Fun with Sports and other Misc. Activities

If you're not a die-hard fan of the MIT women's rugby team, you might not know much about this lovely sport. I certainly didn't. But, thanks to a wonderful game of "touch" rugby this week, I can summarize pretty well: it hurts.

Rugby, at least to an uninformed American, seems to be pretty much as popular as football (aka soccer for those who choose to call a game wherein most of the time you don't touch the ball with your feet "football") over here. The rules are pretty counterintuitive though...especially the part where you're not allowed to pass the ball forward (I'm not making this up). You are, however, allowed to express levels of violence rarely found outside of inner-city gang beatings. Awesome! (if you're the tackler and not the tacklee, I guess). 

I found all this out when I was invited to play a game of touch rugby (aka "girly rugby" for those who particularly enjoy broken bones and dislocated joints) on Tuesday afternoon. The idea is that a "tackle" is touching someone with both hands below the waist (I subsequently have a theory that touch rugby was, indeed, invented by girls). The good news is, you rarely get tackled. The bad news is that someone running into you full speed in an attempt to grab your legs still hurts...a lot. Also, rugby is a LOT of running around, so the whole out-of-shape lot of us were more or less knackered after about 20 minutes of playing (I would point out that the teams were also very, very unfair). At that point we sort of retired to kicking the rugby ball around the field and attempting handstands (or epic handstand wipeouts, in my case). 

I've also joined the gym here at BT, since I'm in one of my phases where I attempt to acquire non-negligible levels of upper-body strength (this has yet to work out for me, incidentally). More impressively, I've actually been GOING to the gym two or three times a week (in the past I have somehow tried to get in shape via having a gym membership, which may not have been the best strategy). If I've acquired any extra muscle in the last week, however, I doubt I would notice since I can no longer move my arms (some combination of working out a few times this week and playing squash for the first time in two weeks yesterday). I quite literally had to roll out of bed this morning since I couldn't actually sit up.

BBC Weather has predicted a warm and sunny weekend, so I'm a bit nervous (that is if the correlation of BBC Weather being wrong about 100% of the time holds out). I've got plans to go to Primark with Jia-Yan (who has all the qualifications of a good shopping buddy...namely being female and wanting to go shopping with me) tomorrow and then to go up to Cambridge with her on Sunday (Jia-Yan is a Cambridge alum who did CME, so we get on quite well, and she's going to show me around Cambridge a little more). I mostly plan on nursing my sore muscles via moving as little as possible. 

In other news, I successfully drove John's new Mazda on a PUBLIC ROAD! And I didn't crash it! And I made it all the way up to 4th gear shifting with my left hand! Whooooo!!! Next step: roundabouts *shudder*

Linguistic observation of the day:

The British drop "that" at the end of some statements. For instance, if I said "Should I go to the store?" your typical British person would say "you could do"...not "you could" or "you could do that." I have almost seamlessly incorporated this new phrase-ology into my vocabulary, but am somewhat disappointed with how little notice it has received from my British friends ("you don't say that in America?" they ask, puzzled, when I insist they recognize my drastically improved linguistic skills). Usually I get lauded for things like the correct use of the word "football" or saying "loo," but somehow I am the only one who has noticed this difference between British and American English...how strange.

Next week I'm going to Birmingham to visit Aaron Sloman, a big name in Cog. Sci. and AI...I'm SO excited! I also have plans to go hear the LSO on Wednesday, so I'm super excited for that as well! I'm trying to plan my long weekend in either Paris or Rome, so if anyone has any ideas which I should pick either way (ahh, Paris so temptingly close...) let me know. 

Till next time.