england vs. paraguay with dukegabe and one of his friends, a Distinguished Stanford Alumnus. i've concluded that everyone who graduates from stanford shares a part of the same consciousness, so that at least a portion of all their actions is governed by the Mother Brain, or something. this particular DSA won some favour by having heard of bandura and zimbardo, and their work, unlike one other current student (who shall remain unnamed) who couldn't even point me to the psychology department.

as you know, the match was dull, and by the second half we found ourselves whipping out the rulers -- aka talking about our lives to date (it's so hard to disentangle the two things nowadays, isn't it? i need to meet more people who don't collect prizes like panini stickers. either that or we need a standardised way of scoring these things. +10 points for a psc scholarship, +2 points for graduating from rjc, +6 points for being under-14 windsurfing champion, +457 points for saving a village in a small african nation from the clutches of tyranny, etc. then we can paste the scores on our foreheads save simply barrels of time. how beauteous mankind is!) i know this all reeks of cynicism and jealousy, but that's exactly what this is not -- what i'm trying to say is that in our circle, all this generic stuff gets in the way of getting to actually know people. i hate all this mental adding-up of points, and even if neither person is doing it, there's always the secret fear that the other person is. you are not what you do!

anyway, this is why, privacy issues aside, DSA was DSA -- because he was, ironically, nearly indistinguishable in 2 hours from every other DSA i've ever met.