um... guest post?

First, this isn't heather writing. Second, if that confuses you, go read the most recent post, should be somewhat of an explanation. Third, ... um... this is really long. Apparently I have a lot to say about myself. It was fun to write though, so I won't be upset if nobody reads till the end ;-)

Ten things I hate about you. No wait, that's the title of that Heath Ledger movie. Ten things to hate about me? What? Never mind.

I like to be an ass to my body. In many different ways. Not only do I enjoy doing the things that are bad for my body, I get a kick out of the idea that I am the master (mistress?) of my physical being and that it WILL do exactly as I say. One example is the cancer fundraiser a friend of mine organized a couple years ago, it involved running up and down the stairs of the McGill football stadium in Montreal. For 24 hours. It wasn't quite as bad as it sounds, it wasn't constant running for 24 hours, the idea was that there was a certain target number of laps you wanted to reach within the 24 hours. In my case it meant I ran up and down the stairs for the first 20 minutes of every hour for the first 12 hours (from noon to midnight), then I slept for an hour, and then I walked the first 40 minutes of every hour for the remaining 11. Lesson learned: if you're going to do something like that, a couple DOs would be a) think about training for it first, like maybe run up a few sets of stairs maybe even one time before the day of the event; and b) STRETCH!!! Even if you are like me and opposed to stretching on principal and only do it when everyone else around you is doing it and you would feel like a tool to just stand there. If that's the case, make sure you surround yourself with people who will be stretching constantly, thus forcing you into it. One major DON'T would be don't get up to go to frisbee practice at 6am the next morning thinking you can actually do it. You will quickly find that your reward for such hardcore-ness will be tendonitis in both your Achilles' tendons. Or something equally nasty that will restrict your forms of exercise for the next several months to those possible in swimming pools.

I like to be an ass to my brain, much for the same reasons I like to be an ass to my body. My friend, who at the time was my roommate, and I decided last year to embark upon a new sleep regimen called the Uberman. You can google it if you want. The idea is that you sleep for 20 minutes every 4 hours. And that is it. As in, you sleep for a total of 2 hours in a day. Why would one do such a thing? Well number one, it means you have 22 hours of wakefulness in a day, which means there is so much time to do all the fun stuff you want to do and can never fit into your day. And number two, it's showing your brain / body who's boss. Until it turns on you and you end up writing an email to your boss at like 4 in the morning, which is completely coherent with the exception of a few nonsensical sentences seemingly inserted at random in the body of your otherwise totally normal email. Permanently etched into my brain are the two funniest: "bla bla bla research bla bla. The Kiegel exercises are complete. Bla bla bla new paragraph bla bla. I cannot WAIT to case it like a dutch language. He has the most fowl mout I have seen in my year! Bla bla bla." Much blushing, apologizing botched attempting to explain ensued, the people who cared about me forced me into bed, and I've been on at least a quasi-normal sleep schedule ever since.

Frisbee is of course a big part of my life, but it is by no means the only athletic part. I grew up playing hockey, and after a brief hiatus I am back on the ice. I especially like hitting people. And scoring goals. Actually I think I had a dream about scoring a goal last night. But hitting people is almost as satisfying. It actually threw me for a loop when I started playing frisbee and ALL contact was basically outlawed… took me a while to figure out I had to actually actively avoid crashing into people. I also like to do pretty much everything else with the exception of baseball: soccer, climbing, biking (long distance and mountain), running, tennis, squash, and on and on. But baseball… I hope there are no baseball fans in the audience. I may have just lost all respect for you. Wait – heather, how do you feel about baseball?

One of my favourite movies of all time is Throw Momma From the Train. Synopsis: A fat little loser (Danny DeVito) who lives at home with his Momma (played by the most ogre-like human being I have ever laid eyes on… possibly male… leading me to wonder how they phrased the recruitment ad for the audition for that particular part) takes a creative writing course with a recently-divorced failed author (Billy Crystal). Things take a turn for the worse (or the hilarious) when Danny thinks Billy is asking him to kill his ex-wife and offering to kill Momma in return. If you haven't seen it, and have a slightly oddball sense of humour, I highly recommend it. If only for the pleasure of hearing Momma's voice, which is a perfect match to her physique. "Type, type, type like a fat little pigeon" I often say that to my sister, except I replace "pigeon" with "pig". But that's a story for another day.


I used to think I was a frisbee dork. And then I met Heather. Now that I know what an actual frisbee dork is, I guess what I am is… a frisbee enthusiast? THINGS I WILL DO FOR FRISBEE: a) give up basically all of my summer weekends (and by summer I mean April till November); b) spend all my money on gas, hotel rooms, tournament fees, uniforms, field food, etc.; c) drive from Waterloo to Toronto once a week at least for practice (drive ranges from an hour to two and a half hours, TO traffic is out of control); d) miss my cousin's wedding to play at No Borders, perhaps the least competitive tournament of the year (to be fair this was last summer and we were going to be sending our team as two smaller teams); and e) destroy my body playing with, in addition to my main team, a side-team that doesn't practice and sends approximately 10 players to its tournaments. Let me give you a little insider's tip: when a team doesn't practice, not all of its members stay in shape, so while you might think that 10 players means you play 7 out of every 10 points, in reality in the case of anyone who can possibly handle it, it means you play essentially every point. So much fun, but I'm pretty sure I'm destroying my joints. Good thing I grew up with non-impact sports, otherwise I'd already be in a wheelchair. THINGS I WILL NOT DO FOR FRISBEE: a) run my life as if I was in another time zone to prepare my body for a tournament to be taking place in said time zone *ahem*heather*aHEM*; b) obey instructions to do sprint workout / fitness workouts on my own on days when we don't have practice – pretty sure I wouldn't be saying this if there was any chance anyone from Toronto was reading this… um… hi Mere! Oops. c) play outdoors after October and before April – unless it's in Florida or some other such warm sunny locale; and d) um… really that's about it, and I can't help but notice that my "not" list is way shorter, so maybe I AM a frisbee dork.

What I AM is a little bit of a dork in regular, non-frisbee life. Kind of embarrassing, and again this isn't the kind of thing I would tell people if they actually knew me, but Heather already knows (I warned her up front), so really… I WILL be a student for my entire life, or at least until they say they won't pay me to do it and I have to go find a *real* job, and I love to whine about it but really I love it. I went to a talk yesterday and I got so excited about the research it was describing that I was literally bouncing up and down in my seat. Well maybe it was more like I was fidgeting. But you get the idea… just in case you don't, I will hit you with one last piece of information: I can't think of a coherent order to put these little nuggets of Kristin-ness in, so when I'm done writing them, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to copy and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet into a single column, then I'm going to use the =RAND() function to generate a random number to go into another column next to each nugget, then I'm going to ask Excel to sort the two columns on the random numbers, and that will be the order the nuggets go in. If you understood what I said, you are just as much of a dork as I am, and if you didn't, well you'll never know the true extent of it.

I like eminem. There, I said it. No, no: I LOVE eminem. Not the person, as a person I have no doubt that he's a total prick. But his music… sheer brilliance. As far as I am concerned, he is a lyrical genius. If anyone thinks otherwise, I would suspect them of not ever having actually listened to him rap, because if you actually give it a chance and get over the gangsta façade, and your natural revulsion at some of the things he actually says, you will come to appreciate, I think, the way he fits words together and makes things rhyme and just sound so… good. And if you don't, well… I'll meet you at the bike racks at 3:30 and we can have it out that way.

And I'm done. I thought I could make it to 10, but I'm running out of steam, so seven it is. I hope I won't look back on all of this and find it too embarrassing, but I'm done now and I'm not the type to edit myself, so… there you have it!