I’ve lived in my current apartment for more than six years, and for five of those years I’ve lived in the room that has roof access. This has translated to: various handymen, roofers, and landlords crawling in and out of my window when there’s a hole or a leak or an air conditioner problem (not that we have central air conditioning…the store downstairs holds that honor).

For a while there was a roofer named Willy who consistently called me before he was scheduled to come over, so that he could ask me if it was going to rain. I tried a few different approaches to this once I realized that “I don’t know” or “I don’t think so” weren’t working. Finally I told him that it wasn’t currently raining and that the forecast said it wasn’t going to rain until four (this was true). He called back an hour later and said it was going to rain so he would come next week.

(it didn’t rain)

Given all of this I was thrilled when my landlord decided to cut a hatch in the roof so that he would be able to access it directly from the store and bypass navigating through my window. Someone came, crawled through my window a penultimate time, cut a square in the blacktop, and then crawled back in and shut the gate for good, I hope.

My roommate, during the time this was occurring, was out of town at a bachelor party. He got back a few days later after little sleep and multiple flight delays. When he finally reached home he settled in to take a nap, only to wake up twenty minutes later to the sight of a shirtless, mustachioed man’s torso sticking out of his roof (where, as far as he knew, there was no hole), as the man swung a hammer loudly and randomly around.

(nap time over)

He captured some of this on video and it’s one of the greatest things I’ve seen. For reasons of decency and privacy I won’t post it but will instead share the three other things that have made me laugh that hard in the past five years:

1. http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

2. http://thebloggess.com/2011/06/21/and-thats-why-you-should-learn-to-pick-your-battles/

3. (make sure you click through the images)

Oh the humanity.

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American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett made me want to go to the American Southwest, New Mexico in particular. The novel is classified as literature, horror, fantasy, and science fiction depending on where you look…so it’s none or all, basically. Reading it made me realize that as far as science fiction or literary fiction with a science fiction bent (but not wanting this to be a post about genres, categorization, or what’s “literary”…) goes, I prefer to read about very old things, rather than very new things–that is, otherworldly creatures rather than outer space and androids. Granted, that’s probably why many booksellers don’t classify it as science fiction, but there’s enough technology in it that I think it passes.

The book takes place in a town called Wink underneath a pink moon, and I would like to go see something like it.

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…no, not that kind. I haven’t had those since I was maybe seven and realized I was never going to be an elite gymnast (yes, it was that obvious even then). I mean LITERAL dreams. Three, at this point, which means…enough for a LIST:

1. Several weeks ago I had a dream that Simone Biles was up on vault–it was hazy as to whether this was team or all-around finals–and that when she ran down the vaulting runway her steps were off and she ran past the springboard. Now–you are allowed to do that, as long as you run PAST the board. You can start over. But the second time, she ran onto the springboard, which would mean she got a zero.
2. About a week ago, I had another Simone vault dream. This time it was qualifications and she did her Amanar as usual, with just a step on the landing, but then she tripped on that step and stumbled farther forward, and farther, eventually falling all of the way off the podium. When I woke up I was waiting to see if she had missed making the all-around final because of this mistake, although it seemed that the entire field of gymnasts had had disastrous qualification rounds, to the degree that the commentators were struggling to pronounce the names of the gymnasts in the lead because they had never heard of them.
3. The other night I dreamed that on every elevated subway in NYC, though the subway cars still looked pretty normal, ran on water instead of tracks–like giant log flumes. Every time one of them pulled into a station, Michael Phelps jumped out of the train, swam to the edge of the tunnel and back, and then the train pulled away.

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Gymnastics:

• What’s more exciting–utter domination or the slimmest of margins among competitors? BOTH, of course. Unsurprisingly, Simone Biles utterly dominated the women’s all-around final, but her male counterpart, Kohei, was part of a men’s all-around that managed simultaneous total domination–from 1. Kohei, winning his second Olympic all-around gold (he also won silver AA when he was 19 in Beijing) and capping off eight years of beating everyone all of the time, to 2. Oleg Vernaiev absolutely catching up to him in ability, difficulty, and execution, and finishing in silver only .1 behind King Kohei. The competition came down to the final two high bar routines and was determined only by Oleg’s large hop on the landing of his dismount. Otherwise, he would have dethroned Kohei.
• Vernaiev has event final chances, especially on parallel bars, and I hope he wins gold there. Kohei has team and AA gold and now it’s time for other gymnasts’ brilliance. On the women’s side, though, I can’t help but continue to want 5 golds in total for Simone, which would mean she would win the beam, vault, and floor event finals–because it’s hard to choose between slim margins and HISTORIC ACHIEVEMENTS.
• The battle for bronze among the men was also fantastic, with at least six guys having amazing competitions. For the women it was a little disappointing, with the 3rd and 4th place finishers having some significant flaws, and gold and silver were so far ahead they were foregone conclusions (but SIMONE!) Event finals should be more exciting, though in a few of them, the bronze medal will really be the only one most of the contending women have a shot at.

Track and Field:

• I really enjoy the contrast between the extreme sensitivity and technology of the touch pads that determine the winners of the swimming races vs. the low technology and seeming imprecision of the high jump bar.
• I like how the end of the high jump portion of the heptathlon is sort of reminiscent of the end of a spelling bee, when there are only two contestants left and they go back and forth. Not completely akin, because they don’t keep going if both jumpers miss (3x), but they do keep going as long as they’re both making it. High jump is also mesmerizing from a physics standpoint and also from a breaking-of-convention standpoint…I wish that I would one day see an Olympics in which someone defies the conventions of form the way Fosbury first did in high jump (perhaps in high jump we could see someone run straight at the bar instead of in a loping circle–or is that what they did before the Flop became standard?). Maybe Usain Bolt already does that with his running form.

In general:

• The Olympics: when you get to learn the adjectival endings used to describe people from every country of the world. The usual suspects like -ese, -an and -ian, -ish; the slightly less common -ine and -i; the handful of -ch/-nch/-tch; and the outliers like Greek, Lao, Malagasy.
• Commentators across the sports saying things like “the more better smoothness” and “the best highest dismount” and it not even necessarily sounding wrong because the Olympics are so impressive they require double comparatives and superlatives.

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Swimming

• I love watching track because you can see the athletes’ faces and they look, well, much more visibly human than the swimmers, who resemble graceful aquatic mammals until they win, take off their caps, and suddenly it’s not a manatee or Aquaman but instead a large British child.
• That said, I fully love these swimming commentators. They sound like they’re having the GREATEST time and their pitch and speed increases so dramatically at the end of every race. And they crack each other up. It’s like having Frick and Frack from Car Talk do the commentary.
• Right now, they’re laughing hysterically at the antics of Chad Le Clos in the ready room, where Le Clos is air boxing and growling like a bear directly in front of Michael Phelps, who is about 50% doing the thing that little kids do “if I can’t see you you can’t see me,” 50% slouching in his folding chair as if he can make himself look small, and 50% giving Le Clos an old-man “get off my lawn” scowl. Yes, that’s 150%; he’s clearly more than one full person.

Gymnastics

• 41-year-old Oksana Chusovitina, who has been competing in Olympic gymnastics longer than I have been watching Olympic gymnastics (I didn’t really follow until 1996, her second Olympics), will be in the vault event final this weekend. I’m guessing she’ll go all out and do her handspring double front, which is probably not a vault any women other than its originator, Elena Produnova, should be attempting, but you know what–it’s Chuso. She can do what she wants. (Dipa Karmakar from India may well do the double front also. Don’t get me started on Igor Radivilov and his decision to skip adding twists to things and instead try to turn himself into a human pinball and do a TRIPLE front vault.)
• Men’s gymnastics: I guess the Japanese men’s team finally winning gold has definitively proven, then, that medals are to Kohei Uchimura what Pokemon are to Kohei and he’s going to catch them all. And if he wins enough, he can pay off his Pokemon Go inflicted $5000 phone bill.

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Gymnastics

• Rebecca Andrade’s floor music seems to be a Beyonce medley. Well, not seems: is.
• The availability of live streams for qualifying rounds is <choose one of the following cliches> an embarrassment of riches, a mixed blessing, likely to reduce both my socialization and my iPhone step count for the next few days.
• Yesterday I watched men flip for about 5 hours, mostly while I was soaking my foot in a tub of water because I inexplicably ground some glass into it while walking to my living room. (Glass was surgically removed with the assistance of two pairs of tweezers, needle, knife, my bedside lamp, and kind temporary surgeon.)
• I started to really worry during the men’s qualifications that there was something wrong with the vault. More crashes than would reasonably be expected and one horrific injury (which made my glass-in-foot seem even slighter), which I’m going to hope they didn’t replay in primetime coverage (the vaulter is okay, but has broken tibia and fibula both).
• This wouldn’t be totally unheard of, given that the vault was set too low for the women’s competition in Sydney in 2000…but so far the women have been looking normal on vault, so it could just be a normal-ish difference in equipment (specifically that this vaulting table is not as hard/has more give than the vaulting tables most of the athletes practice on, causing some to get less push off the horse and thus crash).
• I am not particularly interesting in my choice of favorites in my chosen sports. I like Federer and Serena. Uchimura and Biles. You know, four of the greatest of all time. And that’s part of it; the greatest-of-all-time story is one of my favorites, and it leads to sidebar conversations about goats, which is never unappreciated.
• It’s probably as much the narrative that gets me as it is the individual–though maybe not; Roger and Serena and Kohei and Simone are all pretty fantastic personalities–and another narrative that I (everyone? Like I said, not very left-field in this) favor is that of the newcomer underdog.
• On that note…my other favorite in men’s gymnastics is Manrique Larduet of Cuba, fondly known as “Mandrake” by the gymnastics world after one of the commentators at the Glasgow world championships pronounced his name like he came from Harry Potter. Larduet was second all around in 2015, but he had one of those vault crashes…no injury, but whatever happened caused him to get so confused in the air that he didn’t even get credited for the vault he normally does, since he just sort of flung himself through the air. Fortunately, he still made the all around final.
• There are still no lyrics permitted in women’s floor music, but since 2008 or 2010 they’ve allowed “vocalizations,” the result being that at least one gymnast has a piece of floor music during which some guy sings “Dah dah dah dah dah” the entire time.

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Waterland by Graham Swift made me want to go to the fens, the flattest parts of East Anglia in England. The book didn’t make them sound particularly uplifting or physically beautiful, but it did make them sound magical. I read this book my senior year of high school and my English teacher told us that there was a famous writing program there, and that there was speculation that the flatness of the land (see also The Iowa Writers Workshop) had a role in producing so many novels. Fact-checking: I don’t even know if Iowa is really so flat–I’ve heard a lot of references to the hills of Iowa; there’s probably nothing scientific about it, but I do like the idea that a barren landscape with little variety drives people to create, to build virtual towers to break up the monotony.

I actually applied and was accepted to the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing program, but went to New York instead. I finally got to see the fens a few years ago: flat, magical.

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I’ll start by saying that I once climbed halfway up Mt. Olympus in an epic day/night that started in a grove of fig trees, traversed mountain, beach, and highway, and ended in a Greek heavy metal bar. But that…contained very few feats of athleticism, unless you count the record-setting number of cups and plates I broke the next morning while trying to wash the dishes.

It feels gauche, or perhaps well beyond that, given the human rights violations, corruption, pollution, doping, and on and on, to still love the Olympics fervently, but I do. It may be that their destructive potential has caught up to or surpassed their potential for good, and I hope that in the future we’ll see a radical difference in approach…but in five days I will be watching the torch, Bob Costas, and the march of nations, and probably crying whenever the Olympic theme song plays, even though that usually heralds the advent of a commercial break.

The Olympics is the only time I watch swimming or track and field; tennis and gymnastics I watch whenever it’s possible. I tried to postulate the other day as to why it’s swimming and athletics that I find so suddenly, quadrennially compelling, but couldn’t really specify. It’s the racing, yes, but then I don’t have any interest in rowing. I’m not captivated by any of the team sports, unless they’re relays in swimming/track, which are “teams” but consist of only one athlete at a time.

It seems that now track and field is unquestionably the (Olympic) sport most marred by doping, which does cast a pall. We still have Usain Bolt and the memories of Michael Johnson (watching him round the corner in the final stretch of track, chest upright and gold shoes flashing), though, right? Gymnastics is probably the safest; steroids might in theory help gymnasts, but building too much muscle would be detrimental–in general, gymnastics is about balance, including the balance between strength and agility. What kind of drugs would even confer any benefit to a sport that is so dependent on precision? Beta blockers?

There’s a balance to be found in the human interest stories, too; I will vomit if I hear anything along the lines of John Tesh’s patronizing “Little girls dancing for gold” fluff intro, but please do give me the backstory on the people I’m about to watch accomplish ludicrous feats of athleticism, so I can be even more overcome when they win or lose.

I’ll never forget seeing a guy who was a year ahead of me at my small, suburban high school win silver in the hurdles in Beijing, then turn to the cameras during his victory lap and shout our area code (I’ll never forget it in part because I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone rep an area code before, certainly not a Cincinnati area code, and why area code and not zip code–just length? Why not shout out the 45215?)

Five days.

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I used to read various slush piles in several past lives, and I kept a running list of some of the more memorable opening lines, final enjoinders, or premises for novels/books of nonfiction/short stories. (There used to be/still is an archive of an anonymous tumbler along these lines–though no longer active, it’s still funny: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/)

Some people had questions or proposals for me:

• “Have you ever seen a book for lay adults about the human colon?”
•  “We are in the making of a diet book and my partner and I are looking for a literacy agent.”

• “There are some men born with such potential for greatness and perfection…that they are already born circumcised”
• “For twenty-five years, I was involved with the sport of thoroughbred racing-pigeons”
• “My credibility begins at birth”
• “I am a former pubic relations writer”
• “I have a great love for Siamese cats and have trained several over the years to be my bodyguards.”

Or their books:

• “This book is for young adults/children None-Fiction.”
• “I would like to inform you that the manuscript is currently going through editing and reversion in the Spanish virgin, English is complete.”
• “My work is in the Fiction gender”
• “Strikingly different to much contemporary fiction as it is without fowl language”

• “Knowing the cause of Cancer isn’t right for you, huh.”
• “By the way, Claire is a beautiful name, that is if you’re an overweight, 57 year old virgin who has no taste in books and who uses the grease under her arm pits to cook her morning bacon in, to feed and nourish your also overweight and  unfathomably ugly lesbian lover who happens to be celibate…agh, enough with my outlandish, creative, incredibly clever, overly thought out insults, let me just say that I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
• (sent on Christmas Eve) “You still haven’t responded to me. I’m starting to think this is what I think it is…Someone will be by your apartment to pick up my manuscript…you will recognize him, his name is Eli!!”
• “”I suppose you would prefer some tripe written by Charley Sheen about his drug problems.”
• “”Pull your head out of your butt.  This is going to be a bestseller.”
• “I’m sure your incompetence will serve you well in corporate America.”

Alas, many of the most hilarious had to do with the content of the proposed book/story, and are too specific to share. But they live on in my dreams!

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Things I can never keep straight in my head:

Complementary vs supplementary

Inductive vs deductive

Miss America vs Miss USA

Song lyrics by the opening act of a show I went to a few weeks ago:

“I am sensation. You are sensation. We are sensation…” (and so on…)

They later sang a song whose primary lyrics were “Who am I? Who am I?” Hello, you’re sensation.

I like the conjugation of a verb as the primary basis for an entire song. If I write a song, it will just be Russian time adverbs shouted in succession with great enthusiasm. “скоро! всегда! сейчас! иногда!”

Overheard:

In my house:

“How’s the giant space-whale-sea creature thing going?”

“Oh, it’s dead already.”

Thank goodness.

On the street:

First woman: “I gotta show you a picture of Angie proposing to Cindy for like the tenth time.”

Second woman: “Oh really?”

First woman: “Yeah, she got down on two knees.”

Well if one knee doesn’t work…

From a student:

Student: “I’m going to get ice cream. Do you want some?”

Me: “Sure, I want to try it.”

Student: “Nooooo…I was just saying that to be polite.”

And now you’re going to have to actually…be polite.

A cartoon idea:

Forlorn-looking plastic (see-through) cat (or raccoon, or bear, or etc), filled entirely with those fake lucky rabbit feet you could get at the skating rink or arcade if you had enough tickets. Thought bubble: “I’m full of faux paws.”

And scene.

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