group dynamics: April 2006 Archives

On Apr 29, 2006, at 11:56 PM, Chris Boulton wrote:

AMHERST, MA, April 29 - In a stunning turn of events, Brett Ingram cast the deciding vote in the GSS elections yesterday. Mr. Ingram's ballot, marked with his signature uppercase 'X,' pushed the GEO-endorsed slate of candidates over the top of a hotly contested election. Turn-out was high. But in spite of 600 voters (up 250 from the previous year) coming to the polls, in the end, it all came down to Brett. Elections observer George Liu was there. Marveling at Mr. Ingram's insouciance in the face of such a historic moment, Liu concluded "Never before have I witnessed such exquisite suffering on behalf of suffrage. But one thing is certain: that old curmudgeon carried the day with his vigorous exercise of the franchise." One minor annoyance for Brett; one giant leap for the Graduate Student Senate.

read second paragraph email conversation with non-god dated Apr. 29 2006."

you have to trust that no matter what happens you will get through it, that it's just what's meant to be - not because it's fate but because that's the way it is/was. so you invent your story about it in a way that cultivates the kind of human be-ing to which you aspire. it ain't easy and it ain't fun when things don't go as we desire but, somehowsomeway, if you can hold fast to any kind of belief that sustains you then you can get through.

Copied from the April 26, 2006 6:31:55 PM EDT email newsletter of the Graduate Employee Organization (emphasis added).

2. GEO Election Results:
-------------------------
Following the elections on April 18th and 19th, the following candidates were declared elected:
President - Srinivas Lankala (Communication)
Vice-President - Jeremy Wolf (Political Science)
Secretary-Treasurer - Mandy Cheung (School of Education)
Members of the Steering Committee - Jason Rodriguez (Sociology) and Anna Curtis (Sociology)

The new officers will be inaugurated at the last membership meeting of this semester on May 10th at 6 pm.

Communication in Crisis conference organizers might be frantically trying to recoup the semester (could be a projection on my part) but the event is still on the radar.

A long time ago (!), Donal got me into the Department of Communication here at UMass.

and the rest of you are LOSERS! Who says the Black Eyed Peas are better than bowling? The Blog Victim won three of four games, but if I won the last game by 64 pins....setting a new personal best (!) of 158...who's the better bowler? BV approached his personal best. Alas. He fell short by one. 1. That's o-n-e pin. Even then, his margin of victory was only 71 pins. Oh. So much for Blog Gossip. :-/

After he won that game, he speculated about his character, pondering (out loud!) whether he was the kind of person to celebrate a victory by continuing to crush his opponents or . . . (he left the rest unsaid. Hmmmm.) Let me just note the margin of loss progressed from six pins, to eleven ("I just have to knock 'em out, at least a spare") to the aforementioned seventy-one. And this, after saying "the house of the straight-shooters" held no enmity, blaming all of that on those who aspire to spin. Having been so soundly pulverized in the third game, you must imagine that I was pleased by the spread after my turkey (another first!) in the last game when the score showed me with 122 (7th frame) and BV with 37 (5th, b'cuz he had a strike in the 6th and hadn't yet bowled his 7th). NO DOUBT that was the largest spread of the match and yes, thank you, I'll just take my bows. :-0

"a heart-shaped leaf" - this must be the image of the 19 folks who converged on the bowling lanes tonight in honor of Luscious' 72nd birthday and JC's successful dissertation defense. Or, perhaps it was merely a reference to the (gendered) fashion observation that "all the women are wearing green, almost," "except," adds a graffiti-ghost, "those who are wearing red. and blue. if not yellow."

Bowling was merely filler for the real show tonight. CAKE! There was a profusion of cards and well-wishing, such that a portrait of (the back of) JC's head) as he sets off on his new life wound up in Luscious b'day card, and a birthday memory for Luscious wound up in the blog notes. The negotiations for a trade-off to mask the first error resulted in an "economic metaphor showing the capitalist ideology of the contemporary global village": "What are you gonna do in return?"

Competition spun down the lanes and among onlookers. Strikes by the following were witnessed: Siri, JC, Greg, Rajiv, Linus, Darpan, Zeynep, and Alenka. LB too but barely - according to the "if its not blogged; it didn't happen" rule, a group cheer indicating a possible strike doesn't verify the strike; however an actual eyewitness strike did (eventually) occur. Four doubles were thrown tonight, by Luscious (as usual), Cata (in the 10th frame!), dadofzeynep (officially, Nejat), and yours truly. :-) Zeynep, having waited 15 years to beat her dad at bowling, soundly pounded him 132 to 100 in the second game. No one set any records tonight, although I came close, falling short by four measly pins. I had a 93 in the fifth frame bowling right-handed; compare that with the 95 total I had in the game I bowled as a lefty. (Then it started to go downhill. Not as severely as Linus though, who cooked our breakfast in the first game and fizzled like a fire in the rain during the second.)

Meanwhile, JC continued the streak of his good day, pummelling his opponents by 30 pins. Alenka, Maja, and Jake all tied at 106, doing some threesome kind of thing? Then there was a flask going 'round one of the other lanes, and a backpack sounding suspiciously full of empty bottles....a rowdy encounter between Anuj and Rajiv which paled in comparison to the lunge and knock-down between Lava and Linus later. What was up with the testosterone tonight?

Don's creativity of JC (a bald head morphing into a bandanna-covered hairy head) inspired additional artwork, including this pregnant duck. ("Duckness" is obvious; you might have to stretch to glean the pregnant part.) It's unclear if this sketch is an actual portrait or an amalgam of the clutch of us nondescript types. Did I mention Darpan got confused about the sport of the evening? It may all have been some kind of discharge for the real, poignant details of JC's defense, in which some of the beneficiaries of his community work on fair housing expressed their gratitude for his work above and beyond the call of academic scholarship.

Kinda gives ya a nice warm, heart-shaped leafy-feeling, doesn't it?

Once upon a time there were bowlers.

Actually, bowling has persisted and I've even been there; just behind the times with the blogreports. And this after folks started inquiring and/or commenting about these posts in particular! (I guess I'm still not very audience-friendly.) :-/

Why what? Why bowl, when the most one can say about an evening's effort is, "that was an odd ball"?

Two weeks ago (!), Luscious bowled with a calf injury. No, not a baby cow, he twisted something in his lower leg playing basketball. His injury did not lead to the worst bowling of the evening, however. That honor fell to Dan, who was bolluxed, boogered, and otherwise convinced he should have stayed home to watch DVDs. "It is nice," he conceded, "to see Luscious suck." As it turned out, "only Steph" had a decent night, although Lava pulled off a right- and left-handed combo score of 161. (He does pay me to write nice things about him.)

Maja was prepping for her defense the next day (which she passed with roaring colors), Mafu and Angie dropped by for a quick hello, and the Hungarian (as he was introduced!?!) on the team rolled a couple of muffie games. There is one enigmatic scribble I can no longer decode:

What is my "x"?

I await the answer with suspence.

I have a hang over. It's the fault of those dang Nepalese! I didn't have that much wine; I think it was the apple tobacco. Or perhaps it was the time warp to 2063 B.S.? (No, that's not what you think, it's Bikram Sambat.) (Which may or may not be the same as the Vikram calendar, which describes the four eras of Hindi temporality.)

Supposedly the flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah is a traditional fixture among folks gathering just to chat. I smoked more than the last time (and I'm not a smoker). The truth is, I'm no longer in my twenties, or even early thirties! Can't party so hearty anymore. sigh I had to leave before the promised 4 am meatballs and music.

My peers are more critical than me. I thought it was pretty good, but they lamented it's predictability and (hello?) the amount of violence.

I was intrigued by the relationship between a man who has reinvented himself and a woman who has to reconcile her attraction to this man with a past she abhors.

Otherwise, it was predictable. There were also several loose ends not pursued and/or left untied. "Half-assed," was the assessment of the clerk at Captain Video. Then they (my friends?!!) tried to blame me :-0 only because Munich was out, there would have been too much thinking involved with Good Night, And Good Luck, and Jarhead didn't grab their interest. Maybe they regret passing up the opportunity to watch Jesus Christ Superstar?

There was the colleague I saw this morning who didn't moderate the emphasis: "You look like you could use a cup of coffee."

The professor who took pains to express in several different ways what I "need to understand."

The lecture that included details about the despicable events at Duke over the weekend.

The cartoon drawn for me by a student mocking my emphasis on parsimony in writing. I forgot to write down the sentence reconstructed to correct a dangling modifier. :-( It referred to "festering trolls in the basement" and was a genuine collaborative effort, with the adjective, subject, and location (I think) all supplied by different individuals. More of this!

The idea for a SNL skit on a PR firm specializing in dissertation titles for graduate students.

Finally, there were blini. (Delicious!)

Last week at bowling I set my personal best: 153, setting up a tie with Zeynep.

However, I couldn't bask in the glory too long because of this

and then its revision . . .

I'm not sure of which to be most afraid?