Ep. 6: Under Lights

Notes from 13th-25th of February

Coming back from the highs of my trip in New York on Monday night (Feb. 13th), I awoke next day to the tragic news of a mass shooting at Michigan State University. With three dead and five critically injured, this was something that rocked colleges all across the country, but especially at somewhere like Purdue given our (relative) geographic proximity and that both schools are in the Big 10 conference. West Lafayette is (I hope) a very safe place to be, though it is safe to say that this was a sobering return to reality and something that upset many of the students here.

Despite this very dark start to the week, there was much to keep occupied with.

Tuesday was Valentine's Day of course, and was sweet to see some little booths set up around campus giving out free roses, chocolates and other small little things. The day is certainly much more widely celebrated over here than in Australia. One of my professors even made these little hearts that he gave us with funny little quips written on them when we asked a question or answered one correctly.

Later that week on Sunday we had our final round-robin game of the basketball intramural league, again slated for an 11 PM start. We unfortunately drew a team that apparently either won the competition last year or came very close to doing so and they absolutely wiped the floor with us. They were up 20 points in the blink of an eye, and the game was actually stopped with a few minutes remaining when they got up by over 50 points. To be fair, our team was extremely undersized (I was playing center) and the other team was shooting lights out so it wasn't much of a contest. Nonetheless, we finished 2nd in our pool of four, and so will carry a decent seed into the first round of the playoffs starting next week.

I also managed to find a really great spot on campus to practice piano. In the basement of one of the residential halls (Hillenbrand) there is a music room with a baby grand Steinway piano sitting there for use in really good condition. Compared to the one in the South Tower I flagged earlier, the room/environment is overall nowhere near as nice, but this is made up for in spades by the improved playing experience. The only issue with this setup is I have to be a little covert in getting there because it is only intended for Hillenbrand residents. Getting to the room looks like this: waiting outside the residences minding my business until someone swipes in or out with their special fob and then quickly ducking inside; loaning out the music room key from the front desk, which is easy because they don't check that I am a residence; then finally (and this is the hardest part) getting down to the basement floor via elevator or stairs (key access) by convincing someone that I have left my swipe card up in my room or doing that manouevre where you stand in the corner away from the buttons when someone else is there and have them ask you what floor you want to get to. All in all it's a fairly manageable operation, just a little bit of extra overhead!

I've been making some good strides the past two weeks in the photography realm as well I feel. There are two aspects I am splitting this up into: learning how to take a good photo, and learning how to edit a great photo. Currently, most of the focus appropriately is being spent on the former, since no amount of editing prowess can recover a bad image. Garbage in, garbage out. To this point, I really have just been aiming the camera and pressing shoot, and that leaves nothing to say of the way I have been indiscriminately swapping between modes and twisting dials without having any idea of the theory behind what I am doing.

The good news is that the basics concepts are pretty easy and intuitive to pick up, and yet even these few ideas have opened my appreciation of photography immensely. I picked up a 50mm lens with a wide aperture for shooting nice portraits, and will certainly look at adding maybe one more lens for more landscape photography, but at this stage there is a lot of quality improvement that can be made with the equipment that I have got.

On Dancing

The major development over the past two weeks has been that I finally got around to going to Salsa classes on Tuesday nights and Bachata classes on Thursday nights. To this point in the semester, I had always been finding an excuse to not go - homework to do, dinner to eat or whatever it might have been, something always took priority. Given that I have never done any dancing before in my life and have been known to vocally oppose dancing when in a club on a night out (though that rests more on the environment rather than the actual act itself), there was also surely some hesitancy/fear/perceived future embarrassment keeping me back.

As always, though, perception is always outsized when compared against reality, and after my first class I realised I had nothing to worry about really. Aside from every being extremely friendly¹, the first class I went to started off with a review of all the major basic steps of Salsa and so the ramp into this new skill wasn't criminally steep. The same goes for the Bachata classes. I am always wary of entering into a new field and learning two different variations at once (e.g. learning French and Italian at the same time) since as a beginner the learning signals overlap so much that it can be difficult to distinguish, however so far the improvements are coming rapidly which is pleasing - I am certainly far from the worst dancer there.

The other tangential reward to be gained from these classes is meeting a large influx of new people once again. Well, pretty much exclusively other girls, since as a leader (almost always male) I only dance in partnerwork with a follower (almost always female). Admittedly, these roles have been somewhat reversed in the first two weeks as I am developing, but even at this point it has been immensely satisfying to complete some extended sequence of moves with your partner and achieving fluid levels of synchronicity.

For a club where you have to pay only $40 a month at the start of the semester, this is a pretty good setup. The next step is going to some of the social dances that they run and dancing in a free-flowing setting where as a leader you have to actually conjure up the movements as opposed to following some prescribed spins and turns that we have been taught and practiced multiple times over. Even the small amount of practice I have had with doing this has left my head reeling with all the computation it is doing, from the footwork, to thinking about what move to execute next. Clearly with further work at some point down the line both of these aspects become instinctual rather than premeditated.

On the IU Game

The home basketball game I had had penciled in on the calendar essentially from the first week of classes was against Indiana University (IU) which was on Saturday Feb. 25th. As in-state rivals, it doesn't get much bigger than this in Indiana basketball.

And there is a lot of animosity between the two schools. There's actually a myth (potentially true) that some time ago a few drunk IU fans wandered around campus to visit the grave of John Purdue and subsequently dug up his body and took it with them. The legitimacy of this story aside, it does add substantially to the venom between the two fanbases. And given the close loss we had suffered to them on their deck a few weeks prior, the stakes were massive. With a win, we would seal up the Big 10 Championship and get a strike back against our rivals. Safe to say then, that the prices for tickets to this match were going through the roof. However, I managed to sneak one for $175² on the Monday and then sat anxiously waiting Saturday evening to roll around.

The build-up to the game was truly special. Normally with these home games I have been safe getting a good seat by rocking up about 45 minutes before tip, but this time around showing up a full 2 hours before the start, there were already thousands of students lined up in queues that wrapped in both directions around the arena. Spontaneous chants were oft to be heard, and anytime a small group walked by in IU gear, boos rung through the afternoon air.

It was also pretty cool to walk around the campus and see it transform into a breathing trash-talk of IU. My personal favourites were the banners draped from the awnings of many of the frat houses lining University St and Northwestern Avenue as you walked down towards Mackey.

Now, the following will only make sense with a bit of background context. Each college arena as a section of seating designated as the "student section" where, naturally, the students sit. It is the section that generates the outsized majority of the noise, despite making up the minority of seats, and the placement of this section makes each stadium unique. Many colleges put the students along the bottom deck wings, so that on the TV broadcast all you see are crazy fans jumping up and down. Mackey Arena however has the section split into two, one behind each basket going from ground level right the way to the back³. It used to be just one massive congregation behind the Southern-end basket so that when opposing teams ran out of the tunnel all they saw was this wall of fans, but I personally like the split approach. The South end is the main one, the one you would prefer to sit in if given the choice; it's bigger, it's where the band is, and like I said it has a great view of the tunnel. However, upon arrival, the lines for the Southern entry were massive, and so I elected to go to the North entrance and joined a much smaller queue in the hopes of securing a great seat, albeit on the inferior end. But for a game like this, there is no bad seat in the house⁴.

I would say I was about 50th in line at my entrance, so things were looking good. Gates opened at 6 PM, so now it was just a waiting game for half an hour or so. Then, much to my dismay, at 5:50 PM peering through the glass gave a view of students piling around inside the arena and filling up seat after seat after seat. Turns out they had opened the South entrance early. So for all of us in line who had tried playing it smart, by the time we got in literal seconds to minutes after the designated opening time, both student sections were entirely full. Many people had jackets flung over entire bleachers to reserve seats for them and their closest dozen friends, and to make matters worse there were many, well...people that didn't exactly look to be of a student age. Once you're in the arena, unless you are trying to get to reserved seating, no-one checks your ticket.

After frantic scrambling up and down the stairs, the four others who I had organised to sit with got to the game and managed to miraculously find seats for us on the South end. Right in the very last row.

Despite this, we still had great views of the court and because we were right next to the roof (if I were a few inches taller I reckon I could have touched it above our heads), the reverberation from the crowd was immense. And I thought things got loud the first few times I had come here. This was on a whole 'nother level. Even a single three pointer or defensive stop was enough to release the shackles of the crowd, 15,000 rising to their feet and unleashing wave after wave of sound.

And then we lost the game. Disappointing for sure, but a truly remarkable experience. It does mean that we have lost now 4 of 6 games and whereas we were once crowned as the best team in the nation, the wheels are starting to fall off a bit now, and at the worst time of the year with March Madness looming.

Footnotes