Back in Cornell we had to take two phys ed courses (and pass a swimming test) to graduate. For my first one I took a weekend massage seminar, so I could get it over with without interfering with the scheduling of my “real” classes, which in retrospect was the exact opposite attitude I should have taken towards these things.

There were a lot of couples taking it together - boy/girl romantic ones, also a few sorority sisters and a pair of sports bros. I went into it alone and so for applied exercises got paired with a 300+ pound black dude I’d never met, which sounds like a setup for a gay panic joke or an ‘80s buddy comedy; in practice he was a decent and competent enough guy but we didn’t really bond or anything and it was hard to get a feel for the landmarks of bone and muscle under all that flesh.

Towards the end of the second day the instructor, a long white-haired old hippie woman with - reasonably enough - strikingly well-muscled hands, asked if anyone had any questions or specific techniques they wanted to explore. One guy (in one of the boy/girl pairs) asked if she had any recommendations for massage as a mood-setting activity with your romantic partner and she went off on him being, like, actively offended that anyone would think to sully the dignity of massage by using it for sensual purposes.

That year I was formally webmaster for the campus branch of NORML, on account of I was the only freshman to show up at the orientation week recruiting meeting. The only thing that came of it really was I got invited to a house party and who should I see there but the massage instructor, magnum of white wine in one hand, hugest cone spliff I’ve ever seen in the other, hitting on this Swedish freshman girl by massaging her hands.

My second phys ed class was an introduction to handgunning. The instructor was the coach for I think the women’s crew team. He was a gun guy, had a .50 deagle and a .44 magnum he let us fire as a reward in one of the last weeks, and the only practical use for such ridiculous hand cannons I’ve ever heard - in summers he guided canoe expeditions up the rivers of Alaska and needed guns small enough to wear while paddling but strong enough to stop a charging bear.

Anyway, the first two range days we did flinch drills - we’d take a .22 revolver, load two chambers, leave one empty, one full, two empty, and then spin the cylinder before locking it, so it wasn’t until the third or fourth trigger pull that you could be certain whether the hammer would fall on a live round or not.

The idea was that if you fired an empty chamber but the gun still jerked, you’d realize you were doing something wrong - nominally, “pulling” the trigger with your whole hand rather than squeezing with just the finger, or alternatively flinching in anticipation of the recoil. In actuality, it was hilarious how many of us, growing up with toy guns, simply hadn’t internalized that we didn’t need to mime the recoil or say “bang”, since a real one does that for you.