Girls On The Gridiron

Remember in school, when you learned it was called balance of power? You know, when no one branch, much less party, controlled all our branches of government?

Such a refreshing change to see some sense restored, as well as some balance…

I finally found out last night where my bizarre combination of broad shoulders, large musculature and height comes from!!!

You see, for those of you who don’t know me (and for some reason read my blog) I just don’t match my family. I just don’t. My older brother is shorter and very muscular. My little brother is tall and thin. Mom is short and so very skinny and the man who helped contribute to my birth is tall and slim. My cousins on my dad’s side are short and skinny and the ones on my mom’s side are too short too.

So where the hell did I come from?

Since college, I’ve weighed in from anywhere between 180 and 200. Anyone who sees me is like “you look like your 150.” Apparently, 150 seems to be the upper limit of what people imagine, without pictures of oompa loompas appearing in their brains.

But I haven’t’ seen that weight since high school. (At which point the man referenced above, some of you would call him dad, would habitually tell me I needed to lose weight.) Maybe back then I didn’t have any muscle. Who even remembers?

But today I stand before your proud of my weight and the way I look. It took me 4 years to be happy with who I am. having a loving husband helped. Playing football and competing in weightlifting sealed the deal. Because hey, if I was a skinny chick, I would have gotten my ass kicked.

I used to be shy about the weight thing, until the first time my football team posted it on the web. Then it was like, oh…My friends saw it, and only a few teased me. But whatever, how many girls do you know who play line?=)

The only other time was on a leadership retreat. I was up a tree (5 stories high) standing on a platform, on belay on this rope. The next girl who was supposed to be my counterweight strapped in. I looked down. She was like 100 pounds. Wet. I asked what the highest weight difference was that these ropes could support and we…just…made it..That was the first time I remember announcing my weight at the top of my voice to a group of ten people.

Today, I’m around 185. I work out multiple times a week. I can leg press 250 pounds for 60 reps and not be tired. My calves are like rocks and my thighs…well, I’m working on those. But I’m proud of my strength and my ability to lift more then your average person.

But last night, someone told me I look like my maternal grandmother. That she was also big, with broad shoulders. I don’t think they had women’s football back then, but she sounded like someone who could have played it if there was.

I never knew my real grandmother. My mom’s real mom died while giving birth to my mom. A tragic way to start a childhood, my mom still deals with the effects of it to this day.

So I hope that for my mom, learning that her kid looks like her mom, just made it a little easier.

And to my own real grandmother, thank you for finally making me feel like I belong in the family.

You Decide.

Holy cow. Something I never expected to see. The NY Sharks lost their first regular season game in 5 years.

Woah. This rocks my foundation, my very faith in football. It makes me mourn the passing of an era.

Growing up in an underfunded program in Queens, my teams always lost. Everything. All the time. It didn’t matter though, because sports are sports and if you learn to lose early enough, you learn to lose with grace and realize from the beginning, that it really is the journey and not the end.

With the Sharks, it was like magic. My last season, we were untouchable. We were champions. We had been winning since 2001 and through 2002. It was awesome. NO one could take us.

That’s a feeling I never had before and one I was proud to have experienced. We fucking rocked. There was bad with the good, but in the end, when you’re a champion, it’s an amazing feeling.

After I left, a little team out of CA came in 2003 and defeated the Sharks, in the championship game. That sucked, but hey, if you’re gonna go down, it’s ok to go down to a champion.

But in the regular season? NO way.

It says something to the growing strength of the other teams and the continual progress of women’s football forward. Which is good.

I love you ladies, for everything we’ve done together, for everything we’ve learned and for what we’ve made this sport into.

But for a Shark, the impossible has happened.

We have lost.

To a legacy I was lucky enough to be part of, all I can say is:

SHARKS! HOO RAH! 51!!!

The House voted to extend the Patriot act, though with some amendments. (I wonder, what books make their warning lists. Who determines them?)

Been thinking about civil liberties, with the police checking bags randomly on our trains and subways.

I have to admit, I’m on the fence here. Put yourself in a NY’ers shoes for a moment. We take a transport system that is hot during the summer, freezing during the winter, not always on time and usually crowded. Most of us leave no extra time in our already long commutes to deal with extra security.

However, we’re the same city that had our skyline ripped apart. We’ve dealt with extra security measures, threats and fears for years.

We’ve watched in horror as Spain suffered their attack and then London. And now London has gotten hit again.

We’re also one of the few bastions of liberalism and diversity in the nation.

So how do you balance all this? How do you balance a need to support your family, a fear of past and current events and your own civil liberty and freedom?

When it comes to our public transport network, I’m going to let my conservative inclinations fully vet here. I am fully in favor. I think if they could find a way to fund it, maintain it and run it fairly, there should be the same type of security you have in the airport in all of our transport networks. I have no idea how they would pull that off, but if they could, I think they should.

Of course, this would be too time consuming and expensive. Maybe a middle ground could be metal detectors and bag scanners at the entrance of subways. Increased security at our depots.

Less then that could be these random checks. But we must make sure the people who do them have the right equipment and training.

I don’t want to live in a military state. But I’d also like to travel freely and without fear.

My first experience with martial law was in San Francisco during the riots. My second experience of the tightest level of urban security was 9/11. (Was that even martial law? I didn’t know or care at the time. I was still trying to figure out the horror of what I witnessed.)

Obviously, you can’t fight this type of cowardly, terrorist activity. But I’d like to see us try.