One Team. One Family.

     Any athlete, former athlete, or team player understands what it means to be on a team.  When you first meet you're all strangers and slowly, as practices and games become more intense and exciting, you become closer and closer.  In some cases, like at overnight camps, you are forced together so suddenly that becoming friends is only natural.  When it happens like that friendships can grow within days.
     Having been on many teams in high school and middle school I can say it is not always this way especially if you aren't living with your team or if you are different ages.  In my case, playing a sport in college is much more different than playing in high school.  Being here before school starts for pre-season with only the team to be around really brought s closer and made us become the best of friends almost immediately.  Different teams also have different dynamics, I would say that our field hockey team has a great dynamic, we never have drama within the team and we all get along really well.
     It is interesting to be on an athletic team at Skidmore, since it is a liberal arts school there are many people who have never played a sport in their life, but there are also people who play tons of sports.  The field hockey team is seen as exclusive and that we are only friends with each other.  This is not the case, we just became friends before anyone else was here and going to practice everyday with the same group of people really brings you together.  The public sphere here at Skidmore is kind of like the artsy kids vs. the athletes.  Well not really versus each other.... I'm not sure how to word it but there aren't many people who do both art and athletics, well actually there are! So I don't know why it seems so separated.
     So to finish out my blog postings, I would like to dedicate this blog to my field hockey team.  I love you guys! And thanks to all my readers (classmates) and I really enjoyed writing this blog, I wish I had the perseverance to keep it up and running.  But who knows, I may get really bored this summer :)
   

Relationships~ with People, with Technology

Living in a tethered world, where everyone we know has a cell phone and a facebook or twitter acount, is an anxious world to live in.  Being constantly connected to the people we care about most (i.e. parents, friends, lovers) carries with it a necessity to know what is happening in the other persons world at all times.

I encountered a situation last night where one of my friends had been talking to her boyfriend earlier in the day and he had stopped responding to her texts kind of abruptly.  She had texted him then saying she didn't like how the conversation ended and he didn't answer for an hour and half.  When she called me over to her room she was freaking out that something bad had happened to him in that hour and a half.  She was very confused as to why he hadn't answered her texts or calls.  I tried to console her telling her he was probably just being a stupid boy and forgot his phone in his room or something but it did not calm her down.

We live in a world full of instant gratification.  When you send someone a text, you get a reply within ten minutes, always.  If the person isn't responding, that provides an answer to your question in itself; when they don't answer our texts, we automatically think that they are saying in their minds, "I don't like you, I'm ignoring you".  Some people simply can't handle this notion of being ignored or even thinking they are being ignored.  This instant gratification policy is not a good thing when it comes to learning to be patient.  Our world is full of impatient people who look for immediate replies to texts and emails, and when they don't get it, you get another text ten minutes later saying, "Are you mad at me?".

The Food Frenzy

    A big difference between men and women is the food intake.  The kinds of food, the quality of the food, what's in the food, and how good the food is for you are all major factors in detecting a difference between men and women's diets.  Also the amount of food consumed by men and women is different.  In general, it is believed that men eat everything in sight and women choose their portions carefully so as not to overeat.  Men don't care about eating crap all day everyday, but women like to eat balanced diets with a little bit of unhealthy food for dessert typically.

     Vegetarians and vegans are much more likely to be women than men.  I feel that men would be ridiculed much more if they were vegans or vegetarians because their friends would not be accepting of someone not eating the meat lovers pizza at D hall.  Obviously Skidmore is a much more accepting campus and I know guys who are vegetarians or eat very healthy for different reasons.  But I also know guys who refuse to eat vegetables because they never liked the taste of them, so it really depends who you are talking about.

     The weight issue is also a problem with many women and not men.  There are about 8 million people in the U.S. suffering from an eating disorder and only 10 % of them are men.  A eating disorder means the person suffering sees themselves as much heavier than they actually are and therefore do not eat as much as they should.  Women also tend to care much more if they are overweight then men do.  So, even though more men are overweight then women, the men who are overweight don't do anything about it and women do.

SEX

     Who has better sex, men or women?  Who controls the sex, when it's happening between a man and a woman?  Who has more sex?  These are all valid questions when thinking about the male and female roles in sexual intercourse and also in relationships in general.  

     In an article I just read from the Hitched Magazine, sex scientists say that women want sex to be more about the connection between the two partners and men want it to be more about the orgasm.  The reason you usually see women refusing to have sex with men in movies and on TV is because men make sex all about themselves, once they're done, the sexual moment is over and it turns into nap time.  In order to make women more keen on having sex with them, men have to cater to their needs ever once in a while.  

     Also, men always say they want women to take control of the sex, and rock their world, but sometimes when they do, the men don't know how to handle it and freak out.  If a woman is sexually assertive, the man will be taken aback and will make it seem like the woman did something wrong, when she was just horny!

     It seems to me like the system is backwards sometimes, why does the man always have to/get to decide when and how the sex happens?  Here are some reasons why, thought this does not apply to all women and all men, the statistics show that about 30 percent of women suffer from lack of desire, and only 14 percent of men suffer from it.  Also, masturbation has a large role in who thinks about sex more, men tend to engage in solo sex 25% more than women do.  This shows that even when they aren't getting any with a girlfriend or wife they still pleasure themselves more often than the women.

     To wrap it up, statistically men want sex more than women do.  But I beg to differ and say that women are just as likely to assert a sexual act on a man as a man is to a woman.  If the man is taken aback by this then he needs to get over it because some women are just as horny as men!

Super Heroines

     How much do you guys know about super heroes? How many could you list off the top of your head right this minute?  Let's see: Superman, Batman, Robin, Hulk, Mr. Incredible, Spiderman, Captain America, Wolverine, Iron Man, Flash, and so on and so on.  How many woman superheroes can you name, or should I say superheroines...? Wonder Woman, Elastigirl, Rogue, Storm.... That's about all i got!  What the hell!  But before we get carried away, lets just talk about how totally awesome these super heroines are.  Have you ever seen what happens to a Toad when it gets hit by lightening? Because storm has (only serious X-Men people will get that).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj_BjUZiNKs

      Who're the only 2 chicks in the Justice League? Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl.  Depends what season or time period you watch, but sometimes its just Wonder Woman, and she kicks major villain ass!  Super heroines held their own in the fighting department, most of the time saving Superman or Flash's butt's while still pounding on the bad guys faces.  I'm a big fan of X-men and was never really into watching the Justice League when I was younger with my brother, but I'm very into women power figures.

     In the Incredibles, Mr. Incredible starts going on secret missions without telling his wife (Elastigirl), and she begins to think he is cheating on her when she finds a hair on his jacket!  But then she finds out he is trying to relive the glory days without her and she gets super mad.  She was always the one who wanted to keep fighting crime and never settle down and have a family, but then when they did he started getting antsy and went off on secret missions!  When Elastigirl finds out she gets there as quick as she can and helps free him from the trap he got himself into.  (AKA: girl power! like he would be dead without her.)  The point is people, there should be more female super heroes!!!!

Showpa?

     In athletics, girls and boys sports are one in the same.  Everyone wants to win, everyone plays their hardest to beat their opponent.  Boys play against boys and girls against girls because if we all played together boys would have an unfair advantage. (if a girl and boy are both GREAT at soccer, the boy will beat the girl because of muscle mass and structure of the body).  That is just a fact I'm not admitting that boys are better than girls at everything because that is an unfair matchup.  However, if a girl is great at field hockey, and a boy has never played before the girl could probably beat the boy off of pure skill.  It is only if the match is equal that the boy will "win".
     One thing that differs between girls sports and boys sports is appearance.  Talking to one of my guy friends on the baseball team yesterday I found out about a whole new world of male grooming.  When boys are playing their sport they have something called "Showpa".  A boy's showpa is the most important  aspect he can prepare himself for on game day.  My friend told me that his showpa includes tape and pre wrap on both wrists with his socks pulled up and sunglasses on upside down on his hat.  This seems insane to me, I never thought boys got so "made up" for games like this.  Also eye-black is an important aspect of a boys showpa, they spend lots of time on this in the locker room.
     Let me just tell you.... When girls get ready for a game, all I do is put on my uniform and braid my hair in a way that it won't fall out during the game then I am set to go.  I know some girls who have certain rituals in the locker room but nothing as crazy as the showpa procedure.  Some people have certain braids they like or pre wrap they always use, but no unnecessary wrist taping or sunglass wearing.
     I'm sure not all sports do this and that the baseball example is an extreme of the normal boy sports team.  But I know for a fact that lacrosse boys have the "lax flow" meaning their hair is long enough that it has a flow to it coming from under their helmet.  Their are also many stereotypes to athletes like the "lax bro" and the softball "lesbian".  I don't mean to relate to any of these stereotypes at all because I believe even if you play a sport you are not only defined by that sport.

A League of Their Own

     In the movie, A League of Their Own, World War 2 is threatening to ruin America's favorite past time, baseball.  With all of the men overseas fighting, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League starts up to save the sport of baseball.  They recruit women from all over the U.S. and... let the games begin!  This real life historical event started out in CHicago because the Cubs manager wanted to make money even when the men were away at war.  The AAGPBL ran from 1943 to 1954.  The movie takes place in 1948 when the Rockford Peaches win the World Series.
     This movie is uplifting and inspiring to women like myself because it shows that even a manly sport like baseball can be played and  successfully held up by women in a professional setting.  The women in this time period were sassy and demanding, they knew what they wanted and fought for it.  This is about 20 years after women earned the right to vote so the fight they won was still fresh in their memories.  I feel like women nowadays have no recollection of the adversity we overcame to have the rights we have today.  Obviously, I believe we never should have had to earn the right to vote or be treated as equals, but since we did, we should never take it for granted.
      Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for our futures when they refused to live in a man's world.  The women in the AAGPBL remembered this and when their husbands, fathers and brothers went into the war they paid their country back by playing in this baseball league.  Even learning about the Women's Rights Movement isn't enough for kids to realize the full extent of what women went through to have the rights we have today.  Even I can't fully understand it because I've never lived in a world where women didn't have the same rights as everyone else.