mid life crisis/reinvention: farewells and one last ball

This week I have a cold! La-me. I've just finished my negotiations paper, which was actually pretty fun because I got to analyse a negotiation I was familiar with. As it turns our, Michael Moore is making a documentary called "Sicko" about the fiasco that is the US medical system, and they wanted to get my band's domain for the movie. They wanted it for free, and we wanted $100,000... needless to say it didn't pan out too well. Anyway, it was interesting to analyse the negotiation using all of the theory I've picked up over the last 8 weeks. Too bad I didn't know about that stuff when they first contacted me a year ago! One of the neat aspects of this paper is that I asked friends, mentors, colleagues, and family members how I should tackle the negotiation, and analysed each of their inputs separately in the paper, so I'm posting it here for folks to read. If you can cut through the academic BS (required when writing academic papers), it's kind of funny and interesting. One hint: BATNA means Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement.

One of many funny things about Oxford is that every time you choose to do one thing, you are giving up on something else. You really have to get used to juggling stuff. So, because I had a fever last tuesday night, I had to miss my pal Brandon's birthday. But, I still managed to get to a dinner at AJ and Caroline's wednesday night and the St Cross Ball thursday night. Admittedly, I took it easy and went home early, but I just couldn't bear to pass up on these once in a lifetime deals. I missed Jimmy Carter's speech at the Sheldonian thursday because I had to get some progress on the negotiations paper. :( Pat Butler (latest Birdbath bassist) actually got to meet the man. Pretty darn cool.

Dinner with the Dennisons, Jurys and McInerneys

AJ and Caroline were kind enough to have the 6 of us over for a roast lamb dinner... good stuff. We chatted and teased each other, and talked about courses, but underlying the whole evening was the spectre of leaving. I may see these folks a few times over the summer, and then once again intensively in September for a week... and then everyone is off to their far flung destinations and back to normal life. I caught a photo of Claudia leaving with Andrew and Ava, and I wondered when we would sit down to a dinner like this again? I was hopped up on cold medicine, and just sat in the corner enjoying everyone's company, trying to keep from getting everyone else sick.

Gabe, Caroline, AJ, Ava, Claudia, Andrew

Reba, Katie, Gabe (giving me the hard-ass look)

McInerneys out the door... when will we see them again?

St Cross Ball

My friends Renee, Vai, and Shannon are all members of St Cross College, which is a new college in a very old building (the Pusey House... love the name!). St Cross is small and really beautiful. The ball was masterfully planned by Ms. Shannon, and had a French Revolution theme, complete with a beheaded Marie A. I was still sick, but feeling better. We all met at the famous Eagle and Child for dinner before, and then went to the ball. There was dancing, champagne, lawn bowling, croquet... all good silly Oxfordy stuff.

Reba and Monica in the cab on the way over

Renee at the Eagle and Child

Brandon in the cab with the Thames (Isis) in the background

Monica at the Eagle and Child... what a cutie!

me and my lovely wife at the ball

Reba and Vai at the guillotine

later on that night...

Sylvester Awards

I touched on this briefly in another post, but thought I should go into a bit more detail... every year, there is a silly awards show, called the Sylvesters where the MBAs vote on funny awards to give each other. I won the "Inaugural <name witheld> Best Use of Class Mailing List Award" which is basically for sending out too many weird requests to the class email list. The person who really deserved this was so obvious that they decided to name the award after him. He would send out these crazy 5am drunk mails that really did not make sense whatsoever... I just asked a lot of questions. :) And of course, another incarnation of the Birdbath, I think the 7th(?), played a few songs. I wrote a song for the occasion, called "Fear and Loathing in the OX1". OX1 is my post code. I'm going to try to do a home studio version of this this summer when I get time.