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As I packed my bags for our East Coast trip to New York, I realized I had way more stuff than when I arrived two months ago. A few trips to the Nike and adidas employee stores will do that to you I guess. Having somehow zipped the last zipper of my borrowed Portland Pilots duffle bag (traumatic), I sat by my luggage wondering who was going to carry all that stuff to the car. Unfortunately for me, my brother wasn't around and I had to do it alone.

Once I was back in the house doing my last check for anything I might have forgotten, I realized I didn't have any of my material items in sight. Even my phone was in the car. All I had for that brief moment was all I was.

The night before our last regular season home game I watched The Dark Knight because it happened to be on TV. Similar to when Pink Floyd is on the radio, I can never turn Batman off the TV if it's on. There aren't many movies that can take me away from my cell phone, or my selfie phone as I like to refer to it now, but Batman hits me where it matters - right in the feels.

When I was little, I had a streak of about five years where I was Batman for Halloween. Not Cat Woman. Not Poison Ivy (as if anyone would be her anyway) and certainly not Vicki Vale. (I don't even count Batgirl, sorry). I was Batman. I was a superhero. And that image as a six-year-old has rarely escaped my mind.

I randomly picked out the book Examined Lives by James Miller - because like most athletes, I think I'm on the path to becoming the next Socrates. (The irony of that statement is that Socrates was also one of the Brazilian soccer players I grew up idolizing - video clips here). Regardless of all the amazing coincidences that naturally occur during my writing, Miller talks about some of the greatest philosophers of all time and ends the chapter about Socrates with this bit of verbal gold:

"I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible." - Friedrich Nietzsche

This is my first post since joining the Portland Thorns of the NWSL. If you weren't aware that I changed teams, now you know. I made the daring move from my "comfortable" life overseas back to the country I was born in. I imagine people have been dying for a post about the Thorns. I feel like they want to read about how Christine Sinclair never misses a shot in training or how Alex Morgan has a professional hairstylist straighten her pony tail every day for training.  Or maybe how Rachel Buehler randomly tackles complete strangers while walking down the street. Haha - what? None of those things are true.

I read today on Twitter that you should have the last sentence of your novel finished before you have your first sentence. I think that's true whenever I start to write. I know how it will end up, but i's always the most difficult to begin. So, now that you know you're with me through the most difficult part, maybe we have made some sort of connection. The beginning, of anything, is always the toughest. You are in a transition phase. You're learning. You don't quite understand the people around you or the process that is required. It's a lot like starting with a new team. What worked for one coach won't work for another. And you'll have a different assortment of teammates no matter where you go, especially different countries.

What does it really mean to nutmeg someone in soccer? After doing extensive (typing the word “nutmeg” into Google) research, I found this on Wikipedia:

“The most likely source, however, was postulated by Peter Seddon in his book "Football Talk - The Language And Folklore Of The World's Greatest Game".[3] The word arose because of a sharp practice used in nutmeg exports between America and England. "Nutmegs were such a valuable commodity that unscrupulous exporters were to pull a fast one by mixing a helping of wooden replicas into the sacks being shipped to England," writes Seddon. "Being nutmegged soon came to imply stupidity on the part of the duped victim and cleverness on the part of the trickster." It soon caught on in football, implying that the player whose legs the ball had been played through had been tricked, or, nutmegged.”