we're not sports people around here, but we do kinda like the olympics. msg used to get super-hyped about them every four years when they'd roll around while he was growing up, although because he doesn't want to get caught liking sports, sometimes he plays it off as, "well you know, there wasn't a damn thing to watch on tv back then, so the olympics were like a solid week of big spectacular stuff that you never got to see."
but the flip side of that is, these days there are way too many damn things to watch on tv, not to mention hardly enough time to blog and work our rpg magic and all the other things a house full of creative yams like ours gets up to. so if we don't basically make ourselves make the effort, suddenly we turn around and we're like, "wait, the olympics are already over? dang, i really wanted to watch some of them. poop."
there's something ... enchanting to the olympics, you know? for one thing, they really stand for something, and it's something pretty cool that i personally dig on con mucho entusiasmo. people coming together to put aside differences and discord and showcase what beautiful and astonishing things human beings are capable of accomplishing. things like ...
so why do we end up mostly missing out on them around here? partly it's just laziness, i've got to admit. yep, we're pretty much a house full of slackers around here. also at least one of us has been accused now and then of being occasionally, just slightly, in the nicest possible way, crazily inattentive to his surroundings. (oh dang, spoiler pronoun there, sorry!)
there's a weird thing to it too, though. we've talked about it, and at least for some of us (not me, i'm the eternal optimist) there's this fear of scrounging up the time to watch the olympics and figuring out the best place to go and do that and turning it on and instead of the way the olympics always are (wow! amazing! wow! amazing! hmm, pretty good ... wow, that's crazy! holy cow, awesome! dang, how long is it going to take for them to get this next match set up? wow! amazing again! huh? basketball? dudes, we can watch basketball literally anytime we want to [which around here, spoiler alert, is very, very infrequently]. okay! great! back to the good stuff!) we'll end up watching it and just hit all the boring spots where not only is nobody breaking records and making your eyes bug out, but what they're showing is just only passably interesting and we remember, "oh yeah, we really don't like sports all that much."
can i even actually remember that happening? no, not really. and i poke everybody else about it sometimes that if we'd just get up off our patooties and watch, we'd really enjoy it, like we almost always do.
what i guess it really is, is that the olympics are this fantastic metaphor for life, but the way folks around here engage with the olympics is this fantastic metaphor for not getting as much out of life as maybe you ought to, because you're too lazy or apathetic or just not paying attention.
so when it's olympics time (assuming any of us notices), i kind of feel like it's my job to either get us to watch some olympics, or get us to do some of the other zillions of amazing things that make life so fantastic.
if i can pull that off, i usually end up not minding too much if we miss the games. because there's a bigger game going on, and we're all in it all the time, if we pay attention and give ourselves those pushes to stay in motion, keep our eyes open, and really, really feel things.
2 comments:
Olympics! The buffet table of sports! Some aspects make you say 'oh, that's not bad', others knock your socks off, still others you don't even notice, and there's some that you're legitimately allergic to.
We here at Deafening silence Towers are largely sports-averse with the exception of football (aka soccer, and even then, only half of us are keen), so we've never been the type to take notice of the Olympics; in fact, we didn't realise it was an Olympic year until literally yesterday. Lenka doesn't mind gymnastics, and I kinda like the ski-and-shoot (aka biathlon) cos it's such an odd combination of tasks.
Personally, we think all of you at Worthy Estates should collectively sit down and watch enough of the event until you reach the point you'd mentioned where you actually don't like sports all that much. Maybe a day's worth of programming is sufficient. At the very least, the commentary from Aers alone could make it worth your while. :-)
i'm always so bad about seeing your comments, dc! i obviously need to dig into my settings and see if there's one that will email me when a comment gets left. i thought it used to do that? maybe i'm thinking of something else.
we didn't see much in the way of the olympics. at some point we switched over to it and fencing was on, and honestly, i would have liked it better if it had been the kind of fencing where you put up posts and pickets. aers and sasha were deeply disappointed. i think sash took actual offense at the fact that there wasn't a team version where they put two groups of three or four in a circle and duel it out until only one side has anyone standing. after that disappointment, i don't think i'd dare try to get them to watch the biathlon. most likely the "bi" part would make their imaginations run away with them, and then finding out what the sport is really about would make them even more outraged than the fencing did.
we tried to watch a bit of the weightlifting, but akane repeated her story about her bad weightlifting boyfriend, and from then on aers and sash were making too many wisecracks for us to take it seriously.
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