Flashback Mondays, part 2

Saturday Afternooon Hockey:

Not quite Monday Night Football, I know. Sometime in the Fall of 2003, Greg had a brilliant idea. At some point in his past, he had gotten a Franklin street hockey set and used to play with Paul or Eugene every now and then. While we were at Monterey Highlands Elementary School playing basketball, two things became obvious: one--that the blacktop surface there was open and flat enough to play hockey on, and two--that we had the numbers to play three on three (which is pretty ideal for street hockey). So that Christmas, we all asked for hockey equipment from our families. When I say hockey equipment, I actually just mean hockey rollerblades (which are definitely different from regular rollerblades) and sticks--no protective gear whatsoever. From then on, we had the times of our lives every Saturday when everyone was home from their respective colleges and ready to have some fun.

It hurt. A lot. To start, none of us was in very good skating shape, so after a few hours our ankles and backs felt as though they had met Mike Tyson. On top of that, someone would always end up with a nice fat bruise on his shin since we didn't have shin guards, at least not at the start. Eventually, as each of us got jobs and as more Christmases came, we became fully protected (at least as protected as we could be). Simultaneously, our conditioning got better, though extended breaks from playing has set us back many times. Regardless, hockey lets us stay active and brings us together, and I'm pretty sure it'll continue to do so for the rest of our lives.

Flashback Monday, part 1

The Best Picture Ever:

For Greg's eighteenth birthday, his parents decided to take us to Universal Studios. This struck me as odd for a couple of reasons. First off, none of us could drive, so they had to drop us off, which seemed entirely undignified for a group of legal adults. Second, was there really that much at Universal for a group of strapping young men? It seemed like Six Flags would've made more sense in terms of proving our masculinity (which at the time seemed like a big priority), but instead we were going to the land of Shrek, Back to the Future, Waterworld, and the tour of the Backlot. A somewhat inauspicious start.

After we got there, it was clear that there was a very finite number of things for us to do during the day, so we began wandering the park for backdrops with which to take amusing pictures since the park was littered with them. One moment Greg was being run over in a moment of police brutality, the next I was riding a horse into a Wild West sunset. However, the best picture came not as a result of what was in the background but rather what was in the foreground. Kris, the only one of us with any knowledge of the Japanese language, spotted a group of Japanese schoolgirls visiting the park. It immediately became his mission to go up to them and ask them for a picture together. The catch was that he didn't quite know how to phrase his question. As a result, we stalked these poor girls for twenty minutes while Kris searched the annals of his memory for at least a few words that would communicate his desire. In the end, the only word he could recall was "shashin", which literally means photograph, but that's all that we'd need along with some pantomime camera clicks. The result was a great picture that to this day reminds me of how great it was to be a happy-go-lucky teenager.

Not that it's much different than being a happy-go-lucky twenty-three year old.