Megan Stielstra's Blog

Our internet has been down for a week. Our internet is (to me) a complicated system involving shiny boxes—one of them white and glowing like a space-egg—with flashing red lights and multiple cords and Comcast guys scaling exterior walls to drill holes in the building and at the end of it all my house is wireless and I can download movies while taking a bath, find recipes from theotherwhitemeat.com in the kitchen (that last comment seems to indicate that I, like, cook), write stories in my office in the back or, from my bed, search Craig’s List or rate movies on Netflix or blog (as a verb) or whatever I’m doing to quiet the noise in my head. The End of the Day noise, which, for me, used to be very loud, but quite suddenly is nonexistent because I am a teacher and the semester has ended and now I am Not Working for three whole months, Not Working meaning not having to be at XYZ by three o’clock with the multiple things read/researched/prepared and can, instead, sit here in the air conditioning writing stories with a cold icy beverage (Stoli V?) nearby which is really more work than it sounds. It is this kind of work: the going from No Time to Nothing But Time, when it’s very easy to put aside all the things you have to do (finish rewrite. Submit. Prepare paper for London on Thursday. Did I mention I’m going to London on Thursday? To present a paper on Gender and Writing in Education for the National Association of Writing in Education. I told that to someone the other day and said someone replied, “How come you’re presenting at a NATIONAL conference in LONDON?” Okay. I’ve been working hard on holding back the sarcastic comments (I think, in this instance, it was “D’UH!”) that rush up my throat when people say such things because, well, it’s nicer, and I’d like to be the nice girl instead of the sarcastic bitchy girl—

Bookmark that, I’m going to come back to it later.

—and also maybe I can help educate people by explaining, in my teacher voice, that the United States of America is not the only NATION in this world, that other countries may also be called NATIONS and therefore Great Britain may have NATIONAL associations as well and, seeing as all of us in this world are interested in diverse points of view, said NATIONAL associations may have people from other NATIONS present at their NATIONAL conferences. Do you think that sounds bitchy? Or should I have just said, “D’uh!” Hey, is this parenthetical Elizabeth Crane-esque or what?) until tomorrow (because today I have to see the two o’clock matinee of Mr. And Mrs. Smith) so my question is: how to deal with distractions? The internet has not been a problem ‘cause it’s been down all week but now—after much plugging and unplugging and re-cabling on Christopher’s part—it is back, and what am I doing? Instead of working on my story about snow? I’m online, writing about NOT writing about snow, which is too pretentious and meta and Adaptation-y for me so instead I’ll talk about the ROLLER DERBY which I went to last night, which was the greatest thing I’ve seen, which is making me rethink the whole (bookmarked) Not Wanting to be Bitchy and Sarcastic thing because these girls were TOUGH, muscled and scary and beautiful, rock hard bitches for sure, on their skates in fishnets and helmets and elbow pads, stars sewed onto their bloomers which you saw everytime somebody knocked somebody down and then, holy shit, it was ON: the girl who’d gotten knocked down would go after the knocker-downer, skating superfast around the ring, catching up to her attacker, grabbing her around the waist and pulling so both girls hit the ground, rolling on top of each other like a barroom brawl except there were more superfast girls on skates headed right for them and the longer they laid there punching the shit out of each other, the more likely someone would be to trip over them, roll right over their pretty lipsticked faces. One girl’s nose spouted blood. Another was rushed to the hospital with a dislocated ankle. Two—on penalty for punching referees—had their wrists tied together with rope and had to drag each other around the ring and—AND—there’s two thousand (!) people crowded into the Congress Theater to watch this, this part-athletic skill, part-professional wrestling, part-supermodels-in-Mohawks and bustiers on roller skates, and everybody’s cheering and booing and screaming, even—ESPECIALLY—hypocritical “I don’t condone violence in athletics” me. I was standing on my seat, waving my fist in the air yelling, “Go QUIET STORM!” She’s my favorite. In roller derby, the objective is for each team’s Jammer (the player at the back identified by a big star on her helmet) to pass as many members of the opposing team as possible. The opposing team tries to block her (knock her down) and her team tries to block (knock down) the opposing team so the jammer can get through. Quiet Storm is this tiny, whipfast thing from Hell’s Belles. Nobody even sees her coming and then she’s passing them, waving (bye-bye!) and moving on to pass the next. Each team had a player like her (Anna Mission … From God from the Double Crossers, Hurricane Charlie from The Fury, Tex Anne from the Manic Attackers) but what made Quiet Storm the best was this: she’d hold her finger up over her lips and go “shhhhhhhh.” ‘Cause she was the Quiet Storm. And the crowd would hold THEIR fingers to THEIR lips and go “shhhhh” with her. It reminded me of Detroit Tiger games with my dad when I was a kid. Lou Whitaker would come up to bat and the crowd would chant “LOU LOU LOU.” He was everybody’s favorite and so was Quiet Storm. But, as I sit here thinking about it, I also liked her ‘cause she didn’t knock anybody over. She didn’t punch anybody. She didn’t swear, or yell at the referee, or cut anybody off or do anything illegal. She won fair and square and, yes … nice. I went up to her during intermission to ask for her autograph, and as she was signing the lady standing next to her gushed, “Isn’t she wonderful! I’m her mother!” I looked over to Anita Beer standing next to us, blood pouring from her nose. On down the line, another girl (Tara Heartout?) was nursing a bruised thigh. I thought, over my mother’s dead body would I ever roller derby. I’m just not tough enough.

But you can get your ass I’ll be sitting at the crowd at every match, eating a hot dog, drinking a beer, holding up an I HEART QUIET STORM sign and going “shhhhhhh.”