Captain's (B)log: 4th February

The last two days have been almost entirely uneventful, actually. Aside from patenting a new indoors sport (banana standoffs, see above) that's not so much sweeping across Utica as limping across a small corner of it, the past two days have been an exercise in how much I can possibly nap in a forty-eight hour period between shifts of study. Which hasn't been very unpleasant.

    I did have a pretty awkward moment the other day, though. I was booking a room in the college library for the student literary journal, of which I was elected editor-in-chief for the year when I slid out of the first meeting for a bathroom break. Anyway, the poor lady at the library information centre had lost her voice, yet was striving to communicate with students anyway by way of fierce little whispers and hand gestures. I didn't realise I had begun to whisper back at her in that same way until about fifteen seconds after I'd softly wished her a good day and waltzed nonchalantly out the building. I wouldn't be surprised if she'd put the hit out on me by now.

Captain's (B)log: 2nd February

Sat down with a group of students to watch the Superbowl today. People tell me that the Superbowl is a big deal but, alas, my knowledge of (American) football is only a bit more comprehensive than my knowledge of basketball. I know that for basketball, the aim is to shoot a ball at a hoop, I know for that football, the job of one one team is to get the ball across a field angry obstacles and the job of the other team is to take on the role of said angry obstacles. Still, it was an enjoyable time, even if I - pretty skilfully, I'd say - managed to avoid gleaning any sporting intellect at any point across the four hour time frame.

Captain's (B)log: 1st February

Had a rather pleasant day today. And, judging how that first sentence went, one straight from an Enid Blyton novel. I spent the first hour or two of the early afternoon - often referred to as 'morning' by students - chatting with some friends gearing up to play some variant of Dungeons and Dragons. I have, incidentally, discovered I'm only a little less clumsy living out an imaginary life than my actual one - the whole idea of Dungeons and Dragons is based around the idea that a team of players can act out in their minds anything they can conceive of, but I always seem to be five fictitious miles away from any action and cowering from anything more fear-inducing than a particularly toothy gerbil.
        Later, I wandered down to an art exhibition put on by UC and for which I'll have to write about for the college paper, and after that wandered down to a Lebanese restaurant with some of my fellow international students.
        I spent the remainder of the day seeing if I could take artsy shots with my camera-phone, but packed it in after realising with some dismay I'd skipped so far into pretentiousness I'd need some rations and a serious rope ladder to get back out again.

Captain's Blog: 31st January

     If you want to eavesdrop, you go to the Utica College cafeteria (hereafter, Utica College will be replaced with UC. As is said by faculty, it takes 'UC' to spell 'success'. As one of my lecturers pointed out, it also takes them to spell 'sucks'). The cafe - pronounced calf over here - is, for whatever reason, the area where people tend to lower their conversational guard to somewhere just below the earth's crust an let all their hitherto unvocalised thoughts out for an airing. Take, for instance, the conversation I overheard at lunch, where an issue regularly stumping philosophers since Plato was broached:

"Hey guys, so if a girl has a great body, can she still be a zero out of ten?"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well, if she's got a real ugly face, for example." 

"Hmmm. Tricky one."

"I know, right?"

A few second's pause. Then:

"I don't think so. I think no matter how bad her face, that can't cancel out all the other stuff, can it, really."

Another pause.

"Yeah, I'd agree with that."

"Cool. Coffee?"

     Eating aside, I spent the majority of my Friday evening watching my first college basketball game. The players involved moved rather fast - I slowly came to the realisation that if I'd run onto the court at any point during the match I'd have been reborn and as human roadkill and then peeled off the floor- and I also wasn't entirely sure of the rules beyond the standard ball-meets-hoop love story, so I grew a bit tired of the sport after the first, say, four minutes. To try and amuse myself, I turned to my friend and asked if he wanted to place an innocent wager on whom the victors would be. The loser, it was decided would have to fetch the other cups of cocoa for the weekend's duration.

    

  I'd have said it was a silly thing to bet on. Had I lost.

Captain's (B)log: The Return!

If a hypothetical friend came up to me one hypothetical day (preferably a day where large, hypothetical doses of coffee and biscuits are being freely and un-hypothetically consumed), asking me what I thought the biggest disadvantage to living in upstate New York is, I'd have to set down my mug and explain that one of my major disappointments is that nobody at home seems to actually know upstate New York is here at all. 

  

   Of course I'm exaggerating a tad. Most people do know there is a New York that exists outwith New York City. Problem is, it's rarely referred to in the United Kingdom outside of the context of the city and, as such, I've found it often treated as a sort of amorphous blob that everyone knows is out there somewhere and will be found when somebody actually wants to go look for it.

       This is a shame. NY the state, if a little barren of life in spots - barren like the moon, actually - has lots of fun little quirks that generally tend to make up for it. Take the town names strung throughout the place, for example, either blatantly titled after other cities (here you can jaunt from Syracuse to Rome or Paris and be back well before lunchtime) or else holding a definitely half-hearted feel to them. My favourite examples of the latter from my scanning of Google-earth has included Friendship, Otto and the completely adorable Wirt. Can you even imagine how Wirt came about?

"Hey, Greg, what d'you reckon we should name our new town?"

"What did you say?"

"'Wirt', did you say? Yeah, that could work."

"Sorry?"

"Oh, that's good too! Write it down for tomorrow."

    But I would also confess to my hypothetical inquisitor, if they hadn't by this stage wished they'd never asked and were already away and looking for some hypothetical decent conversation, the lack of information is partly my fault, at least in terms of the people who I've left in Scotland. It's been four or five months since I've last posted a blog - you can chalk that up to several reasons, as varied as they are dull  - and though some people have probably responded to their absence with a miserably lengthy sigh of relief, I've decided to fling the blog back into cyberspace. It's going to be in a different format, though: I'm going to aim for a daily short posting (you have to set up the standards before its possible to let them slip, after all) of a diary of sorts. Some days such a diary that might entail a half page of meandering, some days a perhaps photo or two, some days a pair of sentences standing on their own wondering where the party's got to. We'll find out as the semester progresses with the workload.

I'm also stop stabbing absolutely every post onto social media. You know where to find me.

Until tomorrow!