The sky has fallen

Something massive happened on Sunday. The world stopped spinning on its axis, fell out of orbit, and has been launched on a trajectory that has us all now hurtling towards the sun to our impending, and very uncomfortable, death...

Or at least that's the impression you would get from listening to my teammates when we found out that we 'lost' the negotiation/arbitration competition. When I say 'lost', I mean '2nd in the country', but I think that my teammates would have preferred not entering the competition at all if we had've known that we'd come second. Me... personally... I think it's a great result, but I get in trouble every time I say that, so I've stopped. Now I just think it everytime I hear another person moan about how the Fates have colluded to ruin their lives. We should've won, but I've moved on.

It's hard, though, when you hear people around the university commenting on the 'loss'. Like today, in my translation class, 2 guys who sit infront of me were wondering where another one of the students was. This student was the leader of my university's teams, and had taken the month off classes in order to prepare for the competition. Nice guy, but devastated that we 'lost'. Anyway, the conversation I overheard went like this:

[Guy 1] "Where is x-san?"
[Guy 2] "Didn't he say in his email that he would be back in classes from December?"
[Guy 1] "Yeah, but that was once the competition was finished, and it finished over the weekend."
[Guy 2] "How did they go?"
[Guy 1] "They totally screwed up our unbeaten record. They lost the competition for us."

At which point, my Japanese language tutor, another student in the class, who had also overheard the conversation and knew that I had participated, was frantically waving his hands from across the room, trying to stop me from starting an argument with them. I wasn't going to start an argument, but I was going to bludgeon them to death with my textbook. My hardcover copy of Gorove, "Developments in Space Law" was heavy enough to take both of them out. I'm glad he stopped me, though, because I would have regretted it - it's impossible to get the blood out of paper...

But its all over now, and my workload has decreased significantly - such that I now have more time to pursue my life ambition... World Domination!