Shredded Bats

Did you ever wonder where wood chips come from?

College is expensive.  At some point in 2004 I was faced with the millennial's dilemma and realized that as great as my summer job at the local pool was it just didn't earn me enough money to offset some of the cost of school and living expenses during the year.  I needed to find something more profitable than the $7.50/hr that I had been making.  This is how I came to work as a temp. 

LC Staffing was located in a small and slightly abused building just between the edge of town and Evergreen, the unincorporated town outside of town.  The paperwork asked what sort of work I was looking for so I asked the receptionist which jobs made the most.  She told me it was manual labor so that's what I chose.  I was then assigned a staff member who did the formal interview.  We sat in a cramped back office cubicle with no light as she went through my questionnaire and I reiterated my desire to earn as much money that summer as I could.
"You want to do labor?"
"Yes."
"You can lift 100 pounds?  Really?"
"Yeah, definitely."
"wow.  you must be strong."
At the time I wasn't really familiar with the tone of voice used by people who think you're lying to them.

She found me a one week job in landscaping on a dude ranch just south of Whitefish.  What I didn't know is that when people say that you're going to do landscaping they usually mean that you're going to pick weeds.  It paid more than my lifeguarding gig but not as much as moving furniture or working construction like many of the other temp workers did.   When I got there I was surprised to see a former high school classmate getting out of her car in work clothes and gloves.  Tiffany had pulled the same landscaping card I had and we were set to work grooming the lawn and tending the gardens.  It wasn't a bad way to spend a week.  The weather was nice, the supervisor was friendly but not creepy and the company was good but I was still hoping for a longer gig that paid more.

After several more landscaping jobs, a stint at a deli and a horrifying 5 hours as a bus girl in a restaurant it dawned on me that I was never going to get sent out to work construction.  When my assigned staff member at LC Staffing told me that she was trying to get me jobs that 'weren't too hard' what she meant was that she didn't think girls should do that kind of work.  It's hard to put your finger on why you know that kind of thing when you're in that situation but between that, the jobs I was assigned and the rumblings among other temps that women weren't wanted on particular jobs even though you legally couldn't say so it became clear that gender was the overriding issue preventing me from earning the kind of money I wanted to be able to earn.

Before I had much of a chance to contemplate what might be reasonably done about that sort of thing another opportunity presented itself.  One of the members of my parents church was a person of some degree of importance at our local lumber mill.  He mentioned that they too hired through LC Staffing and that perhaps I should see whether they were needing additional summer labor at the moment.  When I asked, my assigned staff member abruptly handed me off to another staff member who sat me in front of a training video, gave me directions to the mill and and told me to report in at 5:30am the next day.

We were more or less surrounded.

It's worth noting at this point the degree of influence Plum Creek has on the local economy back at home.  They are the largest private landowner in the United States with about 6.8 million acres, nearly 900,000 of which are in northwestern Montana.  A job at the mill was a good blue collar job with lots of hours and decent benefits in a town where about 75% of my graduating class did not go to college and the other options were the aluminum plant, a boom and bust manufacturer of semiconductor washers and not much else.  When I was in the fifth grade we got to go to the FORESTRY EXPO! Which was an educational event on forestry topics for local fifth grade students.  Among other things, I remember a very cool demonstration of logging techniques and forest management put on by Plum Creek.  They made the case for logging in a community that in many ways depended on it.  Many of my friends parents worked there (and still do).  It wasn't exactly a hard sell.

I was to report to the C shift of the re-manufacturing (REMAN) division at the Evergreen mill.  I didn't know what the meant, but I did know I'd be making over $10/hr so it seemed like an improvement over pulling weeds.  Everyone I talked to told me I'd probably be pulling plywood off the chain.  I didn't know what that meant either.

The next morning in the pre-dawn darkness I drove into the lumberyard and parked my dad's tiny '86 Honda Accord somewhere between a forklift and the requisite lineup of Ford F-150 pickups.  The sweet smell of sawdust greeted me as I walked into a mostly empty break room and asked for Jerry*.  What greeted me was a manic gorilla of a man addicted to steroids and just shy of his 35th birthday.  This was my shift manager.  They later told me that Jerry used to sometimes pick up the vending machines and shake them to dislodge free snacks - peanuts in particular -  but then management got wise and nailed down the vending machines.  I determined that it would probably be better to be on Jerry's good side.

From there I learned that REMAN had nothing to do with plywood.  We were actually the third largest producer of finger jointed 2x3, 2x4 and 2x6 in the world.  A finger joint looks like this:

When 2x4's are made without jointing, the machines run the entire tree through a machine made for that purpose.  Some of those long 2x4's come out unusable as a single piece of wood.  The way to make those 2x4's usable is to chop them into smaller pieces that fit the grade and then glue those pieces back together into 116 1/8th inch long slices.  That's what we were doing.

The trouble is that someone has to decide which long 2x4's are usable and which aren't.  We had a machine for that, but sometimes it's 'eye' couldn't decide and that's where I came in.  My job was to sort through the undecided pieces of wood.  If one end of the 2x4 was bad, I used my chop saw to cut it off.  If a long end of the 2x4 was bad then I used my rip saw to turn it into a 2x3.  Bad pieces went to the wood chipper and good pieces went to get jointed and glued together.  I manually sorted about 5,000 pounds of lumber a night and went through a pair of gloves every week.  It was the bitch job, it was mine and it made me about $8,000 a summer.

Terms:
See the bark on both sides of this piece of timber?  That's called wane.  You can't nail into wane and it has to be removed if it takes up more than half the nailing edge of your lumber in order to be stud grade wood.  Knots that are larger than half the width or edge of your wood are also below stud grade and must be removed or sent to the chipper bin. Wane that covers the short end needs to go too. 






The constant roar of the machinery meant that conversation was not possible on the floor and in any case my station was not close enough to anyone else to talk so I mostly got to know my co-workers in the break room or not at all.  There were 11 of us on shift and one other woman so by the second summer it was really like having 9 older brothers and one very tired aunt.  They adored me, and in what seemed like not enough time I was as much a part of their family as anyone.

One day I was pulled from my usual work to do what was essentially quality control on a long line of identical pieces of wood running by a conveyor belt.  I was to be the second eye in addition to the machine and flip anything bad to the person at the chop saw.  At first watching the belt made me dizzy, then gave me a little headache and before I knew it I had full on motion sickness.  Vomit came roaring out of my throat and so I turned and yakked in the first thing I saw - the belt to the chipper bin.  The guys came over to pound me on the back and laugh at me.  "You shouldda seen when Bobby done it!"  In fact it soon became clear that at some point, each of them in turn had vomited into the chipper bin.  It was a bond we shared.

Evidently at some point in the not too distant past someone had died in the chipper.  No one knew how exactly, but the guy had disappeared on shift and when someone stumbled to the horrible conclusion that the chipper could have been to blame pieces of him were in fact discovered there.  Now the room had a camera.  The chipper operated without human assistance most of the time but occasionally a long piece of 2x8 would jam it and someone needed to go in there and either pull it out or shake it enough to make it go in.  The camera was there to see if there was a jam and possibly for safety reasons too.  The only other woman on shift watched the video as she operated the 'seeing eye' machine.

It was also true that bats sometimes roosted in the wood pallets that waited outside to be processed.  So naturally when one of those bats was caught, the guys thought it would be really fun to rattle the chain of their colleague watching the camera and to do so they stapled the bat to a piece of 2x8, waved it in front of her camera so she would be sure to see it and threw the whole thing into the chipper.  They thought this was hilarious and in telling the story to me I thought it was funny too.  So many months in their company had changed my sense of humor somewhat, but when I attempted to retell the story to my other friends all I saw on their faces was horror.  Not funny at all.  Some aspects of the mill didn't translate back to the rest of my life and some of my life didn't really translate to the mill either.

By Rainbow they mean rainbow trout.  Not gay people.

"Hey, you wanna go out to the Rainbow tonight?"
"I'm not 21 yet."
"Don't matter.  Neither is Bobby!"

The Rainbow was and probably still is the trashiest of dive bars.  Its reputation preceded it so even if I had some desire to go out drinking with the boys and witness one of the many brawls they so often spoke of, fear of the venue alone probably would have kept me away.  They didn't seem to mind.

Back at work Jerry crowned me employee of the month and crowed that I was "the best motherfucking rip saw operator [he] ever had!"
"but you're not a motherfucker, right?" asked another co-worker, eyeing me.  It was 2:30 in the morning and I was alone at night in the warehouse with 9 of the guys.  It didn't seem like a great time to make a stand for normalizing gay life so I sat there in my brother's Marine Corps camo pants and work boots with what little hair I had hidden under a bandanna and shook my head 'no.'  I suppose it was true strictly speaking.  I had never fucked anyone's mother.

As the summer came to a close so did my time there.  They often hired college students to work the busy season so the guys knew that I was easy come, easy go.  Nevertheless they encouraged me to come back and put in some hours over Christmas  or maybe even graduate from school and come back to work full time as many of them had.  On my last day my shift manager pulled me up into his office, shook my hand and let me know that if I ever needed anything he was only a phone call away.  They were there if I needed them because we were family now.  I thanked him, left the building, pulled away in my dad's little car and never saw any of them again.

The Mostly Weekly Dribble

I always thought that if suffered some major injury from derby that I would write a book with my new found free time.  I also always thought that my brain would be a bit clearer than it has been but things are coming around.  It's 27 more days until I'm supposed to start walking again.  I have to admit that I've been trying steps but when I said as much to my physical therapist I got 'the look.'  They're pretty good at 'the look' actually.  Must be all those rollergirls they treat.  At any rate, I need a distraction and this is it.  50,000 words which is about 1,800 a day until I walk again and you're going to find them here (unless my inspiration runs dry in which case you're going to find whatever you find and you're going to like it). 

The first time I tried to write a book the summer before I was a Freshman in high school.  I had just read the series "So You Want to Be a Wizard" and my friends Dakota and Caleb had both just written epic fantasy novels which I did not read but was very impressed with nonetheless.  This confluence led me to the conclusion that if they could do it, I certainly could do it and so my very own wizardry epic began (this was before Harry Potter.  I swear.)  I used to hide in the spare bedroom back in the corner of the basement with my clean and perfect black composition notebook and draw out character profiles in my very best handwriting.  This took forever because my handwriting is now and has always been absolutely atrocious but I wanted it to be good.  This was my new, secret and exciting calling. 

However like all of my new, secret and exciting callings it didn't stay a secret for long.  I proudly wrote out 40 single spaced typewritten pages and proceeded to show them to everyone who would look.  My Freshman English teacher promptly had me go to some sort of writing clinic where I sat on the tired chars of the Eagles Lodge in Kalispell, Montana with other high school students.  All of them were probably older than me and many of them certainly seemed to know what exactly you ought to be doing at writing clinics.  We went through the beginnings of my novel which was nestled inside a cheap but much loved purple plastic binder and agreed that it had great ambition and lots of potential.  Or maybe that I had great ambition and lots of potential.  One of those

It may have had potential but I had run up against a wall.  My main character was an orphan who did not know that she was a wizard (I swear!  Before Harry Potter!).  She was tall, blonde, athletic and smart.  Persistent too, but did not trust people.  She had a little sister and together they went from foster home to foster home.  Kit (the nickname for my girl) was very troubled and possibly into drugs.  She needed to hit bottom to discover her true identity.  The problem with that was that I was not troubled, just a tad neurotic.  I had never used drugs or taken a sip of alcohol and I lived a fairly Rockwellesque childhood with ballet classes, piano lessons and the occasional foray into childhood sports.  So while I was trying to write about Kit's spiral into some sort of suicide attempt it was clear that I in no way possessed the emotional depth to pull it off.  I was 14 after all.

So Kit went to go live on the bottom shelf of my bookcase in her shiny purple binder.  She's still there, actually.  Sitting in my parents house, waiting for someone to come along and let her find her true self.  I like to think that if that damn Rowling woman hadn't come along I might have come back and found a way to write myself out of my literary trap but no one wants to be a copycat, least of all me. 

I think it must have been the next year that I got my own email for the first time.  My family had gotten a home computer when I was 9 or 10 but the internet didn't come until later and even then there was some degree of uncertainty as to what one was supposed to be doing online anyway.   I remember spending my allocated time entering in URLs I found on cereal boxes which provided a temporary reprieve from creating folders within folders within folders strung out in long nests of codes meant to prevent my brother from reading my very secret private computer files which for some reason I did not elect to keep on a floppy disc that could be removed and hidden.  This was all until it was discovered that I could collect the email addresses from my various summer camp friends and keep up with them much more frequently than traditional letter writing had allowed.

And thus Peatty23@hotmail.com was born.  At the time, my brother desperately wanted a PT Cruiser because he had just gotten his license and the PT was clearly the height of coolness and fashion.  Instead, we rode around in a tiny grey '93 Mazda pickup just big enough to transport a few tubas or maybe a jazz band's worth of music stands for my dad's work.  I called this pickup Peatty in an effort to goad my brother with daily reminders about that which he could not have.  23 vaguely rhymes with Peatty and so I took this address and sent out a mass message to everyone I knew talking about my adventures in learning how to drive a stick shift.  I sent mass emails with these sort of self absorbed fun anecdotes on a more or less weekly basis and called it The Mostly Weekly Dribble.  So while I'm not saying that I invented the blog at sixteen, I am saying I got an early start.

I considered the Dribble to be the side show to my main event.  I still wanted to write fiction and Kit was still my character although her circumstances had changed.  I no longer read as much fantasy in high school as I had in junior high and so Kit needed a real life scenario to go along with her fabulous good looks, street smarts and witty charm but it seemed like every story line I came up with was too pedestrian for her impeccable strengths.  I wanted her to live in a city, but didn't know how to write city life and I wasn't sure what she was doing there anyway.  So instead I just wrote descriptive scene after beautiful descriptive scene where nothing ever happened but it was all set up just so and she was alone.  Always alone.

In the meantime the Dribble was wildly successful by my own measure although in re-reading some of them its hard not to come to the conclusion that they were written by a hyperactive squirrel.  At any rate, people seemed to respond to it and I got a chance to be funny and insightful which I love.  Here's an excerpt from June 7th 2002:

"So ya know what I was thinking?...........

Wouldn't it be terribly lonely to be a superhero?  I mean yeah, you get all the sexy babes, you get to save the world and everyone loves you.  But in the end I think it would be lonely.  Everyone would respect you, but I think because of that, no one would ever really know you.  I'd be lonely anyway.  In the same respect it's like some of those people at school.  Ya know who I'm talking about.  The kid everyone knows and likes.  The one who's always surrounded by a thousand people.  I think it's people like that who are the most lonely.  What's the use of having lots of friends if all of them are too in awe of you to really ever be close to you?  It's something to think about anyway.  Why did this come up?  Well we have this assignment in history to make up superheros.  It's our semester.  Yeah, don't ask....."

^this is the saddest thing I have ever written.  Why it didn't occur to me that I was that kid is beyond me.

Then college happened and for some time Kit disappeared entirely and the Mostly Weekly Dribble became a Mostly Perfunctory Series of Updates.  I was too busy being overwhelmed to be clever.  In my Freshman year I took a small honors course discussion course whose topic I think was intentionally vague and made more so by the fact that our professor wanted us to self direct the class into some area of the humanities for a journey of discovery and knowledge.  What we actually did was talk a lot about numerology.  There were only 14 people in the class and one of them only came once.  Her name was Alexis Kent.  We talked a lot about Alexis while she wasn't there.  We speculated on her proclivities and wondered aloud what sort of life she might be living while we were in the classroom.  Her number (based on her name in n numerology) was a 3 which meant that she had a propensity for fame.  I liked the idea of her.

Later that year I went to see the vagina monologues with some friends. After the play we were standing around chatting about what we might name our own vaginas (like you do).  Before I knew what I was saying I blurted out the first name that came to mind.  "Alexis Kent."
"You mean Alexis Cunt?"  Asked my best friend.  Raucous laughter ensued.  I decided right then and there that Alexis Kent was not the name of my vagina.  But she did stick with me.  She was Kit all grown up and so after college I began again to try to write her into my first great work of fiction.  I lived in New York City for six months after school and finally could write an urban story.  I had experienced some heartache, some adversity and some really bad choices and I knew that Kit, Alexis - whoever - could weather it better than I had.  She was my perfection, and that was a big part of the reason why she never came to be.

It was at about this time that I was reading a news article about a young writer talking about her memoirs.  She had started her writing life in fiction but never had much success.  Finally, after showing a story about a little old man to a friend of hers the friend looked up and told her that the story wasn't about some old man, it was about her.  That all her writing was about her.  That in spite of all her efforts to imagine something new she was really just writing memoirs and maybe she should stick to it.  I read this, looked up from my writers block and realized that Alexis wasn't real at all.  She was just the all the things about myself that I liked best without all the things that made me interesting.  No matter what story I found to fit her it would only ever be a shiny patina over my own.  The decade I had spent writing Dribbles instead of fiction wasn't a way to bide my time until I came up with the great american novel - it was my novel.  Will be my novel.

And so we find that I am 29 and writing memoirs in spite of my youth.  Not because of a sense of vanity (although I do plead the 5th in that regard) but because its what I do well.  I don't think in novels but rather essays.  27 days until I walk means 27 days of essays about my life.  I hope you enjoy it.

Thoughts on Coaching

awesome-train.blogspot.com

Learn it.  Love it.  Know it.

After approximately six minutes of consideration I've decided that the easiest solution to my malware problem on the old blog would be to start a new blog.  And then this URL was available which pretty much sealed the deal.  Most of the old posts are here now which I imagine is mostly to my benefit but you know - you can still read them too.

Actually the review of old posts has revealed a couple of things.  First - I used to work out WAY more than I do now.  And with more drive.  Second - I pretty much only write on a few themes.  Goals.  Motivation.  Perseverance through adversity and awesomeness.  It's not necessarily a bad wheelhouse but I thought I'd see whether I could get out of it for a minute.

I've started to do some coaching this year which I LOVE.  Back in the day I used to teach French horn students (and WAY back in the day it was swimming lessons) and while I don't really want to do that sort of thing full time I do miss it and coaching has dome some work to fill that gap.

But as opposed to music lessons or swim technique, the coaching space in roller derby is a sort of weird confluence of various styles.  In my first year of learning to skate I took lessons from speed skaters, artistic skaters, jam skaters, former hockey players and then just a whole lot of folks who taught themselves.  Of course every one of them is certain that their style is the most correct and each of those styles have some pretty significant differences between them.  It makes for an interesting learning environment and that's before you get to the many opinions that exist just within the roller derby community.

Then there's the matter of trying to aim at a moving target.  Two years ago I got picked up to a team without having solid transitions on either side.  Today we don't even let new skaters practice with teams until that skill is down cold.  The rules of the game literally keep changing so the things that are most important to know how to execute change too. 

So the question becomes not just how to teach new skaters the rules of the game and basic skills but also how to best prepare them to pick the most right action for them out of the many possible right actions (not to mention the many possible wrong actions).  In doing so I often wonder whether it's possible to create a method of learning any particular skill that's more direct than what I was taught or whether doing so would miss some fundamental skating skill developed by learning an intermediate version of that skill.  Was the 'intermediate' version really necessary at all?  If we teach skaters the methods deemed most important today will those most important methods still be considered as such in two or three years?

^OK - so that's incredibly vague and esoteric.  Let me see if I can provide some examples.

I used to call getting low the 'all purpose flour of roller derby.'  Now I'm not so sure.  Consider what it feels like to get low on transitions.  Do you really know anyone who stays low throughout the turn?  Last year we took some footage of Nasty Nikki Nightstick doing a turn around toe stop and when reviewing the video at slow speeds discovered that the very moment of her turn she stands up.  If you think about it in terms of physics, this makes sense.  It takes considerably less energy to spin an object that is straight up and down than it does to spin something that is unevenly weighted on the lateral axis.  Imagine spinning a straight straw versus spinning a bendy straw that has its top bent.  The straight straw is easier to spin.  Following that logic it's easy to imagine that teaching new skaters to transition while bent at the knees and waist is actually making them less stable. 

... and what about when making a wall?

Look how low I am!  I'm Low McLowerson!  So Low!

Look at Jes Rivas! (lane 4 in blue)  She's... in an athletic position!  She's Athletic McPositerson!  So positioned!

You guys - Look.  You can't really play roller derby in a deep squat all the time.  I spent a lot of time reviewing footage last fall and noticed that blockers I admire like Juke Boxx and Jackie Daniels have a much more upright position than I had been taught.  These players stand with their back up and their butt down which gives them a less low position but much improved lateral movement not to mention a whole 'nother way of feeling the jammer on their back.  I've been trying to teach myself the same but have found that nearly everything my body knows about how to stop and move needs to be adjusted because the stance is so different.  It's going to be a long road.

So what should we teach new players?  It's true that you hardly ever see anyone playing 'too low' while we often see players who are too tall.  Should we bother teaching a more nuanced stance now or is it better to let them develop as skaters and re-learn it later?  I don't really have the answer for that and not just for skating low but for a lot of things.  And do you know what?  That's what I like about coaching.  In a lot of ways it's a skill that allows you to really tap into critical thinking and creativity in ways that simply playing the game does not.  I don't pretend to know all the parts and pieces of how to put this game together from the ground up but I do look forward to a vigorous exploration in the years to come of exactly that topic.

Therapeutastic!

(see - it's like therapeutic and fantastic put together in one word)
First some housekeeping.  My blog seems to have been infected with malware that tells you your Java needs to be updated.  I'm trying to uninfect it but should that fail I may need to move this page to a new blog.  I'll let you know if that happens and in the meantime, do not click on that Java nonsense.  Second - Morganautumn I do not see your email address on your profile but if you put it there or in a comment I will email you!
...on to other things.
Last week I started physical therapy in a cloud of expectation.  Finally!  The resting part is over!  Time to actually DO something to speed my recovery.  I was also really genuinely glad to see my physical therapist again.  I've been a patient over at Advanced Manual Therapy in Ballard on and off for the past four years (which I would like to point out predates my derby experience).  I've never been a person who had their own neighborhood bar, grocery or restaurant (where everyone knows your name!) but AMT is most certainly MY physical therapy office.  Ignoring for a moment what that says about my apparent propensity for injury I will say that it's great to know that while PT can be painful and boring at least its with people I know, like, and trust.
Having said that, I will admit that at best I am usually a pretty OK physical therapy patient which is a significant improvement over my pre-derby life where I was generally a totally non-compliant physical therapy patient.  I've always had bad feet and spent significant time in PT when I was a kid.  Other kids did not have to go see Fred the physical therapist, did not wear orthotics, were not forced to do situps every night before bed and didn't have to wear tennis shoes all summer in lieu of sandals.  I associated these things with my own weakness and so I associated PT with weakness.  It's taken a long time to for me to turn that mindset around and also to learn that weakness isn't actually a permanent and unchangeable state of being.
The roller derby community on the other hand is generally unabashed in its enthusiasm for rehab and prehab and so I too have learned to be unabashed.    Still, there are always so many exercises that it can seem hard to keep up.  I usually pick the top two that I should be doing at home and do them during my break at work.  It's not a perfect solution but it's consistent and better than nothing.
This past week of PT has been a lesson in what six weeks of atrophy can do to you.  On Saturday they asked me to do a hip adductor leg raise with two pounds attached to my foot on the bad leg and I couldn't.  Not because it hurt, but because there was no strength there.  It suddenly became very apparent that while I may be cleared to walk in another five weeks if I don't stay up with the PT my muscles won't be able to bear the weight.
I've suddenly found myself to be very motivated.
<posted on 4.1.14>

The Seven(ish) Stages of a Broken Leg

Not all of the best stories start from the beginning.  At least that's what I've been telling myself.  It's been six and a half weeks since I broke my leg and yet every time I come here to try to hash it out I come up short of a full story.  I haven't been able to process this thing emotionally.  Or maybe it's that I'm still processing it.  Grief has seven stages after all...
DENIAL:  IT WON'T BE THAT BAD
So...  Yeah. The actual breaking of the leg part really was fairly awful.  And the fallout afterwards was/is also pretty bad.  I used to have this vague idea that breaking your leg doesn't hurt that badly.  You always hear people say that the adrenaline kicks in and they didn't really feel it or whatever.  I've actually seen at least three different people break their own legs and they didn't look like they were in a ton of pain.  And you get pain meds right?  Clearly the pain meds are great and make the pain go away and also make you feel euphoric about life.  Right?
Not quite.
PAIN:  THIS REALLY FUCKING HURTS
I'm still not really able to go back and think hard about how the fall/hit/break happened because it's too traumatic.  I remember screaming and not being able to stop.  I'm hoping to be able to return to the track without having to break that down mentally but maybe that too is denial.  As far as the pain meds go I can admit that the first shot of morphine was great.  Instant relief and relaxation.  But the second did almost nothing and I was in too much pain that first night to sleep at all in spite of the pharmacy being pumped into my arm.  The pain ranged from mild to severe for two weeks.  My first attempted blog post was trying to happen about then and all I could manage was a long litany of how much pain I was in, the types of pain, the trying to get past the pain.  I had enough sense not to post that one because it was too depressing.  You're welcome.
FRUSTRATION:  I WANT MY LIFE BACK
About two weeks ago I found myself in bed and trying to work from home but actually weeping for the first time.  I was finally off the pain meds and realizing just how much I missed people.  How tired I was of existing in bed for 20 hours a day.  How annoying it was that every tiny thing around the house took three times more energy than it should have and that a simple trip to the grocery or a restaurant expended nearly everything I had.  I wanted to sleep in my own bed again, see all my teammates again and have the hours of my day filled with more than TV and crochet. 
...and do you know what?  I'm still pretty much there (but increasingly able to get around, thankfully).  I guess the next stage is supposed to be guilt.  I suppose it's possible that there's been some guilt.  I sometimes wonder whether things might have been different if I had been a better jammer that day.  Or a worse one - so that I wouldn't have been put in.  But I know that the truth is it doesn't really matter and so I've been trying to steer clear of that one.
The other truth is that there's a lot that's happened that doesn't fit into this nice rubric of grief.  Like...
GRATITUDE:  THANK GOD FOR MY FAMILY
When I was lying on the floor, panicked and waiting for the ambulance one of my teammates asked if she could get me anyone.  I asked for Razor who came over, held my hand and asked whether I had a high pain tolerance.   When I said yes she relayed the information to the firemen "hey, she has a high pain tolerance so if she says it's hurting, it really hurts."  I don't know why - but it was the right thing.
When I got to the hospital the firemen tried to move me from the gurney to a wheelchair which caused agonizing spasms.  As I lay there in tears my teammate Bruisey told them 'no.'  They couldn't move me.  It obviously hurt too much.  She said it when I couldn't.
It was my last day in the hospital when my mom came in from Montana.  I've never been so glad to see her face.  She was immediately able to organize the things I hadn't thought of.  Going to the store to grab essentials, getting my apartment ready for a less able lifestyle, making sure my insurance paperwork was in order.
On my arrival home a small army of elves from the league whisked away my sofa and replaced it with a hospital bed.  Prepared meals began to fill my freezer.  I may have been high on drugs and in no small amount of pain but the days were full of friendly faces, encouraging emails, love, life and laughter.  It meant everything to me and still does.
So that's where things stand as of today.  I know I still have a long road ahead of me and hope to do some more writing here now that I have the time.  One thing is for sure, things are looking up from here (or maybe that's the denial talking).
<posted on 3.26.14>

All Is For The Best

—It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end. . . . . Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.
-Dr. Pangloss in Candide by Voltaire

Today I'd like to share with you one of the ways I reset my frame of reference when things in my life aren't going my way or when the monotony of day to day living starts to get me down.*
If you could define the crux of the logical fallacy in many religions it would be what we often refer to as the human condition.  If god is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving - why does pain and suffering persist in the world?  Surely one of those three attributes of god is incorrect.  For the nonreligious the closely related question concerns our purpose here on earth.  We as humans would like to assign value to our life among the chaos.  Why folks chose to go on living through unbearable circumstances?  To cling to life when it might be easier to lay down arms and give up?
In the 1700's a popular French philosopher named Liebniz proposed that since god is all knowing, all powerful and all loving it only stands to reason that this world - the one we live in - is the best of all possible worlds.  Things literally could not get any better than they are right now.  That particular theory played very well with the folks in power in France at the time as you might well imagine.
It did not play well with Voltaire who subsequently wrote an anonymous pamphlet called "Candide" or "Optimism" which was a satirical look at Leibnizian optimism.  Candide is the hero of our story and begins is life in relative comfort and taught Leibniz by a certain Dr. Pangloss.  I won't write you a book report, but for a variety of reasons Candide's life turns from mediocre to horrible in a few short pages.  He is made to suffer through war, famine and earthquake.  His beloved is raped and nearly killed.  His tutor is horribly maimed by syphilis. Characters thought to be dead reappear later in the story but are made old, scarred, poor and miserable by the life that circumstance has forced them to live.
In the middle of this narrative Voltaire allows Candide to escape.  For once, chance brings him good fortune and he finds himself in the mythical El Dorado.  Streets are indeed paved with gold.  Everyone is well fed, happy, healthy, wealthy and charitable.  The side trip allows Voltaire to say "look - if this world is the best world that an all powerful god can create why is it that I, Voltaire, can think of something better?"  Foolishly - Candide chooses to leave El Dorado taking with him as much wealth as he believes he can.  This is human nature at its most predictable.  To be wealthy is not enough - we invariably want to be wealthier than those around us.
Now back in the real world Candide loses all of his fortune, is reunited with his beloved only to realize that she is now ugly, maimed and kind of a bitch.  He finds himself living out his days in Turkey with the miserable characters of his life, arguing about philosophy and living in abject poverty.
(are you ready for the paradigm shift now?  I know it's been kind of rough up until here.  Thanks for sticking with me.)
One day, Candide happens across a man who alone of all the people he has met in his travels is not miserable.  He lives in a decent house with a decent garden and a decent family.  He welcomes Candide and his friends to dine with him as a matter of hospitality.  Naturally, Candide asks about the philosophy by which this man lives.  Surely he must believe that he lives in the best of all possible worlds?  But the man will have none of this talk.  He sends Candide away.
The incident shakes Candide out of his philosophical reverie.  He takes stock of his current situation and sees that he too can have a garden.  His beloved can make crafts and sell them.  In fact, everyone in his home has a skill or trade that's of value.  Their life improves and they no longer bicker but simply see their life as it is, work hard and tend to their garden.
Why do I like this story?  First the obvious:  I love any story where the solution to the given problem is to work hard.  If you haven't figured that out yet then I'm guessing you've never read anything I've written here.  But the less obvious?  I think we hear a lot in modern living about how things must not be as bad as they seem.  We have a reflexive desire to make things 'be OK.'  You know what?  Sometimes things aren't OK.  Sometimes life hands you a shitty deck of cards.  Every waking moment is a moment of hell for someone here on earth.  War, pestilence, famine and disaster prevail over the lives of millions and global warming is probably going to kill off humanity in the long run.
The question isn't whether things are OK.  The question is how you're going to decide to live in spite of all that.
Candide decided to take in his surroundings, see what was real and then work hard and tend his garden.  When I have days of being overwhelmed by various forces I cannot control, I try to do the same.

*I learned everything I say here in a college philosophy course and hope somehow that the naysayers of higher education and the humanities in particular might consider intangibles such as these before spouting off about the lack of value of a higher education in liberal arts.
<posted on 1.31.14>

Passionately Motivated (Not A New Year's Resolution Post)

One of my teammates posted this to Facebook today.  Since Beethoven is my spirit animal I thought I'd repost here:

It's the new year and while I've tried to get started on thoughtful and funny lists of things I've learned in 2013 and things to continue to work on in 2014 they've all been a little flat and uninspired so I'm sparing you the emotional pain of slogging through it.  Suffice to say that what I appear to have learned in 2013 was how to play Angry Birds.  Everything else is debatable.
That's not to say that the time wasn't well spent.  Earlier this fall a friend of mine asked a very relevant question:  How do you stay motivated?  It begs consideration.  How does one get back on the rink day after day, year after year with joy in your heart and fire in your eyes?  I guess the simple answer is that you don't.  Passion is bound to wax and wane with time.
As of today Jet City is back from our two week holiday break.  I've spent the time almost entirely off skates and instead spent time enjoying the holidays and binging on inspirational sports stuff. If you're struggling with the passion of the game then I highly recommend this course of action.  If you're not struggling then I still highly recommend it.  Inspiration is funny - I find that if I surround myself with things I find to be uplifting then it's not long before I drown it out in the everyday noise of life.  Real inspiration comes from within, not my Facebook news feed.  But every now and again an infusion is welcome and I recommend these:
Blind Your Ponies by Stanley Gordon West
This is a book about basketball and small town Montana.  You have to read about 50 or 60 pages before it gets any good so if you find yourself nodding off through the first little bit then stick with it.  The book is not for hardened cynics or realists.  You have to be open to inspiration if you ever hope for it to find you.
The setting is Willow Creek Montana, a place that hardly exists on the map and makes my hometown look like a modern metropolis.  The wonderful thing that the book helps to capture is the nature of sports in small town America.  Hollywood would have you believe that high school athletes across the country are put through rigorous training and selective cuts all so that they emerge with an unthinkable drive to win and the right to walk around town like gods.
But in small towns (and I mean really small towns) this isn't always true.  Your team consists of whichever unlikely souls you can convince to play.  The hope isn't to field a winning team but any sort of team at all.  In Blind Your Ponies we are dared to believe that six boys can overcome their God given abilities to come together and find something great.  That hard work, grit and fortitude mean more than numbers and training.
Rudy (1993)
Yes I know - Rudy makes a lot of top 10 sports movie lists.  I wouldn't mention it except that it appears to have left me a sobbing, hiccuping mess on my sofa this weekend.  In case you live under a rock - Rudy is the story of an unlikely hero who grows up as a huge Notre Dame fan.  When his best friend dies he leave the factory where he works in order to attend school and play football for Notre Dame in spite of his poor academic record and lack of athletic talents.
My swim coach in high school (who is the coach we should all aspire to be) often referenced Rudy in our practices.  At times in the move when all appears to be lost, Rudy goes to his priest and asks, "have I done all I can?"  Since then I've made it my mantra as well.  When I'm down, lost, discouraged or angry I find myself in the mirror looking up and asking "is this it?  Have I done all I can?"  The honest athlete knows there's always more and Rudy not only finds a place in his heart to keep going he touches every person in his life with his dogged perseverance.
These things inspire me because I identify with the underdog in sports.  I believe that heart beats talent every day of the week and twice on Sundays.  What I wish for you in this new year is that you find your own inspiration so that your passion may follow you in 2014 and beyond.
Happy New Year
<posted on 1.2.14>