This week's instant karma is from page 246:

Give yourself freedom to fail.

Something I used to rarely do, I'm afraid, but that I'm starting to do more.

No one is successful in everything. No matter how gifted, talented, skilled, intelligent or coordinated someone is, he will fail at something at some point. Anyone who doesn't fail can't possibly be fully challenging himself.

At SFUL last night I allowed myself the freedom to fail, and threw some throws that I wouldn't throw in a Mischief game, or even in practice.

And yet they still completed.

Go fig.

This is definitely where I've been going for a while now: forgiving myself, encouraging myself, trying new things (say, singing in a Viking Operetta, or hitting a baseball in a batting cage), allowing myself to look like a complete idiot in order to learn something new.

And this is a good thing. Because in trying, we grow.

... doesn't mean they can't catch.

Or run.

And if they catch the disc in the endzone, they won't have to throw.

I managed to play for a half hour last night at my first ever SFUL league game. I was terribly late because I had a bug I just had to fix. Managed to do so, then dash up to the City, using Raphael as my carpool buddy.

When I arrived, I put my cleats on quickly and, against my better judgement, didn't run to warm up. When I watched from the sidelines the players weren't running too hard, so I hoped I would be fine in not warming up too much.

I, then, asked one of my teammates to throw with me to warm up my arm. He said sure, and stood about 5 yards away from me.

What the?

Dude, step back to 15.

I threw him the disc, a gentle backhand. He responded, "Oh, good throw. Nice!" in the most annoying, condescending way, and threw the softest backhand ever back to me.

Heh.

Yeah, mister, I suck. My fingers can't handle your throws, and I don't know how to run.

I actually didn't know what to expect. I wasn't sure of the skill level and didn't want to open my mouth to offend anyone or play at too high of a level.

Deciding to keep the whole skillset underwraps, I threw another two or three throws, then went out to the line. We were down 5-10, game to 15 or time, which expired in 20 minutes. When asked what I like to play, throw or run (heh), I responded, "Sure." They told me to go long, asked if I knew what a stack was, because they weren't stacking, and received the pull.

Three points later, the score was 8-10, with my having caught, threw or assisted each of the three scores.

So much for keeping that underwraps.

I desperately wanted to run around, so I stayed in most of the 20 minutes without subbing. I was worried about taking up too much game time, but the other women, thankfully, didn't seem to mind.

On one swing pass I received, when I turned, one of my teammates was open on her woman, cutting in hard, but still 25+ yards away. I wasn't sure if she could catch, and her "hard" was still very slow, but her timing was brilliant. You have to reward that. I threw the disc right into her chest, a soft throw that bounced out of her hands.

She may have dropped it, but I has very, very happy I threw to her. She'll make that cut again.

We lost the game 12-15, after trading points for the last few. When we went to write a cheer, the stand-in leader (Charlotte, our captain, wasn't at the game last night) told me I had to write the cheer because I had been at this game the longest because of my UPA number.

D'oh.

Busted.

When I told Kris about the evening, he told me I was Kramer, referring to the Seinfeld episode where Kramer learned karate with a bunch of 10 year olds.

When asked why he was learning with 10 year olds, Kramer responded, "I'm dominating."

After watching Gone in 60 Seconds, Kris turns to me to ask, "When is the warranty up for our car?"

"Which one?"

"Your car."

"It's already expired."

"It's already expired?"

"Yeah. We bought it in October 2000. It's now 2005. The warranty expired."

"Cool. We should install nitrous in it now."

Blink.

"Yeah, just what I need to enable my 'safe' driving. Even more power in my already too powerful car. Yeah, let's do that."

"But just think, Doyle will be willing to drive more. 'I can drive. Look, I brought an extra gallon of nitrous!'"

The slightly bigger but not quite major street that my street intersects has two lanes where it meets up with the closest really major street.

The left lane is a straight or left turn lane. The right lane is a right turn only lane.

Usually, drivers on the street know what's going on and move into the correct lane before they get to the intersection.

Not so today.

With three of us (Kevin, Chris and me) leaving from my house for practice, carpooling makes sense. Especially with Kris driving back from practice with only him in the car.

Given I have a two seater, and Doyle's truck cab isn't quite comfortable for three, Kevin had the honors of driving the three of us to practice. Kevin has a four wheel drive car.

And isn't afraid to use it.

We approached the above mentioned intersection behind a huge SUV, a tahoe or suburban or whatever those hummer wannabe vehicles are. The truck stopped early, several car lengths behind from the intersection. Another car had stopped in front of it, trying to move from the fewer-cars-in-the-shorter right turn only into the more-cars-and-longer-wait left/straight turn lane. The attempt failed, and said car stopped, blocking both lanes. The huge SUV stopped behind the first car, and we stopped behind the SUV.

As we stopped, Doyle piped up, "You have a four wheel drive. There's enough room to go around." as he pointed to the sidewalk to the right. Kevin looked at the space, nodded and said "Uh huh."

I chimed in from the back seat, "Dollar."

Kevin turned to me with a smirk that said, "You just called dollar on that?" and yanked the wheel hard right.

Up and over the curb we went, with me giggling and laughing the whole way. Omigod it was hysterical! We passed the huge SUV, passed the cluster producing car and into the clear right turn lane just as the light turned green.

Zoom!

Oh, I was laughing so hard. Doyle was in the front seat, laughing, too. As we stopped in the left turn lane at the next light, the driver of the car behind us before Kevin's crazy-man move pulled up next to us.

"That was awesome, man" he said, wiping a laughter tear from his eyes.

With a paddle.

Since Kevin decided to work outside today (thus ending Kris' and my argument over what needs to get done first - the bathroom or the front yard), I needed to give him the list of things to do:

• Clear out the rocks in the front yard
• Move the fertilizer to the front yard
• Spread said fertilizer
• Move extra compost and dirt to the front yard to level it

That fertilizer? Well...

Four (yes, four) months ago, Mark came over with a sixty (yes, 60) pound bag of chicken shit, er, poop from his chicken coop. "Makes for a great garden," he said, adding, "or so Megan tells me."

Now, sixty pounds is a little too much for me to carry, so to prevent the dogs from eating all sixty pounds of chicken shit, I put it (pulled it, dragged it, heaved it) into a trash can.

And promptly forgot about it.

Tragically.

Because it's been a really wet spring.

And I didn't have the top on that trash can.

So, the trash can fills up with water. I now have a 3/4 full trash can of 60 pounds of fetid chicken shit soup in my back yard. No one dares lift that lid, for fear of the fetid chicken shit.

No one.

So, back to Kevin.

I told him what I needed done, and before he started, I had to apologize, "I'm about to give you the worst job in all the world."

Doyle heard me and retorted, "Aw, it can't be the worst job in all the world. It's not like he has to swim up a river of shit or anything."

Kevin laughed. He was getting ready to swim.