The Beautiful Game

Living in the West Campus house system has, so far, been great. Besides having a dining hall two floors below my room, I've also gained the opportunity to participate in a variety of events ranging from concerts to cookie decorating. Because what I really need is to jam more things into my schedule.

I haven’t been able to attend a lot of events (between AAIV, Cornell Productions, pep band, and p-chem problem sets, I don’t have any free nights) but two things that I have done are soccer and house dinner. House dinner is every Wednesday from 6-7 in all the West Campus dining halls and during that time, only residents of each house can eat at their dining halls. As the food is even better than normal, I make it a point to go to house dinner whenever possible.

A couple weeks ago, they served us salmon as well as cake to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the house.

Counterclockwise from the roll: salmon, beef with noodles, green beans (in the back), potatoes, and salad

House dinner also merits tablecloths and cloth napkins.  Fancy, I know.

As for the other house activity that I've participated in, that’s where the title of this post comes from. Soccer is known as the beautiful game, and I have now become acquainted with the beauty that is intramural coed soccer. In an effort to keep teams balanced, we play 8 v. 8 with four males and four females on the field for each team. This leads to the three questions of coed intramurals:

1) Is the game still scheduled to be played? [Forfeits and bad weather shortened an already short season for our house team.]
2) Are there enough girls to play?
3) Has the other team showed up?

If the answer to the above three questions is yes, we then get to play 40 minutes of soccer. It takes us a good fifteen to twenty minutes to walk to the field. One way. It’s still completely worth it. I've gotten to play in a couple games, and I've come to realize that I've missed playing soccer. It’s true that coed intramurals are about as uncompetitive as you can get, but that doesn't mean it’s not a lot of fun.

One more note on the beautiful game: the New England Revolution are continuing their playoff push with a home and home series against the Columbus Crew. They’re currently still 7th in the Eastern Conference, but the teams in 4th, 5th, and 6th are all only one point ahead, in part due to a Revolution victory over the Montreal Impact last weekend.