Adverse Possessors

Apparently law students love legal puns. As I mentioned earlier, the Thursday bar event is called the "Bar Review." I learned recently that the Halloween party at the Law School is called "Ex Parte." And my intramural football team is called the "Adverse Possessors."

Yup, I'm on an intramural football team. All the classes of 1L students have their own teams so it was natural for me to participate in mine. Tonight was our first game of the season and we played a team studying Nuclear Physics at the grad school here. The game started at 8:00 and our coach asked us to be there at 7:30 to practice a bit. I left my apartment at 7:00 to catch the UT Shuttle to the IM fields but I couldn't find the bus stop, so I walked the 25 blocks to the fields.

I walked through an Austin neighborhood called Hyde Park. I've heard of this area before as the place where a lot of graduate students and professors live. It has a real neighborhoody feel, the first I have noticed since I moved here. As I have professed, I love Austin, but I must say that aesthetically it doesn't have much on New York. There are no rows of brownstones, and sidewalks seem to come and go with no reason; it is primarily a driving city. I am a walker who enjoys meandering and getting lost in the grid of pre-war New York City buildings and townhomes, so this has been an adjustment for me. Sure, Austin has a certain funkiness about it that I really appreciate; it is utterly unpretentious with a kitschy charm. And although I think the West Village in New York is generally too overrun with designer labels and yuppies and hipsters, there is nothing like the quaint two or three storied brownstones that line those cobblestone streets, their basement bars and hidden back gardens giving New York that "New York" feel. The feel of a small town in a big city.

In Hyde Park there are no brownstones and no townhouses, but there are cottage-like houses with small yards lining narrow streets where each intersection has a four-way stop. The houses are modest yet polished, there are trees with swings hanging from them, a public swimming pool and tennis courts, and people taking evening walks. It's charming in the homey sense. It's the small town feel in the city.

I arrived at the IM fields at 7:40, a bit late but nothing catastrophic. We threw the football around awhile and the game was on. I am proud to say that I was on the receiving end of the first complete pass of the game. My problem, however, which I first noticed in practice, is that when I catch the ball I am so proud of the catch that I kind of forget to run; the flags around my waist were immediately stripped. Our team played fine and was certainly not out-matched by the Nuclear Physicists we were up against but sadly, we lost. The loss was comforted by team margaritas at Trudy's after the game.

The IM fields at UT, like just about everything here at UT, are enormous. They are not lying when they say everything is bigger in Texas. We played under the lights and the evening was uncharacteristically cool compared to recent weather. It was lovely.

I'm hoping the Adverse Possessors will have a couple practices before next week's game. Once the bulk of us get more comfortable with the game I think we'll be a solid force. In the meantime I'll enjoy my walk to the field.