time.


Two hours later, I had the new card, and I was out, out, out.


In 1994 I need a haircut; in 2006 I need a shave.

One Third of Professional Croquet Players Miss the First Wicket

You haven't won until the final positions are captured in the cameraphone.

Since college I've been pretty obsessed with lawn games.

Sophomore year, Prudy and I discovered a group called Mrs. J's Midnight Croquet playing said game at nearly said hour in the Mac Lawn in Cambridge. We played—in the dark + with drinks = negative balls—with these friendly folks for a while in the spring. When the club president said she had to give up the game during her semester abroad at the Biosphere II we tried to stifle our laughter and quietly wrest control of the club set from the other hippies we played with. We failed in the struggle, and a man with a painfully-hyphenated name took control of the set and moved it up Mass Ave to the center for High-Energy Meta-Physics (HEMP—forgive the Harvard humor, I'm not responsible), otherwise known as the student vegetarian co-op house.

Within months we had control of the set—and got busy jettisoning extra wickets to make more room for bloody mary mix. I also wrote a number of grant proposals to the student council, making note of the dire situation of our club when compared to the varsity status of the Yale team. Grant proposals required the submission of club bylaws to affirm that the group was non-exclusionary. If anyone ever digs up what I handed in for that portion of the proposal, there are probably a number of well-meaning social organizations whose members will never look me in the eye.

Anyway, croquet has, of late, given way to boules and/or bocce (depending on the conditions of play—you know I'm sensitive to these things). First there was a spate of boules playing in San Francisco last spring with Hunter. In fact, an entire Napa visit was basically hijacked by our feverish need to claim a patch of grass as our own by lobbing giant silver balls back and forth until security was required to remove us. This particular team of players has yet to be reunited, despite an attempt to carry on a set of these benign-looking eight-pound spheres for a trans-continental flight to a wedding. The TSA does not look upon these little friends with the same love and affection that I do, and other amusements (mostly dressed in pink taffeta) had to be found on-site.

Recent graduation frolicking has provided a return to the sport, even with the distractions of kite-flying (see below, or just 'look up') nibbling at the corners of my leisure time. Recently, some of this hot ball-on-ball action has even been caught on home video. The freestyle forms of throwing seen in this clip have come to my aid when playing in—what is today an inevitable misfortune befalling the passionate lawn bowler—groups my mixed skill and divergent interests. As I discovered back in my days in the Harvard Mallet Society, when Scarf Girl is just coming to the Sunday morning BM and match-play to practice bending over seductively for the boys in seersucker, it is important to change the rules of the game a bit so she becomes more interested in the game at hand than tempting and tormenting poor Charlie, a young man whose just trying to hang on long enough so he can make it to the priesthood.

I digress . . .

On Friday, I went out for a belated birthday celebration with the nearest and dearest of NYC. Thoughtfully, Teddy Roosevelt chose a bar on Atlantic Avenue with its own bocce court as our rallying point for the night. This was, how can I say, auspicious. Despite the leaking roof that made the red clay at the middle fifth of the court into a water hazard-cum-booby trap, we managed to pack away three matches before the second galvanized pail of Schlitz and Schaeffer cans was emptied into our bellies. It's at moments like these where I realize that erudition and the cultivation of refined habits are their own rewards.

So, if you're looking for a pickup game of croquet, or just want to to hear a complete catalog of college references to the sticky wicket, I think I can point you in the right direction.

Got a Kite

It was my birthday earlier this week, so we went to a nearby bar for a drink. We, here, being the slowly-dwindling group of ex-architecture students who may or may not have a clear employment future and who are instead living through the beginning of summer as if we just graduated from high school. We're talking Dazed and Confused minus the Moon Tower. As has been proven so often lately, there is only one end game for all of these evenings: small circles of people dancing in a darkened apartment to the extended version of White Lines.

I received five kites. One was a small airplane about three inches across with two tails almost a meter long and made out of recording tape. We figured if we pulled it through a walkman it would either play Cindi Lauper or Beijing Opera. There were other normal kites too—all of this because I was at a house party a couple of weeks ago and there were some kites in the house that I found really relaxing to fly. I don't think I'd touched a kite since I eight or ten, and it was a cool rediscovery.

Then again, it's only so cool to be the one walking around a bar with a bundle of kites. I'm used to being the only person reading a book in a bouncer's line, but having rolls of rainbow nylon under my arm really does make the rest of the patrons a little shifty.