Let's Try This ... Again

I've been overeating, gaining weight -- too much, too fast. I haven't skated in months. I'm working from home and barely leaving the apartment. While I exercise every day or so, using an On Demand workout or a DVD, and my workouts aren't half-assesed, I always soon afterward light up and then binge while aimlessly surfing the Internet. I'm throwing up once or twice a week.

This isn't an acceptable state of affairs. It's not healthy for my mind or my body. This is also incredibly cliche, "It's not healthy for my mind or my body" or some variation on the phrase appearing in countless blogs online. But I'll embrace the cliche.

I must reduce, or better yet eliminate, the marijuana. It is a crutch that helps me put off until tomorrow the anxiety. It makes me OK with procrastination and I don't think I'm getting much enjoyment out of it.

I must use the Weight Watchers account I just signed up for as a means of curbing binges.

I must leave the goddamn apartment once in a while, get off the couch. I must have at least two conversations a week in person with someone who is not C.

I must, I must, I must. It's terrifying to be in this state. I know it's because my job situation is so tenuous, C's financial security finally wobbling, my mother's mental health once again in the gutter. These are all legitimate reasons to feel stress, and I know what I should do. Work out, read books, leave the apartment, cross-stitch, play video games, keep my hands busy and my vaporizer turned off and exhaust myself so I can fall asleep at night, yet these more soothing coping mechanisms do work for me in a way.

In the long run, they are going to keep me stunted and lazy and fat. I can deal with fat, but not this piling-it-on weight gain.

This blog is a wish. May I develop the strength to commit to making some changes that I know will serve me far better in the future. I feel that I am on the edge of the precipe, and if I fall, it could be decades before I re-emerge. It feels a bit like my last chance to save myself. Way to put pressure on yourself, FFS.

My Fat-Girl Figure Skating Idol

I don't know Meghan, aka YouTube's icesk8r96, but I would like to. She is the posterchick for big girls on ice, and her YouTube channel is inspiring. Observe her flying camel:




And her lovely loop:



And this graceful freeskate program:



When I tell myself that my heft is getting in the way of my skating, I must remember Meghan, who can still turn in a nifty little layback spin and is working on her axel. An axel! I can't imagine.

During my brief return to the ice yesterday, I felt incredibly conspicuous--not because of my size, as there was a similarly built woman. I felt out of place because of my crummy skillset. And why is that skillset so deficient? Because I don't practice enough. Because I am inflexible. But mostly because I am fearful.

The problems that plague me in real life--a lack of confidence, a crippling fear of failure, a habit of sticking with that which I know I can do instead of taking a chance on something that could be great--are present on the ice. I am terrified of falling. Each time I fall, and it's only happened a couple of times, I feel the wind knock out of my, feel pain radiating through my chubby body, accompanied by heaping doses of adrenaline and fear and disappointment. How could I fall on a forward crossover? What the hell is wrong with me? Everyone saw that! Everyone who didn't now sees the ice shavings on my butt or my knee! They know I suck.

Well, they knew I suck before I fell. That shitty forward crossover broadcast my suckage. I didn't need to wipe out for everyone to realize it. Yet I still find myself deeply embarrassed. And deeply hurt. I always need to evacuate the ice and breathe--just like when I slipped going down the stairs at a movie theater and landed, hard, on the edge of a stair. I gathered myself as the audience laughed--one yelled "Ooo, she took a spill!"--made it around the corner, and stood there, hurting, for a good 10 minutes. I am a wimp and have always been: As a child, my older brother once impersonated me by saying, "ooo, a scratch! Mommy, I need a band-aid! Mommy, I need a band-aid!" Each cold knocks me out for days; the cuts on the backs of my heels from poorly-fitting shoes make me wince with each step.

I need to get over my physical and emotional problems with falling. Here, a therapist would point out that coming to terms with failure on the ice would allow me to navigate my social and professional lives with greater confidence, leading to greater rewards. I bet Meghan has mastered the art of falling on ice. (Though not recently, one hopes: According to her YouTube profile, she's taking a break from skating because she's pregnant!)

Maybe next time I'lll let myself fall.

Back on the Ice ... Sort Of

My skates rusted a bit over the summer. Well, not literally--I'm pretty conscientious about wiping them down before I put on my absorbant blue skate guards. But I probably only laced them up and took to the ice a couple of times over the last four months. I've been frustrated by my inability to learn new moves, but moreso by the atrophying of skills that I thought I had pretty much mastered, or had at least achieved a certain level of competancy. Now my counter-clockwise forward crossovers are sloppy, my clockwise crossovers a joke. I don't lean into the circle; I pick up and plop down my foot the way I did long ago when I was in Beta. I'm afraid to even try backward crossovers, knowing that my blades will click and I'll come close to falling. Forget about the waltz jump I was learning in the spring. I need to get back to basics.

I'd like to take another class, perhaps the fitness skate, which is less a workout than an opportunity to work again and again on the fundamentals. But with my new job starting (eek) next week, I don't know whether I'll have the time. It's just an excuse, really. I'm a hermit, and it's increasingly difficult to motivate myself to leave the warm, cozy apartment with my insane cat, Teen Mom reruns, laptop, and vaporizer. I need a kick in the fat ass to get moving. I'm setting a goal to once again skate on a weekly basis. I tried to wheedle free skating out of my rink by offering my services as a copy editor for their Web site and newsletter, and the general manager expressed some tentative interest, but I haven't heard back yet.

But it's worth investing in this. I spend money on all sorts of ridiculous things. Mostly food. And books. Skating, when I do it well--or capably--makes me feel like I've accomplished something, makes me feel graceful, makes me feel relaxed. I need more of that in my fat-assed life.

What I Can Do, What I Can't, and When My Gut Gets in the Way

I've been figure skating for about three years now. When I say I "figure skate," most people tend to ask, "So, can you do a triple axel?" It's usually stems less from sarcasm than from a genuine inability to think of a single other figure skating element.

But the fact is that I can do very little. Here's what I'm pretty confident with:

• Forward stroking
• Backward stroking
• Forward crossovers
• Backward crossovers
• Swizzles, forward and back
• Slalom, forward and back; with one foot on a good-balance day
• Bunny hop
• T-stop
• Snowplow stop
• Hockey stop
• Two-foot spin, verrrry slowly
• Inside and outside forward 3-turns
• Inside and outside Mohawks

So, really, not very much. I'm struggling now to learn:

• One-foot spin
• One- and two-foot spin from back crossovers
• Half-flip jump
• Waltz jump

My waltz jump is coming along nicely, though my transitions between crossovers to the jump are rough at best. Usually when I practice there's at least one 10-year-old practicing soaring waltz jumps a few feet away from me. I hope I'm imagining the looks of superiority I suspect they shoot my way. My half flip is laughable, largely because instead of launching off my toepick, I tend to sort of pivot on it, meaning I never entirely leave the ice. Gotta work on that one.

And I'm simply too fat to perform:

• Shoot the duck, when you skate low to the ice, with one leg stuck out in front of you. My body's too heavy to balance on one skate while remaining upright. This means I will have to lose significant amounts of weight to ever perform a sit spin. But good news, I'm years away from being able to do a sit spin anyway!
• Lunge. My butt gets in the way. I sort of did it a few times, but then I hurt my knee and am now lunge-shy. It's like when I was a kid and just becoming fat, and I became too scared to do a back handspring.

It took me an ungodly long time to do a Mohawk; trusting my feet, and accepting that I might fall, were challenging. I know that you must fall to become any good on the ice, but oh, it hurts. That much body weight smacking against the unyielding ice leaves me blue and swollen and cranky. The associated adrenaline rush typically knocks my proverbial breath away, and I have to leave the ice. I typically then sit on the bench, gathering myself. Each fall is somewhat devestating. Maybe I just need to start falling on purpose so I can overcome the fear and the pain more easily. Surely there's a cliche in that sentence somewhere.

The Standard Blog-Introduction Post

This is perhaps the third or fourth blog I've attempted to inaugurate. As a twentysomething in the media, how else am I supposed to break out of my stalled entry-level position and land a book deal? And yet I have been unable to maintain a blog for more than a handful of posts. Perhaps this will break the cycle, or perhaps I will leave it to grow stale and unread. Motivation is a problem when it comes to disciplining myself to writing, whether for pay, for work, or for my own edification and expression.

Actually, motivation is a problem in many realms of my life. Hence the fat. But I'm working on goal-setting and -attaining. Hence the figure skater. I'm a klutz, utterly graceless, without talent in the arts or athletics, but figure skating is fun. And it makes me stand out a bit. "Oh, you figure skate?" people tend to say, perplexed, when I mention that I'm off to the rink. In truth, sometimes I whip it out in inappropriate contexts, an attempt to demonstrate that maybe I'm a little more interesting than the person I'm conversing with may have guessed by my slovenly appearance, frizzy hair, and ungainly gait.

But figure skating is also an attempt to instill some discipline in my life. It is a path, a hierarchy; you cannot move forward until you have mastered the prerequisites. So I struggled to master my 3-turn so that I can now struggle to do a half-flip jump, though in reality my "jump" is more of a pivot on the toepick; I am afraid to leave the ice. I am afraid of many things. But working on skating helps in that regard, too, to conquer my fears of failing and falling and all the things in between the physical and mental barriers I erect for myself.

So I'll try to keep this going. Maybe it'll keep me on task for once in my unstructured life.