I have learned, through trial and error, that passion is almost my only motivator. I don’t really have to spend my time worrying whether I am “following my passion,” because to be honest, I have never been known to follow much of anything else, even when my college roommates were poking me with sticks and telling me that I’m going to be late for statistics class, again.

I’m lucky I have a passion for eating, or I would have starved to death pretty much as soon as feeding me became my responsibility. I can see the tombstone engraving now:

The kitchen was all the way over there, and I just couldn’t be bothered.

–Jen the Trephinist, 1980-1998

When I am not passionate (see: statistics class), I can barely stay awake. I learn nothing. I am bored and stupid and whiny and I dislike myself almost as much as the people trying to teach me poker or football or knitting are learning to dislike me. I shift in my seat, I sigh, I prop my chin up on my hand. When told to roll a pair of dice and add up the dots, I moan theatrically and lay my head down on the table, because counting dots is soooo hard and soooo pointless and oh my God who even caaaaaaares. Needless to say, you probably shouldn’t invite me to Game Night.

When I was in school, ADD diagnoses had not yet become all the rage, so instead I was just lazy—bright, yes, and capable, yes, but going nowhere. I mean, despite the fact that I had already completed the unabridged Les Miserables of my own volition in SIXTH GRADE, turning the pages in morbid fascination as I realized that people used to like sell their own front teeth and build their own barricades in the streets and shit, I got a D in English my freshman year of high school because I couldn’t be bothered to compose Captain Obvious essays about the oh-so-implicit themes in Lord of the Flies. I mean, we all get what that book’s about, right? Right? Must we be so tiresome as to insult one another’s intelligence by beating the topic into the ground?

Unfortunately, my English teacher took exception to my logic, and my parents REALLY REALLY took exception to my logic, which is how I found myself spending the next three years flipping through My Antonia and groaning over the computer keyboard while my parents jingled the car keys over my head. (Turns out I had a passion for being able to go places by myself.)

Despite my parents’ shrewd ministrations, I still got a D in PE class my senior year, even though I weighed under a hundred pounds and could run a mile in less than six minutes. This happened because I found real bowling to be unappealingly intricate, and thus insisted on perfecting the Granny Throw instead, which was less effective but far more amusing. Luckily, at that point, my parents were just happy I had somehow managed to graduate with a B average and get into a decent college, so the incident passed by without comment.

That lazy label, though. It stuck with me for years, because when my teachers said it, I believed them. And when anyone I was in a relationship with said it, I believed them too. I believed them because somehow, it had escaped my notice that when I am passionate, I can learn. I can concentrate. I can focus with a singularity of purpose typically found only in moths plink-plink-plinking against lightbulbs, longing for the filament that eludes them even as they bask in it.

Except I am not a moth. I am a human, right down to my cerebrum and my opposable thumbs, and that means that I am going to GET that motherfucking filament and I am going to make it my bitch.

For instance, as a small child, I decided that my fondest wish was to dig a hole to China, where everyone wore funny clothes and walked upside down. My mother, never one to discourage me but also somewhat familiar with my Moth Mode and therefore concerned that I would dig a hole deep enough to hit a buried cable and electrocute myself or God knows what (and also admittedly somewhat worried that her backyard would not look as nice once I had graced it with an impromptu mine shaft), told me that I was absolutely welcome to dig my hole to China—as long as I did it with a fruit spoon.

That’s right: she handed me a FRUIT SPOON, with helpfully corrugated tip, and graciously wished me the best of luck in my efforts to reach Peking.

Naturally, I did what any rational person would do, and snatched it out of her hand like FINE, BITCH, and marched myself right out into the yard to show that woman who’s boss. And then I dug for hours with that goddamned fruit spoon, crouching all day in the blazing midsummer heat until there were blisters on my hands and she finally just took it away again, like, “Okay, psycho, if you aren’t going to take the hint and give up, then I’m going to pretend I suddenly really need this fruit spoon for something else, like this awesome fruit cocktail we’re going to eat out of this can, because it’s the 1980s and that’s just how we roll.”

Yeah. I was totally lazy. This trait was so clearly demonstrated throughout my childhood, like when I designed and tested several homemade parachutes (active ingredients: twine, garbage bags) by jumping repeatedly off the low end of the roof of our house until I almost broke my ankle and my mother once again found some creative way to suggest that perhaps this particular project had run its course.

More recently, this past Christmas, I thought it might be a fun idea to make a coffee-table book for my boyfriend, depicting the various online interactions involved in my stalking of him. Sure, I could assemble the pages in Photoshop and then have the book printed … OR I could lend it a whimsical quality by printing out all the photographs and Google chats, then assemble each page on a black refrigerator using alphabet letters and thematic retro magnets that I had purchased for the occasion after combing through the magnet selections of no fewer than three separate gift stores, and THEN set up a tripod and photograph the front of the refrigerator thirty SEPARATE TIMES after I had composed each page, and THEN tweak all of it in Photoshop before assembling it into a Shutterfly book.

Of course, when I reviewed the photos, the clarity was not to my liking. No problem! I simply dropped digital versions of the photos on top of the photographed versions (carefully drawing feathered selections AROUND the magnets sitting on TOP of the photographed photos, of course, to preserve them), then scanned the face of each magnet on my parents’ scanner in order to repeat that process with each magnet.

Also, I suppose it’s worth noting that I had taped off a 12×12 square on the fridge first, because the coffee-table book was 12×12 and it was important to me that everything be life-size, as it would be on a refrigerator. Plus, you know, it’s important to make sure the photographed type doesn’t come out too small in the final product. Ahem.

And then I got worried about page spreads not corresponding nicely with one another, so I also had the presence of mind to make a spacer page in order to ensure that I could have the spreads I wanted:

Yeah. Hi. Did I mention that I did all of this in two days?

Oh man. Sooooo lazy.

I have told you all of this to explain why, with only about a week’s notice, I’m moving back to the small hometown I swore I never wanted to live in again. Based only on three fuzzy cell-phone pictures, I rented an apartment over the phone while pacing the floor in Los Angeles, and I just saw it for the first time yesterday. I completely adore it … which is good news, seeing as I will be living in it NINE DAYS FROM NOW, HA HA HA HA.

“But you were talking about moving to Portland,” you’re saying. “But you said you wanted to live somewhere that is vegan-friendly with public transportation!”

Oh, I know. I know, because I’ve had this conversation thousands of times throughout my life. It usually goes like this:

Me: I’m moving back to my hometown!
Other Person: What? I thought you were moving to New Zealand.
Me: Oh, that. No. New plan.
Other Person: But … you had so thoroughly researched the neighborhoods of Wellington.
Me: I know, I know. But that was before I knew about this other thing!
Other Person: You drew a comparison chart outlining the pros and cons of Wellington vs. Auckland.
Me: Oh. You remember that.
Other Person: You were going to have a llama.
Me: Well, there’s no sense dwelling on the past now that—
Other Person: The llama’s name was going to be Daisy, you said. Daisy the llama.
Me: Don’t be difficult.

What can I say? Moth Mode trumps all. (Also, this gig is relatively short term, so I’m still visiting Portland in May and could very well live there by the end of the year, if I like what I see.)

So … why? Why would I move somewhere that lacks a Trader Joe’s, has a tiny childfree population, and thinks that fish tacos are totally vegetarian?

Well, I’ve got two words for you: roller derby.

“But wait,” you say. “How can a town that doesn’t even have a Trader Joe’s have ROLLER DERBY?”

And the answer to your question is, “It doesn’t.”

But it will, if I have anything to say about it.

We had our first practice on Tuesday night. I doubt that any of my old teachers would have guessed that their lazy former student would be willing to embark on a twenty-hour blitz across three time zones just to be there. I slept in the Los Angeles airport on Monday night just to make sure I wouldn’t miss my 6 a.m. flight, then flew through Denver to Chicago, where I spent my three-hour layover typing up notes, then flew to my hometown with just enough time left to run into my parents’ house, print up my notes, stick them on a clipboard, grab my skate bag, and run out the door. After leading practice, I drove home, added my instructional notes to our Facebook discussion board, then climbed into a bed for the first time in more than thirty-six hours and curled up with the cat to snag some sleep before I had to roll back out of bed the next morning to pick up the keys to my new apartment (and oh, also, lay eyes on it for the first time).

I have two more practices to run before I drive back to St. Louis to walk into the home I will by then have left spontaneously abandoned for over three weeks, so that I can spend the subsequent week packing for the caravan that’s showing up to retrieve me on the thirteenth. I can start packing just as soon as I’m done running my last recreational derby game in St. Louis (in a recreational division of the league that I started in order to provide beginners and derby retirees with somewhere to play).

Before I do any of that, of course, I have a giant editorial deadline to make on Monday, a new apartment to clean, and a track to build. I’m sure my former math teachers would be surprised to know that I just willingly spent my time memorizing the dimensions of a standard Women’s Flat Track Derby Association track. A derby track, if you were wondering, is 88 feet long, with the curves radiating from points each 17.5 feet from the 44-foot center mark, swinging in inner and outer arcs that are 12.5 feet and 26.5 feet from those points, respectively, though you do offset each of the outer arcs a foot to the left of the center line (if you are standing at the center line and orienting yourself toward the curve each time).

In other words: PLINK-PLINK-PLINK, BITCHES.

And to think I never even managed to learn to apply the FOIL method properly, despite hours of tutoring. I’m not sure why. I’m guessing it’s because I was lazy.