Arch-ery

On Thursday I turned in my thesis, and it was a kind of strange feeling. I'd been editing it & making revisions for a couple of weeks off and on, and then I wandered up to the graduate college, they checked whether my figures were on the pages the list of figures said they were on, and took it. Excepting waiting, the whole thing took ten minutes. (The waiting was more like a half hour or more. That's part of why the in & out bit of it seemed so weird to me.)

Despite the anti-climasticity (when you have a master's degree they let you make up words) of that whole thing, it is lucky that I turned it in when I did. See, the deadline was Friday and not Thursday, but I had to drive to St. Louis on Friday for a kuk sool tournament. Matt & R. & I ate at IHOP in the morning, drove to St. Louis, R and I tested for black belt (1), and we didn't get time for dinner until about 11 at night. We went to this fantastic Lebanese place whose kitchen was about to close. Make sure you eat at Saleem's, y'all. I mean, even if we hadn't been imploding from hunger this would have been awesome food (2).

The next day there was a kuk sool tournament, which is what everyone except me was in town for (I didn't compete, I just tested). They had split up the tournament into kids' and adults' sections, with the kids competing in the morning and the adults in the afternoon. This was awesome, except they put the promotion ceremony/masters' demo in the middle of the day. They promoted me, and when they were ready to start the afternoon competition they were short on judges. They asked all the black belts who weren't actually competing to come down & be a judge. I didn't volunteer at first, because I didn't really think I counted in my hour-old black belt. But then they started threatening to come up in the bleachers and get us, so I figured I had better go. That whole thing was kind of uncomfortable.

(1) There were so many people in such a small room, working out for such a long time, that the floor-to ceiling mirrors and windows all fogged up. I hardly remember the test, I just remember the food.

(2) Matt ordered this great thing, which then was accidentally put in front of me. By the time we figured that out, I had already eaten half of it and I wasn't giving it back. I think it might have been called "mouzat" but the description I've found of that doesn't quite match what I was eating. Whatever, it had an M and a Z and some lamb in it. With rice.