My left cheekbone is beautifully and hugely swollen, though its volume is gradually diminishing in favor of a bluish-green bruise that resembles a makeup job gone horribly wrong. Ben, I think, was the one who called it the battered woman look.

My waking up at 9:30 this morning coincided with Spanky coming into our room and dictating that I get up to play coed IM football. This past Thursday, I had promised to play without anticipating the terrible lapse of work ethic that would lead me to an unfinished program, an uninitiated paper, and an unprepared-for final this Monday. When I woke up, I was fairly certain that I couldn't afford the three or four hours it would take to go, play two games, and shower afterward. But I had promised to play, and we did have to have a minimum of three girls. Plus, we'd been anticipating these playoffs since the beginning of the quarter. Each Tuesday in October, they'd rush madly around trying to collect the requisite three females, and bike over to the Sandhill Fields with great anticipation. And then, there'd be no opposition team. So although we'd been registered in the coed division since September, nobody had yet played a real game; the excitement and energy had long been accumulating up the wazoo.

Even at a high school football game, the players are so ensconced in their padding and helmets and uniforms that it's difficult to think of them as people and football as a game. To me, a mere spectator in the thirty-seventh row of bleachers, each play seems more like a move in Axes & Allies, controlled by the coach as a supreme general, than a spontaneous sport: three troops here, one there, two more to defend the base. Oh yuck, I'm doing what I hate to read: dramatizing accounts of the physical with fanciful and unnecessary frills. I'll stop now.

Anyway, the point was intended to be that the game seemed so much more real when I was in it—I mean, these were the same folks I wandered the streets of San Francisco, pulled all-nighters, and ate lunch and dinner with. Because each play had to be centrally coordinated, all eight of us actually conversed and communicated with each other Branner love, I guess. We ended up kicking Serra's butt 19-0 in the first half, then got sort of complacent and didn't score at all in the second. We had scrimmaged and lost to the second team, the Thrashers (who were literally all Korean), a couple of weeks ago. But with the postwin high from the first game and an really awesome dive on the fourth down, one yard from the endzone by our quarterback Freddie, we won that game 7-0 as well. Since the third team didn't show today, the championship will be the first weekend of winter quarter. We resolved to kick some Grad School of Business butt, then headed home...

Wait a second. Both games are over, and there's not mention of how I acquired this new facial feature. That's right. The games were strictly touch, with only a couple of mild and accidental collisions on my part; my visage wasn't to be changed until later. Ravenous, we tried to race each other back to slip into the dining halls before they closed. As we weaved in and out of the sidewalks and bollards, Enessa and I heard what we thought was a squeal, and checked back to see whether Evonne was okay.

Evidently, I'm not a very fast checker. During the time that it took me to ascertain Evonne's well-being, I ran smack into a lamppole at an estimated 10 miles an hour. This was fast enough to loosen my bike chain from the gear and wrap it around the pedals, give a slight bend to the frame that caused some paint to flake off, and make the left side of my face swell up enough considerably within two seconds. While this naturally hurt, there was no point at which the pain was bad enough to make me wince; anyway, the irony of the collision made it too funny to be upset about. I just kind of stood there in shock as everyone else caught up. Too bad I didn't have a home video of that... hee.