Hey everybody, it’s the Big EZ here. I figured it’s about time I wrote my first blog entry for this year. Of course, I’m still going to school at good old UT Tyler, in Tyler, Texas. Tyler is in what’s considered as “East Texas.” East Texans are typically the most conservative and most religious people in all of Texas. As you can imagine, it is vastly different than Barrie. Just to give you an idea, the majority of people here are under the impression that allowing concealed handguns on University/College campuses would increase safety, as potential assailants would fear returned fire. I think that it doesn’t take too much of a brain to realize that this is an utterly ridiculous idea, but that’s the great thing about living in Texas, you’re always in for a surprise. Just the other day, for example, I was waiting in my friend’s car as he went to buy something at a convenience store, and as he gets out he says, “If anyone tries to rob you there’s a gun in between the seats.” In Canada, I would have laughed and said “yeah sure,” but in Texas, he’s totally serious, and there most certainly was a loaded gun between the seats.
Of course I love to ham up how exciting East Texas is, but besides from the fact there are more Churches than roads, that everyone has wild political views, and the majority of adults carry a concealed handgun, the people are pretty normal, and regularly extremely helpful. But now that you have a rough idea of the atmosphere, I figure I can talk a little bit about school and tennis. Going to school in the States is a lot different than school in Canada. Basically your first year and a half of college involves taking Core Curriculum courses that are required for every single degree. For example, I had to take Texas Politics, American Government, US History I and II, as well as a bunch of other basic courses, all of which I had absolutely no interest in. But once you plow through those, you’re ready to take on courses that pertain directly to your major. My major was originally Finance, but after discovering how boring business classes were, I decided to switch it up and be a Math major. On the bright side, I feel like I’m learning in my classes now, but on the downside, Math is about 70 times as hard as Finance. I think my Analysis teacher summed up every test we have had when he said “In math there are the halves and the have nots, what I mean to say is that half of you passed the test, and half of you have not.” At least this way, when you pass the test, which I regularly do, you feel really good about yourself even if you got a terrible grade. Fortunately for me I’ve been doing pretty well in my classes, and might even graduate early, but I haven’t yet decided if I want to cram my schedule so I can or not, but we’ll see.
Tennis this year has been pretty fun. We lost four of our best players this season, but in return we got five new freshmen. For the most part, these kids are pretty goofy, and if you’ve ever seen me coach 5 year olds, you’ll understand that if I call someone goofy, they probably are ha. For the most part though they’re good guys and are fun to hang around with. The only thing that worries me is if they can hold a 2.0 GPA, because they never seem to be studying. However, that’s pretty typical for freshmen. Our fall season didn’t go as well as it had in previous years, but was enjoyable nonetheless. I won the majority of my matches, but I wasn’t exactly playing at the top of the line up, so it wasn’t too impressive ha. Now we’re in the off season, where our team practices on its own twice a week, and everyone tries to catch up for all the school they missed during season. That’s pretty much where I stand with tennis right now.
Right as season ended, I decided to engage on the nerdiest adventure I have ever partaken in. In my spare time, I play a video game called Starcraft 2, which is basically the nerdiest game I have ever seen. I decided to go to a big tournament for it in Orlando, and had a blast with a bunch of fellow nerds. This tournament was seriously intense. This game is very big in South Korea, and a bunch of people flew in from there to compete, as well as aspiring young nerds from all over the States and Canada. Me and my friends going decided to stay at the cheapest hotel in the area, which wound up being where a lot of broke college students decided to stay, so we met a ton of people at the hotel. However, it wasn’t exactly the classiest place we had ever been to. Our hotel room had a couple holes in the wall, and our bathroom floor was covered in water upon arrival. One of the other kids staying at our hotel told us not to look under the chairs, because his had a million spider webs under it. Fortunately for us there we only saw one cockroach throughout the weekend. As far as the tournament went, I did exactly as expected and lost in the fourth round of the losers side of the double elimination bracket, but got a bunch of pictures with some of the nerdiest people you will ever see in your life, and couldn’t be more proud ha. Here’s a couple:
The guy in the middle is “White-Ra”, he’s a really famous Ukrainian guy, who is super old to be a professional gamer, and the guy on the right was one of the guys I went with.
This guy is “Huk,” who won the tournament coincidentally.
And finally it’s “oGsMC,” who flew in from Korea, and took down second place.
Well, that’s about all I have to report so far this year. Hopefully you don’t look down on me too much for being a nerd, but you can’t hide the truth ha. I will be sure to dominate school and hit the tennis courts. Hopefully all of you are having a good year, and maybe I will see some of you over the Christmas break!
