I joined in the summer following seventh grade and became a year round diver. We dove in all conditions even rain! Well we were supposed to but I refused to dive in the rain. There was much too much potential for me to slip and crack my head open which was the only thing I concentrated on while at diving practice: not cracking my head open on the diving board or the pool deck.

As a result of my fear of cracking open my head I was prevented from participating in an entire series of dives. I forget the number class but they were the inverted dives, a variety of dive the layman may know as a jackknife, not the can opener mind you, I had no problem with that, but the jackknife. The inverted dive required the diver to trounce to the end of the diving board bounce themselves STRAIGHT up, NOT out, (never out, for that was considered bad form and would also allow for a fair amount of clearance between the diver's head and the diver's board, which is not cool or impressive) and then rotate their lower body up and their upper body down in a movement with their head just scarcely missing the edge of the diving board but in many cases that I saw, not missing it at all. This motion would be likened to slipping on a banana peel, which by the way, I have done THREE times in my life.

Because of this I was never in my three year diving career made a full-fledged member of the varsity team. I was only allowed to dive varsity at local meets, the scores of which would not effect our CIF standing.

Because I was not really on the varsity team but practiced with them I was the odd man out or the whipping girl, if you will, of the team. I was constantly fooled with and taunted, much the same as I was by Phillip.

This marginalization was actually for the most part due to my mouthiness toward the loser upper classman, Benj, who thought he was so rad because he was the nerdy son in the sequel motion picture to The Incredible Journey, the one where the cat and the dog communicate telepathically and audibly for the viewing audience and get lost in the wilderness while their family moves across the country. Wowie huh?

I think another reason I was so ostracized was because when the weather started to get cold I refused to sit in the metal horse trough with everyone else. It really was a horse trough or maybe it was a pig bath. This is more believable if you understand that Thousand Oaks finds it's deepest roots in the equestrian lifestyle and to this day still hosts a rodeo every summer. Anyway, there was a garden hose connected to the faucet of a sink in the janitor's closet of the girl's locker room that ran down the open air hallway and under the fence around the pool, bring hot water to the trough so our precious little muscles wouldn't get cold while we waited for our turn.

Well I refused to sit in that stupid horse trough because I felt like I was being cooked in some kind of human stew. All you would see was the tops of our heads sticking out of a container that very, very closely resembled a cooking pot. So I said no thank you. As a result I was deemed, "weird." As you can see, diary, I was not the "weird" one, I was not the one volunteering to be cooked alive in a pig bath/horse trough.

You see diary, I was always the victim. I tried to live my life with reason and personal integrity and look what the masses did to me, they pushed me to the fringes of the diving team.

You know I bet if I had told that story of overcoming adversity for the essay portion of my application to UCSD, I would have gotten in the first time I applied.

24 August 2002 - 4:41 PM

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