24 March 2000

We went to K.T. and Kevin's for dinner last night, and had a very good time. K.T. made Greek food, most of which had names I can't for the life of me remember, but most of it was pretty good. I especially liked the meatballs, which were made with ground lamb and had a lemon sauce - it sounds weird, I know, but it was really good. And her baklava turned out very good. I didn't care too much for the stuff wrapped in grape leaves, but then I'm not a big fan of cold rice; I thought if I could have had just the filling, hot, it would've been a little weird, but good.

Kyle, a friend of Kevin's from work, came too, and we spent a fair amount of the night confusing him with references to things he wasn't familiar with. But he really seems like a nice guy, so hopefully we'll be seeing more of him.

There's nothing especially exciting on the docket for this weekend - my game tomorrow evening, and that's about it. I'm looking forward to some real rest-time.

The local radio station we listen to most often has a morning segment called "Battle of the Sexes" which is a trivia game between two call-in listeners, one man and one woman. I don't know exactly how this happened, but on Monday this eleven-year-old kid, Mark, called in and told the DJ's that he thought he should play Sarah, the nine-year-old girl he carpooled to school with. He was sure he'd win, because "Boys have bigger brains."

They set the match for this morning, and I lingered in the bedroom after I'd gotten dressed to listen.

Sarah complained that Mark had told her her brain was "a speck of dust" while Mark reluctantly conceded that "some girls can be smart." Each thought they would win by a landslide.

Sarah won, 3-2, but the only question Mark missed she couldn't answer either. They both go to the same school, and I can see this now. Sarah, flush with the triumph of winning against a boy two years older, will brag. Mark, humiliated by losing to a girl two years younger, will insist that she got all the "easy" questions. And they'll fight in their carpool even more. Still, it was funny to listen to.

Word of the Day: berserk - frenzied, crazed

We say "berserk" to mean agitated, but I honestly did go berserk - in its older meaning of battle-mad - once. I was in the sixth grade, and I took a lot of flak from the other kids in my neighborhood for the crime of being new, and worse, smart. I'd attended private school through the fifth grade, but for various reasons, I'd asked to be moved to public school after that year.

The public elementary school was about six blocks from my house - two over and four up. I walked it every day, rain or shine. Plenty of other neighborhood kids made the same walk. There was one kid, Tommy, who lived on my street, about four blocks over, so we wound up walking the same four blocks up to the school fairly frequently. Tommy was twice my size - a tall, heavily-built kid - and a real bully. He mostly just taunted me verbally, but one day coming home, right near the corner where we'd turn in separate directions and I'd escape him, he started picking green apples off someone's lawn and throwing them at me.

One hit squarely in the back of my head, and it hurt. Everything after that for at least five minutes is a confused blur. I don't remember anything clearly again until a red convertible pulled up next to the curb and the lady driving it yelled at us until we quit fighting. She stayed on the corner idling until we'd each picked up our dropped bags and books and gone our separate ways.

I hated that woman for interfering.