So the tattoo on my forearm is from a Viking coin…
Practically every symbol of Odin has been used by Nazis, fascists and neo-Nazis in the last century. It sucks, because I wanted some Odin stuff but would pretty much die before I inked a symbol like that on myself, or connected myself with any of that.
This raven looked even a bit too close to the Nazi eagle for me to be comfortable, so that tattoo artist altered it by adding knotwork and extending the tail. Then he hid the Odin rune (currently also a neo-Nazi symbol, sigh) in the tail knot:
Odin’s two ravens are Hugin and Munin. My kids say this one is Hugin, but we call him Hugh.
1. Thank you for talking to me. It is so fucking lonely out there on the ice being the only chick sometimes. You are nice. You are uber sweet. Thanks for making it feel social and like a game.
2. Hahahahahah, you flirt. What are you, like 20? ROFL. <3
3. BUT I WILL TAKE YOUR PUCK ONE DAY RED BARON! I WILL I DON’T CARE HOW FAST YOU COME SPEEDING INTO MY ZONE…
*
I would like… to do what S said and not take this so seriously.
I would like… to shut my brain off and not spent half my time on the ice anticipating fucking up and the other half beating myself up for fucking up when it inevitably happens.
I would like… to just play.
To just play in some unfettered, joyous way that I do in fact feel about this game, somewhere down deep in my soul and bones.
I come off the ice on the verge of tears which of course I choke down because, it’s hockey. And all strangers, all guys. And hockey.
I keep coming back, even though I put myself through this shit every week, once a week, sometimes more. I keep coming back because some better instinct drives me to put my skates on the ice and open up all the speed and paltry skill I have and try again, try again
try again
despite everything. Despite not seeing progress, a lot of the time, or even the point.
Music to work out to. Or Ride Large Horses and Lop off Enemies’ Heads To.
So I joined Fitocracy and a lot of you reading now are my Fitocracy buddies (hi buddies!!). The community there is fantastic and in terms of having people around – virtually if not physically – makes lifting a whole different experience. I love lifting, but it’s kind of lonely if you don’t have a regular workout partner, and I can do the solitary thing for a while but then I find all the alone time less meditative and more depressing.
I have learned so much already. One of the things I’ve learned is that my work gym while convenient, is inadequate. I brought in a barbell and about 100 pounds of plates, and I’m bringing in my bench which has a rack but already I’m deadlifting more than 100 and pretty soon the nice wood floor is going to start to take a beating from the plates. There are no mirrors, no racks, and the pullup frames aren’t anchored. If I want to do pullups I have to stack some plates or a few dumbbells on the other side of the rack so when I put my weight on it it doesn’t crash down on top of me.
Fun times.
So I went over to the local BSC, which is super swank and has really nice people who are Gay and Out to Me in the First Fifteen Minutes, which I kind of love (seriously, I didn’t even out first), and the free weights are decent and wow, that’s still kind of a lot of money to commit every month even with my work’s discount.
But meanwhile, the guy I talked to was from Hawaii… except he only said that because most people don’t know Samoa from a Girl Scout cookie, but then it came out that I’d lived there and actually he’s part Samoan and then there was lots of hugs and talofa and his sister’s a fa’afafine and you know? You know? We laughed about how anytime someone says “oh, I know this Samoan guy” we get all excited and say WHO WHO WHAT SAMOAN WHERE because we are all homesick like that. And then they say, oh this guy
“he was in *Foxboro*,” said my new friend disconsolately.
You miss family. Family is part of it. A big part of it, and respect, he said, and I agreed. It’s a different idea and we talked about Vailima and the beaches on the north side of the island, and the crazy way the roads around Pago Pago are set up. He went to school there too.
This is the waterfall we used to swim in, by my house:
Jump off this. Repeat. Repeat again.
So I was all kind of happy and a little homesick and wanting to swim in some waterfalls, and went back to work feeling that kind of weird sense of being from too many places and no places, all at the same time.
And I thought really, I don’t want a gym membership.
So I sent out an email.
“O HAI WORK AIGA. About our nice but very empty gym.You guys want to go in on some good plates and a couple of decent barbells and maybe a standing rack? Um, or does someone want to bring their stuff in too because I have mine here and do we really want to pay thirty-some dollars a month when we have a really nice gym downstairs?”
I was deluged with emails.
Serious lifters, guys who wanted to donate their weights, who wanted to go in on more equipment with me. We’re going to meet next week and look at the gym as it is and see what we want and start estimating how much a good minimum set up will cost us, once we get all the donated stuff in.
People I know who should know better do, though. People who have been otherwise supportive and nice and who I know actually aren’t homophobic.
But look, if you use the words, they do damage. To me, as your friend, and to everyone else.
I said repeatedly in the locker room “seriously quit with the homophobic slurs” and I got so much pushback and protest, about how it wasn’t about me, about how I should be thicker skinned, about how “I have a gay (relative of choice) so how could I possibly be homophobic??”
So much defensiveness, so much anger, when it wasn’t me using the slur in the first place. Look, if you say something and I say “don’t use that word, it hurts my feelings,” what you say isn’t “ZOMG I AM NOT HOMOPHOBIC YOU ARE OVERREACTING,” say “oh, hey, yeah. That was shitty, sorry.” Apologize. Don’t do it again. Easy.
But that’s not what happened.
And maybe I got strident.
Maybe I got angry.
Maybe I knew when the team disbanded and I wasn’t offered a spot on another team that that had something to do with it. Because things were fine until then.
Maybe people don’t get how isolating it is to be one of a handful of women, and the only out gay person in the league. Maybe it’s hard to understand what it’s like to be in the minority like that, and the huge impact hearing a slur makes when it’s just you and you’re not sure you belong there. Maybe people don’t know what it feels like to be that different all the time, when you feel like you have more to prove, because of being different. And so you don’t get what a huge, huge impact a slur makes.
It says “no, you don’t belong.”
So no matter how much the rest of your actions may say otherwise, that one word, your defensiveness when I call you on it is huge.
And you think, you think it’s just us in the locker room but your sons, your daughters hear you. Other guys who look up to you and want to be like you and who want to emulate you and get your attention hear you, and then they all do it. Because if you do it, then it must be cool. And you already fucking know it’s not cool. My son then listens to those slurs at school and the message he gets is “never ever talk about my family.”
You see? So it’s you and me in the locker room and every time you say “faggot” or “no homo” it causes these ripples. That affect all of us in spreading waves of damage to individuals, to families, to the sport.
It’s sexist rhetoric. And it’s enabled by well-meaning people who still don’t get the actual problem, which is gender boundary transgression.
Here’s some history.
I was a fat kid. Or, you know, I was a pudgy kid and then I was a kind of pudgy teenager who was somewhat physically active and I’ve always been really strong. Just my physiology or something, who knows.
About the time Becca and I got married I’d kind of gotten my head together and also not, about my weight and food and she and I lost some weight, and around that time I started running. Which, actually, I hate. I hate running. I hate running and it sits very often in the same place in my brain that dieting does, of “good” and “virtue” and also
“thin.”
Bullshit, running. But I was running and lost more weight and everyone praised me for being skinny and what I was was actually really cardiovascularly fit and while I hated running I loved the activity and moreso I loved the prowess. So I swam, and biked, and ran, and worked towards triathlons and also joined the Milpitas firefighter academy program and started trying to become a full time paid firefighter.
Firefighting changed everything I believed about myself, my body and my weight. Being fit from running did me no good at all in fire, where I was failing physical agility tests because
1. I wasn’t strong enough
2. I didn’t believe in myself and didn’t believe I could do the job because I was fat/a woman/some other thing
3. I wasn’t mentally strong enough because of one and two.
Those three things meant that even if I managed to somehow pass an agility test (it happened a few times), I failed the process because an oral board panel and paid personnel know when you don’t believe you can do the job even when you’ve passed all the tests and the words coming out of your mouth are “I WILL BE THE BEST FIREFIGHTER SINCE SMOKEY THE GODDAMNED BEAR.”
I failed.
Colossally. I failed in hundreds of small ways and I failed in the larger sense and then I spent about a half a decade kicking myself for it. Then I took up hockey.
Okay, okay, I’m getting to the point.
My point is, if I had played hockey and lifted weights seriously back then, I would have learned a lot more about myself, about my breaking points, I would have developed both the critical physical strength but the even more critical mental strength necessary to both get the job and do the job.
Watch this. Watch this woman not give up. Watch her not accept failure. Watch not her physical toughness, but her mental fortitude.
Now.
Think about “femininity” with me for a second and tell me why it is that it’s wrong when we rush to reassure women who are resisting weight lifting with this phrase.
“Don’t worry. You won’t bulk up.”
What?
No, seriously, what?
You just told me “be as good as a male firefighter but you can’t look like one.”
HOI?
WAT?
First of all, yeah. Women who lift don’t bulk. Generally, we are not wired to put on massive amounts of muscle and to do it we’d have to change our hormones and body chemistry.
But there’s a deeper thing going on here.
I have to compete in a male space while not looking like a man. This is the most important thing of all the things.
And even people who lift say it. And it’s bullshit, actually. What if… we stopped worrying about maintaining this small=feminine thing at all? What if we just said “hey, I’m going to freaking work out and lift and be badass?”
And that was it?
When I started passing firefighter agilities I was around twenty pounds heavier than when I’d started fire. I’d mostly stopped running, and instead I was doing things like this to work out:
Just like that, with a hose like that, in front of my house. My neighbors thought I was out of my fucking mind but that’s how you train for an agility, by doing the stuff in the agility. Plus teaching your brain, “no, you can actually do this evolution. Knock that whiny self-doubt shit off.”
At the time, I had stopped thinking about body. I’d stopped thinking about weight. Fuck my weight. Fuck thin. Fuck “petite,” I just wanted to have whatever it was going to take to pass the fucking agilities and get the firefighter job. I did chinups on a chinup bar over the bedroom door. I hoisted a bag full of weights by a rope up the back of the high school bleachers. I squeezed a squeeze-grip in my truck at traffic lights.
It wasn’t enough. All that. Wasn’t enough.
Now, I know. Hockey and weights have made a difference and I’m pretty sure that with some focused work, at 43 and 180 some-odd pounds at 5’4″, I could get on deck and pass an agility test without much trouble.
Size no longer factors into it. I lift and I think power, I think muscle. I think a size of myself that is beyond size, where someday I will deadlift more than my own weight and the physics of “feminine” cease to matter.
Worse things can happen to a woman than to look like a man.
