Baseball and Monkey Faces

This weekend I went to my first two baseball games of the season! Granted, they were college games, not professional, and I am about 1800 miles from Fenway Park, so this was not as exciting as it could have been, but still, it was a grand occasion. I saw the #4 Rice Owls baseball team battle the #7 Cal State Fullerton Titans (calstatefullertontitans calstatefullertontitans calstatefulterson....shit!) in the first two games of a three game series on Friday and Saturday, and they won both games! Which was good, because they ended up losing yesterday (probably because I wasn't there, so obviously I now have to go to every single game, good thing they're free!), and Rice has not lost a three game series at home in something like the last 30. So needless to say, I am now an Owls fan, I have a Rice hat, and I can even sing along to the Alma Mater that plays after every game which the Owls win. That is to say, I can sing along to the last four words, which seems to be all anyone else knows anyway (mumble mumble mumble...to RICE! BE! TRUE!). And, as you can see to your right, the Owls, as a result of this weekend's two wins, are now ranked #3 in the country, behind only undefeated Georgia Tech and wildly overrated Clemson (I know nothing about Clemson, but I have to assume that they are wildly overrated). Anyway, those rankings should update weekly, so check back!

I may post more at a later date about the experience of attending a college game versus a professional game, but maybe that's not quite interesting enough for anyone who is not me. One more thing about Saturday's game, though, is that it was extremely sunny and about 85 degrees outside, which caused me to receive a moderate sunburn on my neck and parts of my face. Let the record show that this occurred on March the 4th, and it marks I think the very first time in my life that I have been sunburned before my birthday.

This artwork arrived in the mail today from Josh:

He claims that he used these nine monkey faces to teach his Japanese schoolchildren different answers to the question "How are you today?" He then challenged me to figure out what they all are. So that killed about two hours right there. Let's number the faces as follows:

123
456
789

Here's what I have come up with so far:

1: Happy
2: Angry
3: Depressed/Hungry
4: Overjoyed/In love
5: Sick/Extremely drunk
6: Unsure of one's self/Worried/Having to urinate
7: Evil
8: Pretending to be happy despite being deeply and fundamentally unhappy, because you're not yet ready to talk about it
9: Frightened/Dead

That's the best I've been able to do. If you think I'm wrong, or that you can do better, please comment and tell me what you think they mean. In English, preferably. But, needless to say, I was overjoyed (#4!) to receive these pictures, and they are now hanging on my wall so I can see them and laugh every day. So thank you to Josh for sending me presents!