3 October 2004 - Sunday
Where does time go when we kill it?
Again I find the weekend shorter than advertised. How can an afternoon and two days pass so quickly?
Granted, I did use up a good deal of the weekend talking with new people. Conversations do strange things to my sense of time; the minutes seem to pass very slowly during the first quarter- to half-hour, but after that an entire evening can speed by without drawing attention to itself.
In addition, I burned through three hours yesterday by attending a community theater performance of Dearly Departed, which, while amusing, was not as amusing as the rest of the audience seemed to think. After that, I let another hour and a half slip through my fingers by watching the end of Miracle, which, no matter what any history major says about it, is still just another sports movie.
This evening, supper became a major production when we discovered that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was on. Perhaps I was trying to redeem my entertainment choices by watching it. Or perhaps it's just really, really cool to see biker Nazis get spoked by father-son archeologists. In any case, I ended up leaving the movie to talk to new people again.
Fortunately, I am smart enough to avoid any of the absurd activities of "Fall Fest," which begins tomorrow. Somebody was trying to start a rumor about going to the banquet as a group, but they're going to have to get more persuasive if they want me to join. Even as a chance to dress up (and see everybody else dressed up), the banquet is still part of a very annoying tradition.
| Posted by Wilson at 23:37 Central | TrackBack| Report submitted to the Life Desk
Ah, but there are other ways to have fun that night. It's the most entertaining meal of the year to eat in the cafeteria, for example. With everybody who has any social skills away at the banquet, the dining hall is nearly deserted, and the male/female ratio is literally 20 to 1 -- yet the food is really good. It's a highly amusing experience.
The thoughts of Wilson on 4 October 2004 - 8:58 Central+ + + + +
"yet the food is really good."
Is this because:
a) Saga suddenly has competition from the banquet caterers?
b) Saga IS the caterer and serves respectable victals to banquet AND cafeteria, on that night only?
c) All the truly discerning palates are at the banquet?
or, (and this is my guess :-)
d) The people left in the cafeteria are putting a "brave face" on the situation?
+ + + + +
a) Unlikely. If somebody wants to go to the banquet, they will. Saga's relative quality will have no effect on banquet attendance.
b) Nope. The banquet was at a country club, as I recall.
c) Certainly not. The people avoiding the banquet include the most critical and negative people on campus.
d) Doesn't explain everything. The improvement in quality at Saga came as a surprise to me when I first noticed it; everyone else present agreed with my assessment; and the leftovers from that meal were judged excellent by those who had attended the banquet but ate at Saga the next day. If anything, that last group of people should have had a lower opinion of Saga after eating the catered food.
I think the food was better (a) because light throughput meant that the food suffered less from mass production, and (b) because Saga was aware of the need for this meal to be special -- not in order to compete with the banquet but for the sake of the meal itself.
The thoughts of Wilson on 4 October 2004 - 14:13 Central+ + + + +
I bow to your explanation, including the introduction of a new word to my vocabulary: "throughput."
The thoughts of Ma Hoyt on 4 October 2004 - 18:27 Central+ + + + +
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I persuaded another girl to accompany me to a Valentine's Banquet once. We went as nuns, dressed in full "habit," courtesy of a local high school which had recently done "Sound of Music." (See, I knew this other girl that knew the musical director.....)
Had the most fun I've ever had at a banquet.
It pays to have friends AND have fun. I think you should get up a group and go :-)
The thoughts of Ma Hoyt on 4 October 2004 - 7:43 Central+ + + + +