Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Departmental Review

"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy" Dept.:

Yesterday was the last day of the spring institute session, and, as usual, the institute had it's end of session lottery in which the main prize is a 1.5 million won travel voucher students can use to travel to a foreign country (secondary prizes include free tuition for the following session). Anyway, one of my students, Ryan (Seung Min-Jeung), won the big prize. I'm very happy for him. He's a really good kid and has very good English skills. The best thing about it is that he's never had the opportunity to travel abroad before and now he gets the chance. It shows that good things do indeed happen to good people!

"Medical Anomoly or Baseball as Holistic Medicine" Dept.:

Last week, Wednesday to be specific, I blew out my left knee. The miniscus ligamet tore and I was hobbling around in a great deal of pain. I went to the doctor on Friday, and he informed me that I would need surgery, which we then scheduled for Friday this week. The idea of surgery, coupled with being in pain, did nothing for my mood on Friday, so as a distraction, I decided to go to a baseball game and get drunk. I accomplished both goals and had a damn good time in the process.

Well, it seems that the combination of baseball and massive quantities of alcohol have magical curative powers. Yes, I can see the raised eyebrows and the hear the sarcastic, "Oh, really?" It's true, and I'm a believer. I believe because I got up the next day, hung over as stink, and was wandering around the house for about 30-45 minutes before I realised that my knee wasn't bothering me. "Odd," I thought, but I remained PAIN FREE all day Saturday. I figured it had to be some sort of fluke; a weird psychosematic reaction to having surgery; and that the pain would surely be back on Sunday. Nope. No pain. I felt so good that I went to another baseball game, had a great time, and figured I'd be back to my old gimpy-ass self on Monday. I woke up Monday feelin' fine. It's Wednesday now, and I still have no pain and a full range of motion in my knee. Go figure.

Now I may be making a mistake, but I'm going to stop by the doctor's office this afternoon and cancel the surgery. First of all, surgery sucks. I don't want to do it period, but if I was still in pain, I'd suck it up and go. But I'm not in pain; I feel fine. Will this aggravate my knee problems in the future? Maybe. But given the choice of no pain now vs. certain excruciating pain for a month and three months of being on crutches...well...I'm opting for the no pain now course.

"Baseball as Soul Butcher" Dept.:

As much as baseball may have holistic healing powers, it also the power to rip out your soul and cast it deep into the fiery depths of Hell. Thus it is for Nationals fans. The Nats this season have a revitalized batting order that has provided more scoring in a week of games than the team put up in the entire first month of last season, and yet the team is 0-7.

I watched the opening day game at Nationals Park yesterday against the World Champion Phillies. Now the Phillies team was reeling from the death of long time announcer Harry Kallas, who had collapsed and died in the announcer's booth two hours before game time (Kallas had been the voice of the Phillies for 38 years and was to Philly fans and the team as Harry Carey was to the Cubs). Despite 14 hits, including home runs from Elijah Dukes, Adam Dunn, and Ryan Zimmerman, and putting 8 runs on the board, the Nats still managed to lose the game 9-8. This is due to some really shoddy fielding (3 errors) and a Nats pitching staff that has a tendency to throw fat, hanging, breaking balls over the middle of the plate that leave the park with alarming quickness.

If the Nats want to avoid another 102-loss season, they're going to have to do something about their bullpen. They've got the bats, but if they keep giving up 7-8 runs a game, it's going to be a lo-o-o-o-o-ong season.

"Life in General" Dept. :

Same shit, different day. Sigh.

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