It took me all of about 18 seconds to fall in love. In real time it was actually only really like three seconds on the jam clock. The short video of a brief moment in a December game between two talented west coast teams seemed this week to set all of derby Facebook’s hearts aflutter, mine included. If you’re a derbyist on social media, you know the video I’m talking about, in which a tenacious jammer lights up a very solid-looking blocker who attempts to backwards block her on the inside line. Basically the jammer just trucks right through her with a shoulder hit to take that inside like she owns it, barely missing a stride, while the blocker lands flat on her back.…
Reflections on roller derby
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Once I saw a guy in the produce section at the grocery store wearing a shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Running sucks.” I had a chuckle at that because I couldn’t have agreed more. With all due respect to those who love and excel at running, I have always despised it. As a kid, I dreaded the mile portion of the Presidential Fitness test in PE. As an adult, I never got past that hump to experience the runner’s high no matter what I put on my iPod. I was never tempted to sign up for a race, despite their promise to deliver feelings of self-satisfaction and accomplishment. Treadmills might as well have been torture devices, to my mind. That said, I recognize that…
Derby takes you strange places. And I don’t just mean a shitty skating rink in a shitty town you’ve never heard of. Or up on stage at a dive bar, singing karaoke in a pair of cow-print chaps. (Though it takes you there, too.) Sometimes it takes you bursting into a room full of newspaper journalists from around the country and entering into a spirited simulacrum of “Queen of the Rink” on carpeting with a skater you just met twenty minutes before. If my life had taken a slightly different path a few years ago, I would have been on the other side of the encounter I described above, a training session for reporters learning how to shoot video. I would have been earnestly…
Categories: derby beginnings, writing
All work and no practice makes Vivi a dull girl. Well, dull is probably not quite right, but it makes her a very restless, anxious girl. Our league scheduled a break around the holidays — it might have been the longest consecutive time we’ve gone without practicing since I started derby. As part of the league’s board of directors, I approved this, while inside I was screaming: “Nooooooooooo!” What was I going to do without practicing for more than two whole weeks?! This might sound like insanity. But it’s actually the opposite. Practice is what keeps me sane. A forced break is probably not a bad thing, especially for someone like me. I confess, it was nice to be able to have a few…
I’ll be honest when I say I was not unhappy to see 2012 kiss off. (Cue that Violent Femmes song.) After getting dropped off to my apartment some time after 1 a.m. on New Year’s Day, I was pretty sober and not quite ready for bed. In the quiet snowy darkness of the early morning, I felt I was still in a sort of liminal stage between 2012 and 2013 so I decided to take a few minutes to write and reflect before bed. 2012: The Year of Sadness. That emotion seemed to be the general vibe, the overarching theme, the fog that blanketed everything. Yet upon further examination, in the interstices of my melancholy, I could see that many good things happened in…
Categories: goals