Lazy Is As Lazy Does???

The Common Hour, in actuality the common 65 minutes scheduled for a campus wide speaker or event every thursday, discussion today was on the impotence of athletics at F&M and, by implication in my opinion, Division III schools in general. One statistic thrown out during the meeting was that the highest average GPA for an interscholastic team last year was around a 3.6 and the lowest 2.6. I was stunned! When do athletes find the time to study???

This got me thinking. I'm not doing terribly as a student but I don't have the same drive and energy for school work that I think I should have. Separately, but perhaps connected, I am one of the laziest people when it comes to physical exercise. I am allergic to gyms, I see no point in traipsing across campus to get sweaty and do laundry faster. But maybe there is a point to the whole exercising thing that I've been missing.

I remember all those Tiger Schulman karate commercials saying that their students improved their bodies and minds, and were able to focus on academics better. I've heard talk about how being on a sports team, or simply sticking to an exercise regimen, can prepare your mind for buckling down and doing work...and in fact give one the drive s/he needs to accomplish it well. If exercising is what I need to get that academic drive back, then I guess I'll never get it back :)

I'm writing this from the Alumni Sports and Fitness Center, covering football practice as the rowers row and the runners run.

Sent from my Sprint BlackBerry

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Short Reflection on 9/11, A New Project(s Perhaps)

This morning on twitter I replied to a 9/11 related memory with a short memory of mine own. I said "@llanerrr I was in 5th grade and we saw the smoke and thought it was rain clouds, we didn't want to watch Matilda or 101 Dalmatians again." I didn't think that that short synopsis of that day for me could be confusing, because of course it made sense to me. But of course it did lead to confusion and I had to explain that Matilda, 101 Dalmatians, Goerge and the Giant Peach and other associated movies were the movies of choice when we denied recess due to weather. By the 5th grade, most of us had seen all those movies from beginning to end about 50 times at least, so the thought of having another recess taken away from us by mother nature was a little hard to bare.

Retelling the emotions that class 5-308 felt in the moment when we first saw the smoke makes me want to know what other's reactions were. As we approach the 10 year mark I am seriously considering starting a project to catalog the reactions of ordinary people, and not just Americans but internationals too. I think 9/11 was an event that everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing as if it were yesterday. I know that I'm one of them.

Onto a little more of a cheerful subject. I am an avid reader of a blog called the Sartorialist: thesartorialist.blogspot.com if you're interested. There people in the fashion world take pictures of everyday people that they feel have good or quirky fashion sense. I'm not one for fashion, but I do appreciate the pictures they take and the care with which they do so. In that same vein then I have started a little pet project called The University List : theulist.blogspot.com if you are so inclined again. Following the same model of the Sartorialist, I, and hopefully YOU and some friends of mine at other colleges and universities, take pictures of my fellow F&Mers and then I describe in a few sentences why I did so. Hopefully I can get this grow to other campuses around the country (and the world) but for now I'm content to go it alone...but I won't be for long :)

I write this post from the Innovation Zone in the basement of the Harris Government Center on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College.

 

 

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