written 4 December 2000, in an English class, in response to the question "What is your favorite winter sport?"

Winter sports? Hah! You know, this isn't a very fair question. Not everyone is interested in sports, or at least not school sports.

The only sport I've been interested in is, sadly, one of rather limited scope. Fighting. Brawling, fencing, martial arts, marksmanship. Violent blood sports.

You didn't expect that answer from a P.K., did you? But it's true. I've read too many books, you see, mostley sf/f, and they tend to have some kind of ritualized fighting. I'd love to be a mercenary of a medieval-age world, like Kerowyn, or Tarma and Kethry. All three of them are from the Heralds of Valdemar series.

I'm such a violent person, but I've never gotten in a fistfight. I don't want to get in trouble, you see.

I suppose the school sport that most closely resembles my style of fighting is wrestling, but that's just morally wrong. How can you stand to go watch two guys in spandex put themselves in compromising positions and stick their fingers up each other's bums? While starving themselves for the privilege? The argument has been made that it's not like that (it is) or that the ancient Greeks and Romans did it too, so it can't be bad.

Well, I say, yes. They did.

Naked.

.

.

Note: This was written a good five months or so before I found out about the SCA. The fact that I did, after I'd written (and forgotten) about this, highly amuses me.

And I still agree with all that I wrote, too, which is why I've now saved it for posterity.