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dragonlady7Head above water. Still above water. I am reading LJ intermittently, trying to keep up. I open tabs on entries, to reply to them later. Eventually I close them. I am reading, and I care, but I just can't get thoughts down, can't cohere enough to communicate.
Computer had a scary kernel panic last night. Why? Because I have over 75 tabs open in Firefox. All of them things I plan to get to, soon, later, last week, three months ago. It's relentless, this life.
(I restored the session. Mixed blessing.)
Last night was a derby bout. Semifinals for season championship. My team was in #1, undefeated for the season. We were up against the #4 team, winless for the season. Last time we faced them we won by 1 point.
Last night we won by 50. They were down a key player, but I think the real difference was that we had a self-run bench. Instead of the coach telling us who was playing the next line (and mostly just putting out the same people over and over) , she simply split us in half, and said, "Organize yourselves." So we had certain designated jammers, split up evenly between the lines and operating in rotation. The rest, we filled in ourselves, by discussing and making plans on the bench. It worked flawlessly.
I realized early on in the night that I was not going to play well. An hour before warmups I realized I'd forgotten something crucial, and had to make a panicked phone call to get it taken care of. Then my phone died, inexplicably and utterly-- it had a 45% battery charge, then wouldn't turn on. (It turned back on today, claiming that the battery had been low, but after being plugged in for 5 minutes, it was back up to a 45% charge. Hm.) So I couldn't find out what was up with my emergency help, and people kept asking me what was up, and I didn't know. About two minutes before warm-ups I got another piece of extremely disappointing news*, and had a moment where I looked around trying to think of somewhere I could go to cry, undisturbed, for a little while. But no-- I had to warm up, right then, because the bout was about to start. So I choked it down and went and skated, and eventually found a teammate to just hug me for a minute so I could feel better. (It did work, somewhat.)
So I appointed myself Line 2's bench manager, and put lineups out. As the night wore on and I kept making mistakes out on the track, I focused on the positive, and substituted a couple of rookies who were doing extremely well, instead of going out myself. They played wonderfully, and were delighted to see heavy rotation, and didn't let me down the way I was letting myself down. It felt much better to have that kind of control, and the others seemed to welcome it; it calmed and focused us, since we were putting out lines more or less by committee. I made almost no decisions-- I just organized. It was really calming.
I felt like I didn't play much, but I'm sore as hell this morning. I mean really, really bad. My thighs are like stuffed sacks of cold shit. It's awful. But I was exhausted when I started the game; my legs felt heavy even before I started warmups. I don't know. I'd been really working on my conditioning, I thought, but I'm in a bad way. I guess I'd better work even harder this week, since I have bouts three of the next four weekends and I'd really like to do well in them.
This morning at dawn's crack I drove Z to the parking lot of his office building and he got into a minivan to drive to Baltimore with 6 of his coworkers. He'll be there until Thursday. After he left I cried all the way home in the car, dwelling on the disappointing news I got last night. I got home, changed, grabbed my skate bag, went to practice, and skated until I couldn't feel my legs, and then laughed until I cried with my teammates, who were all hungover, happy and hilarious. (We attempted to scrimmage, all bruised and shaky, since we have two bouts in the next three weeks. The last jam, we jammed a skater who never plays that position, and she proceeded to cut track heinously and scream nonstop. It was so funny we all wound up lying on the floor laughing too hard to get up.)
I got an hour's nap with Chita sleeping on my face, which I'd badly needed. Then it was off to a work function.
Tonight I need to send out about 30 emails, crop several photos to web resolution and send them out, and write up an exhibit description for the QCRG website. I have gotten so little done today, and I don't have time to slack like this.
The exhibit opening is Thursday. Yes, THIS Thursday. That's not long from now. The photos are all printed, I'm told, and are waiting at the Delaware Ave store. So I'll pick them up tomorrow after work, and then I'll be off to the gallery, to start the process of hanging the exhibition. Oh lordy. I don't have the text for the labels. I don't know if we need an artist's statement or anything. I might write those things.
I don't really want to be alone. Z left me a sink full of dishes and an unmowed lawn, and I won't be home except for minimal quantities of sleep this week, so I guess I just hope I don't get a ticket for the lawn. I'll have to do dishes to eat, but then, I won't really have time for food so it won't matter, I guess.
And I can't even bribe Chita to snuggle with me right now, so that's depressing. But hey! My team's undefeated this season! That's never happened! It's kind of awesome. So there's that.
* The disappointing news? I had nerved myself up, after considerable agonizing, to ask if I could get a photographer credit somewhere on the exhibition's promo postcard. I felt bad being pushy, but, well, it isn't an exhibit of tattoos, it's an exhibit of photographs of tattoos, and I took every one of them. So I think I kind of ought to be mentioned.
So the person doing the postcards added me in, in this tiny font, in the corner. It didn't matter, I was happy.
I saw a printed copy, two and a half minutes before warm-up. And my name was gone. And it utterly gutted me, which I hadn't expected. But it had taken so much for me to speak up in the first place, and if I'd known it didn't matter and I wouldn't get it, I wouldn't have expended the not-inconsiderable effort that cost. I really did dwell on it for days, remorseful at what a greedy bitch I was being; I can't help it, that's how my social anxieties work.
After the bout Z pointed out that in the digital file, my name *was* there. They'd just used such a small font, thin, white text on black background, that in the print, the ink had bled very slightly, and thus had utterly, completely obscured my name. Even if you know it is there, you can't read it, but you can see a few pixels of interruption in the ink on a few of the copies.
Still devastating, but now I'm even more upset with myself that I'm still this upset about it. But I am. Oh, I am. It's pathetic.
Computer had a scary kernel panic last night. Why? Because I have over 75 tabs open in Firefox. All of them things I plan to get to, soon, later, last week, three months ago. It's relentless, this life.
(I restored the session. Mixed blessing.)
Last night was a derby bout. Semifinals for season championship. My team was in #1, undefeated for the season. We were up against the #4 team, winless for the season. Last time we faced them we won by 1 point.
Last night we won by 50. They were down a key player, but I think the real difference was that we had a self-run bench. Instead of the coach telling us who was playing the next line (and mostly just putting out the same people over and over) , she simply split us in half, and said, "Organize yourselves." So we had certain designated jammers, split up evenly between the lines and operating in rotation. The rest, we filled in ourselves, by discussing and making plans on the bench. It worked flawlessly.
I realized early on in the night that I was not going to play well. An hour before warmups I realized I'd forgotten something crucial, and had to make a panicked phone call to get it taken care of. Then my phone died, inexplicably and utterly-- it had a 45% battery charge, then wouldn't turn on. (It turned back on today, claiming that the battery had been low, but after being plugged in for 5 minutes, it was back up to a 45% charge. Hm.) So I couldn't find out what was up with my emergency help, and people kept asking me what was up, and I didn't know. About two minutes before warm-ups I got another piece of extremely disappointing news*, and had a moment where I looked around trying to think of somewhere I could go to cry, undisturbed, for a little while. But no-- I had to warm up, right then, because the bout was about to start. So I choked it down and went and skated, and eventually found a teammate to just hug me for a minute so I could feel better. (It did work, somewhat.)
So I appointed myself Line 2's bench manager, and put lineups out. As the night wore on and I kept making mistakes out on the track, I focused on the positive, and substituted a couple of rookies who were doing extremely well, instead of going out myself. They played wonderfully, and were delighted to see heavy rotation, and didn't let me down the way I was letting myself down. It felt much better to have that kind of control, and the others seemed to welcome it; it calmed and focused us, since we were putting out lines more or less by committee. I made almost no decisions-- I just organized. It was really calming.
I felt like I didn't play much, but I'm sore as hell this morning. I mean really, really bad. My thighs are like stuffed sacks of cold shit. It's awful. But I was exhausted when I started the game; my legs felt heavy even before I started warmups. I don't know. I'd been really working on my conditioning, I thought, but I'm in a bad way. I guess I'd better work even harder this week, since I have bouts three of the next four weekends and I'd really like to do well in them.
This morning at dawn's crack I drove Z to the parking lot of his office building and he got into a minivan to drive to Baltimore with 6 of his coworkers. He'll be there until Thursday. After he left I cried all the way home in the car, dwelling on the disappointing news I got last night. I got home, changed, grabbed my skate bag, went to practice, and skated until I couldn't feel my legs, and then laughed until I cried with my teammates, who were all hungover, happy and hilarious. (We attempted to scrimmage, all bruised and shaky, since we have two bouts in the next three weeks. The last jam, we jammed a skater who never plays that position, and she proceeded to cut track heinously and scream nonstop. It was so funny we all wound up lying on the floor laughing too hard to get up.)
I got an hour's nap with Chita sleeping on my face, which I'd badly needed. Then it was off to a work function.
Tonight I need to send out about 30 emails, crop several photos to web resolution and send them out, and write up an exhibit description for the QCRG website. I have gotten so little done today, and I don't have time to slack like this.
The exhibit opening is Thursday. Yes, THIS Thursday. That's not long from now. The photos are all printed, I'm told, and are waiting at the Delaware Ave store. So I'll pick them up tomorrow after work, and then I'll be off to the gallery, to start the process of hanging the exhibition. Oh lordy. I don't have the text for the labels. I don't know if we need an artist's statement or anything. I might write those things.
I don't really want to be alone. Z left me a sink full of dishes and an unmowed lawn, and I won't be home except for minimal quantities of sleep this week, so I guess I just hope I don't get a ticket for the lawn. I'll have to do dishes to eat, but then, I won't really have time for food so it won't matter, I guess.
And I can't even bribe Chita to snuggle with me right now, so that's depressing. But hey! My team's undefeated this season! That's never happened! It's kind of awesome. So there's that.
* The disappointing news? I had nerved myself up, after considerable agonizing, to ask if I could get a photographer credit somewhere on the exhibition's promo postcard. I felt bad being pushy, but, well, it isn't an exhibit of tattoos, it's an exhibit of photographs of tattoos, and I took every one of them. So I think I kind of ought to be mentioned.
So the person doing the postcards added me in, in this tiny font, in the corner. It didn't matter, I was happy.
I saw a printed copy, two and a half minutes before warm-up. And my name was gone. And it utterly gutted me, which I hadn't expected. But it had taken so much for me to speak up in the first place, and if I'd known it didn't matter and I wouldn't get it, I wouldn't have expended the not-inconsiderable effort that cost. I really did dwell on it for days, remorseful at what a greedy bitch I was being; I can't help it, that's how my social anxieties work.
After the bout Z pointed out that in the digital file, my name *was* there. They'd just used such a small font, thin, white text on black background, that in the print, the ink had bled very slightly, and thus had utterly, completely obscured my name. Even if you know it is there, you can't read it, but you can see a few pixels of interruption in the ink on a few of the copies.
Still devastating, but now I'm even more upset with myself that I'm still this upset about it. But I am. Oh, I am. It's pathetic.
