Today's features: a short story, some dithering, and some musing. I'll tell the story first, because it's inspiring.
I've been hearing stories for a few years of how colleges are so desperate to meet their Title IX requirements that they've been giving rowing scholarships to tall athletic girls even if they haven't rowed before. I hadn't seen any concrete examples until now, but I met one this morning.
The college who gets this girl will be happy with their bargain, though. She'd been burned out on her other sports and is looking forward to trying rowing, but she's never done it before (she did visit a practice at the school she'll be attending). This is the only city in this state with any rowing at all (well, one new junior program is just starting in another town). So she got in touch with someone here, arranged for a private lesson, and drove three hours to get here. She'll be coming to town on weekends to take lessons the rest of this summer. I was impressed - I haven't seen that kind of initiative even from most masters rowers. With that committment, I'm sure she'll do well.
And I checked - the coach at her prospective college didn't tell her to do this.
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The dithering: I am not, as may be obvious from yesterday's entry, enthusiastic about tomorrow's flight to San Diego. In fact, I've been very nervous. This morning I went rowing, did a hundred meters, and thought, "OK, if I'm doing 10,000 meters today, that's 1/100th down, only 99 more like that to go. I can do this."
Now, I do tend to do fractions like that to keep myself going, and it's OK to do it sometimes - to think, "OK, I'm starting the middle third of the practice now," or, "Last half, it's all downhill from here." I count off hundred-meter bits to get through the end of practice, too, sometimes to the tune of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" or "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain", with improvised lyrics. (In my head, not out loud.) That's all fine. But to start a row counting it off as one more series of ordeals to get through, especially at a time when I'm rowing for pleasure and maintenance, not intense training, is a bad thing. It makes rowing one more stressor, and in me, it's a sign that I'm pretty stressed out already. Of course, tomorrow's flight is the main thing hanging over me right now.
So I sat up straighter, tried to row more smoothly, and tried to appreciate the milky reflection of the sky right before the sun rose, the way the sun seemed to pop up all at once, the motion of my boat, the feel of the horizontal lines I was pulling, and so on. And I'm trying to convince myself that tomorrow's flight will be an adventure, a fun challenge, and even a little bit miraculous, that I can fy a tiny airplane all the way from the desert to the ocean. It hasn't entirely sunk in yet, but I'm working on it. (It will help if Rudder can keep from nagging, "Have you considered this? What about that?" Having another pilot in the house is not always as helpful as you'd think, especially when I'm better off not dwelling on this more than enough to get everything ready.)
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The Musing
Sometimes you see a face that seems to belong to another period - it's not clear if it's a matter of expression or what, though I don't know why faces ought to change by decade. Connie Willis, in To Say Nothing of the Dog has Ned initially thinking that Verity must be a Victorian contemp because of her perfect Waterhouse face; I once knew a woman who always seemed like she ought to be wearing 1940s outfits. I can't say what the changes stem from, or even if they're real. Some of it is probably hairstyle, too.
But bodies really have changed over time. If you look at a random group of people today, you'll see a few really fat ones, a majority who ranging from a little to a lot puffy around the gut or the hips, and a few hardbodies who obviously spend a lot of time in the gym. There will be only a few people who are somewhere in the middle, without either extra fat or bulging muscles, and maybe a couple of skinny ones. If it's a young group, there will be a few more in the middle group, and several who have that stretched exaggerated leanness of adolescence, but there will still be quite a few carrying extra weight.
Now go look at an old group photo - here are some from the building of Hoover Dam and here are a bunch of WWII bomber crew photos. It's easier to see in men, because there are just more group ohotos of them, and because they're likely to be wearing more form-fitting clothes. It would be easier still to see in a photo where some of the men are shirtless, and I have seen some like that, but not online. What you see in those is very, very few overweight people - but notice also that none of them look like gym rats. You rarely see bulging biceps or pecs, or carved washboard abs in old photos. What you see are barrel chests on some guys, and long stringy - but obviously strong - muscles on others. (The military guys may be a special case, because they're young and in military training, but remember this is just after the Depression. Some of those guys were eating better than they had at home. And some were flying missions nearly every day, which doesn't leave a lot of time for jogging or lifting weights.) I think there are two factors involved: fast food hadn't been invented yet, and peope got their muscles not by working out, but by plain working.
There is one place you do see the older physiques still, though: in athletes. I don't mean Olympic athletes, so much: for those people, working out is a full time job and they do have the carved washboard abs - though even there, only the weightlifters have large bulging arms. Other athletes' muscles are defined, but compact, because they can't afford any wasted weight. But think of the athletes you know: soccer-playing women, surfers, people who play Ultimate Frisbee twice a week. Think even of some of the pro sports: baseball players don't tend to be bulgy (or when they do, steroid rumors arise). Most basketball players have muscles, but they're not huge. Weight lifters do get huge, because they're building muscle for one quick all-out effort, and have no penalty for carrying excess around. Body builders look good, of course, but they just look fake to me, especially the ones with the dark even tans that you know come from a bottle or a tanning bed. Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I do like the idea of a body built more for use than for show.
(Now if I could just get rid of a little of that useless flab....)
Posted by dichroic at June 3, 2005 12:37 PM