Posts Tagged Under ‘University of Michigan’

Michigan 27, Wisconsin 25

What a come-from-behind Michigan victory today! Twenty points in the fourth quarter to beat the ninth-ranked Badgers.

And guess who left the stadium early after a totally disgusting Michigan first half, convinced this is the year to go back to being a Northwestern (now 5-0) fan?

Whoops.

But at least I have lots of company — half the student section was walking down Hill Street with me. As The Wife said, this is karmic justice for the fact that I made a rare exception to my “Don’t leave even when your team is losing” policy.

Yo

Recent things:

• I believe that even if I supported anything about Sarah Palin, I’d still be really sick of seeing her everywhere I turn. Conservatives would compare Palin’s star power to Obama, but Obama’s ascent took a good two years and wasn’t compressed into a two-week news cycle. He’s also one of the two people actually running for president.
• Another Palin-borne irony: after years of ignorant sports commentators decrying hockey as “not a real sport”, it’s now somehow true that being peripherally involved with organized hockey (even at the little-kid level) is considered a solid qualification for the Presidency of the United States. The NHL’s marketing department needs to jump on this with the quickness.
• Part of the reason I was excited to get to the University of Michigan this year was the chance to go to a school with a real football program. Nevermind my conflicted loyalties from being born in Columbus and having attending another Big Ten school; this was supposed to be my chance to claim a piece of the action as the Wolverines crushed all opponents. Instead I get games like this, this and also this (which, though a win, was most unimpressive.)

  Northwestern, meanwhile, is 3-0.

  Bastards.

• While searching for a sound effect that would convey Michigan football’s limpness, I did manage to get seriously geeked from this:

  ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A what.

• Congrats to my cousin Dante and his wife Kari on their new son (and, simultaneously, their anniversary), who was born just this morning and is the first of the new generation in my family. Pitt, you just gained another fan.

Ross School of Biznezz: The First Two Weeks

With my dive into the MBA life starting tomorrow, here are the past few weeks in handy bulleted-list fashion:

• After getting our UHaul on yet again, the wife and I are now the shiznit at this moving game. (Though she’s staying in Chicago — more on that later.) I’ve taken the wizened Ikea furniture we had lying around from my 23-year-old days and brought it to Ann Arbor for a two-year last hurrah. I think the bed and the computer desk will make it through, but I have my doubts about the dresser that I bought in 2003 from some sketchy Euro-dude furniture store in Astoria. It’s sub-Ikea quality and failing fast, so I’m rolling with the Millennium Falcon of dressers — “You hear me, baby? Hold together.” Luckily Ann Arbor has a thriving freecycling community, so if all goes according to plan I won’t have to move this junk back with me to Chicago in 2010.
• Speaking of moving, if I end up staying in the same apartment until I graduate — which will likely be the case from my end of things, as teleporting will have to be perfected if I want to shorten my commute to class — then this apartment will be the one place that’s housed me the longest since I left Pittsburgh for college. In those ten years, my record for staying put is a tie at 16 months: one stint in a shared house in Forest Hills, N.Y., and the other in a Foggy Bottom studio. I’ve always left voluntarily, yet I’ve had no fewer than 12 addresses in ten years, and Ann Arbor is lucky No. 13.

  Damn, dudes.

• Leadership training during Ross orientation wasn’t quite what I expected. I figured on a classroom situation, but the thing was really a lot more of a corporate management retreat without any trust falls. (We did cross an “acid river” using only two boards for six people and tied a rope into a knot while we all six maintained a grip on it. But, like I said, no trust falls.)

  All kidding aside, I’m still a little unclear on how it’s possible to teach intangible character qualities like leadership, creativity and self-awareness, but all of these activities did make the week kick ass at the team-building thing. I’m already buddied up with most of my sectionmates, and we seem to have a really laid-back but competent group — the combination I’ve always appreciated the most in the workplace. Things have clicked so well that we won the Grill for Glory competition over the other five sections, fulfilling the mathematical reality that 6 is always greater than 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5. Holla.

I did take away one big negative experience from the orientation week, which is that it kicked off the less-than-awesome reality of being away from the wife while I’m here at school. Objectively you could say I have it pretty good — we live in the era of email and IM, there are other people here in similar and even longer-distance situations, Chicago is only four hours away, and neither of us are deployed to a hostile area like some of the military peeps I know. But this experience is the one I have to live, so in the meantime I’m dwelling on other things and waiting to get my semester on, when I figure I’ll be so busy that I’ll have no dwelling time anyway.

Also, Michigan lost this weekend to Utah. This disappointing-football-upset BS was supposed to end once I left Northwestern.

Related P.S. - Props to my fraternity pledge son Adam Rittenberg for his awesome Big Ten gig at ESPN.