this is life in austin & aspen » run club

What to do on Wednesday

Lyssa — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:38:04 +0000

Wednesday this week is offering a doubleheader of athletic options. There’s always SoCo Run Club, the awesome run club I won’t stop talking about, but now there’s a new competitor: Wednesday pickup volleyball at Zilker.

So, there’s a friend of mine who started the meetup.com volleyball group (you can access it through atxvb.com too … he’s a web developer). Normally I would think he’s awesome for starting something like that, but I must admit that I’m a little snobby/territorial about playing volleyball at Zilker. See, I started going out there last year, and it’s where I met a bunch of the people I now consider my closest friends. And I didn’t use a meetup group! We just met! Naturally!

Which, of course, is some silly logic. I should be glad that other people are getting a shortcut to making friends, I should be proud of my friend for starting something that helps other people make friends, I make friends from the group, and so on. I just don’t want these people to think I made my friends off the internet … because I didn’t! But what’s so wrong with that? After all, aren’t I encouraging readers of my blog to participate in things I tell them to–through the internet–and therefore make friends ostensibly from the internet?

And the funny thing is, I like a lot of the people from the meetup group. And if I didn’t already go to Zilker, I would be THRILLED to find the meetup group, I would join, and I would start going to Zilker! It’s just that sense of wanting everyone to know that I was there first…

However, you should ignore my elitist, proprietary ramblings and come out to Zilker tonight to play some sand volleyball with some cool people. Myself excluded, as I have just demonstrated that I am not, in fact, cool.

New Direction

Lyssa — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:48:00 +0000

Rather than being a ramble on my life, which no doubt my mom finds very interesting, I’m changing the scope of this blog back to my original intention: This is Life in Austin. What I do, what I see, what trends I identify, what I think everyone else should do, visitor and local alike. So in the spirit of that! here’s what’s hot for Wednesday, April 2:

Evening:
1) SoCo Run Club: meet at Doc’s, run 3 miles (reunite with my buddies from last season!!), hang out & make friends
2) T-shirt pickup for Austin Sports & Social Club Flag Football league (conveniently also at Doc’s!)

Making Friends Through Sports

Lyssa — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:35:00 +0000

I got an email today inviting me to a crawfish boil, and it reminded me how incredibly lucky I am to have formed the friend network I have so quickly. I moved back to Austin a little more than a year ago and have already established a group of really good friends, tons of other friends, and even more acquaintances–plus a serious boyfriend I just broke up with. Most of them I met through sports, or met through friends I met through sports. Maybe I’m just lucky to be athletic.

Moving back, I made it a goal to make a lot of friends. The only way I knew to do that was to join teams and get active, so I joined a football team and started going to a run club. There I made friends, some that stuck, some that didn’t. I went with old friends/acquaintances from my high school to play volleyball–a sport I never cared for or wanted to learn to play–and now play 2-3 days a week! Right now I play on four sports teams: a basketball team, a football team, and two volleyball teams (with mostly the same people–one is coed and one isn’t).

The point is that I’ve made awesome friends really quickly, and I have sports to blame/thank for that. Do other cities have Austin Sports & Social leagues? Because that has been instrumental in me finding friends. That and Zilker Park’s sand volleyball courts! Saturday mornings, starting at 10 am going as long as we last … VOLLEYBALL!