The past few weeks have been a maelstrom of terror and pain... but at least its finally over and I can spend spring break (woo) decomposing in a rancid, motionless heap. Let this be a warning to you all: grad school is not to be taken lightly... or, actually, at all, now that I think of it.

In order to alleviate some stress, I decided it would be "fun" to play 18 holes of golf down at the local university-run golf course with a friend of mine from the anthro department. I was mind-bogglingly wrong. As it turns out, the A&M golf course has gone from being merely mediocre six months ago to being laughably pathetic... and this is coming from someone who plays golf maybe twice a year. In fact, after a few holes, we became aware that people were actually in the process of actively destroying the course. The grass was all dead, there were giant tread marks gouged into the fairways, and there were seemingly random piles of sand all over the place. Additionally, the putting greens were cut down to the bedrock, and then coated in an inch of sand. A ball rolling across this surface would either continue rolling for all eternity, with no pesky "grass" to slow its pace, or it would ram into a sand drift and come to a complete stop, or even reverse direction. I joked that it looked like they fired the greens-keeper and just hired some guys to drive a dump-truck full of sand around the course with the tailgate open.

To make things worse, the A&M golf course seems to defy all laws of physics. Its somehow designed so that the sun is always in your eyes at the tee, and every surface slopes into a garbage-filled gully that manages to border every hole. Between the gully, the sun, the random sand piles, and the suspicious, alligator-wallow like mounds of garbage and excrement around every corner, we each managed to lose about 10 golf balls a piece before we even got to the back 9.