Gauging interest

So, here's this thing I've been mulling over lately:

What's the deal with coupon blogs? God, I sound like a bad Seinfeld skit. I love couponing as much, if not moreso, than your average broke-ish twenty-something... though, I suspect that that in itself might be the problem. Most coupon blogs are maintained by moms, or those with mom-like responsibilities. Not that there's a damn thing wrong with any of that, and I have nothing but respect for the bloggers who can somehow keep on top of every circular and coupon released every week. I frequent more than a handful of them on a regular basis. 

But I always feel like there's something, or someone, missing. Mainly, the voice of the broke-ish single twenty-something. I don't talk about my kids (what kids) or even my pets (what pets). I'm not going to go buy diapers, no matter how free they are, and making out like a bandit with all those stackable 10/$10 deals? Not gonna happen. Come on. I live in a 450 square foot apartment. I barely have a closet, let alone room (or need) for a stockpile. So I feel like there's room in that sphere for the voice of someone like me, someone who would be elated to be able to save mad cash at the liquor store, or needs to know where the best happy hours in town are, or how to snag free stuff from the coconut water company, not the baby formula company. I dunno. Someone who can make couponing and saving money cool-ish to us broke single folk. Because honestly, I'm the only 29 year old I know who lives alone and buys 3 Sunday papers every week, just so I can save 40%+ on my grocery bills. And it kinda boggles my mind that none of my other friends do this - not only because we're all varying levels of broke-ish, but because come on. Saving money is awesome. (There is absolutely another blog post hidden away here about how much I love the sound of scissors snipping up coupon paper, and how my Grandma taught me how to clip coupons from her deck overlooking the ocean in Atlantic City, but, y'know, another time.)

Anyway, I'm just trying to gauge interest from my meager reader base about this. Would anyone read it, or even care, if I wrote about this stuff? Good idea? Bad idea? Already been done idea? Don't worry, I'll be back to talking about roller derby in no time.

If A, Then Fall Down.

Cleaning my skates isn't hard, or scary, it's just an exercise in patience coupled with my OCD-tendencies and utter terror of botching something up. I'll spare you the how-to of bearing maintenance (though it appeared on my facebook page last night at a friend's request), as my fears lie in the details.

What if I bend a bearing cover. What if there's still dirt in there and the bearing locks up and I die. What if there isn't enough lube and the bearing locks up and I die. What if there's water in the bearing and it rusts then locks up and I die. What if I snap something on the cage (the thing that holds the individual balls in place) and the bearings fall out and my wheel falls off and I die. And so on.

Granted, all this is relatively pointless, since the ACTUAL consequence of any of these worst case scenarios is pretty easy: If A (where A is the catastrophic ruination of any part of my skate while skating), I fall down (I am the best faller on the team, I have NO fear of falling), do situps for the rest of practice, and buy new parts.

All that said, it took me four hours to fully clean my skates last night, since my bearings had to go through four acetone washes before I was convinced that they were all clean enough to be reassembled.

Shiny and clean!

The interesting thing happened when I went to clean my wheels. (Lucky, there is nothing scary about cleaning wheels. Rinse 'em off and you're done.)

The first time I took my wheels off my skates was also the first time I had them regrooved. After about a year of skating, they'd all been worn bald, and I was sliding all over the track. Theoretically, people told me, you can tell how you're skating based on how worn down your wheels are, and where. Inside wheels wear faster than outside wheels, since that's where you should be putting the most pressure. They also wear at a slight angle, because of crossover. Because of this, you should rotate your wheels regularly.

But my wheels were all uniform. I took this to mean that basically, I sucked.

This time, though, as I was swishing my skinny new Stalkers around in soapy water, I realized that they actually felt different. As I took them out and looked at them - yup. Sure enough, some of the grooves are more worn down than the others. And it's pretty evenly divided, 4 and 4. So, inside wheels and outside wheels. Which means that since starting roller derby (and changing to new wheels that don't suck and actually allow me to T-stop and are ohmygod amazing), I've legitimately become a better, stronger skater. Whaaaaaaat??

I shudder to think that I might actually be, y'know, learning anything in roller derby besides how to skate fast and get low, but there it is. If I keep doing a thing, eventually I will get better at that thing. And eventually that thing will have noticeable results. It's terrifying. And inspiring. And I just said inspiring.

All cleaned up and ready to roll.

And I Would've Gotten Away With It, If It Weren't For Those Meddling Kids.

I took a rain check on yesterday. Part of being an HSP is knowing my body, and my limits. I took a bunch of Sudafed on Tuesday, forgetting that Sudafed is pseudophedrine, is a basically an amphetamine, and tends to react like speed would in many people. Especially me. (I've tried Adderall, which is similar, and it was one of the scariest afternoons of my life. I ended up in the nurses office, unable to stop vibrating. Literally.) So I woke up on Wednesday in the throes of some sort of manic episode/anxiety attack type thing, with my thoughts racing and my body feeling like there was a high-speed rail line racing alone under my skin. Nothing was possible, and every sensation, every thought, every stimulus, was too much. I probably should have realized something was awry when I woke up in the middle of the night, because the hidden snaps on my duvet cover were registering as "too pointy" on my skin.

I hate being in that situation, knowing that something is wrong, actually wrong, but unable to figure out what it is, or how to circumvent it. Then feeling powerless. Like I'm not in control, like my body is winning, like I'm just a passenger along for the ride in my life.

Luckily, somewhere in between the "I hate myself"s and the "Everything is terrifying"s, I remembered the Sudafed thing, and was apply to delay sensation overload long enough to ask my phone what side effects of the drug were. Oh, look. All the things I was experiencing. It was such a relief to know that this wasn't just my body chemistry having it out for me, but something outside, something that could be dealt with. Granted, I still couldn't actually get out of bed. But I was able to recognize that if I just waited long enough, the drugs would pass out of my system, and I'd be ok. So I slept. All day. I've never really forced myself to sleep before, but I didn't really know what other choice I had. At least in sleep, my conscious mind can't hurt me. (And my subconscious has been behaving itself rather well these days.)

Around 10.30pm, I woke up, and felt ok. Thank god. And then I vowed to not let today end up like yesterday. I ended up emailing my mom, telling her everything that had happened that day, and promising her the things I was going to do today. Because I need to hold myself accountable to other people. It's too easy to let myself down. I do it all the time. My brain is programmed for self-sabotage and disappointment. Letting other people down, though? It's much harder. More to the point, lying to other people is much harder. And I know that if I tell mom a thing, she will later ask me about a thing. And then I either have to tell her all about it, or I have to lie. And I hate lying. (I'm also terrible at it.)

So today, I pulled on my big-girl pants, changed the wheels on my skates (oh my god, my bearings are filthy), and went to the park. To skate. Alone. By myself. For the very first time.

And it was scary. What if there were other people there? What if all the hockey rinks were occupied? What if people stared? What if people laughed? What if I got there and didn't know what to do? What if I fell down a lot?

I've never actually exercised by myself before. I can count on one hand the number of times I've gone running, or popped in a workout video, or anything. Usually getting me to work out is an exhausting exercise in coercion and bribery and teamwork. By which I mean, exhausting for the other person.

So this? Kinda huge.

I got to the park, and both rinks were empty. So I walked up, picked one, strapped my skates on, set my clock timer, and just... did things. Regular laps. Sprinting. 8 on the floor, both ways. Shuffling reps. Grapevines. Jumping. Heel-toe runs. 10 laps/10 reps each, making myself to pushups/crunches/leg lifts/planks when I stopped for water. Was it effective? I have no idea. I was sort've winging it. And about halfway through, there were all these small children on skateboards weaving around me. And their moms, watching me. And yeah, that part was kind've embarrassing, because I kept getting winded, and they kept being wired.

But hey, I did things. And it wasn't so scary. Though next time (whoa. There's gonna be a next time? I guess so.), I'd like to bring a friend. Because one of the things I did learn today is that derby is way more fun with my teammates than it is by myself. Though, on the other hand, an hour on skates without getting hit was kind've nice, too.

Don't Call Me Surely.

Progress is weird. You creep along, little by little, and then, all of a sudden, you're doing the things that you thought you'd never be able to do.

I had a couple of those moments at practice tonite. DeRanged and Psychobabble, two of the best skaters in roller derby, came out to run a training session with us. As always, I was terrified. I mean, these ladies are legit roller derby superstars. I feel like I'm never going hard enough, or doing well enough, to impress them. And trust me, we ALL want to impress them.

We worked on a bunch of offensive hitting drills (things I am not good at: Offense. Hitting. Drills.) and, even with my laryngitis and allergies/head cold, I managed to surprise myself.

Tonite, I went to practice. (I am a giant baby when I'm sick. Usually the sniffles are more than enough to give me a reason not to go out. Let alone to go exercise.)

Tonite, I did 40 pushups. (Number of pushups I could do at a time when I started playing roller derby: 1. Maybe. Sort of. Not really.)

Tonite, I pushed the largest girl on my team out of bounds.

Tonite, I chased down the jammer as she busted out of the pack, and I caught her.

Tonite, I gave Psychobabble a hip bruise. (And then she gave me pointers on how to be more effective when I use my bony, bony hips, and I squealed a lot on the inside and HOLY SHIT I GAVE PSYCHO A BRUISE WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN.)

Little things, building on top of each other, manifesting into noticeable progress. Just keep doing one thing every day that scares me.

Do One Thing

I've been playing roller derby for almost 10 months now. I'm far better on my skates than I was 10 months ago, but I'm still nowhere near where I'd like to be. Lots of things still terrify me about the game, and the amount of both skill and knowledge that I have to acquire to get there is often completely daunting.

Months ago, a teammate let me in on her personal mantra for derby improvement: Do One Thing.

It's impossible, in the limited practice time my team has, to learn everything all at once. And trying to do so will likely just muck you up on the track, whether you're trying too many things at once, or not concentrating on nuances of a skill, or even just not paying attention to where other people are. You can't do everything. So Do One Thing. Pick one thing, each practice, and make a concerned effort to do that thing to the best of your ability. Maybe it's holding the inside line and not letting the jammer past you while you're holding it. Maybe it's the perfect 180 single knee fall. Maybe it's keeping an eye out behind you while you're skating forwards. Whatever. Do One Thing.

One of my biggest issues on the track is that I get frustrated with myself far too easily, as my knowledge of the game and strategy far outweighs my personal physical ability actually, y'know, do any of those things. (Stop taunting me, Tomahawk stops.) And it trips me up. I start thinking about what I want to do, what I should do, and the next thing you know, I'm in my head not paying attention, and the jammer has danced past me without even a glance from my direction.

Last night, though, I Did One Thing. I made a concerned effort to listen to my teammates, to pay attention to where we all are on the track. By doing that, during scrimmage, I was able to see two of my teammates pull out to the front of the pack, chasing down the opposing team's jammer, and to hear a 3rd behind me, caught behind the other team's blockers. And I was finally able to put listening skills and derby knowledge together, as I skated in between the two groups, forming a bridge that kept the pack intact, and enabled my teammates up front to knock their target out of bounds. It was a tiny thing, a thing that only lasted a few seconds, but it was One Thing. A thing I'd never done before, and my first conscious instance of being able to put all the pieces of the derby puzzle together, at once, on skates, in the middle of an actual jam.

It felt pretty damn awesome.

Roller Derby & Branding, or, We Love the Petty Stuff

I can't believe I'm writing a blog post about this. I really can't. North Central Regionals ended YESTERDAY, and SOMEHOW, I am still involved in a conversation about TEAM COLORS.

Fighting on the internet: we're all winners, here!

So here's how this came about:
In the North Central Regional tournament final bout, Windy City (Chicago) was playing Minnesota. My home bracket is Eastern, my current bracket is Western. I'm not super familiar with the teams in North Central, besides by name only. Having attended college in Wisconsin, my choice in who to root for in this bout was based on one thing: Whoever isn't Chicago. So, let's be clear here: I WAS ROOTING FOR MINNESOTA.

When I tuned in to the bout, from my apartment here in Boulder, CO, several minutes after the bout had started, I realized that I had a problem: I had no idea which team was which. This shouldn't be an issue, I thought. Teams have different colors. So which team is which color? Looking at the pixel-y scoreboard on the WFTDA free feed, Windy City's logo appeared to be blue/black/white. Minnesota's logo was red/gold. Simple! I will root for the -- oh. Wait. There's no red/gold team on the track. There is one team, in black/white. And another in blue/black. This... this does not narrow things down. Maybe the logos will be on - no, I can't make out the logos on the uniforms of either team, they're too low-res. Furthermore, neither team's uniforms had the names of the players on the back. So while the announcers were able to identify each player by name, I had no idea who was who, or who was playing for who.

At that point, I did what any reasonable netizen would do: I asked The Googles. Pulling up Minnesota's page, I was greeted with a front page full of RED AND GOLD. Ok. Still not helping. So I looked for their team picture. Their allstar team does not have a picture in the "teams" section of the website. So I looked at their home team pictures. They have 4. Their teams skate in: orange/black, pink/black/white, green/black, and red/white. None of these are their logo colors, nor are they the allstar team colors. I remained confused.
{Update, 1/30/13: Team photos are now included on the MNRG site. There is still no team that uses Red & Gold as their colors.}

Finally, through the grace of the internet, I asked the feed announcers to clarify. Luckily, they did, and all was well. But somehow, this turned into a giant can of worms that I am STILL TALKING ABOUT.

(For the record, Windy City was skating in black/white, and Minnesota was in blue (aqua) and army green, not black. The low res feed was clearly not helping me out yesterday.)

Issues that appear to have been conflated in all of this:
- I do not hate MNRG, their fans, or anyone else associated with the team.
- I do not hate their All-Star team's colors.
- I don't think their logo is ugly. (Or stupid, or anything else.)
- I do not think their uniforms are ugly. (Or stupid, or anything else.)
- I do not want their colors to be black and white.
- I am not calling for the skaters to stop training to address this concern.
- In the face of Nationals, I do not believe this is a pressing issue for anyone associated with the team. (If it is ever addressed at all, it is an off-season discussion.)
- I don't think the MNRG All-Stars are the only members, or only "important" members of their league.
- I am not belittling their current fanbase, who clearly already know that the MNRG All-Stars skate in Aqua and Army.
- I don't expect anything to change because of me.

All that said, I have to admit: I'm confused as to why MNRG uses colors in their logo that do not correspond to any other color scheme in their league. I'm confused about why their allstar team and their logo are different colors. I don't understand what purpose it serves, on a local OR a national scale. I don't understand how it helps their branding initiative, or enables MNRG to be recognizable as an entity.

Logos are not just a cute picture that you slap on a shirt. They represent an aspect of a branding initiative that is meant to distinguish your product (in this case, a roller derby team/league) from all the other similar products out there. In the case of derby, this is critical. With 1000 leagues worldwide and growing, with (let's assume) more than triple that many teams competing (home teams, jr teams, etc), it is important for these logos and these brands to be unique. Because, let's face it, there are only so many skull/skate/derby pinup variations to go around. (I'm being facetious, internet. Not every derby league loves these things in equal measure, or at all.)

To make that uniqueness resonate with your fans, or to be accessible by potential fans, there needs be some sort of consistency within the brand. In the case of a sports team (on any level) this is usually by team colors. The team colors reach across the brand. They're the color of the field, the color of the uniforms, the color of the rally towels. (Again: I'm aware that derby does not have fields. Or rally towels. Yet.) They're a way for fans to identify not only as supporters of their chosen team, but to identify each other, as a community. You're never going to mistake a Jets fan (green and white) for an Eagles fan (forest and silver).

Now, derby is a little different. We have leagues, and within those leagues there are travel teams, home teams, junior teams, maybe even a rec team. I'm not saying that with that much diversity involved in a league, that all teams must have the same colors. (While some professional sports teams, such as the Phillies, tend to integrate a common color scheme across their farm teams as well, it is not the gold standard. Nor is it a wholly accurate comparison, since farm teams for the parent league play other farm teams, not each other. I digress.)

However, it seems logical that the travel team, the allstar team, whatever you call it, should be the core of the league's branding effort, at least on a national stage. They are, after all, the team that observers in other cities (states, divisions, countries, whatever) think of when they think of the league. When my dad calls me from Philly and talks about Rocky Mountain, he's talking about the 5280 Fight Club, not the Red Ridin' Hoods or the Sugar Kill Gang.

And to that end, it makes sense, to me, to have your league branding effort and your allstar branding effort synch up. Have the logos match. Have the colors match. You can call them the 5280 Fight Club, or the All-Stars, or the Liberty Belles, or whatever you want - but to everyone in your non-local market - anyone that isn't a rabid fan (and let's be honest - that's most fans. The conversion rate from "new fan" to "megaloyal fan" is pretty high, but every new fan has that initial entry point.), they're simply Rocky Mountain. Minnesota. Philly. They're synonymous, and they're the largest public face your league has. What advantage is it to have them represented by different things? By having a disparity in your league/allstar branding effort, you're simply making it that much more difficult for a new/potential fan to identify your product.


UPDATE:
So, after a really, really embarrassing amount of back and forth on this with people I've never met on the internet, it has come to light that the reason for the logo/uni differential is... tradition.

MNRG were one of the first flat track derby leagues during the derby resurgence of 2004. The logo, designed then, was never conceived as a marketing tool for a broad audience. As for the evolution of the uniforms, away from the logo colors, I have no info. But basically, the reason for the split is "that's how we started, we're not gonna change it now!"

Which, to me, is preposterous. You're not the same team that you were 8 years ago. Not only are you a different team, but derby is a different sport. To hang on to this old logo, sentimental as it might be, is looking backwards, not forwards. While some might see it as a nod to history, to tradition, the fact is, it causes confusion and breaks up brand consistency. Refusing to evolve your brand is not a cute, kitschy kickback. It's a stubborn, shortsighted means of denying growth to your product's development.

At this point, I'm half tempted to start pulling up various timelines depicting the brand-growth of professional sports teams, from conception to how we know and love them today. Things that include changes in team location, name, color, logo, font, uniform style, hell, even socks. The thing that make these changes necessary is time. Repositioning your brand helps to distinguish it from other similar brands available on the market. The thing that makes these changes stick is consistency. Sports teams change their branding initiatives all the time. But when that happens, it's a systematic, across the board change. Their new uniforms match their new website match their new hats, match the new colors of the dugout and the new logo on their stationary. They don't change the team uniform colors, then keep the old colored logo because it reminds them of their history. That's inconsistent, and doesn't send a coherent message to their consumers. (They do, however, keep an archive of the old branding, and continue to release "retro" styled products. That's also a completely different positioning of the old logos.)

I'm quickly losing steam here, so I'll sum up:
I don't hate the MNRG logo. I just think that it's inconsistent with their brand. If they had someone take 5 minutes in photoshop with it, to update it to their All-Star teams colors of aqua and army (and changed the website color scheme accordingly), everything would be hunky-dory. In synch. Not confusing to new fans - and, yes, there will be new fans, who will be just as confused as I was by their current lack of consistency.

Next month, MNRG (who sadly fell to Windy City) will face Charm City (Baltimore) in the first round of the National Championship tournament. Both teams will be playing live in front of a non-local, to either team, crowd. The broadcast will be viewed not just by fans of the teams, or the divisions they play in, but by all roller derby fans. But Charm City's colors are actually red and gold. Short of the announcers announcing, over and over, that MNRG is in the aqua and army (because fans do not all tune in to the feed at the start of a bout - and the vast majority of fans will be watching this from home, not from the Broomfield Even Center.), it will be up to the fans at home to figure out who is who. And a 10 minute Google search that solves the problem only by process of elimination is not good marketing. Not for MNRG, not for WFTDA, and not for roller derby.

{Update, 1/30/13: Michael McFarland has written an awesome article about the specific artistic flaws of derby logos, that compliments my issues here almost perfectly. Check it out: Rebranding Roller Derby: Athletic Logos and Sports Design

Coming Clean or, We Call This Burying the Lede.

I've been rolling this around in my mouth for days, now, and I still don't know how to say it.

I've typed more than a handful of versions out, and none of them seem right. The thing is, I'm leaping in to NaBloWriMo, and I honestly don't know how I'm going to manage a month's worth of entries without coming clean about this to the blog.

And I tried do a "short" version of it, but it just turned into a long version anyway, so if you're interested, read on. And if you're not... I dunno. Skim. Maybe there'll be important bullet points along the way.

When I started this blog, I had every intention of chronicling my story of quitting grad school and moving on with my universe, through the lens of depression (which every therapist I've ever been to has agreed has some sort of hold on me), general anxiety (only the more recent therapists have agreed that this might be a thing), and social anxiety (subset of general, painfully obvious to everyone around me.)

It has been, and is, harder than I thought it would be, mostly because it's difficult for me to write about how hard things are, or to wrap things up in a tidy bow at the end of posts. The thing is, depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. They're not "oh I had a bad day so I took a bubble bath and now I'm better" posts, they're "I'm too incapacitated by sadness to take the 10 steps from my bed to my bathroom to fill up the bathtub" posts. They don't end on high notes, or with solutions. And I've been scared to post, publicly, about how I'm "really" doing.

The other part was that aside from a few moments of abject depressive hysteria, very few of the things I was writing felt true. And since I couldn't figure out why, I just... didn't write.

Switching gears: A few years ago, a friend of mind who did happen to see those depressed-hysterical thought-spews recommended a book to me. I glanced at the author's website, but never really followed up on it. It had a hokey title, and sounded like a self-help book. Neither of these things have any sort of appeal to me.

But funny enough, something about it must have grabbed me, because every few months, I'd go back to the website, and wonder if there might be something to all of it.

Last month, I was low. Lower than I've been in a really long time. Hysterical, phone-a-friend, serious thoughts of self-harm low. (It's hard to say any of this out loud, in public. My gut instinct is to cover it all up with platitudes and denial - "I'm ok now." "I'm fine." "Don't worry about me"'s. I don't want anyone to swoop in and try to save me, but at the same time, I desperately want to stop hiding the sheer fact that yes, sometimes there are these things, and they're bad things, and they're terrible, and they're hard, but they're TRUE. I'm not comfortable hiding my depression anymore.) After a late night at a friend's place, freaking out her boyfriend with my crying, I did one of the hardest things I've ever done as an adult: I walked into a bookstore, and headed for the self-help section.

The best part of this was discovering that the book I was looking for was not, in fact, shelved in the self-help section. It was in Psychology, which, ironically enough, made/makes me feel less crazy about the whole thing.

I picked up a copy of the book that my friend had recommended to me years ago, and started reading the introduction. And there, at 7pm, in this independent bookstore in the heart of downtown, I started crying. It would've been sobbing, probably, if I hadn't learned how to cry silently years and years ago.

3 pages in, and already the author had identified behaviors and patterns that I could barely explain to myself, let alone verbalize to other people. Things that I had been thinking about and living with and knowing for as long as I can remember being able to, y'know, think.

These things in my head, about my head... they weren't just symptoms of the depression, of the anxiety. They're a whole separate thing. And it's not bad, it's not scary, it's not yet another disorder to lump on top of the others, it is, at its heart, just a different way of interpreting sensory data, and a difference in how data is processed and acted upon. Not bad. Not scary. Just different.

I identify as what Elaine Aron calls a Highly Sensitive Person. If you're interested, you can poke around on her website. The link she includes to the basic assessment test is super telling, and likely does a better job of explaining what being an HSP is and feels like than what I could do in my own words. (For the record: Aron suggests that if you score a 14 or higher on the self test, you are probably Highly Sensitive. I scored 23.)

Reading her books have been a strange journey of self discovery for me. I'm not learning anything new, per se, but it's wonderful and scary and freeing to not only have a name for what goes on in my head, but to know that there are other people out there. And to know that I'm not broken.

So there. That's that. I'm an HSP. I'm not sure how that information is going to manifest itself in this blog, but I felt that it was important information to share. Maybe it'll give you a better perspective on how I live my life, make the decisions I make, think the things I think. Maybe saying it out loud, in the blog, will let me be more open and honest with my process - both how I'm progressing, and how I'm getting there. Right now, I'm really not sure.

But being open about feels real, feels true. Feels like a Thing I Need To Do in order to keep moving forward with things.

So.

Now you know.