Social Capital

As predicted somewhat in my previous post, the continual temptation to go out and party with the international students has disrupted my study habits. Thankfully, reading is easier to catch up on than writing so for the moment I'm in the clear, but last week was rather ridiculous. Thursday night, after finishing a parkour class (more on that later) I was all set to get to my reading and research when someone down the hall says that people are going out to a bar, so I figured "what the hell" and went along with them. Similarly, on Friday night I was trying to make up for the work I didn't do the night before, and catching up on missing time due to waking up late, but was unable to do so because of another party. This was repeated Saturday night as well and were it not for the fact that nobody parties on Sundays I might not have gotten any work done. All that said, perhaps the fact that I did get it all done speaks to the fact that it was never as dire as I made it out to be. But the important thing to remember is that, while I was not doing work, I was by no means slacking off—I was, as one of my former professors would say, "accumulating social capital."

Specifically, we've (myself and a plethora of Germans) been going out to the clubs and pubs with a quartet of Danish girls (which is every bit as awesome as you would imagine). Now because Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are very similar, they are somewhat mutually intelligible as long as you speak clearly. Or conversely, if they can't quite hear what you said and they fill in a missing consonant or vowel as you shout above the club noise. However, as I learned this weekend they are not the same language. Right before we were going to go to another pub the Danes wrinkled their noses because someone had farted in the bar. I smelled it as I was walking up to them and so asked, "Fisa?" which is "fart" in Swedish. They looked at me rather shocked and said, "What did you say?" As it turns out, "fisa" (or however it's spelled in Danish) is the word for "cunt" or "pussy", related to the Swedish "fitta". The misunderstanding was resolved quickly enough but for that split second it appeared as if I just walked up and called one of the girls a cunt.
Tangentially, when I was in Sweden for Midsummer we were guests in the home of this one girl named Isa, whom her friends would jokingly call "Isa fisa". Given that Isa was a bigoted, lecherous, unfaithful, abusive woman I think the Danish fisa suits her much more appropriately.

The parkour class I mentioned above is one of the clubs at UMass that I stumbled upon by walking through a bunch of booths (there's a quiddich club and a freethinkers club too, whatever the hell the latter means) in the middle of campus during the first week. Most of the stuff is conditioning and simple exercises, but it requires a good amount of coordination and strength. Personally, my out of shape self was so sore after the first class I was achy for the next 5 days. Parkour is supposed to be about getting from point A to point B in the most efficient manner possible, a philosophy which is not quite manifested in our exercises, such as climbing along window sills on the entrances of buildings. Technically speaking, straight up bipedal walking is the most efficient form of locomotion (aside from wheels), but I can definitely appreciate the exercises. Regardless of whether or not I'll actually ever use parkour to jump off rooftops or scale walls, the conditioning will make me one strong, agile mo-fo.

UPDATE: One of my friends in the dorm evidently tore up his knee playing muggle quiddich. Evidently, it's a bit more hardcore than one would imagine a bunch of fanboys running around with brooms between their legs throwing deflated volleyballs at each other to be.