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celebrating what is coming

• by kerri

The past is important in telling our stories, to understand where we’re at and why we’re there.

But tonight, I am not celebrating what’s ending . . . i am celebrating what is coming.  I don’t “do” new year’s resolutions, because a resolution is simply a goal–and goals need to be set and re-set frequently to make progress.

Today I closed off 2011 with my friend and former coworker, Sara, just one of many amazing people I experienced the joy of meeting in 2011.  We ate too many crepes and had an amazing time, and were ironically wearing the same Hollister hoodie in different colours, pink t-shirts underneath and brown jackets!  [I took mine off for the picture].

sara and i!

After making a final pharmacy trip for the year (gotta love breathing, yeah?), I came home to do a final workout to hit 800 kilometers for 2011.  To give some perspective on how much I’ve grown in regard to exercise and fitness in 2011, my total on December 31st, 2010 was a tiny 100 kilometers [which was upped to a legitimate 106 as I found later on that I had forgotten to count an April race in there].

That. Is. Huge.  The big change in 2011 came in September through the amazingness that was Physical Activity: Promotion and Adherence, definitely my favourite university class thus far, and really gaining the understanding that the SMALL things make a BIG difference!  Though an unintentional success attributed to making small changes and regulating physical activity, since mid-September [at my highest ever weight which may have been some sort of weird fluke] I have lost a total of 17 pounds.  I can’t say I felt “bad” before or anything, but comparatively, I feel totally awesome both physically and emotionally with the GOOD changes that have happened!

I’ve walked 213 km, stationary biked 143, and racked up hundreds of kilometers in commutes. I walked one race, went on a few short hikes, went on an adventure rock climbing this past week.  I played hockey both in my skates and in my Sauconies and skated down rivers.  I’ve played in concrete jungles and playgrounds.  This has been the most active year of my life, and I plan to strip that title away from 2011 and give it to 2012.

This year, I have reached farther than I thought I could, pushed my lungs and my body in bigger ways.  I started thinking about things differently, relationships changed and growing happened.  I did things I couldn’t believe I would or could succeed at.  
I got a new job at an amazing daycare.  I worked one-on-one at camp for a week, which was one of the biggest challenges and biggest joys simultaneously.  I have met so many amazing people in “real life” and online.  One of my best guy friends for a time became my first boyfriend and even though it mutually didn’t work out, it definitely did not damage our friendship, which was the most important thing to us.  I returned to Chicago.  I watched one of the girls I do inclusion with grow so much in where she’s at, while simultaneously realizing the growth in myself through her.  I have fallen more and more in love with the subject that is applied health.  I have changed my perspectives on health advocacy, become more involved, and continued to learn how to OWN my asthma and encourage others to do the same.  I have learned to better live with what I’ve been handed.  I have learned more deeply that health and wellness is a choice.  I have learned to see things differently, engage differently, and not just make goals, but meet goals and ENGAGE in these goals to use them as learning experiences.

I want to continue that next year.  Continue moving forward, continue proving myself wrong, continuing to grow and learn and thrive, not simply survive.

There is more goodness coming.  There is a year of hope, joy, change, growth, learning, and love ahead.

Bring it on 2012. GOOD THINGS!

asthma / health + fitness / kinesiology / work

fantastic friday

• by kerri

This is the best I’ve felt in weeks.

This morning, I woke up and grabbed my inhaler has a completely different meaning.  I woke up, realized how fantastic I was feeling, and reached up to grab my Ventolin to pre-medicate for my first workout in over two weeks, instead of reaching for my inhaler to take the edge off gunky morning lungs.  I kept it short and light, covering 5.66 km in 25 minutes–the last thing I want to do is start going too hard too fast and end up back where I was two weeks ago and get sidelined again (I’m doing a vlog series right now called Working up to Working Out, chronicling my journey back to kicking ass, so feel free to check that out).  And I feel even better afterwards.

Following that I checked the MyBlackboard thing to see if our research papers for Issues in Sport had been graded yet (surprise surprise, nope. They were due November 18th. This would not bug me so much if I had grades for more than one of four reflections for the class also), and the icon under Promotion and Adherence caught my eye.  Course wrap-up message and final exam grades.  Bring on the seconds worth of anticipation when you can’t get the page to load fast enough, right?

The final exam was yesterday and our (unofficial) exam marks are posted (this has me wondering if Jay slept at all or just motored through them), and scored 84% . . . and if all stays as is, will have officially earned my first A- in university!  Needless to say, I am stoked, and that combined with how I left my Physical Activity and Aging exam feeling so positive on Wednesday night . . . well, it’s awesome.

And with that, and being a ball of energy, I am off to work — today is “Santa Day”, so it will be full of pizza and presents and staying at work until 8:30!

But also full of feeling positive, so hooray!

health + fitness / kinesiology

stairs.

• by kerri

In the middle of campus, there’s a set of stairs sandwiched between two escalators.  It’s been a topic of discussion in more than one of my classes, and Promotion and Adherence is no exception.  We watched this video in that class too — I’d seen it before, but I love the concept.  Who DOESN’T want piano stairs?

They might make more students actually use the stairs between the escalators on campus.  I actually race people by running up the stairs and seeing if I can beat the person who got on the escalator the same time I got on the stairs.  Mostly people on campus just STAND on the escalator, too, like the people in the video above. Hello, they are meant to make you go FASTER not SLOWER.  Additionally, a girl in my class said that the only people she ever sees on the stairs are people who are in kinesiology.  We need Point of Decision prompts hanging at eye level above all the escalators and elevators on campus.

Burn calories, not electricity. Take the stairs.

Today I was on a mission for baked chips on campus.  The vending machines in the athletic centre had none, so I ran [literally] to the other building via the skywalk on the next floor up, up one of the flights of stairs between the escalators, and up to the other vending machines.  Nada.  Back to the cafeteria.  Nope.  Oh well, no chips for Kerri isn’t exactly a bad thing, right?  Ran back down the stairs to the athletic centre again.

So, who is the only person on his way up the stairs as I am going down?  Yep, it’s my Promotion and Adherence prof, Jay.  Further underscoring the kinesology-people-on-the-stairs thing.

I try to take the stairs whenever possible — when I was still seeing my old pulmonologist [yeah, I’ve decided to ‘break up’ with him], I’d always take the stairs to the seventh-floor lung clinic.  Thatgot me a look from the receptionist a time or two!  [Hey, I may have asthma, but I’m young and otherwise healthy!]

They may not look like pianos, but they’re good for you!  If you don’t already, try it this week: take the stairs.  It all adds up!

being a student

midterm madness and other such chaos

• by kerri

So I dropped another class today, Religion.  It means no more unfinished readings and no more complete confusion.  It also means I still have to fight my way through another six credit hours of humanities at some point in the very new future.  In the last two years, I’ve dropped three humanities classes–Religion and Pop Culture, Linguistics and now this one.  Add to that my other chronic course dropping habits including Psych Skills in Sport and Life, Anatomy, Intro to International Development studies [in first year], Scientific Principles of Fitness and Conditioning [which I’m now in next term], Developmental Psychology, Introduction to Disability Studies and Introduction to Sociology, and you’ve got a pretty wide range of dropped courses.

I know my study habits leave something to be desired, but I really am trying to keep up this year and it’s just getting more difficult with increasing readings.  I have issues with procrastination, and I’m the first to admit it.  I have a master syllabus of all my requirements for each course I’m in that I look at frequently, important things are in my Google calendar which syncs across the board, and all my notes are always with me in Evernote.  And like Religion, some things just don’t work.

I was really excited for the second term of Religion, but considering I knew literally five points on the review, and was up until 1 am writing a paper and then launched into crazy Wednesday — work, a meeting with my Issues in Sport prof, Issues in Sport, lunch, practicum, Promotion and Adherence, attempt at religion studying and dinner, and then Physical Activity and Aging until 8:30 [or 8:10 today].

I would show you my awesome scorekeeping drawings from practicum today, except for I have no idea where my phone cable is and the e-mails of the pictures apparently aren’t coming through.  They were awesome, though, and the seniors thoroughly enjoyed them and kept telling me things to add.

The coolest thing today was that I had an impromptu tweetup with Donald after Physical Activity and Aging.  We found out via Twitter he was just a building over from me at school and he came by after the presentation he was at — how cool is that?

Tomorrow: work, no class, and probably a flu shot.  So a) I don’t get really ridiculous sick and b) my doctors don’t yell at me.

being a student

dude, it’s called kleenex – tales of a university germ factory.

• by kerri

So in one of my classes, there’s a guy that my friend and I refer to as Awkward Guy for a reason or five.  I mean, it’s hilarious whenever somebody addresses the prof like “Uh . . .Professor . . . I just have a question about the reading?”  Because really, I call ’em by their name, or I just say hi.  None of this professor business, but to each their own.

That was only the start of the class, though.  Soon after the lecture began, he started sniffling.

Then sniffling louder.  And grosser.

We formed groups for discussion on scientific reasoning for the parting of the Red Sea and Moses and whatnot.  I turned to the guy behind me who had just converted me to Sharpie Pens, and one of us made some sort of comment about Awkward Guy’s sniffling.  Then our group did our work, we tried to convince some guy to just try to separate faith and science for twenty minutes.  ” . . . but, I’m a Christian . . .” Some girl: “Yeah, so am I, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think about it differently for this discussion.”  I mean, I’m a Christian, but I’m not all literal about the Bible and stuff as much as many people in this class are.  And I mean, your beliefs are your beliefs and that’s cool, but for the purpose of academia, entertain some opposing thoughts for a moment or twenty.

Group work ended.  The class quieted down, and we could hear Awkward Guy sniffling again.  Seriously, we just had twenty minutes of group work, plenty of time to escape to find some kleenex.

Then he got louder.  And louder.  And louder.  And then of course the sound got grosser and grosser and grosser . . .

Sharpie Pen Guy mumbles “Dude. Blow your nose already”, though I think I’m the only one who heard him. Dear First Years of the world, please learn that you are not in high school anymore, and you can get up and wander around and/or go to the bathroom and/or leave at any time you feel inclined to.  Especially so you don’t gross the rest of us out.

I spent the rest of the class exchanging glances with Sharpie Pen Guy whenever Awkward Guy loudly snorts back the slime being created by the response of his immune-system affected overreactive mucosal membranes.  I try to focus on lecture over the fact that Awkward Guy has just wiped his snot on his sleeve.  Sharpie Pen guy mumbles that the snorting is making him feel as if he’s going to throw up.  I nod and mumble in agreement “Yeah, same here, man”.  I have no idea how I would have survived class without Sharpie Pen Guy to commiserate with.

Finally, finally we’re freed . . .  and I try not to touch the doorknob on my way out, but immediately go wash my hands, shaking my head that the same people who are working hard at earning a university education often can’t figure out how to not spread germs through a couple simple arts–kleenex and soap [soap . . . that’s another story for another day].

And this is why everybody in university gets sick and spreads germs like an elementary school.