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| In an art gallery, Glendale |
Yuji came to our school late last year. A very quiet Japanese guy who loved the Denver Nuggets and apparently had a penchant for wrestling snakes. Along the banks of a river. Naked. I kid you not.
The kinds of things my students reveal when I have them write their essays can be anywhere from humorous, insightful, touching or shocking. If I remember correctly, they were supposed to have written about family traditions. Some students wrote about how their family celebrates a birthday or a certain holiday. Some students wrote about religious practices. Yuji wrote about wrestling snakes. Along the banks of a river. Naked. When I asked him about this, several times to be sure that he understood me, he was quite serious about the thing, so I can only assume that he's telling the truth. However, snake wrestling aside, Yuji is also a basketball fanatic.
In case you've been living under a rock (snake reference), it's March Madness. NCAA basketball championship time. I'm not a gambler, far from it. In fact, I'm somewhat the opposite of a gambler; I'm so bad at gambling, or my luck is such shit, take your pick, that I don't even think about gambling. Not even as a joke. An ex-girlfriend of mine was a somewhat big gambler. I had no idea until she and I went to Las Vegas once. It was like the scene from Lost In America when Albert Brooks wakes up to find his wife at the tables after they had stopped in Las Vegas on their way to discover the American Dream. Brooks' wife, played by Julie Haggerty, has a near-demonic look on her face as she ends up gambling away their "nest egg". My ex- wasn't nearly that bad, but I tried keeping up with her one night at the black-jack table. I lasted less than an hour. I returned to our room around nine. She got back some time around 4AM. I lost twenty bucks. I didn't even ask her how much she lost.
But I digress. It's March Madness and time to fill out your brackets. I've always wanted to do this, create my brackets but I was always afraid that my overwhelming ignorance of the teams involved prevented me from making sagacious choices. But after a few years of paying attention to the wins and losses I realized that had I entered a brackets game, I might have actually done well. So this year, I went all-in. Sort of.
I registered for a free site with the potential of winning a million dollars. That's about as risky as I get. But I needed help completing the entire bracket. The first round was pretty easy, but I was getting hung-up on the latter rounds. The deadline was approaching to have my picks in and I needed help. I was sitting in the back of the office when I heard Yuji's voice. I thought Yuji had returned to Japan months ago to wrestle snakes by the banks of a river, naked, or whatever, but he's been sticking around this whole time. Perhaps the snakes have not yet returned to the banks of the river. Or they're not big enough. Who knows. But there he was, wearing his Carmello Anthony jersey. So I walked up, and after a few minutes of pleasantries, I asked him flat-out for his thoughts (read: picks) on this year's NCAA. And I gotta' say, that snake wrestling Japanese kid sure can play bracketology. With Yuji's help I'm currently 22-6. Not bad when you consider nobody, and I mean nobody had Old Dominion or Murray State.
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