How do I love the Olympics? Let me count the ways!
I'm a total Olympic dork, from the opening ceremonies (even though that whole bit with the kid flailing in the air over the plains for 20 minutes was a bit strange) to every random ice & snow event those athletes come up with. It's bizarre, actually, given how I hate being cold, was a total skiing fiasco (the term
"yard sale" was coined just for me), and never quite had the balance to skate without falling (although I blame my parents for this: they had us learn to skate on my older brothers' hockey skates...which were made in 1942...with no ankle support...on a pond that might or might not have been all the way frozen. Granted, the water was only 5-6 inches deep beneath the ice, but we didn't know that! Just imagine what feats of Olympic greatness might have happened had our little ankles been stable and our little minds been free of the terror of the deep?!?)
I've been cheering across national borders for the past two days, celebrating with teary eyes along with a Canadian mogul skier, a Dutch speed skater, and the Chinese couple who won last night's pairs figure skating gold. It's fun to watch really talented people succeed.
But it's also fun to feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself. A Twitter friend pointed me to
this article in the
New York Times about the long-term benefits of playing team sports, and I was captivated. Partly because my own mediocre attempts at athleticism have served me well, but more because I wonder if that sort of team experience isn't something we long for later in life, too? Isn't this sort of what book clubs are? And writing groups? And even (although this is a stretch) following along as Jennifer Weiner
live-tweets The Bachelor? It's part identity, saying who we are & what we care about, and part experiencing something together. I dig that.
So let's create our own Olympics! Tell me this: If you were to compete for the gold in some newly created winter "sport" what would it be? (And let's keep this family-friendly, limited to things that can be shown by ABC in prime time!)
Me? I'm in training for 2014, where I'll compete with the world's best in Speed Dressing, where you dig an entire outfit from a bin unfolded of laundry. Go team!
How do I love the Olympics? Let me count the ways!
I need sleep. Not sure what's going on lately, but my body has decided that it's only going to sleep every other night. And on non-sleep nights, my brain just spins. You can almost hear audible whirring sounds, like my mind is a computer that needs to crash/reboot but can't quite get there. 
And this: 
It was one of those great weekends where I did all sorts of things I wouldn't normally do. We had friends visiting from out of town (I'll call them MUSEUM GUY and THEATER GIRL). Normally, I'm the world's worst tour guide. Wherever I go, I'm much more about people and conversations than historic sites. It's just the way I'm wired. If you visit my hometown in Maine, I can give you directions to the beach and a couple of great restaurants, but I have no clue what the current population is, or if a certain historic-looking building is of actual historic interest (unless it's in the Historic District, and then I can say for certain that it can't ever be painted purple or magenta). It's even worse here in Cambridge/Boston: I drive visitors around while attempting to appear knowledgeable, but my tour basically consists of: "Um...look! There's the Charles River, Harvard, AND MIT! And Fenway Park is over there on the other side of the river under the giant Citgo sign!" It's dismal.
