TeamKit

I have never been one for much need for association to groups. I've never really been the lone wolf type, but just haven't found it necessary to belong to an established group. I never played competitive team sports competitively as a kid. My parent's weren't super into it, and it was a bit to structured for me. By structured I mean I couldn't change my mind on what I wanted to do every 5 seconds. I played a lot of sports (i.e. baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and trampoline) with my dad, older brother, and friends, but I always liked having the ability to jump from one sport to the next because I didn't have the best attention span.

Since I never had been part of a team I was really surprised to have the experience I had dawning my team kit for the first time. During this last winter I became part of a Northern (I mean the real Northern) California and Southern Oregon Cycling team Etna Brewing Co./ DeSalvo Custom Cycles. Being still fairly new to the sport of bike racing (crossed over from Triathlon) I was excited to be part of a team for many reasons, but mostly because it would offer me some discounts and people to train with.



When I picked up my teamkit this spring I was mostly excited to have a couple new jersey's and bike shorts because it was just that time of the year. However, when I pulled on my Etna Brew bibs and jersey for the first time I was overwhelmed with the sense of pride! It gave me an immense feeling of accomplishment and instilled a huge amount of drive in me. From that moment in time on all I have wanted to do is train more, train smarter, train harder, and race race race race my bike. The issue of jumping from one sport to the next on a whim as vanished. Everything in my life is now structured around insuring I get to ride my bike six days a week, and race as much as possible.

Being a part of a team or recognizing myself as part of something has been a very positive experience for me. I now have more understanding why so many people pursue association with a social group in the vast array they exist. It even compounds the significance of Chuck Palahniuk's book Fight Club.

Are you correcting my spelling?

Disclaimer: This post has absolutely nothing to do with the outdoors!

I grew up in a family that obsessively corrected ever miss spelled word and grammar error I ever wrote or spoke. I am grateful that I was raised in a family that cared enough about my education to put in the effort to teach me the correct way to read, write, and speak. It influenced me later in life when I finally chose my major in college as a Bachelor's of Science in Human Communication. The well established background gave me a advantage in all of my public speaking classes as well as researching and writing a copious amount of papers.

I find myself as a college graduate and, what I consider, a moderately well educated person still having people correct what they interpret are miss spelled words or grammar mistakes. This really annoys me! I can understand the assumption that a young kid has spelled a word incorrectly out of error. However, one should not assume that all words spelled untrue to traditional form are in error. We live in a free thinking world, or at least some of us like to think that we do, so why should we forcibly conform our use of language. Its barbaric. In the art world its an insult to trifle an artist expression even if it is outside the traditional realm of art, but somehow it is okay to presumably correct someone's self expression through words. If I so choose to spell a word a certain way or not put a comma in my sentence or string multiple sentences together without the traditional means of punctuation's who cares?

Personally, I think that there are much bigger issues in this world then if I used affect when I should have used effect or since instead of sense or just simply didn't feel the need to go back and change the fact that i didn't capitalize my i or put in that letter I left out of a word. I will give all due respect to the english language and there are situations where I believe sentence structure and spelling should comply to a traditional form. But in the end it is a language that is ever evolving. And, so what if the traditional rules are slowly falling off. If they are falling by the wayside it just means that we don't need them anymore because the are out dated and superfluous. Some might say, we have to draw the line somewhere or it will be anarchy. This is not a gateway drug situation. The world is not going to fall out of orbit and were not all going to die if I don't spell every word the way it is in the dictionary. Stupid Webster anyways!

None of this is to say that I disagree with the proper education of language, speaking, spelling, and grammar. But at some point do not just automatically jump to the conclusion that someone has made a mistake, and then feel the need to jump in and prove how much smarter then them you are. And, even if it causes major issues for you emotionally, mentally, and physically allow nontraditional thinking and expression to happen.