The end of summer

Originally posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 3:33am

So I haven’t done too much at home since I’ve gotten back from Mexico. A lot of housecleaning and Olympics watching.
My sister threw my tea away, which is annoying. She must have thought nobody drank it. She also threw away our ceramic candleholders from Honduras because she thought they were old and nasty-looking, but I thought they were cool, and I don’t even know how we got them. Granted, we never used them, but that’s mostly because my dad is afraid of candles. Also partly because the dining room table was rarely ever clean, but I cleared it off two days ago, which is perhaps a bigger achievement than it sounds.
On the plus side, she found $50 in one of my old sixteenth birthday cards, which sort of makes up for it. She also found an enlarged picture of a slightly pudgy, middle-aged man bearing the following inscription:

To Brian,
Now that we’re BOTH in Concord, lets do lunch some day!
GOOD LUCK
GEORGE

We asked my dad who George was, but strangely enough, he had no idea. An hour later, it occurred to him that George was a convicted criminal who got sent to the New Hampshire State Prison twenty years ago, and one of his colleagues had given the picture to him as a joke. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.

As far as the Olympics are concerned, I must say that I am really not a fan of Michael Phelps. With the notable exception of the smiling assassin, Muttiah Muralitharan, I tend to dislike teams and athletes that always win everything. I dislike swimming, or rather, I dislike watching other people swim. I dislike the fact that they give out swimming medals as if they were candy. Lastly, I dislike the fact that Michael Phelps’ mother gets more coverage than most Olympic athletes do.
If that makes me a heartless and spiteful person, so be it. Please don’t take this as an endorsement of black magic or anything, but if I had a cute little Michael Phelps voodoo doll, I would take a pair of pliers and fasten them onto his nuts two seconds before his next race. Let’s see him win eight gold medals under THAT kind of pressure.
But unfortunately for me, Phelps did indeed win his eighth gold medal in Beijing, making this “probably” the best week of his life. This means Michael Phelps has now singlehandedly won, in a single week, eight times as many gold medals as the nation of Togo has won in Olympic history. Phelps is also the most popular American Olympian as measured by number of facebook friends.
I watched that race tonight at a bonfire/cookout hosted by two of my best friends from high school, and we also watched Usain Bolt of Jamaica set a new world record in the hundred meters despite not really trying. I attempted at one point to ask the other guests, “If Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt met in a dark swamp and had to race each other through a field of waist-deep mud and rotting leaves, who would win?” But I stumbled over my words and actually said, “What if Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt melted?” The answer to this question is: they would coalesce into a superhuman frog-being.
At this party I also realized that you can instantly improve any story simply by including the phrase, “He, in turn, interpreted this as a challenge to his manhood.” Five points to Slytherin if you can correctly name the story I was telling.

About seven or eight years ago, my family took a vacation to Florida, and while we were there, we went to see some sort of gymnastics competition. I remember seeing a dinosaur from Uzbekistan named Oksana Chusovitina, who was very good at the vault but was around twenty-six at the time, which is already prehistoric for a female gymnast. It turns out that Chusovitina is now thirty-three, a naturalized German citizen, and competing in her fifth Olympics, a record for female gymnasts. She even has a daughter and moved to Germany to get better treatment for her leukemia. And to think, I actually got to see Chusovitina’s fossilized remains compete in person!

A new school year is almost upon us, and I have been giving some thought to the question of all the things I am looking forward to. Really, I am hoping that this year is the beginning of a new and improved Tim Graf. Sleeker. Faster. More aerodynamic and fuel-efficient. I’m not sure exactly how I will make all of this happen, but I’m thinking possibly hair extensions.
I am definitely looking forward to seeing all of my old friends again and catching up. I’ve decided that there haven’t been enough road trips in my life, so maybe if the right opportunity comes along I will get to do one or two of those.
I’m hoping to finally become a member of my church, but as far as Christian ministries go, I am probably going to take a different approach this year and devote less time to them. I want to break out of the Christian ghetto and develop interests, abilities, and relationships elsewhere. That being said, I intend to focus on one in particular and try to involve myself in their ministry as much as I can. I’d like to co-lead a Bible study, or possibly disciple somebody. I mean, if the right baby bird came along, I wouldn’t mind taking it under my wing, although I am led to believe that I may not be cut out for that sort of work. What disciples need, my friend, is emotional stability, and what I have to offer . . . isn’t that. I'm more like a beautiful trainwreck.
I’m not expecting my classes to be either particularly enthralling or particularly soporific. I am doing an honors research project in linguistics, which terrifies me because I don’t know what my topic will be.
I also need to figure out my Spanish situation, because I earned upper-division Spanish credit in Mexico this summer, but I’ve never taken a Spanish class at OU or taken the necessary steps to earn advanced standing. I’m not sure if I’m going to take more Spanish or not.
I am hoping I will be able to sing in the opera chorus for “Lakme” this semester so I can have a challenging opportunity to strengthen my voice and express myself creatively. Some people have told me I have a good voice, but I still have a lot to learn about choral singing. I will need to change my schedule around slightly to do this because the rehearsals conflict with Second Language Acquisition, but I thought I had a goofy schedule to begin with, so I won’t really mind.
I’m also hoping I can join the Oklahoma Daily in some capacity. I would love an opportunity to reenter the world of journalism, if I have the time.
Last semester I was working eleven hours a week at Crossroads; making smoothies in the mornings was kind of fun, although I did not particularly enjoy working in the kitchen for five hours every Saturday night. I assume I still work there, but honestly I have no idea what’s going to happen with that. I just found out yesterday that apparently when I was in Mexico I received a letter informing me I had mandatory orientation this Monday and Tuesday, which poses an interesting logistical challenge for me because I’m not flying into Oklahoma until Wednesday.
The thing people don’t realize is, I’m not from Oklahoma. I’m from halfway across the country. If you have some kind of activity planned before the semester starts, you need to let me know about it MONTHS in advance. If you don’t do that, I won’t be there. It’s called booking flights while they’re cheap, people!
Also, the ironic thing about this mandatory orientation is that they didn’t actually train me at all before I started working. They just threw me to the wolves, and I had to learn how to feed them as I went along.
Anyway, there are a number of other things I am excited about as well. Playing Ultimate Frisbee again on a regular basis. (I fully intend to score at least one touchdown this year with my “secret throw.”) Curling around the TV with good friends and watching OU dismantle lesser schools on the gridiron. Working out if I can find the time and some other guys to do it with. Taking in some concerts and shows and visiting the art museum. Maybe getting one of my musically talented friends to give me piano lessons.
Reading as well. OU has a lot of crazy linguistics books in the library just begging to be read, and I wouldn’t want to let them down, now would I? You can actually find an entire book about . . . I don’t know, pronouns. You can read a whole book about pronouns. Or conjunctions. Maybe a few of them will come in handy for my project. I’ve also just started a massive volume on church history by Justo Gonzalez which should be a cracking read.

I should probably say something also about community service, because I think it’s important, but I don’t really know what I’m going to do about that. Perhaps I will make it the subject of a future note.

This note is dedicated to my good friend Josh, who asked me what I was looking forward to this semester three times. OK, it may have only been two, but it’s funnier if I say three.

Oh, and I’m also looking forward to getting a ride to OU from the airport. So, if any of you love me and are going to be in Norman at 1:00 pm on Wednesday, would you like to give me a ride? Tell you what, you don’t even have to love me. You mostly just have to have a car with seats.