On showing up. Trees Hall is an old building that sits on the very apex of the aptly named "Cardiac Hill" at the University of Pittsburgh. It's called that because, should an unfortunate soul have a previously unknown heart condition and try to scale it, they'll more than likely drop dead before they reach the Burger King in the Pete three-quarters of the way up. It's to the top of this mountain I would trudge on Sundays, past the strewn clothes and occasional bodies of drunk college kids, to a musty basement in an old building. In that basement was a magical place called the Multi-Purpose Room. Now, the uses of that room truly were legion. Some nights it would be filled with wrestlers, kickboxers, dancers. Other nights it would be a place to study, swing kettlebells, and practice esoteric martial arts that were obviously invented in that very place the day before by a group of guys with access to fake weapons and a...
applying leverage in everyday life