Snoqualmie

Co-opers do it in costume.

I woke up this morning covered in spots and with my ass hurting.

It's because my house played broomball last night. Really, I can explain. See, co-op broomball is one of those snowballing traditions that become ever more complicated and ever more entrenched with the passing of time. I'm not sure when, or how, it got started, but now it's a semesterly tournament of rowdy ridiculosity. Teams made up of either one large house or several smaller ones play elimination rounds until one emerges the winner and, I think, doesn't get anything for it except the pride of a job well done. Then we do it all over again.

My house's first game was last night. We're a small house at 50 people, so we were grouped with two other small houses to play against three other small houses. Reasonable, right? Except that Afro House, with a population of 25, brought almost 20 people, and HiP brought at least 10. We had 6 Kingmanites out of 50 (and one didn't even play) and 4 people from Ridge, and whoever the other two houses were they didn't show up at all. We had to borrow people from HiP even to have a team of 12 on the ice. It should have been bloody murder.

But broomball is kind of bloody murder anyway, right? You run around on slippery ice in your shoes chasing after a rubber ball with a wedge on a stick. It's like amateur hockey with equipment that's designed not to work, and the only things left to do about it are to a) cheat and b) go for the metaphorical neck. So you kick the ball, you stick-check people, and you just run into anyone who looks like they might be getting near your goal. And if you're brilliant like my teammates, you make kneepads out of cardboard and duct tape because you know you're going to fall all over the damn place and you need all the padding you can get.

Well, when you're running around on the ice falling down and you've got cardboard taped to your pants, you don't have a lot of dignity left. So you may as well go for being recognizable to your teammates. Preferred methods include silly hats and anything colorful grabbed from your house's free pile. Really preferred methods include both of the above. My housemate Jonathan was wearing fuzzy pink Hello Kitty pajama pants, a tight fuschia shirt with a heart on it, and a neon green fuzzy hat with multiple pompoms. I decided to wear the furry hood from my giraffe costume, then threw sanity to the wind and just put the entire costume on. Under other circumstances I could have simply been the team mascot, but in a hopelessly outmatched broomball game with too few players to switch off, there's nothing a giraffe can do but play. For an hour and a half. Exhausted and sweaty have taken on new meanings for me now.

This picture is not from last night -- I don't think there were any pictures taken last night, sadly -- but it is one of very few pictures extant of me as a large African herbivore. I quizzed a few of my housemates on what noise a giraffe could be reasonably expected to make, and the only answer with which we could come up was, essentially, "gnomp". Gnomp. Gnompgnompgnomp.