A year ago, I was flat broke. I had just injured my bad knee during WFTDA Regionals, I was emotionally spent from a year of being disrespected, and I had spent all my money trying to force an extracurricular activity into a sport.

This year, my body feels great (even if it’s overweight), I can hold a conversation without yelling or being yelled at (mostly), and I just booked a real family vacation. And by real, I mean we are taking The Kitten to see and play in real snow for the first time, not just squeezing in a day’s visit to an amusement park because Mommy’s too busy acting like a bad-ass.

It’s funny how everything works out for the best (even though I’m still a bad-ass).

So I went to the 2008 HRD Awards. I got nothing except for somebody making a snarky comment about how I should have shown up as Linus with a dirt cloud around me (a reference to my bad attitude since July from someone who’s partly to blame for that perceived bad attitude…”that’s bullshit” beotch). And people still wonder why I’m quitting. HA! I thank God every day that I have the balls to stand up and say enough.

I don’t think I’d even continue playing derby if someone was paying me, because I’d still have to deal with women with bigger egos than I pretend to have. Scary.

I may have been born to derby, but I’ve come to realize there are better things in life.

When I think of all the sacrifices I have made for derby in the past three years, my stomach tends to trouble me. Currently, I’m making myself sick by conducting the league’s third annual Fan Favorites survey. This year’s survey is churning up the bile because I am paying for it out of my own pocket, I am seeing the responses on a daily basis, and I am fielding random complaints. I did all the same things last year, without the major derby burnout I am experiencing this year. I had no idea this silly little popularity contest would have the potential to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. To circumvent, allow me to vent…

To the people who showed up at Verizon at 7:00 pm on Sunday and were not let in: You should thank Verizon that they didn’t let you catch the anticlimactic end of a bout you are going to see again in September and you already saw last year (who would have thought that hitting the same girls over and over again would cause burnout?). May I suggest next time (September 14, 2008..hint, hint), you buy a ticket online through the Thursday before the bout?

To the person who dislikes obscene gestures: I did not enjoy the gesturing on Sunday either, although for an entirely different reason. Sometimes sports bring out the best in us; sometimes sports bring out the worst in us; sometimes a lot of things go on behind the scenes that affect us either way. I hope our fans (and our league) can focus on the good things. I’ll try to do the same (see, I’m already feeling better from venting).

To the survey takers who have cookies deactivated or deleted: You should make sure your first answers are the ones you truly want, because I delete any responses from duplicate IP addresses. If you are a derby girl, you should be ashamed of voting for yourself or your team as a favorite more than once.

I have so much more I could say, but for now, I’ve done my derby duty and advertised the survey as well as our next bout. I don’t know how much the venting helped, but it might tide me over enough to get through a HaRD Knocks workout in the morning without screaming or crying.

I am utterly appalled that Texas has only one huge being in the Gallery of Huge Beings. I know there has got to be more than one, although you couldn’t ask for a finer specimen! This is Texas, dammit, and everything’s bigger in Texas. At the very least, somebody should let those huge-being lovers in Minnesota know that.

A coworker has pissed me off yet again. Over the past two years, I’ve been able to turn the other cheek, but it has been really hard these past few days. Partly because I might actually be out of here soon, and partly because I found something that might actually justify legal proceedings. Yesterday, I had to tell our HR guy (oh, excuse me, Director of Human Resources) to quit talking to me because his unethical ideas of how things should be around here and distorted notions of how things truly are around here were making me sick to my stomach. Really what I said was “this conversation is going nowhere” and thankfully he got the message without my having to kick him out of the library. And that’s all I have to say about that.

So today, some loser from admissions (yes, he is a loser because he earned a degree from this joke of a university; therefore, the only place he can find employment is said joke of a university) actually accused my part-timer of drinking on the job simply because she has repeatedly helped an alcoholic student when nobody else would. When I calmly stated that she doesn’t drink, he actually dropped his jaw. So I proceeded to inform him that she has been suffering from pancreatic cancer for the past year and a half, and we are lucky that she chose to continue working two jobs. Could that be the reason she seems a bit off sometimes? Hmm. I hope he feels like the dumb-ass he truly is and refrains from participating in the petty gossip that permeates this toxic workplace, at least for a few hours. Who am I kidding? I’m sure he ran off and told the first person he saw about his run-in with the librarian bitch (oh, excuse me, Director of Library Services Bitch).

I expect everyone around me to work as hard as I do.

I expect those who have messed up to not be offended when someone calls you out on it.

I expect nobody to expect an apology when I know I’m right.

I expect there are people out there who hate me because of my expectations.

I expect I don’t care.

I’ve had ups and downs in derby this week.

I fumed for a couple of days over something that has annoyed me for two years: people that come at a jammer with a good block, but not good enough to take the jammer out, so they use their momentum to fall in front of the jammer and try to break her ankle by wrapping their legs around it. Not a good feeling for the jammer. Referees should call a low block or tripping, but good luck with that.

After recently conversing with a couple of other skaters about whether or not a backwards whip could be used effectively in an actual jam, I pulled one off last night. I threw an off-balance block, went into an eagle, and decided to just turn around and face my jammer who I knew was right behind me. I had two teammates ahead of me in the pack, so I knew I could give my jammer a whip and she would be protected from the one opposing blocker that was ahead of us. I reached out for her, and she grabbed my hand and propelled herself around the rest of the pack. Now that’s a good feeling for a blocker. Wasn’t 100%, but it got the job done.

Can’t wait to show Pikes Peak how Houston rolls on February 9, 2008.

Buy your tickets! This upcoming bout has already been shrouded in controversy and characterized by numerous ups and downs in team welfare. I can’t wait to see the drama the actual day of the bout.

My head got cut off on the back of the flier, so naturally, I was once again inspired:

I called lineups for the Burlesque Brawlers Sunday night. Sure, it sounds easy. You have up to two minutes to tell five women what position they are playing in the next jam. No problem. Then one of your jammers complains about a knee injury, then another is slammed into the bench and comes up with a huge welt on her shoulder, then another skated almost the entire track out-of-bounds (still getting hit while she was out there) and wants to give up (rightly so), and suddenly, you can throw all your carefully-planned lineups in the trash.

I can’t write a recap of the Brawlers vs. Betties, because I spent most of my time with my back to the rink, asking my team who could skate in the next jam. I did see one of our veterans, Wreckhell Welch, get in a fight with Beverly Kills at the end of the first half. I did see some out-of-bounds hits, only because they happened in front of the bench and had me scooting away from the sideline. I did see our blockers get blindsided more than once due to their continued habit of focusing on one opponent and not seeing the whole floor. I was not able to count points, see how each ref was calling the game, watch the other team’s strengths and weaknesses, and other observant things I’m able to do while skating. I planned on watching the video to come up with a good recap, but I’m tired of thinking about it.

The bottom line is the Brawlers lost 162-57, and I have to come up with a way to narrow that gap before we play the Bosse$ in May. My return to the rink would help, but that is still not an option. As I previously mentioned, the Bosse$ beat the Sirens, 90-79. If I had to rank HRD’s teams on their ability to kick someone’s ass on any given day, it would go like this: Bosse$, Sirens, Betties, Brawlers. In my opinion, even though the Betties did such a fine job of preparing us for how it rolls in HRD (some of you might know that’s an inside joke), it’s going to be even tougher on the Brawlers in May.

Sometimes I wish that my experiences in roller derby were more like my husband’s experiences at the deer lease. If one of the guys isn’t pulling his own weight, showing up for work weekends and whatnot, then they get cussed for being the low-down, dirty SOBs that they are in that instance, and everyone moves on. No drama allowed.

Instead, I get to deal with emergency meetings where girls wear their feelings on their sleeves and you can see on everyone’s face how they would rather be anywhere but here. It doesn’t end when the bitch-fest is over either. Some girls will hold grudges from that meeting until the day they die. Drama will prevail!

The Brawlers lived through an intervention last night. As their new co-captain, I must now take some sort of responsibility to ensure that we never have to suffer through one again.