Any of you members of Allentown Athletix? They have a nice facility. Also, they're smart.
My team captain in roller derby is a fitness instructor by trade, and in general a fitness nut. She kickboxed competitively for years, her last season being 2003, when she retired after 18 wins, 2 by knockout. She's about six feet tall, shoulders like a bull, intimidating. She plays hard. Her squat bar, she is fond of saying, is exactly equivalent to the weight of one of my teammates (Notorious V.A.G., who is on the skinny side let's just say).
She's got impressive fitness qualifications, having been certified in several disciplines. She works for more than one gym, and takes on private clients for a hefty fee.

She negotiated a deal, via the Queen City Roller Girls, with Allentown Athletix: She teaches a class there every Saturday morning, 11:30 to 1:30. It is open to any member of the gym. (Nice, as there are no other classes there on Saturdays.)
It is also open to any member of the Queen City Roller Girls, with no need for them to sign up with the gym. (They have our names all on a list, and we just give them photo ID.) The QCRG are also being offered a really great membership rate, so we can use the facility anytime. And in return, we're giving the guy ad space in our programs, listing him as a sponsor, and we've agreed to make a couple of appearances at the gym on skates, probably leading a class or something. It's a really nice deal, and hopefully will benefit both parties enough that it continues, because I would love to join a gym.

It's an insanely good class. She leads off with some intense cardio kickboxing, not this Billy Blanks bullshit but real kickboxing. Then there's a weight training session, with lots of squats and some upper body work. There'll be a resistance-band segment once we get equipment sorted out (the bands in the room were too intense for any of us to manage; poor Stonewall Smack-Some almost took herself out with one and Dewey Decimator nearly snapped her skinny self in half), and then she finishes with a really good session of her Power Yoga-- some yoga, some tai-chi, some using the body as its own weight to strengthen and tone, and a lot of good body-awareness.

But what makes the class really awesome is the instructor. Mia's had a long successful career as a fitness instructor because she is a unique brand of awesome. She alternately barks commands, cracks self-deprecating jokes, bullies and encourages and motivates you to actually do the insane shit she is suggesting. She simultaneously intimidates and inspires. She has this way of demanding success from you by simply expecting that you will perform-- but if you don't, as long as you don't whine about how you can't, she will do her absolute best to give you support or more instruction so that you can perform.

This particular class, however, is also added-to significantly by the members of the class. This past Saturday, the most faithful members of the Knockouts were in attendance. I don't think I'm being vain to say that we are a particularly amusing and hard-working crowd. Hyper Bean, gifted with pattern-recognition skills, began to pick up on when Mia was about to tell us to do the exercise double-time, and would shout it out just before Mia said it. She also, at one point, when she couldn't grasp a combination, just started yelling and flailing, which made the rest of us laugh so hard that it was kind of twice the ab workout.
Stonewall Smack-Some is very new to the whole concept of kickboxing, and is not quick on the uptake physically. She's also Southern. She punctuated the class with comments about yawls just goin' on without her.
NoTorious V.A.G. peppered the entire thing with filthy double-entendres and suggestive comments.
I don't remember who it was who re-dubbed the Tai Chi section's "Wide Wu-Chi Stance" the "Wide Coochie Stance".

We worked our asses off, but we laughed our asses off too. (We followed it up today with a three-hour skating session and then a long brunch at a diner wherein we offended several patrons enough that they left, and also entertained one another until none of us could stand upright for the pain in our abs from laughing. Man, we work hard and play hard, I guess, but holy ow motherfucking ow. Also, ferrets on rollerskates: Hilarious. "Come on, Ferret! Keep up! Trust your gear! Take chances!" Though you had to be there.)

I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to hurt like a rollergirl hurts and is a member of, or had ever considered becoming a member of, Allentown Athletix haul their flabby ass out of bed on Saturday mornings and get in there at 11:30 and ask for the roller derby class.
The Knockouts (and most likely some Dollies, and maybe a Saucy or a Siren or two) will happily entertain you, as long as you do your best to keep up.
(I'm saying, by the way, that we're amusing and inspirational, not hot: you should take this class because it would be good for you, but not if you're going to be creepy. Most of us are married or as good as, bat-shit crazy, or lesbians, so you probably shouldn't be creepy or attempt to hook up with any of us. It's not really a good class for that. You'd be better off coming to a bout and sitting in the front row and hoping to catch one of us in your lap; it's less creepy and at least you paid us to get in.)

So yeah, there's my ad, kind of, and also it would be fun to combine e:strippers and rollergirls. Anyone want to hurt like I hurt? COME ON DOWN. It's awesome.

I'm x-posting this from Myspace because I finished writing it and liked it, and figured it was as much about Buffalo as about roller derby. (I tend to compartmentalize my journals, so e:strip is for Buffalo things while Myspace is for roller derby things.) To contextualize, on Myspace I've recently had cause to comment on my high pain levels; my knee is injured and this weekend my team had two very intense practices that both left me very, very sore.

So, in short, I'm really miserable at the moment and am writing this while self-medicated, so I'll be very interested to see how this appears to me when I reread it tomorrow.


So: Handles.

This is kind of a roundabout story, so just hang on to the end. I promise there's a punchline.

I live in this kind of weird little house. My boyfriend's great aunt bought this house when she first arrived in Buffalo after fleeing wartime Latvia. They'd had to spend some time in refugee camps along the way, so it took them a couple years to get here: let's just say the house must date from 1950.
Great-Aunt Matilda [that's her real name] lived here alone; her only son died at 16 from lukemia, and her husband died of heart failure in the llate '70s or early '80s. Her sister died in the early 90s. She was a very alone woman, with only her neices to care for her-- though they did so attentively and faithfully, still they were women with their own families to mind. One by one the aging population of Latvians who had made the journey with her died of old age, leaving Great-Aunt Matilda more and more isolated.
So Great-Aunt Matilda got by mostly on her own.
She was a Latvian, and a refugee, as I mentioned, so her survival instincts were well-honed, and she had very frugal and meticulous habits. She clung with the stubbornness that had helped her escape the Soviets to her independence, insisting she could manage, that she was fine, that there was nothing wrong. Even as her health failed, she stayed in the house and did everything herself.

An aside:
Q: How many Latvian grandmothers does it take to change a light-bulb?
A: None. "I just sit here in dark..."


The upshot being that the house in which I live was customized over several decades by a stubborn old lady living alone, who saved every plastic bag she ever got, and wrapped the pipes in the basement in tinfoil to keep them from becoming dusty. (She regularly changed the tinfoil.)

But finally, poor Great-Aunt Matilda had to go into the nursing home. One too many falls left her hip so damaged there was not enough bone left to stick the metal fastening pins into. Her vision deteriorated until she was completely blind. It just wasn't possible any longer for her to manage on her own.

The house passed to Z's mom's management. Z's older sister was college-age, and looking for more independence. So she moved in, repainted some things, updated the wiring in the office, etc. She removed the tinfoil from the pipes. But the door-chains at floor height she left, because she never fastened them and didn't care. And the chrome handles bolted into the wall next to the door stairs, the basement stairs, and the stairs down onto the sunporch she never bothered to remove; they were handy when she came home drunk and needed support while unlocking the door.

Z's sister moved to California and got married. But Z's cousins were looking for a place to live; newly-married, their grungy apartment downtown was no longer satisfying. So they lived here a few years, had a daughter, put child-safety covers in all the outlets, childproofed the cabinets, and repainted things again. But they, too, left some things behind: the door-chains and the wall handles. "Yeah," said his cousin-in-law to us when he moved out, "those wall-handles are actually pretty handy."

We moved back from Jersey [long story], and Z's cousins, ready for a second child, had moved out to a new place. We moved into the house.

"Uh," I said, "why are the door chains so low on the doors?" It seemed weird to me to have to stoop to fasten them, and it seemed rather silly that an old lady would make it so difficult for herself. Then I thought about it, thought about how poor Great-Aunt Matilda had fallen and broken a hip on several occasions. Oh. Yes, I suppose you would want to be able to unlock your doors in those situations. Grim. I shivered at the thought, but didn't move the door-chains, because you know, why rock the boat? I never fasten the things anyway.

I thought the chrome handles in the walls were pretty weird, but funny. I never liked bannisters anyway-- the one from the basement is handy to grab if you're trying to lever a huge laundry basket through the narrow entryway.

...

Now I use them all the time, and actually need them, every day, whether I'm drunk, carrying a laundry basket, or not. Just like poor Great-Aunt Matilda.

I might change my derby name to Great-Aunt Matilda.

I think I am going to become a size-acceptance activist.
But I am not necessarily going to do this in a conventional way.
I am going to do it by making porn.
I think that would be awesome.

I recently got my fat ass onto a scale to see if I'd lost any weight, since I've been tracking my caloric intake and half-heartedly restricting calories. Sparkpeople.com recommended for my weight and height that I aim for 1600-1900 calories a day, and I went with that.

I weigh 200 pounds now.
I had never been more than 19....3ish... 5ish... it's not a very accurate scale.
But I'm 200 now.

People have been telling me I look good, I look thinner.
I'm not; my size 14s don't fit me. Which means I'm back in the not-misses'-size, not-plus-size ghetto where I was before I started waitressing and skating.
I've got much more toned upper arms than ever, and my thighs are like rocks, but muscle is heavier than fat.

I now have a BMI of 31.3. Anything over 30 is considered "obese". When I had that run in with the doctor last year who yelled at me to lose weight and told me I was "dangerously obese", I had a BMI of 29. Which is Overweight.

(Did I blog on here that I found out that the knee pain that sent me to her office in the first place was patellar tendonitis caused by improper arch support making my feet pronated so the knees weren't bending properly but had too much lateral pressure? Which is, by the way, entirely unrelated to my weight? Not that she even connected the knee pain with the weight, it's just that the weight is the only thing she saw fit to discuss with me. I've a feeling that if I'd come in bleeding to death she'd still have lectured me about my weight, as if it were relevant.)

Anyway. I just wrote a huge rant on my Livejournal about how I am not ashamed of my fat titties and fuck you if you are (ashamed for me, that is). (http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/981187.html)

I really do think I should at least do some pinup modeling.
If I could dance I would do performance art.

But I'm tired of feeling ashamed that I don't feel as bad as I ought to about the fact that I'm a fucking fatass.

So... if anyone's ever wanted to practice their portrait/pinup photography skills, I am a willing model. Let's make art.

And then sell it to porn sites because hell, I need money. I have a lesbian shotgun wedding to attend in Europe this spring and I don't have the dough for it.

How often do you get to go to a lesbian shotgun wedding???


p.s. I never shared my roller derby team photos here!




There I am! Clinically obese.