How To Disappear Completely

Where's My Water Buffalo?

Amusing thought this morning: the last time I complained of my lack of a vital and necessary addendum to my life, my parents procured it and gave it to me. And I figure a man can't be much harder than an umbrella to track down and send in the mail, right? I'll be checking the post more frequently....
Everybody has a water buffalo. Mine is fast, and yours is slow....Wait! Stop! You can't say that! It is not true that everybody has a water buffalo. We're going to get angry letters from people saying, "I don't have a water buffalo. Where's my water buffalo!"

Maybe I should explain that, in Funkish, the phrase "Where's my water buffalo?" has been appropriated to mean "How come everyone else has something, and I don't?" Informal. Used in jest.
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"It's getting better all the time." Fencing practice, that is. During exams, we don't have to run stairs. Instead, we perform the ancient rite of masquetball! Part ultimate frisbee, part basketball, the teams pass a koosh from member to member down the court in an attempt to land it in an upside down fencing mask. Once your hand grasps the ball, your feet must remain stationary, unless you are the fancy twirl-in-the-air-and-throw-the-koosh-over-your-shoulder kind of guy. The teams are divided according to the shade of the shirt you happen to be wearing that night, either light or dark. I discovered an interesting phenomenon: a correlation between a height in excess of six feet and light shirts. Guess what colour mine happened to be. What made the night slightly more unfair is the sudden appearance of two additional supra-six-foot team members, who both happened to be wearing, you guessed it, light shirts.

The increased pressure of exams means that attendance was severely depressed. As the only beginner who showed up, I was able to fence with the experienced members of the team, even bouting a few with the coach. I also discovered that one must change her tactics when she goes from fencing someone barely 5'3" to fencing....shall we say a light shirt? Fencing someone a foot taller than oneself throws your calculations off. I would think I was a safe distance from my opponent, and he would just reach his arm out and tap me. Stupid long arms.

But I had fun. I am beginning to feel like a member of the team. The student-instructor-who-makes-us-run-stairs-on-normal-days even knows my name. Since there are 60 beginners, I am impressed.

Apparently other fencing teams are not so chummy. A friend on the William and Mary fencing team said that the older members make it a point to intimidate the new comers (he was even shoved against the wall and cussed out once). Maybe this has to do with the fact that W & M boasts a primarily male team (only one woman on the team) whereas at least a good third of the MAC team is female.* But this is only a surmise. Whatever the reason, I am glad that we are not out to kill each other.

*Another hypothesis is that the MAC fencing team is simultaneously the Nerd Club....refuge of engineers, physics majors, and mathematicians who couldn't make the cut on the football team....