My friend, LiberalFish, was invited to go to a rollerskating party last Tuesday. She invited me to come along as her guest. So we went. We strapped on skates, and we "skated." Well, I skated, LiberalFish has never skated before, but she made a valiant effort and she did quite well for the first time.
We met NewFriend while we were there, I doubt we'll ever actually see her again, but she was nice enough. She and I were sitting there chatting when the DJ announced that the next song would be used for a game. NewFriend and I were not going to participate as NewFriend was not a great skater. She, too, was skating for one of her first times. However, two boys (Undergrad1 and Undergrad2) came up and implored us to join them in the game as you needed at least 3 people to participate. NewFriend and I tried to back out, but were unable to do so. LiberalFish was on another bench when the boys came up to us; NewFriend and I told them we had another friend and that she would be joining us. The boys were okay with this. However, LiberalFish did not join.
We went out and we participitated in the game, which entailed holding hands and skating in one direction. That seemed simple enough until the siren sounded and we had to turn to go the opposite way. If any of us had fallen, our team would be out. We had a near fall, but we all stayed standing the whole time. In the end, we won. Our prize? Blinking necklace things. Woohoo.
After the game was over we all skated off and I joined LiberalFish again. She encouraged me to skate off on my own, as I "enjoyed" skating. So I did. I was skating when Undergrad2 started skating near me. He decided to strike up a conversation with me and asked if I'd ever skated at this particular rink before. I responded that I had...as an undergrad. (It just came out before I could stop it, which is not a bad thing. I'm not ashamed of graduate school...and as you'll see it's a good litmus test.) There were one or two beats before Undergrad2 asked "you're a graduate student? In what?" I told him that I was studying Linguistics. He asked if I was at BYU and I told him I was. He then skated off. Undergrad1 conversed with me a bit after that, but Undergrad2 never talked to me again.
Victory.
This post is part of the Blue-Beta Blog Coordination, a continuing series of content coordinated by theme or motif with posts from Confuzzled of I Keep Wondering, Gromit of The Dancing Newt, Redoubt of Redoubt Redux, Third Mango of Funkadelic Freestylings of Another Sort, Xanthippe of Let’s Save Our Hallmark Moment, and Yarjka of Sour Mayonnaise. This week's theme: 'Victory'.
1 comment:
That's awesome. Mostly because I've had similar experiences with grad school being a good litmus test . . . :)
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