world cup

it's official. no further debate necessary. soccer is the greatest sport in the world. no shit, you say? thank you, captain obvious? well, forgive me for living in a soccer-blind country (we don't even call it by its proper name, for crying out loud), but i just finished reading an analysis of ghana, and when they said that the black stars' offense might struggle against experienced defenses like czech republic, italy and USA, i got goosebumps. an international writer (the guy was british, i think) lauding my country's team. see, i've got goosebumps again. with duke, i expect people all over who know about the sport to laud the players and the team and the coach and so on. but learning that people all over the world who know and care a lot about soccer think our coach and our defense and our striker are worthy of note is just awesome, in the old-fashioned sense. i just got another wave of goosebumps. it absolutely crushes me that i'll have to settle for espn gamecast today. thank god the italy game is on saturday, i think i'd go crazy if i couldn't see them play. and beyond just my own team, seeing how much people care, watching an entire stadium full of english people in germany singing "god save the queen" after squeaking by paraguay, is awesome. big-time college sports (basketball and football) are the closest we get to inciting the kind of passion that the world cup does, but at heart they're so provincial. the scale of the world cup is on a different order of magnitude than SEC or Big 10 football. whole COUNTRIES full of people come to a grinding halt when their young men hit the pitch. i only hope that we might see something approaching that passion for the donovans, beasleys, kellers and o'briens of the future. freddy adu, where are you?

in other news, the past week has been okay. work actually got kind of stressful on wednesday and thursday, with visitors whipping the whole office into a frenzy with a bajillion meetings. i got suckered into shepherding a chair candidate (for one of the departments in my school) around all day, which was very annoying because the people i shepherded him to had no consideration for me at all and either went over their alloted time with him or under and left before i got there to take him to the next place. so i spent the whole day looking for the guy, getting scolded by my overworked boss (who kept saying she needed a clone, which was true) for not knowing where he was, and getting yelled at on the phone by people who were supposed to meet with him but either didn't know where he was or didn't know where they were supposed to go. blech. glad that's over. friday was a lot more quiet, which was nice.

thursday night i went to jozi and elena's graduation thing, which was cute. saw some people i hadn't in a while, got made fun of for being too competitive (which i guess i am, but whatever), laid plans to chill with walker and bakri and john later. which we did. good times. i went to sleep at 8 on friday night and didn't wake up until 9:30 the next morning. THAT felt good, let me tell you. waking up at 7 to go to work every day just sucks, and 13 hours of sleep felt goooooood. went for a nice run during the day and helped dad clear up all the sticks and logs lying in our backyard. i can't believe we're only halfway done taking down the tree, we've been working on it for almost two months. mostly dad has, i guess. saturday night our neighbors ian and erin, who represent the next wave of residents in our neighborhood (they're the age my parents were when they moved here 20 years ago), had a little birthday party. it was okay, i guess, but a little awkward because everyone there was either my parents' age (other people from the block and ian and erin's parents) or 30 (everyone else) or me and jack. jack was even more out of place than me, so he left. erin's (quite cute) sister was there and she's 20 or 21, but she had brought friends and showed no interest in branching out to the other college-aged kids in attendance (namely, me). so i left and went to hang out with judy, which was very fun. we went to tastee's, where our waitress was drunk (god i love that place) and then got the ladykillers and what's up tiger lily to watch back at my house because hers was still without power after a tree fell across her car and the power lines along the street. life's a bitch. not really. okay this post is very long now, time to find a new activity. i should post more often, then i wouldn't have so much to say each time. good plan.