Forth! And fear no darkness!: Davidson in the Spring of 2011

As I have never before written about my time at Davidson, this will hopefully be brief and I will be able to push through the semester in a post or two and move on to covering my time in DC. Since I am already in DC, it is going to all be in past tense. Here goes:

Last semester (starting in January of 2011) my courses were: History of Modern Philosophy, Political Science Statistics, American Public Opinion, and Campaign Strategy. I am now an officially declared Political Science major and Philosophy minor. Here are a few highlights (by which I do not necessarily mean they were all good events…I just mean they were important events) of last semester:

In January I passed out in our health center when they were trying to draw blood. As a result I decided to tell my professors as well as a number of other people I was close to (or who I thought should know) that this was something that may happen, but that I didn’t anticipate it happening again and that I was working to control it, but that I figured they all should have a heads up just in case. This started a cycle of me worrying about it all the time, everywhere I went, and the more places I went the more people I told, and the more people I told, the more I worried. Eventually (like…late March) I just had to drop the whole thing and decide I just didn’t care. And that seems to have worked out ok so far. (I do apologize to Patrick again though – he’s now had to help me recover 3 times. Whoops.)

On a lighter note, it was great to see everyone at Davidson again, and Patrick and I lived in a pretty decent room. I decided to play 5on5 intramural basketball, and one of my friends who I saw quite frequently abroad, Paul Britton, was on my team. In our third or fourth game, I took an elbow to the ribs (ok…my own elbow was shoved into my ribs) and I tore the cartilage between my ribs. I tried to play tennis the next day, which made it a bit worse, so I talked to the trainer and she told me to sit for 4 weeks. I sat for 3 (though I did sub in briefly in one 5on5 game to score 5 points…and we won that game by 4). I was back for the playoffs, and we finished out our undefeated season and won the B-league championship (a couple of the games were very, very close, including a 42-41 thriller). Pretty darn fun.

I played tennis most afternoons and transitioned into being the president/captain/ceo/coo/czar of our club tennis team. Over the first weekend of spring break (which was at the end of February) we took 4 guys and 4 girls to Auburn, AL to play in the club tennis Sectionals event. It was actually a lot of fun; we rented one big van to all take together, stayed in a hotel, and actually played pretty well. We placed 2nd in our pool, losing to College of Charleston – though they ended up getting 5th and it was a lot closer than I think they would have liked it to be – and beating Valdosta St and Kennesaw St. The next day we choked against UNC Charlotte (both a coaching and player error) and ended up placing 13th after beating Ole Miss and UNC Wilmington. We likely should have been in the top 10, but for our first trip we did pretty well, and our goal next year is to qualify for nationals (which requires a top 5 finish). Unfortunately, for all of this, I was unable to play due to my ribs, though I tried to sneak in a time or two. Jay Lanners Jr., who graduate this spring, was very very helpful in making this happen, and I also received a large amount of help and support from my sophomore captains, Mark Angel and Lucy McMurry. Unfortunately they're both going abroad in the fall, and we will miss them dearly.

The rest of spring break I spent with Jonathan Fisher. Of all my close friends he was the only one who didn’t go abroad, and it was great to spend a lot of time with him. Basically, we woke up late, played video games, worked on an art project, played video games, watched tv, went to sleep, and then woke up again. It was pretty darn relaxing.

This is probably a sufficient start, I’ll try and find a couple photos to put up of the tennis stuff if I can!