nerds of steel

New York Times Observer! Sorry, was in a tab next to a NYT one-- article (in the "Style" section, oddly) about Nerds of Steel. It is interesting to me because, well, it is so shallow, and women are dismissed as a by-the-way in the first sentence or so.

Roller derby is very strongly tied to the female equivalent of this, which they say just doesn't exist. But it does. It's just different.
And nobody ever writes those stories. "It's different for women," they say, and then don't address it. Nobody really ever addresses that. Because it's not generally interesting. Because the default position is assumed to be male.

Anyway. I guess my relationship to derby isn't the same-- I'm not trying to secretly be buff, or anything. I just have found myself after a profound lifelong disinterest in jockdom to be a fitness nut because I am addicted to exercise endorphins and also have found an external motivation-- the camaraderie of a team-- to get me to squander ridiculous amounts of time and effort, to the point of restructuring enormous swathes of my life, on pursuing physical fitness.

For women fitness is assumed to always be about losing weight. I keep getting stuck in a trap of using fat-language on myself ("my fat ass won't fit in that" etc) when I don't mean to, and I'm so frequently baffled into saying very much the wrong thing. The thing is, I am fat, by the medical definition of obesity. I am! I am just over the upper limit of overweight, by about two to five pounds, into obesity. I am "obese". So I am fat! And thus when I say I am fat I am not trying to belittle myself. But it's so hard not to sound like I am.
Since I started roller derby I've gained about thirty pounds, and lost fifteen again; I fluctuate depending on numerous factors, by quite a lot. I had, even in my worst idle days, never weighed over 200 pounds, though I'd come very close a few times; at the peak of last season I had ventured as high as 215. I hover right around the double-century mark currently. I am proud of this. I have skullcrushing thighs, and I scare people. I am so grateful that roller derby removed that huge psychological barrier-- in 2003 or so when I was very out of shape and had drifted up to 195 I was terrified what would happen if I gained just a few more pounds, and how awful that would be, etc. It was so liberating when it finally happened and thanks to derby I had such an enormous protection from this lifetime of fat-shame conditioning.

But I lack the coherence to make a pithy article about this. I lack a lot of coherence lately and it's driving me nuts. I was going to write a great essay about my annual teeth-gritting ordeal of the Attack of the Part-Time Irish-- don't you people remember the 90s when people were being murdered by terrorists over the wearing of the fucking green, assholes? Can we not be quite so fucking twee about it?-- but it is a very long time since I used to get Sinn Féin's email digests and I just can't summon the ire.

Except when I'm driving by myself. I should record those rants. In lieu of feeble attempts at journal essays.