Autumn.
Okay, so I know I promised to update my blog slightly more religiously than I have been doing, and this post is horribly overdue, but it’s hard to find time amidst crazy amounts of readings (still clearing my ds backlog, the horror!), socializing so that the world doesn’t forget you exist, making it down for rugby practices and games, skyping friends and family (more time-consuming than you think) and sleeping (which I totally don’t get enough of, more on that later). So to all the people who’ve sent me emails asking me how I am doing/telling me how you’re doing, I apologize. Please keep them coming! I may not show it, but I am truly, genuinely interested in what you are doing with your lives wherever you may be in the world at the moment.
Onto what I am doing in New Haven, I will talk generally about the big things.
Club Rugby
Okay, all of you can stop laughing now. Seriously, nobody whom I have broken the news to could keep a straight face. Last time I wrote here, I was a fresh reject-ee of the Yale Debate Association. So in my confusion and lack of direction or purpose, I took a gamble and decided to try out club sports at Yale. Club sports bridge the gap in intensity between intramural sports (your interhouse sports basically) and varsity sports, so the culture at club sports is generally more accepting and might I say less jock-clique-ish. It’s a bit of a full circle for me really, joining club rugby at Yale, harking back to my legendary Sec 1 days (all 30 of them) as an overweight boy on a field with a rugby ball.
The seniors and upperclassmen here are really nice, and that was my biggest fear before joining, that the other guys on the team will spit on my ineptitude and make my life a living hell for even thinking of going to practice in the first place. They have been nothing short of encouraging so I’m pretty glad I stuck around.
Funny story: Americans can’t play sports without gifting their teammates with nicknames. So they can’t simply say, “Pass the ball, Jonathan!” or “Get in the ruck, Jonathan!”; a nickname was in order. So for the first couple of days, I was “Jon Asian”, which was quite funny at first, but ceased to be amusing by the fifth minute of practice when I decided that being reminded of your ethnicity at every play was borderline racist. Quite thankfully though (or not), I have a new nickname now: “Wild Man”. I don’t know what this means (though a quick search on Wikipedia reveals that a Wild man is a mythological hairy relative of the orang utan armed with a club) because I have not been particularly wild around the ruggers (if anything, I have been living up to the meek Asian stereotype around these macho, muscle-bound types) but I must say it brings a smile to my face everytime they shout for “Wild man” to make a run. Little things like these make you feel like you belong, I guess.
Princeton.
Playing club rugby also means that I get to travel quite extensively all about the Ivies on weekends to play away games. So far, we’ve travelled to Princeton (won), Penn (won) and Dartmouth (loss – utterly raped) and tomorrow, I will be leaving New Haven at 6 in the morning for Rhode Island to play Brown in our last away match. Am keeping my fingers crossed for a quick glimpse of Hermione on campus.
When I’m not playing rugby, I’m generally procrastinating and mucking about the room, as I am today. It is too cold out, I don’t feel like doing anything this week because it’s supposed to be a recess week for me since this is the first time in five weeks that I don’t have a DS paper due despite my constant self-assurances that I will take this week to catch up on my readings. So far? Epic fail.
I wished more Singaporeans visited. Last weekend, Nicole came down from New York to say hi, which was nice. It’s always nice to have Singaporeans around, listening to that familiar accent, talking about the familiar things familiar people used to do back home.
Okay, I think I will return to Plato. It is a Friday night, parties abound, but I sit in my room with a book in my lap. I wished we never had to grow up.
i definitely kept a straight face when you told me you did club rugby!
Hey, uh, is it too late to ask you whether or not you saw The Watson?
waitaminute… why on earth did yale debate reject you?! it’s so bizarre it’s almost funny (although I know you probably were not amused, sorry)
hi jonny i remember your rugby days. i think your team was called 8 headed gryphons or something
hi jonathan, i think you’re pretty cool, have been reading through your posts and just hope that the homesickness had died down and you’re enjoying every minute of yale ttm. all the best for everything ! jy !