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Showing posts with label play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label play. Show all posts

Friday, April 2, 2010

Play with the Girls

For about a month now I've been enrolled in a beach volleyball class through a local community college. Now anybody who knows me and my body type might think I'm built for volleyball, and maybe the creator who designed my body, with some help from my genetic brethren the Vikings and Slavs - both notoriously hearty and physical people, had something like volleyball in mind when I was designed. Though my body type was probably originally used for fighting, invading and wielding a sword against the Romans since the average Roman back in 200 BC, was 5'2", and the average Viking was about 6'2" (Viking females averaged around 5'8" back then - my height).

But anyway. I'm sort of built for this type of thing. No sword required.

But I'm rusty. The last time I played volleyball in any sort of organized fashion was court volleyball in junior high, back in 1991. To give a little perspective, in 1991 we were heavy into Desert Storm (thanks Bush, Sr.), the average home price was 120k, and this new thing called the internet was made commercially available and 1 million computers went on line. (Apparently no one knows for sure how many are currently on line, but estimates are in the 4 billion+ range.) So, we've come full circle. Both me and my volleyball playing, our country and the desert-wars (where's all the oil again?), and, of course, the internet going commercial and me entering the blogosphere.

But thanks to my heritage, my early 90s playing experience, and my father, who coached virtually every sport but most notably football, and also taught physical fitness for 36 years in public schools,  I started the semester with a little skill. There were other people with more experience, but I was a solid intermediate player.

But on the very first day of class, our volleyball teacher, aka "coach," separated us into groups to practice a hitting drill involving hitting the ball over the net, retrieving balls and tossing to have the ball set-up to us. Basically, it was a rotation to get us all in the rhythm of playing volleyball. Well. He put me with "The Girls."

The. Girls.

Now, I love women. I love my girlfriends, and as I've grown older have realized the value of good, quality girlfriends. But I also was a coach's daughter. And I've also been "one of the guys" quite a bit in my life.

I have to admit, it bugged me that the coach put me with the girls.

Mostly, it wasn't that I was so much better than the girls, it was that the coach assumed all the girls should be together. It was also that I took to the drill a little faster than some of the other girls.

But I left class that day bugged and, honestly, laughing at myself for being bugged.

Fast forward to 6 weeks later. Today.

I like playing with the girls. In fact, I prefer it.

The inexperienced girls have improved a lot. The experienced girls have improved to the point where they can hold their own with some of the much more experienced guys. Also, the girls are more fun. They don't take the game as seriously as some of the more experienced guys. It's also worth noting that some of the guys are worse than the girl players. It's also worth noting that of the guys enrolled in class, at least half of them have beach volleyball playing experience. Where that's true of maybe 20% of the girls. So all things being equal, I'm having fun playing with the girls.

Side-note. There was a time in my life where I was "one of the guys" for an entire summer. Virtually every day I hung out with these 3-4 guys and we would go to the beach where I was life-guarding, or get food, or play taboo at one of our houses into the wee hours of the morning. For some reason, we just liked playing taboo. Though they came to regard me as a little sister and I never dated any of these guys, they did grow fond of referring to my breasts as "the girls." Don't ask me why. I suppose since I was the only one with boobs, they wanted to name them something special. So every time I write, "play with the girls," I can't help thinking of that summer (I believe it was '96) and how much fun we had doing what essentially amounted to nothing but hanging out. We really should've been playing beach volleyball...

But back to current day volleyball class.

This letting go of my stigma against playing with the girls has yielded some unforeseen side-effects. Firstly, I've mostly let go of being competitive. And I have to say, I like it. I don't care who wins. I don't care if my teammates screw up. I'm just there to learn, get better, and have fun. I've also made some friends. My favorite friend from class is a girl who squeals whenever the ball comes to her when she's not ready. It's great. (Imagine an ascending tone that goes "Whoo-ooo-whoo!") It's like we have our own alarm signal telling us: Pay attention. It's time to play. and Balls will be coming at you now. (Innuendo intended.)


She's getting quite good, actually. We might practice together and I suspect we might go pick up games once class is over.

By the way, I told my dad about this "playing with the girls" thing and he thought it was hilarious. He told me I didn't need to be so competitive. I told him, now you tell me. He was not only extremely competitive, he loved competition. As a kid I used to play one-on-one basketball with him, and this is when I was a full foot shorter than him, he'd hold my head with one hand, then dribble and shoot with the other, just to mess with me.

So I've come a long way.

Play with the girls.

And squeal if the ball comes to you when you're not expecting it. Trust me, it makes the game more fun.



 
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Posted by Katie Strand at 11:06 PM 0 comments
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Saturday, March 20, 2010

Tiredness - Varieties of and unforeseen side-effects

Though I wrote this blog a while ago, this is it's first appearance on blogger and I only edited a few things. Please do let me know your thoughts on tiredness and sleep...or your thoughts on how my younger self used to express her thoughts. All comments are welcome.

Variety is usually good. At least as far as I'm concerned. But have you noticed that tiredness is different depending on what has made you tired?

Right now I'm tired because I'm over-worked (70 hrs a week right now), and underpaid (how much would be enough for 70 hours a week? =not sure there is enough - maybe if I really LOVED my job). Don't get me wrong, I like my job. Which is more than many people can say...but this blog is not about this job.

This blog is supposed to be about the different varieties of being tired.

Have you noticed that feeling tired from playing too much feels so good? Like when you were a kid in the summertime and you were out playing from sunrise to sunset and you come home, eat, and just basically pass out. I loved that feeling of playing hard and sleeping so soundly a bear could come tearing through your bedroom and you'd probably just roll over.

But there are different kinds of tired. The aformentioned, and others as well. There's tired with a headache (brought on from too much computer use or crying babies -of which I have none of my own but have been around enough - babies that is). Tired from traveling- which might be one of the worst because then, to add insult to injury, you have to sleep in a foreign bed or travel more to get to the foreign bed. Yuck. And then there's tired from insomnia from an over-active brain when obsessing about something or just working on a problem way too hard. (Because, really, who ever solved a problem constructively by over-thinking?) That might be worse than traveling-tired. Am I discovering lower-levels of tiredness? This is not a good sign.

One more: Tired from staying up so late with friends who make you laugh so much, your sides and cheeks hurt, and your whole body is tired from the strain of laughing more in a few short hours than you did during the entire Bush administration (laughing was banned during the Bush administration - it was ruled unpatriotic by the patriot act).

So tired leads to sleep. But you know how sometimes you make yourself stay up past being tired to get something done (like work for me right now) and then you realize much to your own dismay that you've pushed yourself past being tired and you can't sleep. I hate when that happens!

So goodnight. And sometimes, even when the tired is induced from a favorable activity (another example: thanksgiving dinner), it can help with a rant, or potentially give you better dreams, or at the very least, give you something to blog about.

Lastly, apologies for being over-parenthetlcal. Recently-discovered side-effect of being overly-tired. Also, over-use of hyphens-another side-effect.

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Posted by Katie Strand at 11:21 PM 0 comments
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