Intramural Sports and the Overestimation of Oneself

I woke up Sunday morning to the droning sound of my alarm clock. I looked at the time, 10:35, and tried to convince myself to get out of bed. It was Sunday after all, the day to sleep until someone calls me at 11:00 a.m. and I ask why they are calling so early and then we debate whether or not 11:00 is early on a Sunday when I should already be up but decided sleep was more important than anything else that could be happening at that time of day. It is called the day of rest after all, and personally I take that very seriously. We should all have a day of rest. But rest was not the topic of this particular Sunday for I had signed myself up for an intramural volleyball team and we were to meet at the Rec Center at the crack of noon on this glorious day.

I showered and prepared to take part in a sport that I haven't actually played since I was on the 8th grade varsity team some seven or eight years ago and haven't technically played since P.E. class my sophomore year of high school. I walked into the Rec Center, swiped my Griz Card, and found my way to the volleyball court. I warned my two other team mates that this wasn't gonna be pretty due to my lack of recent ball play. We all decided that since we were a bit rusty, our team motto would be "We kind of suck right now." This means, there's plenty of room for improvement. We started the usual warm ups of bumping the ball to each other, setting on occasion, then worked into serving. After some trial runs of spiking, which didn't go to well since none of us could jump above the net, we resorted back to bumping the ball and passing it around our little circle.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good about my mad skills. I could still spot serve the ball to basically any area of the court, my passes were going in the general direction I wanted (most of the time), I could set the ball up for a spike, and when I was hitting I at least got the ball over the net.

And then it happened. The ball was coming at me and I knew I needed to hustle in order to save this pass. I scurried to my right, trying to get to the ball before it hit the ground. As I lunged down to get under the pass, I felt it. There it was, like stepping foot in a foreign land, there in my derriere I felt the pull of a muscle (which to this point in my life I had no clue existed) which sent a pain shooting down the back of my leg. "This cannot be good" I thought to myself. As I slowly stood back up, I felt the unpleasant strain of the pulled muscle and yet found it somewhat amusing that I had discovered a muscle I didn't even know I had. The pain quickly went away and we continued playing ball.

Had I not become overly confident in my sweet volleyball skills (or lack thereof), I probably would not have gone for that ball, and to this day, would not know of this muscle which exists in my posterior. So my advice to all those reading this on such a fine day would be to try out intramural sports because even if you think it will just be fun to play a sport you may enjoy, you just might discover something new about yourself. I leave you with some words of wisdom from Forrest Gump...."Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."

Blah-g of the day...being a UM Blogger

Why would I want to be a blogger? (Other than the obvious reasons of fame and fortune of course) Well being a blogger isn't all its cracked up to be. Do you know how hard it is to come up with something new and exciting to tell the world that people would actually be interested in reading? Besides I'm not a writer, but I do dabble in blogging on Myspace, so how hard could it be? Just tell a story...okay, here goes.

I remember my first year at the University of Montana. I was actually attending the College of Technology at the time but that's beside the point. Actually, that does relate to the story so it is actually a part of the point. Anyways, back to the track I was on. Oh yeah, being a COT student I had to make the commute from Aber Hall to the COT East Campus everyday. Seeing as how I didn't have a car I had the always interesting delight of riding on the Mountain Line public transit system. This meant sometimes sitting around in one of those little bus huts for close to an hour waiting for a ride to or from campus. With this kind of time on your hands, you learn really quickly to always have something to read. And I found solace in the pages of the Montana Kaimin. I found particular solace every Wednesday when Luke Johnson's weekly column "Uncle Luke" was published. There was something addicting about Luke's crazy antics. His imagination crossed the bounds of the normalism that the other Kaimin writers had (yes I realize normalism is not a real word, but it just fits). I soon started telling the other girls on my floor about Luke's column. Pretty soon we would spend our Wednesday afternoons talking about "Uncle Luke's" latest column. I told myself that if I ever had the chance, I wanted to have my own "Uncle Luke" type of column. I wanted people to find joy and humor in my perception of this world we live in.

So when I saw the position of Student Blogger posted on the UM student employment website it was like the gates of heaven opened up, a choir of angels started singing, and God's voice rang down with "Annette, you should apply." (Okay, so it was actually my roommate's door opening up, his music playing in the background and him saying, "Yeah, that would be a cool job." But the whole heaven and angels thing sounded way better.)

As I thought more and more about the gig, I tried to think of 15 different things I could write about since there are 15 weeks in a semester after all. Here are some of the topics I came up with: Hiking the M, Griz Football, MontPirg, ASUM, The campus slackliners, John at LaPeak (maybe a bio or interview, everyone loves him), The pros and cons of living in each dorm, The Rolling Stones Concert (of course), Exploring the Drama/Dance department, What life is really like in the Greek system, and the list goes on. Can you imagine how many people would be learning about aspects of campus that they never would have even considered exploring if it hadn’t been for my blog? Now that's cool. Changing the world one blog at a time...I think Uncle Luke would be proud.