Olympic Dreams

I love the winter Olympics. Seriously love them. The summer Olympics are not a big deal. I'll watch them--at least some of the events--but I don't get into them the way I do the winter games. Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota?

Anyway, I always watch a lot of the winter Olympics and this year I've been knitting as I've watched. Ravelry has an event called Ravellenics where knitters and crocheters try to finish projects while the games are on. I'm doing a scarf which I wanted to finish, but because I hate seed stitch, had been putting off. I figured this was a good way to finish it.

And now that I've totally digressed... One of the things I love most about the Olympics is watching the athletes fulfilling dreams. Some of these sports are obscure--like the cross country skiing/target shooting event--and you have to think these men and women are doing it solely for love of the sport.

I love to see people pursuing their dreams. Even if they don't medal, they've still succeeded far beyond someone who didn't even try.

One of my favorite stories is the man from Tonga. That's right, Tonga sent an athlete to the winter games. Notice the singular. Pita Taufatofua spent the two years since the summer games learning to cross country ski on an island without snow. He worked hard enough to qualify for the games. Now that's an Olympic story!

I also think about the speed skating. What would it be like to represent the Netherlands where your country dominates a sport? Is it scary to try to live up to expectations?

I'm sure there are as many stories as their are athletes, but I like the underdog, the kid that's trying with all their will even though they might not be as good as the others in their sport. To me, this is what the games are really about.

Olympic Thoughts

I've been watching a lot of the Olympics and I had a few thoughts about the event so far. First up, the television part of the event.

• The TV coverage has been frustrating. I've wanted to watch the gymnastics competition, but they only show part of it early and NBC saves the rest of it until 11pm at night. My alarm goes off at 4am, so that means I either go to work on no sleep or don't watch. I've been going to bed.
• As I was complaining about this to a guy in my van pool, he mentioned that there's an Olympic channel. What? This would be frustration number 2. Comcast didn't really advertise its availability beyond a little box on the last channels screen, and since they've littered that with advertising, I've learned to ignore it.
• Which leads me to frustration number 3. So now that I know there's an On-Demand channel for the Olympics, I've been trying to watch all the events that I missed because I needed to sleep. I start the replays and they drop out and RESTART FROM THE BEGINNING. I haven't been able to make it through the 37-minute Part One of the individual all-around gymnastics despite trying three times now.

Other thoughts:

• That cupping thing some of the swimmers are doing, leaving giant hickeys on their body is horrible to look at. I haven't done any reading to see if it really works or if they just think it relieves sore muscles, but looking like you were making out with an enormous octopus is just...Yuck!
• The gymnasts look like they're twelve. Some of them look younger than that! It was a surprise to see that most of them (at least on the US team) are legal adults. O_O
• I saw a runner, a refugee from South Sudan, who was competing under the Olympic flag. I thought that was so incredibly awesome that athletes who didn't have a country because of political situations were still eligible. Love this!
•  I was thinking about how many Americans were at the games and how so many other countries have few people there to cheer for their athletes. It's not just because the games are on our side of the world--the US always has a large number of people there. I think we need to remember how blessed we are compared to a lot of other countries.

My favorite event started on Sunday--synchronized swimming! I love the Olympics. :-)

Feeling Alive

At the Evil Day Job (EDJ) yesterday we were talking about these guys who leap from building to building. There's a name for it, which I've forgotten, and it's apparently a sport with training facilities and everything. Um, this is definitely one of those things that has me scratching my head because no matter how much athleticism is involved, some things just aren't sports. They're past times. There's a difference. :-)

We also talked about those squirrel jumper people who leap off like mountains and try to "fly" down as far as they can without opening their parachute. Again, this is considered a sport, and again, I don't think so. But that's not the point of this blog.

When I expressed my opinion, which was basically who in their right mind would do stuff like this, one of the engineers said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since then. I don't remember exactly how he phrased it, but the gist of it was that when he does adrenaline-laden things that at least he's alive and not just living.

I wish I'd caught what he was saying a few seconds sooner because the conversation veered before I processed his words enough to get what he was saying. I'd love to question him on this for a couple of reasons. The first is that he was implying that people (like me) who don't do things like this aren't living. The second is that I'd love to know why he equates an adrenaline rush with being alive.

Cause you see, I totally disagree with him. You see, I can sit out on my deck and watch the birds fly around my backyard and I feel totally at peace and totally alive. No adrenaline involved, just enjoying what life has to offer.

I feel alive when I'm working on my stories, knowing in some corner of my mind that I'm offering my life's passion to the world. That people will read my stories and be entertained (hopefully) and transported into the world of my book and the lives of my characters.

Hell, I feel alive standing in my backyard and watering my flowers. :-) Last summer, I even had a hummingbird hovering next to me. And I feel alive when I see joy spread across someone else's face.

So his feeling that they only way to feel alive is to do something that causes an adrenaline rush is so opposite of everything I've experienced, that I totally don't understand it. That's why I'd like to question him and understand.

I've never, ever had any desire to jump out of airplanes, hang glide, para-sail or leap across rooftops in an urban environment. I've never wanted to jump off mountains or cliffs or scale mountains, then repel down them again. None of these things seem like fun to me in any way, shape or form. But more than that, I don't understand why he thinks doing something that gives him an adrenaline charge is the only way to feel alive. And I do want to understand. Maybe it's because I'm a writer and like to dissect people, but I'm hugely curious.

Part of the problem is that I'm polar opposites with this engineer. Everything he likes to do sounds like my idea of hell on Earth--or darn close to it, anyway. :-) And I'm sure he'd hate the things that I like to do. So since we're so different maybe I won't be able to ever understand why he feels the way he does. And I admit it, my own bias makes me believe that he's totally wrong about what feeling alive means. :-) That'll make it even tougher for me to get it. But I think it would be really interesting to write a character who thinks like this, so I'd like to try.

Winter Lament

It snowed last night. It's still snowing. The winds are supposed to be in the 20-30 mph range. I hate Minnesota.

I think I'll leave it here, although I could go on much longer. I keep trying to tell myself to cheer up, that at least it isn't freezing rain. It's not working. With freezing rain, I'd just take vacation days from work until the roads were clear. With 5 inches of snow, I have to drive to the EDJ.

I saw who won the playoff games this weekend and I have to say, your odds were better if I didn't like your team. :-/ The AFC match up is between two teams that I hate, so it'll be a lesser of two evils thing, and out of the NFC, one team I wanted to see win actually did. New Orleans--and they almost didn't win from what I heard on the recap. Anyway, my relatives in Chicago will be appalled that I was rooting against their beloved Bears, but I was. :-) Instead of giving me grief about that, they should probably thank me.

Anyway, if you discount the snow, it was a pretty nice weekend. My chapter meeting was a lot of fun and I received my Rising Star Award. My hero finally revealed valuable background information about himself, something he had been keeping secret from me. I saw a cable modem in the paper and it listed my ISP as one of the valid activation partners to get the rebates! That was part of what had me dragging my feet, I didn't want to change email addresses, but I didn't think it would be one of the places I could activate at the store. It was nice to find out I was wrong. Of course, I still have to get myself to the store, get the modem, manage to hook it up myself--which I can probably do if the instructions are halfway decent--and hope my computer doesn't move so slowly, it goes backward in time. I really need a new desktop unit.

I have to get going early today. Extra drive time in and all that. Sigh.

Soccer. Yawn.

I saw on the news yesterday that some soccer team in Los Angeles is paying an obscene amount of money to Beckham, a British player married to one of the Spice Girls. I think it's Posh Spice. I can't help but think that this is a desperate attempt to encourage Americans to watch professional soccer. Is it going to work? I have my doubts since previous desperate attempts to get Americans interested in the sport have failed miserably. We've had a couple generations of kids grow up playing soccer now and even they don't watch it as adults.

I'll confess, I think soccer is incredibly boring. When I was a teenager, I went to a few games with my friends, but we didn't find the game interesting at all. We kept going, though, because there were guys in shorts. Now, of course, I can appreciate athletic men in tight pants (baseball and football) just as easily.

Two jokes I've heard immediately came to mind last night when I saw this story. 1. Why do X million of American kids play soccer? Answer: So they don't have to watch it. 2. Soccer is something like hockey--without all that annoying scoring.

Despite Major League Soccer's attempt to round up some interest in their sport, I have a hard time imagining it's going to work. I have this feeling that Americans are going to be much more interested in Beckham's off-field life than they will be in the game. I was thinking about that yesterday and wondering how they'd deal with the paparazzi when I realized that the press he faced in England will probably be six billion times worse than anything he'll see in the US. He'll be a novelty here, a fad, but very few people care about the game.

That's what kind of blows me away, that so many people get so rabid about a sport where no one scores that they riot. Huh? Maybe if the score wasn't nil to nil, the fans might be more interested in the game than fighting each other or setting the stadium on fire.

Okay, sorry, I'm trying to be funny at soccer's expense and humor isn't my forte. Let's just say I don't get it and leave it at that.

I keep thinking, though, of how much good all that money could do if it were given to charity or invested in improving Los Angeles schools or a lot of other worthwhile endeavors. I know, American athletes in sports people do care about are overpaid too. The Chicago Cubs just went out and spent a fortune on players, and while the money makes me cringe, I'm excited about the upcoming season because they should be a vastly better team in 2007.

And it's time for me to logoff and get ready for the EDJ. Sigh. At least it's Friday.