Most of my youth was spent in com­pet­i­tive sports.  Early on it was gym­nas­tics that took over my home­work hours.  By mid­dle school though, it finally dawned on me that I would never be in the Olympics.  A: I wasn’t that good… I mean, I was in com­pe­ti­tions that weren’t very hard and I still couldn’t get a phe­nom­e­nal score.  B: By age 11 I should have been work­ing with a per­sonal gym­nas­tics train­ing coach if I wanted to make it to the big times.  Unfor­tu­nately my par­ents did not agree that this was a wise use of their money.

At that point I was just begin­ning to play vol­ley­ball.  The year I dropped gym­nas­tics, I joined CYO.  [For those of you unfa­mil­iar with Chicagoland Catholic Schools and their sports, CYO stands for Catholic Youth Orga­ni­za­tion… it basi­cally means it is a trav­el­ing team spon­sored by the school you attend.]  In any case, I picked up vol­ley­ball pretty quickly and played on a traveling/competitive team from sixth grade through high school grad­u­a­tion.  I was a pretty decent player.  A major blow to my ego hap­pened at the begin­ning of the sea­son my senior year though.  My coach decided to pull me from the start­ing line.  She said I wasn’t play­ing as strong as she was used to see­ing me play.  This really came out of left field, because I didn’t feel I was play­ing any dif­fer­ently than I had under her coach­ing for two years.  To add insult to injury, I lost my start­ing spot to a sophomore.

So, here I was, a senior in high school, sit­ting on the side­lines of var­sity vol­ley­ball matches, while a some chick who still wore braces and ditzy rib­bons in her hair bounced around on MY court.  I was peeved.

Lucky for me the sea­son seemed really short that year.  I spent the rest of my time mak­ing art, act­ing in plays, and becom­ing increas­ingly excited about liv­ing in Mon­tana for four years.

Tons of snow and one film degree later, I embraced the world in a quest to find the answers.  I guess I am still search­ing for a lot of them.  But there are a cou­ple things that I have fig­ured out.

1. The peo­ple that count are the ones that care and the ones that care aren’t always the ones you expect.
2. San Fran­cisco is nice, but not for me.
3. 42… it’s the answer to life, the uni­verse, and every­thing (and prob­a­bly also my wed­ding date)
4. I don’t actu­ally know Binary, my fiance does… and it just so hap­pens that the date we are look­ing at for the big day, 101010, is point above.
5. As much as I try to curb the habit, I am addicted to cof­fee.  The smell, the fla­vor, the sen­sa­tion after hav­ing had too many cups…
6. I really want to have a self-sustaining home one day (com­pletely off the grid, grow­ing my own food, cre­at­ing my own [and oth­ers’] unique art).

So I guess, in the end, it’s not a big deal that I never made it to the Olympics as a gym­nas­tics con­tender for a world record or that I lost my start­ing posi­tion on a var­sity vol­ley­ball team as a senior.  I found my soul mate and I found myself and to me, that’s a great big win!