How to win friends and influence people

I'm a little bit of a social idiot. Like, I have basic social skills, so if we go out for lunch I'm not going to poop on the table and stuff. But I find it hard to actually fit in with groups, much less stick with them over time. I find friendship to be somewhat demanding, and I don't like small talk or banter or whatever that you need to actually insert yourself into an existing group. Luckily, I have wonderful friends who are forgiving when I drop off the grid for years and then come back into the group as if no time had passed. That's why my friends are awesome.

Anyway, it's hard to fit into groups for me, especially if 1) it's a long-established group with its own dynamic and 2) I'm the only new person and everyone already knows someone else. Well, that's what it's like joining NRV. We skate around and do warmups, and apart from one or two people, nobody would really talk to me and everyone else skates around in a big pack chatting and I'm just this lone person on the opposite side of the track or whatever. It's tough. I mean, it's still early days and everyone is nice and nobody is a dick or anything, but it's hard to know where to fit in, right?

The little piggy still has socks on because
presumably fresh meat need rental skates.

Tonight was NRV's recruitment night. What that meant was that we had regular training, but people interested in derby could come and watch us train and ask us about stuff. NRV trains at an actual skating rink, so there were plenty of hire skates and pads for them to try on and roll around with later and whatnot. We did our normal warmup and then some drills (which I'll write up later), and then we went and introduced ourselves to the newbies (the new name got a few laughs, hooray) and talked to them for a bit, and then they got gear on and we did a little bit of a demo scrimmage to explain to them what was going on. If you were benched while a jam was going on, you could sit amongst the newbies and explain to them what was going on and whatnot, and then at the end there was a social skate and we skated around with them and taught them how to do things like snowplows and whatever.


So, a few things. Warmup was still kind of antisocial, as was our first drill, which was the in and outs (I'll write these up in a bit). There are a couple of fresher meat people that I talked to the first few times before I was allowed to scrimmage, and they're still nice and I talk to them. There are also a few newer team people who recently passe their skills test, but they were all in the same cohort so tend to stick together (see--COHORTS ARE IMPORTANT). Anyway, when we wet to  I was benched with a few of them and what, people were actually talking to me! In fact, Priss was like "WHOA YOU'RE AUSTRALIAN" and then wouldn't let me shut up because she was so excited by the fact that I had an accent. And she just never knew because I had never talked to her.

And then I realized two things:

1. I am not as new as the newbies being recruited. So I can't be all wimpy about being new and shit like that.
2. People actually want to talk to me if I take the time to talk to them.

Admittedly, because I'm a social moron I probably didn't talk to people because I thought that they didn't want to talk to me, and so on. But once I realized that then training was actually fun. Like, I could be all shouty when the jammer was coming up without thinking that people were thinking I was being a bossy bitch, and I even talked to some of the new people and taught one how to sticky skate forwards and backwards. And she thanked me and said she'd come back to another training. Yay.

But the best part was when they put music on and it was stuff like Love Shack and I wanna dance with somebody or whatever which is fine, but then I was skating by a couple of other people and we all started singing the Gangnam Style song, and doing the dance. I think it was more or less spontaneous. It was really weird. But yeah, that was fun. And then we all had the song in our head so we did the dance again. Also, surprisingly, nobody fell down.

If you have no idea what Gangnam Style is, please watch and learn:

Obviously NOBODY had ANY idea what the hell was going on or what he was saying or anything, but it was fun and we all laughed about it and I actually felt like I was bonding with the people I was skating with. And it's all because we've all individually watched some video of a chubby Korean guy doing some weird horse riding dance thingy on the internet. And we've all watched it about 20 times and know all the bits to it.

By the way, the fast sideways running bit is HARD to do on skates.

And then afterwards there was food. Some of the NRV ladies had made food to bring so we could all sit and share a meal with the newbies while we geared down and stuff. Man, southern cooking is fucking fantastic. And the NRV peeps must really like their league if they're going to make like 20 different kinds of food for it. So yeah. Good food, good times. And then we did Gangnam Style again but off skates. Yay. I am happy.

Clockwise from bottom: mac and cheese, peanut caramel blondie thing
(like a caramel brownie), jam and vanilla frosting cookie thing, tiny
tiny hotdogs, pastry thing with chili beans and cheese, plastic fork, more
M&C. Nomtastic.