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Things I want to remember forever from this weekend, part II

I read this again and was slightly sad at the end when I talked about how we had to make it this year.

I transformed from a loving teammate who wanted us to succeed to an ass who stood on the sideline for two or three points during the Calvin game and thought "They don't deserve to go to nationals." I don't know when I'll forgive myself for this. I'm sad that somewhere I lost my desire to be the best teammate I could be in every way.

Legacy part I: for the first time ever, we lost our last game of regionals/the season. The past three years that I'd been here we always scraped together a win to get an odd-numbered finish (5th, 7th, 3rd). This year? 6th. And a 9-1 loss, too. Dang.

Legacy part II: in the hug line, Cam told me "Your legacy is more than this last game." Or something to that effect, I was already crying at this point but that made matters worse, haha. Emotionally, I think that statement had more impact on me than anything else said to me in the context of Valpo Ultimate.

The hug line: I don't hate hugs, but I dislike huggy people who hug everyone all the time. I love hugs, but they should be special. I liked how we did this year's hug line. Justin and Will wanted to keep it brief, so minimal words were said, if any, and I just hugged all of my teammates (twice). I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to do this.

Beating Indiana Wesleyan on Saturday.

Beating Knox 15-0 and using [almost exclusively] the words "Bill" and "pony" hahaha. This is, arguably, my favorite Valpo Ultimate memory. This was John's idea. I can't even describe how much fun this was haha. 15-0. Zero. Zero goals scored by Knox. lawlz.

"Extreme" wind makes ultimate terrible. It was probably up to 25 mph at times. DI was messed up because of this, too. Northwestern and U of I should have swept everybody. What makes a good team? Those teams would crush everyone in normal conditions. What are normal conditions? Is ultimate fair? "I just can't even right now," to use the parlance of our times.

Getting Yo-Amazing with Kate and Ellen, because there's nothing like three good girlfriends getting frozen dairy together, especially when the one really eating his feelings is a boy and not a girl anyway and he gets a lot of frozen yogurt and life is nice. This was a very comical event to me, for some reason.

I said a bunch of bad things this weekend, about my teammates, others, myself, the world, the wind...I never want to do that again.

I permanently stained my new white longsleeve again haha. This picture kind of sucks, my Mom took it on her iphone. I think my Dad took a better DSLR-camera picture.

I feel like Jessica Chastain's character at the end of Zero Dark Thirty. It's over. Four yeas went by so fast. I'll miss these guys a lot. I hope they know how much fun I had them.

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I am 22 and goin' to grad school.

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It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.

Lou Holtz

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500 posts!

Ah. Tumblr emailed me about this.

Here's to here's to's.

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Tickets

I spent just under $400 so I can fly from Chicago to Las Vegas, then fly from Las Vegas to Brunswick by way of Atlanta.

I'm so excited.

I'm also somewhat sad, because on top of that I'll have the ~$300 High Tide fee, $45-$70 for Hotels in Vegas, and (probably) $100 on food and fun in Vegas (maybe that's a poor estimate).

I'm going to miss going to High Tide, it's been one of my favorite parts of ultimate and Valpo every year. I'm stoked to go to Vegas with the alumni. This should be a pretty dope spring break. A few months ago I decided that no matter how much debt I accumulate from my senior year of college, I refuse to let money be the reason I can't do something crazy.

I still want to see if I can road trip with Jonathan for the second week, but that's dependent on potential grad school visits (which I refuse to think about).

Woof. I love ultimate.

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So it all started with this:

"Matt West struggled to live up to his hype of being an athletic guy who won jump balls, Matt misread a lot of discs and jumped way to early very often."

...

"When using relentless positivity with guys like Matt West, who everyone expected to produce on the field, I think it failed because he never started pulling down the jump balls or getting the deep cuts we needed. Maybe Matt needed a little tough love or a little stress, but having me tell him that I believed in him over and over again did not produce results on the field."

I was at an indoor tournament over Christmas break and heard from some Chicago Club teammates that there had been some online rant about Chicago Club written by Bruns, one of our captains. (Bruns was my favorite or second-favorite captain and probably my favorite person on the team; note that favorite person does not mean favorite player, but I did like playing with him. I'm not sure who my favorite player was. Probably Jimmy or Tim. Or Jack, haha. It's a tough call. Anyway, I'm trying to emphasize the fact that I really like Bruns as a person, I thought he did a fantastic job as a captain, and he's a skilled player who is stuck in the Machine friend-zone (like me, albeit for different reasons), and I'm glad to call him my friend. He's a really fun guy. This is a reflection on my, not hatred for Bruns). I pulled it up on my Samsung Galaxy SIII during a bye and read this post, essentially Kevin's collected thoughts on the project of Chicago Club. I agreed with almost everything he has to say, including the above quotes that describe me.

It was nice to have someone else put into words what I couldn't.

There was this funny thing that happened; after I read the post I walked around the indoor sports center and was talking to (or rather, trying to talk to) other people who had known about the post, and I'd try to casually toss out "Yeah, I mean, I'm not offended by Bruns' comments on me, they're pretty accurate. Ha, I mean, like, where did this hype come from though? I mean, you can't blame me if someone else lied about my skills. I never said I was good." There was so much classic-MattWest in those conversations. It was funny.

Anyway, that's stupid. No, not Bruns' valid comments, my reaction. I'm upset that I tried to shove away expectations. If people set some bar for me, I should reach it, or at least reach for it. I should feel blessed that people think that of me. I am athletic (asterisk: comparatively) and I win most jump balls that I go up for in college. Heck, I'd argue they're not even jump balls at that point. I think I'm good in the air. This has never translated well to club ultimate, for some reason...people are better at reading, more athletic, and box out much better. That doesn't mean my vertical is different. I know I need to incorporate those things, but I always freak out about messing one of the three key things up and then proceed to mess things up, those three things being 1.) reading 2.) boxing out 3.) timing my jump. I just need to stop worrying and trust myself more.

I'm not sure what I think about the second quote. I didn't cut deep enough, and didn't sell my cuts enough. I'm not trying to go blameless, here, I'm just curious about how to fix my mentality. Bruns raises a good point, here. I think I needed to be cut down more. I play my best when I'm having fun and have a strong desire to work hard. I want to work hard when I want to play well. I want to play well when I think we can win (Maybe that's the solution: was CC cursed? Can I blame a team incapable of winning? Ha...). I'm not sure how this all works. I am sure that I love playing ultimate, though. Everything about the game, except cutting in zone offense, is awesome.

Anyway.

So this prompted some good self-examination, and that's important. When I got back to Valpo, I did some more of that. I explored Bruns' blog and would up reading pretty much everything. I really enjoyed this one, about moneymakers, and have tried to figure out what that is for me. My guess is it's 1.) someone who is good at getting open (either off of continuation or as the initial cut) 2.) a good deep threat 3.) a good cutter defender. I think I'm better at these than most aspects of the game, with approximately equal strength in all three areas. So I need to ask, then: what does Machine need?

They could always use all three. I'm too short/slow to be a must-have deep threat, and I'm not known as a creative thrower. I'm good at getting open but struggle with applying it to the context of the rest of the field, and timing it appropriately. I think I may be the best at defense, but I'm not yet extraordinary and I need to either play "Neal" style defense where I completely shut the guy down, or "Charlie" style defense where I get them to throw the disc to my guy but then take it away. Charlie is a little bigger (read: taller, but also slightly more built/faster) than me, so it's easier for him to generate D's. I'm not incredibly fast but I'm certainly not slow, so I could be a decent shut-down defense guy.

This is getting long and I'm not sure what all of my thoughts are (which was the whole point of putting it on [metaphorical] paper, anyway...), but I think I've assessed my three greatest strengths/talents that I should advertise in the "job interview" that is Machine tryouts.

I'm excited.

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I love Spongebob.

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Ohp.

Not quite...but I feel regret.

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I can't stop looking through all my pictures of Nicaragua.

I also wrote this maybe poignant post about Thanksgiving in Nicaragua on our travel blog.

A lot of things happened in my absence (or at least some major things).  Life never stops.  Wow haha.

It's good to be back, but I really dug my time in Nicaragua.

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0.625

Texas, Washington, UIUC, Madison, Tufts = done + waiting + nervousness

Cal, Stanford, UCSD = requiring far too much writing + fear that I am not diverse/smart/unique/smart enough + hopefully done by tomorrow night

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Subtweeting

How does "Fall down seven times, stand up eight," make sense?

Did you think before you copied so-and-so's Facebook status?  Unless you're on the ground to begin with, if you fall down seven times, you can only stand up seven times.  If you are on the ground, it makes a little more sense...but why are you on the ground?

Also I hate Buzzfeed and Upworthy.  There is so much hate right here and right now.  I just don't want to write my music paper draft haha...

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Long overdue, some of my favorite quotes from On The Road.

"We'll just have to sleep now.  Let's stop the machine."

"You can't stop the machine!" yelled Carlo at the top of his voice.  The first birds sang.

"Now, when I raise my hand," said Dean, "we'll stop talking, we'll both understand purely and without any hassle that we are simply stopped talking, and we'll just sleep."

"You can't stop the machine like that."

"Stop the machine," I said.  They looked at me.

"He's been awake this whole time, listening.  What were you thinking, Sal?"  I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing maniacs and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanisms of a watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud Pass and yet was made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world.  They smiled.  I pointed my finger at them and said, "If you keep this up you'll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along."

I love that.  "You can't stop the machine!"

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk.  Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Souls.  Real talk.

The Banana King was an old man selling bananas on the corner.  I was completely bored.  But Remi kept punching me in the ribs and even dragging me along by the collar.  "When you write about the Banana King you write about the human-interest things of life."  I told him I didn't give a damn about the Banana King.  "Until you realize the importance of the Banana King you will know absolutely nothing about the human-interest things of the world," said Remi emphatically.

There's also a lot of talk of "IT" in this book.  I dig it.  They never say what "IT" is.  Maybe it's implied and it went way over my head.  Who knows.

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It's not our job to change people so God can accept them; it's our job to accept people.

John Arthur Nunes.

I saw this in our school newspaper (I read our school newspaper every now and then).

I respect this guy and this idea.

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Ah.

I like these two guys, they're great guys, honestly, but I feel like I've failed to do anything wit my life. I wish I could accomplish something neat.

I guess that's karma for thinking I'd be some supergenius engineer who would come to the 5-year reunion in a helicopter and a tiger and drive away in a [insert sports car that I know nothing about here] that was airdropped by the helicopter (because arriving and leaving in the same vehicle is something that cool, rich, successful people don't do) and laugh and smile as the life of the party (do I really want that anyway) and I've have medals around my neck from awards and sports and sports awards, and the night would be fantastic and everyone would say how cool I was and we'd drink white russians and no one would judge me for liking a strange, campy drink (that I only drink because of this).

Karma again: before I even typed the second run of that run-on, I realized that those kids' parents probably reported their achievements to the magazine (both families are decently involved in the school), and my summer research was just presented at it's fields' respective national conference.  Also I've flown to ultimate tournaments.  That's neat.  Now I just feel bad for bitching verbalizing meaningless concerns.

Anyway, I'm realizing that "college professor" is a pretty sweet endgame.  Kate agreed that I was spacey enough today.  Sweet, got that taken care of.

I just hope I 1.) get into grad school 2.) get funding.  My life is great.  Well...I wish my ankle would stop sucking.  That's about it, though.  I had a fantastic weekend and I'm excited for literally almost everything that is going to happen in the next few months (Nicaragua, Christmas Break, [hopefully] Minnesota with Kate, the end of Dale Carnegie Training (I love the course but man it would be nice to have 4 hours back each Tuesday), grad school deadlines...Christmas with my family in Wisconsin!).

Also, I'm applying to Stanford.  And Cal.  Heck, if I don't get in, it was cool to say I applied (actually, probably not...but if I get in, man, that's so cool!  Snooty people go to those schools!  Academia!  Sports!).  I filled in some more blanks on my Tufts app today (and I realized I'm probably least excited to go there of all my schools (even over Madison...?) and it felt wrong to still apply...but...) and they asked for my temporary address until whenever it becomes not my address anymore, and said "Will you be living there in March?"  Does that mean I get acceptance [/rejection] letters in the mail?!  How exciting!  It's like undergraduate applications all over again.  Also, undergraduate is a strange term.  That's all...anyway, my undergrad acceptance rate was 0.75 (3/4).  I wonder what grad school will be.

I think the number of posts I title "Ah." or "ah" or "ah." or "Ah" is larger.  It's a great introductory word.  Or noise.  Or utterance.  Or something.

I miss writing on here.

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I thought about quitting ultimate today.

Legitimately.

I did.

It was weird.

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Will come back from DC!!!

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Stanford wins, in my opinion.

Stanford is the only grad school that has said "Autumn 2014" instead of "Fall 2014" for my date of enrollment.  Props.

...except Stanford and UCSD want all this "diversity" stuff.  Ugh.