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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Somehow I woke up this morning with a song stuck in my head that I haven’t heard since I was maybe nine (though, I will say, I have thought about it pretty frequently). The conceit of the song is…I suppose it’s explaining, amusingly, animal mating and where baby animals  come from. Sample lyrics:

There’s two kinds of wombats

Dad-bats

And Mom-bats

Dad-bats love Mom-bats

And that’s why

There’s wombats

He (Tom Chapin, that is, and yes, Harry Chapin’s brother) goes on to sing about Him-ulls and Her-ulls, and him-ulls being “nuts about” her-ulls giving us squirrels, he-gulls and she-gulls giving us seagulls, and so forth, eventually winding up with “He-ples” and “She-ples.”

Every time I think about the song I remember that as a child I thought that Dad-bats and Mom-bats was the best, most precise portmanteau (if that’s the right word) of all of them, but that “Dad-bats love Mom-bats” wasn’t as good as the more species-specific choices like squirrels being “nuts about” each other.

And then I’d sit around trying to think of animal puns he hadn’t gotten around to.

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• Guy walking down the street complaining to his friend: “Now she’s got some Eggos divorced guy with kids”

Well, don’t blame him; his ex-wife got the waffle iron.

• Spam comment I received: “Crossants can make my small dog sick he vomit two times”

I think “cross ants” are actually more likely to make a small dog sick than croissants are, so points for accuracy.

• Note I accidentally typed in my July budget tracking document: $7 – coffee and scorn

Very possibly it was.

• Woman walking down the street, talking into her phone: “So now I’m just stuck sitting here so I just wanted to give you a heads up”

Lies! Vicious lies!

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Watching Wimbledon makes me wonder why British English refers to “sport” versus American English’s “sports,” but the UK studies “maths” rather than “math.” Technically, there are multiple maths, but also multiple sports; on the other hand, “sport” and “math” both work as categories. It’s just curious that British English and American English evolved to have one of each.

I was in a yoga class the other day and the teacher had a very interesting way of speaking–as far as I could tell she was a native English speaker, but some of her phrasing was unusual. She said, “Now release the leg down to your floor,” when I would have said “Release your leg down to the floor,” (but I do like the idea of everyone having one communal leg and individual patches of floor…), and instead of saying, “Do one more on each leg,” she said, “Do one more on either leg,” though she did mean do the right leg one more time and the left one more time, not to choose your favorite leg and do one more on it.

One of the first words I learned in Russian was “apple,” яблоко, approximately pronounced “yabloko.” Last night as I was reading a (nonfiction) book taking place in part in Russia, I came across a scientist named Mr. Yablokov, which made me happy.

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Sometimes when I visit my parents they indulge me by joining me in watching gymnastics on TV. And by sometimes, I mean the Venn Diagram intersection of “when I visit my parents” and “when gymnastics is on TV.”

During the men’s Olympic Trials (parents will remain anonymous so they have only a 50% chance of bashfulness):

On the men’s outfits: “Are those like footed pajamas?

On the men’s arm muscles, and social media:

Parent A: “It looks like a sausage that’s been tied off at two ends!”

Parent B: “You should twitter that.”

Parent A: “I wouldn’t say that in a tweet. Sausage could be taken the wrong way.”

Parent A: …If I had a twitter, I would never tweet anything cruel. Unless it was anonymous.”

On the gymnast who has “London 2012” tattooed on his arm as a cruel reminder that he was the alternate for that Olympics: “But he didn’t actually make the team? He should have only gotten half a tattoo then.”

***

Me, to teenaged student: “This should read ‘we went out to dinner and drank sodas,’ not ‘we went out to dinner and drank a soda’–unless you really did go out to dinner with five of your friends and drink out of one coke with five straws, which would be sort of charming.”

Student: “Hmm.”

Student: “I’ve heard of marriages that involve more than two people?”

Me: —

Me: “Okay, or that!”

***

Man on the street to his companion: “If you eat like a horse, that must mean you’re a sandtard!”

Companion: “Sandtard?”

Man: “You know. One of those half horse, half human things.”

Companion: —

Man: “Center? Saunter?”

Companion: —

Man: —

Companion: “Centaur?”

Man passing me on the street, to his friend: “Redhead.”

That man has a future in ornithology or some branch of identification and classification, I’m sure.

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