* "Trump appeals for the black vote in front of a bunch of white...:"
( Embed: )* "Right-wing media stokes weird, fake Clinton conspiracy theory:"
( Embed: )* "Trump embraces radical right fringe with new campaign hire:"
( Embed: )* "This 19-Year-Old Could Face Up to a Year in Prison for 1 Gram of Marijuana:"
https://mic.com/articles/150519/this-19-year-old-could-face-up-to-a-year-in-prison-for-1-gram-of-marijuana?utm_source=policymicTBLR&utm_medium=movement&utm_campaign=social#.yRLduc0IO* "Is God Transgender?:"
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/opinion/is-god-transgender.html?_r=1* The lung machine came. OMG! It came with two full sets of mouth parts, a car charger option, and a spiffy carrying case. I no longer need to bungy it back together after washings! I can alternate mouth parts! The new nozzle is large enough to clean properly without a pipe cleaner!
I got crap for sleep, and ended up needing to stay in bed long enough that I could only get 4 out of 6 to do things under the wire, but the two I dropped have more time before they go critical. There is to be swimming tomorrow, sounds like.
* This year with the Oympics, I cut down to the bits I like watching the most. I cut all of track and field too, because I've decided I just don't want to do that to myself anymore.
Watching gymnastics this year, every time they pulled back the camera to show how much space there was in the arena, I thought about how ridiculously crowded and marginally supervised gymnastics was at my school. Like, literally we weren't allowed on the trampoline past a certain age for fear of head injury. Like the apparatus were so crowded, that they would have to shut down and move various stations to make way for others. (IE: you could do do rings and pommel horse OR you could do high bar. To open the vaulting station, they had to shut down balance beam and half of floor.) We had entirely the wrong mats. There was one coach for boys and one for girls, who did not practice at the same time because no space. The boy's coach was from our pool of general gym coaches. The girl's coach was god help us all, a volunteer Mother. I have no idea what qualifications either of them had to be doing something so dangerous and complex with too many kids in a small space. It was ridiculously dangerous, and in retrospect it was a miracle that more horrific injuries didn't occur. The only serious one besides the usual knees and ankles, was the older sister of a kid in my class getting a compound fracture on uneven bars.
So given there was one coach in this overcrowded room, it should be no surprise that actual one on one coaching was only for important students. This is not a story about how I could have been a contender. I absolutely positively couldn't have been. I was a distance runner and a dancer, which meant my musculature was bottom heavy. I had the strength to lift ballerinas and heavy things about the house, but I hadn't anything like the sort of upper body strength I'd have needed to be even close to decent.
What I did have was a ridiculous amount of self discipline. I'd start stretching before they let us through the door. I worked my ass off every single practice. I pretty much taught myself the one apparatus I was actually decent at, based on instinct and things I half remembered from whenever the last Olympics was. I put together a surprisingly complex routine by myself and polished that thing to pieces with no coaching or adult supervision.
It was not a popular piece of apparatus. Various people rotated through there, but really, there were only two of us who worked that station. The other athlete who was decent on it, was not ideal either for it, I a different way, but was also self disciplined and hard working. We ended up paired up for most of the few years I worked at gymnastics, patiently spotting each other and doing our best to help the other one out, mostly because we were the two who cared about doing this one specific thing right. We were neither of us going to set the world on fire with our routines. We were neither of us Olympic material, but we loved what we were doing in our realistic sort of way.
So we were actually going to get to go to a meet with other gymnasts my last year doing it. This was literally our first chance to see where we were skill wise compared to other small schools with minimalist over crowded gymnastics programs, so the coach actually carved out a bit of time to one on one at least a couple people on ALL the apparatus, presumably to stop us being an embarrassment out in public.
Now, I was also in Track and Field from literally the first year we were old enough to have the option to sign up for it. Track and Field had a classroom teacher coach, the same one for Cross Country and High School Winter Track. Again, one dude, coaching all that equipment. I was not important, so coaching in Track and field for me consisted of getting to see all the stations demonstrated on the first day of every season and then getting told every Monday how many laps to run each day that week, plus the occasional speech to the group on things like shoes and nutrition. I went whole weeks in which one sentence was the only coaching I had. It was a disappointment, as I would have liked to try long jump, high jump, and pole vault, but I understood why no resources would be wasted on me. Coaching time was a very limited resource; I would never be a sprinter; therefore I could never be competitive at jumping. Again, it was disappointing, but I understood my limittions and the time constraints.
Gymnastics was different though. Here you have two athletes who are hard working, but with limited prospects, who are the only specialists on the team for that particular piece of apparatus. The Coach decided to teach a higher level skill, one that we absolutely couldn't safely teach ourselves without a bit of coaching an an adult spotter. The new skill looked pretty solidly within both our existing skill sets, by which I mean, it looked doable from the level we were already on, as opposed to the vast galaxy of things we likely could never learn to do no matter how hard we worked on it. Instead of training us both on it, the other athlete got all the training. The other athlete had more social importance, being from a moneyed family and popular, while I was a scholarship kid.
I never resented the other athlete, any more than I resented the folks who got to do the field part of track and field. Coaching in track and Field was logically allocated where it would do the most good. I had issues with the running coach for being an asshole in a variety of areas, but not this one. I resented the hell out of the coaching criteria here though, because it was pretty clearly class based.
We went. I was like a point or so below the other athlete in difficulty, because that is how much difference having that one skill made. I had way more things in my routine, but they were all the lower difficulty things I could teach myself. I cheered the other athlete on because it really was good work and they were a decent human being, rare enough in that place. At the same time, I knew damned well that I could have been just as good with the same coaching. No better. Neither of us ever would have gone much further than that. Neither of us DID go any further than that. Next year I switched to Winter track and we both drifted out of the sport.
Still, it is weirdly comforting to see bits and bobs of things I once did decades ago when my body worked and I was young. I pick them out now and then, not good enough to make a routine of, but here and there things someone good enough for the Olympics thinks worth doing, jammed in between the fancier stuff, a sign that I was completely off track despite no one giving a fuck as to what I was doing and no help figuring out what I ought to be doing.
Sometimes it feels like I hallucinated that last season of gymnastics, but seeing those little bits and bobs makes me feel a little proud of the stubborn, creative kid I was. I got that far with next to no help or guidance or even a crumb of encouragement except for that other athlete. I did my routine clean and perfect. I had the sense to quit when my head bonked the glass ceiling before I broke my heart trying to do the impossible for me.
Not bad, considering.
* "Sculpture used in ‘Black Sails’ (II):"
http://sagestreet.tumblr.com/post/148612087312/sculpture-used-in-black-sails-ii* Louisiana is having a major flooding disaster, the worst disaster in this country since sandy. Want to help?
http://thewightknight.tumblr.com/post/148963870683/the-lonely-one96-almalexiaslouisiana-is* California is now an official disaster due to out of control fire made worse by the drought.
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation* "How to help Flint, Michigan:"
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-help-flint-michigan* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com
* Donate to help refugees "UN Refugee Agency:"
http://donate.unhcr.org/international/general* Organizations helping with the refugee crisis:
http://captainofalltheships.tumblr.com/post/128790538169/an-updated-list-of-organizations-to-donate-to-help* A list of LGBTQA Charities:
http://awkward0w1.tumblr.com/post/126399233673* Want Game of Thrones without the creepy? We desperately need new players. We are very inclusive. "Game of Bones MUSH:" gobmush.wikidot.com
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