I'm really beginning to hate the month before Sectionals, the Labor Day tournament in particular. Last year, I had to play on lots of (admittedly OTC) painkillers. The year before I broke four ribs the week after the tournament. The year before, playing Donner, I tripped in a hole at the tournament and sprained my ankle bad enough to require weeks of physical therapy.

So, this year?

Another sprained ankle, tripping in a hole on the mini field we were warming up in.

The team did a great job at taking care of me. So good, as a matter of fact, that at the end of the day, other than the sharp pain at the extreme flexes, I couldn't tell I had injured my ankle.

Mistake, because I had clearly injured my ankle. This morning, when I woke up after half a night without ankle compression. my ankle was huge, with a black, brown and blue ring around it. My mobility with the ankle gone, too.

So, yeah, once again, RICE before Sectionals. Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation. More like, SLOB. Slow. Lethargic. Old. Bored.

Fixed a few site issues this morning. The problem with fixing one issue is that there are always a billion other things I can do with the site. I would really like to do other things today besides sit on my ass, though.

Today, I fixed the site contents link. I upgraded the alphaindex module to 4.7, before I bothered to track down the original source. I found it at urlgreyhot.com, which was indeed listed at the top of the module file. An upgraded verson is available on urbanfalcon.com, so I downloaded that, reapplied my additional features and installed.

Voila! A working site index. Yay!

Years ago (all of maybe two of them), Donner was a powerhouse in mixed ultimate. Coming out of our section, so therefore in our region, Donner was a regular opponent at any local(ish) tournament.

From an outside perspective, Donner was considered a great team, not only for their athletic prowess (national and world champions), but also for their spirit.

They had the outsiders fooled.

Donner players were notorious for agressive, antagonistic, unspirited side line chatter. Any call made against their team was a bad call, whether the call was legitimate or not. Any call made by their teammates was a good call. Any call against them that was later retracted was rewarded on the sidelines with calls of, "good spirit!" but any kept was met with mutterings and complaints of bad spirit.

So, imagine my flashbacks this afternoon when, after a throw out-of-bounds was met with a cacophany of "Send it back!" and "You should just give us that disc back."

A thrower on the opponent's team had put up a huck along the far sideline. Scottie, a longtime Donner player, was open when the throw went up, and started booking to catch it. The disc started drifting out of bounds, so Scottie had to layout to catch it. Sitting in the location near where he was going to layout was a Mischief player. Because he was unable to layout in his optimal location, a layout that would land out of bounds, thereby requiring Scottie to try for a Greatest (with no one around to catch the throw), when he did stand up, be blamed his miss on the Mischief player.

The near sideline oddly agreed, and felt the disc belonged back to them. Clearly, the non-player was interfering, and therefore responsible for the out-of-bounds catch.

Serious flashbacks. Half of the team are Donner players, so I shouldn't be surprised.

I think if one more person explains something to me, then follows up with the question, "Does that make sense?" I will both scream, and immediately stop whatever project I'm working on for that person.

I'm convinced I've developed an expression on my face of perpetual confusion, because people who have never asked me this question before when explaining things to me, have started.

Either that, or I've missed something. Maybe a two month period of profound stupidity that is causing everyone to think I need things explained to me fourteen times before I understand?

Stop it, people. Yes, I freakin' understand. Yes, it makes sense, stop asking for confirmation.

When I was growing up, the mother of my best friend in late elementary (and junior high) school was a total romance junkie. She had a book of the month club subscription to Harlequin Romances. She would receive four quick-read trashy novels each month. The program had a 4 for 1 deal, where if she sent back four books, she'd get one free. I don't know if she took advantage of the deal, as she had three of four long bookcase shelves full of these books.

In late elementary school, right about when girls figure out what boys are, but boys still think girls are icky, I started reading them. I'd borrow a handful of the books and plow through them faster than my friend's mom. The descriptions of sex in the books were fluff, so a pre-teen reading the books wasn't going to get any type of sex-education from the books.

She was, however, going to get a seriously misconceived view of romance.

The biggest moment in all of these books was The First Time™. The first meeting. The first kiss. The first tear-off of all the clothes, including the overflowing bodice. The first fight. The suspense for each First was palpable on the page. The anticipation of each of those moments that was kept the reader engaged.

There was never any discussion about the aftermath.

Let's not talk about how, after the heroine survived locusts, hurricanes and an abusive, lustful insert some archetypical bad male character here, to find the hero and fall in love, she still had to wake up like the rest of us. She still had to cook, and poop, and work, and sleep, and, you know what, sex after children is just not that fun.

So, let's just stop the story at, whoo, they get together.

After about a year of the trash romances, and a lot of puzzlement from my friend ("Why do you read those books?"), I stopped reading them in disgust. They became time and time again all about the anticipation of love, with no substance. I grew weary of the strong, independent woman turning to mush over a man who probably wouldn't change from his quiet, stoic self, and suddenly open up. There was no realism in the books.

Of course, realism really isn't why people read these books in the first place.

I had difficulties with the basic fundamentals of the books. Ignoring the fact such a romance-novel perfect man couldn't possibly exist, I couldn't get past the implausible situations created for the two main characters to meet. The situations that were, 99% of the time, completely absurd.

So, yeah, I stopped reading them.

What lingered, however, was the sweet taste of anticipation. That moment leading up to the First Kiss? Oh, that was pure heaven. The act of falling in love has been show scientifically to be a cascade of various hormones that induce good feelings, happy emotions and, unsurprisingly, addictive behaviour. The rush of love follows the same pathways as the rush of some illegal drugs, making it sometimes as desired as those drugs.

Given my pre-pubescent trash novel literature tastes, is it surprising that I dated a lot in college?

Heather brought over Veronica Mars Season One last Saturday for Kris and I to watch. She had been watching for the last two seasons, and knew that we had run out of shows to watch (having gone through Firefly and Battlestar Galactice and Lost from Mike). She ordered the Season One DVDs, and brought them down for us when she stayed with us on Saturday night.

I watched the first three discs (that would be nine hours of television) by Sunday night. I finished all the shows by Tuesday night. Too many 1:00 am (natch: 3:00 am) nights these last two days for my own good.

Okay, disclaimer time: stop reading if you're going to watch the show and haven't yet. I'm about to comment on events on the fifth and subsequent discs, thereby spoiling the first 17 episodes for you.

Like you'd stop reading.

Right?

The fifth disc has that wonderfully delicious moment of the First Kiss. The anticipation for the kiss isn't there in the sense the build-up to the moment is short, but the writers did a good job of building up the potential for the relationship. Usually the suspense isn't there, and the anticipation is faked by the characters on screen, rarely felt in the audience.

This moment was different. The guy is a jerk, but you're rooting for him anyway.

It might have been because the characters portrayed were in high school, and the tortured memories of that period never really fade. You always hope that something good works out for someone of that age, because it never seemed to work out for you. It might be because the actor looks like a good friend. I'm not sure.

I think the his look of desire for her made the moment. That look reminded me of falling in love. It reminded me of that rush of emotions, that promise of good, that anticipation of sex and that closeness of the moment.

I've missed that emotion.

I hit rewind and watched it again.

Twice.