shankar2k's Journal: Tennessee

Take me to another place ...
Take me to another land ...
Make me forget all that hurts me ...
Let me understand your plan
-- Arrested Development

For my Labor Day weekend, I travelled to Knoxville, Tennessee to meet up my friend Rishi and his brother Raj. The expressed purpose of the trip was to watch Cal play Tennessee. I felt a strong obligation to watch this game because I'm breaking my vow to go Big Game every year. Yes, I know it smacks of dishonor and reflects poorly on my character, but I reflected on it a lot, and I could not, in good conscience, miss the opportunity to travel through China (as well as cause complications with the internship), for a game that I can (and will) see next year. The greater good must prevail.

Anyway, the day before the game I attended my friend Ursula's wedding reception. That was a good time, it was fun seeing her new huppy David knock over the top tier of their cake. After that, I went out and represented at my roommate Bob's birthday bar meetup thingie. It got over around 2am, and so I started driving to Knoxville at 2:30am. Yes, I know, Shankar is crazy.

I managed to keep myself pretty alert and awake until about 9:30 in the morning. Have you ever listened to the Denny McKeown show? I learned more than I ever wanted to know about maintaining my lawn. For the last hour stretch, I called up Pammi, and she and her kids did a bangup job making sure I made it to Knoxville, safely.

We're not going to talk about the game much, because it sucked *ss. I'm glad that Cal came back and stomped on Minnesota this week. After the game, we headed out to a bar in downtown Knoxville and commiserated with other Cal fans. It felt really nice to be able to connect with all of these random people over something. I think that's the main reason I got into watching sports.

The next day, to make ourselves feel like our trip was worth it, we did an eight mile hike up the Cascades. I was jumping around, acting like a daredevil, and I banged my knee up pretty good. I didn't really care about it, but then Rishi said "If you break your leg, we're leaving you here." Good call. By the time we made it up to the top, we felt like heroes, but we were disappointed because there were like fifty people already up there, including some little kids and grandmas. There was this waterfall at the top and it was quite beautiful.

So it was a nice little trip I made, just before my next great adventure.