b l o g o s

script notes for friday night lights

I just started watching the tv series Friday Night Lights on dvd, and I am totally hooked. For one, as I learned in my 7th-grade Tennessee history class, Texas and Tennessee have some shared history and therefore culture (the accents are more similar than one would expect, e.g.). The portrayal of a small town's obsession with high school sports is eerily familiar. The gender politics, the mixing-in of religion with every daily activity, the insane pressure from every corner to win state, a good-looking, hard-nosed coach, all of these are spot on.  As those of you who watch it know, this show is very well done. I can't believe it nearly didn't make it on the air.

I'm only a couple of episodes in--so no spoilers, dammit!--but so far I've noticed a few missing elements that, if they had been included, would have further augmented the show's hyperrealism. (Of course maybe they show up later in the season, or subsequent seasons.)

1. a shitty concession stand at the games. it needs to reek of ketchup, corn oil, and garish yellow light and be staffed by booster ladies. more fans need to be drinking out of waxy pepsi cups that disintegrate in their mouths and scarfing down oversalted popcorn.

2. making out underneath the bleachers. there are, after all, more reasons for non-athletes to go to games than just to root for the team. 

3.  The smoking crowd. The vo-tech crowd. The drug crowd. (significant overlap here).

4. There definitely needs to be one or two disabled fans who yell obnoxious things at the coach and the players. Ours had one leg, crumpled skin, and wore a trucker's hat sideways. He called himself "Crip," and he would lean on the chain-link fence for all four quarters, hollering.

5. Classrooms.

6. Pep rallies, on Friday afternoon, with hilarious, attention-loving hams who also play on the football team.

7. Other athletes, besides football players--you know, baseball, basketball--who strut into the football games with their letterman's jackets on. Of course my school was so small that all the teams had all the same people on them. But still. 

8. Cars. Shitty cars with loud radios and louder engines.

swimming

When I swim at the pool at the Activities and Recreation Center (ARC, yo), I work on memorizing latin declensions, 50 meters at a time. es, um, ibus, es, ibus. Then I'll flip and turn to conjugations. bo, bis, bit, bimus, bitis, bunt. But sometimes my mind wanders from that, and I think about how Aristotle should have included seeing underwater in his list of things that count as phantasia. Why didn't he, I wonder. He was otherwise so thorough. Surely the ancients did not keep their eyes shut in the sea. I think about stuff going on right now (sum, es, et, sumus, estis, sunt). How on earth Michael Phelps barely skims the surface of the water when I feel like I'm always sinking. How it isn't fair that people got so upset when he was photographed smoking that bong. He's 23 for crying out loud. It was pot: not exactly a performance enhancer. I go back--bam, bas, bat, bamus, batis, bant--and think of other swims before, of E! who taught me how and helped me improve. Of our master's coach who was patient with my plodding and imperfect strokes. Of that time I swam a mile without stopping because I was so pissed at this girl in graduate school. Of that time KM had to get out of the pool because she was so hungry. How E! always craved hamburgers while swimming. How hungry swimming makes me. How butterflies make me think I'm going to drown. How many laps I have to go before my mile is done.

presidential fitness

This photograph of Barack Obama leaving a gym makes me wonder what his fitness routine will be like come January; indeed what he does now. I know he plays basketball, and no doubt he'll be able to organize that at the white house;  though maybe he'll need to recruit secret service agents who happen to play. Does he use machines like the stairmaster or treadmill? Does he spin? He doesn't seem like an elliptical kind of guy--those things are too easy. Maybe he lifts weights. Does he sweat a lot or a little? Will the White House have a fitness room? Does it already? W. probably rides one of those windy stationary bikes.

When he's president, will he schedule a fitness session into every day?

These questions don't, at first glance, seem to bear on the important issues pressing on this nation, but they also kind of do. He seems like the kind of guy who needs to exercise for sanity and focus (something I can relate to). On the one hand, it would seem pretty difficult for the most powerful man in this country to find time to work out, but on the other hand, not at all. I know people have written about the obsession with presidential fitness, which in the popular imaginary usually slides into fitness to lead (think FDR and Houck and Kiewe's book). There's also the obsession in the popular press with such matters, but this is the first time I've actually started to pay attention. I'll probably try to track such matters here, so if anyone sees related articles, please send them along.

anticipation

Waiting for Tuesday feels a little like waiting for a really important championship game, only the players will have gone home; many of the judges don't seem to have watched the same contest I did; and the scoring system may or may not work properly. In the meantime, though, lots and lots of things to keep me busy, in addition to shaking my head at the latest Palindrone: that the press's labeling her critiques of Obama as "attacks" threatens her freedom of speech. I mean, please. Pretty please?

Those scoreboards had better fucking work.

Anyway. My first full weekend at home since early September (and end of D.S.T no less) means catching up by tending to deadlines and promised reading and also some really, really good mountain biking. Nothing gives those endorphins a kick quite like riding at high speeds deep in the woods where the fall colors have turned the sun into a gigantic, super high wattage red/orange/yellow disco ball. I would have enjoyed it even more if not for our governor's plan to close down those trails, along with so many rape crisis centers, to balance his budget. Last week his approval rating was half--half!--that of W's.

Which brings me back around, worrying toward Tuesday. Get that vote on out, people.

bikes, hills, lakes.

We just rolled down from our northwoods vacation, where we hiked and/or biked and/or ran daily. Three out of the six days, we logged more than 15 miles each day, including one hike and one bike around this trail system. The trails, you might notice, even with the blurry i-phone picture, wind around lake after lake. The closest approximation to sublime for me is zooming on a path of pine needles, woods and hills to my right, a beach and shimmering lake to my left. And that's after the bike shot out from under me on the dew-soaked trellis with its surprise curve.  I know a lot of road bikers and non-bikers who think mountain biking is crazy, and given that this trek gave me the occasion to come up with the word "scruise" to name the hideous scrape/bruise thing my handlebar made on my left bicep, they have a point. Still, the concentration and sheer effort required by mountain biking can get my mind off everything else in the world while at the same time concocting some equally crazy endorphines. So yeah, crazy good.

And here is a photo of some cute little duckies in the lake behind our cabin. The little guy kept dipping its head in the water and shaking it out, like ducks do, and well, that's a little bit how we all felt, just being away for awhile.

new rules

Once upon a time when I started this blog, I made some promises. One of those promises was that I wouldn't blog about "my body." This post may or may not cross that line, but today JM and I started a weight-training program. I have not had a hard core weight-lifting regimen since before the car wreck that fucked up my shoulder and neck a few years ago. Repeated attempts to get back into lifting resulted in re-injury, meaning I would end up back in the old neck brace. It wasn't worth it. So I just went with all the cardio exercises and yoga and pilates, and trusted that this would maintain strong, healthy muscles. And for the most part, I guess it has.

But when JM mentioned that he was interested in training with weights, I bit. We even bought a book, which is JM's way (ask him about his books on cleaning the house or individual retirement accounts). This book is called New Rules of Lifting. There's one for men and one for women, but since JM doesn't have masculinity issues (and I apparently do), we bought the one for women. The cover says "how to lift like a man and look like a goddess."

I actually don't aspire to either of these, nor do I appreciate the author's attempts to appeal to women by using punning chapter titles such as "Core of Babylon"--does he know that he's replacing whore?--but I do like the philosophy of this book, which goes against most everything I've ever been taught about weight training.

The author claims that isolating and working little muscles to exhaustion (e.g., bicep curls, tricep extensions, etc.) accomplishes little in terms of the body's overall strength and capacity. Instead, the book promotes weight-training exercises that work a lot of muscle groups at once, and they all involve core muscles (e.g., squats, upright row, pushups). The argument here is that these exercises train the muscles in the way we use them everyday, imitating movements that are familiar to us like standing and sitting (squats) or picking one's self up off the ground--though I guess in academia that's  more typically metaphorical.

The book gives, like, 10 different workouts. And it occurred to me when I was working on the step-ups with dumbbells, that the isolation approach might be exactly why I kept reinjuring myself. If I stick with movements that recruit other muscles as well, I might avoid injury. And yes, I know that this is the very logic in favor of isolation exercises--that the muscles will get stronger precisely because they can't recruit bigger muscles to help. But I'm willing to suspend that in the interest of experimentation. I'm pretty sure I won't end up looking like Athena, but maybe--just maybe--I'll be able to avoid the neck brace.

horror and fitness

Holy crap. Last night John and I went to see 28 weeks later. Don't worry, I won't give anything away; I can barely even remember how it ended.

This is because phenomenologically, watching the movie reminded me of some crazy home fitness contraption I read about last week that looks like a cross between a torture device and an amusement park ride that basically whirls and shakes and drills you for ten minutes until every muscle is sore. I think Madonna will soon use it. 

The movie was relentless. Its makers did stuff with light and speed that I've not yet seen in a horror flick (though I'm no expert--in fact, I don't even like the genre). I wouldn't be surprised to learn of the film inducing siezures or otherwise inflicting bodily harm. This morning my eyes are swollen, my jaw is sore, and my knee hurts.

And I loved it.

number seven

Okay, for those of you who didn't watch the women's national championship last night, I'm sorry.

Tennessee turned in, really, a powerful, even elegant, team effort. They moved the ball, made the right moves, shot well, and played incredible defense. What a joy to watch.

Thanks to Katka for lending cable and couch!

[Update: thanks to those of you who have offered congratulations in the comments.  People have also been emailing all day, and I have to say it's a little weird to be congratulated when all I did was bum a spot on a cable-having friend's couch, drink raspberry framboise lambic ale, eat brownies, and read the house copy of Spin magazine during the commercials.]

tired of your workout routine? try this!

public weight, pt 2 (gender and sexuality edition)

Every once in awhile, a comment or set of comments will prompt a blogger to draw them together in a new post. C's and Chris's comments to the previous post on women athletes and weight, which urge the conversation toward gender and sexuality, are a case in point. My comment response ballooned, sent me to the tubes to confirm some vague memory about women's tennis (details below), and then I decided this deserved its own post.

In grad school I wrote a seminar paper on women athlete's bodies as a site of anxiety about sexuality, especially the WNBA's attempts to hyper-heterosexualize its players in the league's early years. Photoshoots feature the sleekest, thinnest of WNBA players in tight sweaters and leather and dresses. Announcers emphasized certain players' love of lipstick or off-season careers (kindergarten teacher, model) in order to stress that these are Ladies. I remember one valentine-themed commercial featuring men "groupies" of WNBA, running into players on an elevator and giving them creepy googly eyes and saying "excellent crossover dribble."

Here's a small selection of photos of the first faces of the WNBA, Jennifer Azzi, Lisa Leslie, and Sheryl Swoopes.

It's interesting to note how only Azzi's arms are exposed. The Swoopes photo, in fact, where the arms are entirely cropped off, appears in ESPN magazine in a lengthy article about Swoopes's coming out as a lesbian. The trick here becomes deciphering whether the ESPN portrayal is a) flying in the face of stereotypes about lesbian bodies or athlete bodies, b) downplaying the athletic bodies in favor of a 'human interest' story, or c) playing into masculine fantasies about lesbian sex, the ultimate hetero man cliche. I'm just saying, there's something going on here with the discomfort with women's muscles: no one seems to know what to make of them. 

In the WNBA's early years (mid 1990s), women's basketball was being presented as the best of all possible sports for hettie men because those men could play out their sexual fantasies even as they indulged their love for sports. There was no room for lesbianism, when at the same time many prominent players (the league's first mvp, Cynthia Cooper and Sheryl Swoopes e.g.) are relatively out lesbians. The other pro league, the ABL (since folded) presented its players as athletes and even advertised in Out magazine. (Note how the binary becomes woman v. athlete here. I think that's how it works.) Don't even get me started on WNBA Barbie (pictured at left), whose hairbrush is three times as big as her water bottle, and whose physical differences from 'regular barbie' come down to a little more height and flat feet--at least this one can stand (unless she's holding the ball, then she topples over).

There was also the hubbub about a strong and tall (5'9") tennis player, Amelie Mauresmo (pictured at right), an out lesbian to whom Martina Hingis referred some years ago as "half a man." I think Lindsay Davenport even got in on the action there. This instance is yet another instance where the categories of otherness and excessivness all line up: and here we have not only a bulkier than usual tennis physique, but we also have a non-American, non-straight person, etc. The category of woman can't seem to contain all these othernesses (at least that's how the logic goes). I'd argue that the same thing happens with Serena Williams, also a focus of the NYT article. And with the Williams sisters race obviously enters the picture. In fact, I'd credit the Williams sisters with beginning the redefinition of pro women's tennis bodies, starting with the things they wear. I'm positive I'm by no means the first to notice  or write about this.

Obviously this is too much to write about here, and I fear losing nuance by skating from example to example, but this is something I have long been interested in for what are obvious reasons given my life as an athlete and my current one as an academic. Someday I'll share some anecdotes about how my size 'registers' in academe. Thankfully, though, a grad student at Indiana, Korryn Mosizek, is planning a dissertation that will draw together lots of these issues around sexuality and sport (men and women--because as Chris suggests, these issues are certainly not confined to women's sports, they just run very differently on each side). And I know Mindy Fenske at South Carolina is pulling together an NCA panel on theses issues. Go Mindy.

I could go on and on about how when I played our fans were upset because our shorts were getting longer--more like the guys' uniforms, and about the debates about what ABL players should wear (I can't find an image, but the early ABL uniforms looked like one-piece bathing suits). Unbelievable! Thank goodness our coaches didn't give in fully, though they did pass along the message from our administrators that we are Ladies first and athletes second--I can't help but read this as underwritten by the very kind of anxiety C's student is writing about, whereby the categories of woman and athlete are still somehow not entirely commensurable, and the trouble really does fall back on the category woman.