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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Many moons ago I had the opportunity to read a number of essays written for a general music appreciation class. Because this class fulfilled a requirement and was geared toward non-musicians (or even to people with very little musical experience at all), and because the particular group of students seemed somewhat disinterested…the essays sometimes contained very interesting observations.

On musical structure (like…A B A form…):

“This piece is a ba ba ba. It is a beautiful pea.”

On Chopin and his many nocturnes:

“Chapping Nocture is one of many noctures. It was not played by a large scup.”

On live music:

“Mr. Brian was whaling away on his trumpet.”

“The cello is a string. It is a family of four strings. Mr. Enzo was playing with his fingers, which looked difficult and hard. He was playing Pitsy Cato.”

“One of the older students composed his own songs, presumably from scratch.”

“At one point the teacher got up to give a speech and I think she said I hate to give the pitch, but I thought she said I hate to be the bitch, and I hope so because that would be funny.”

On Tchaikovsky’s “The Seasons”:

“Then on to winter, the season of the freezin…and spring, when I could picture the happy pheasants dancing in the square.”

Some pieces went over better than others:

“At the end it sounded like one of them was going to be gnashed with a sword. I didn’t really like it. It seemed to gruesome.”

“I listened to this piece while sitting on my bed with my little tweety bunny aside of me.”

Composers are very prolific:

“At the age of 75, Beethoven became death and started composing music.”

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This is what I was thinking about the other day:

The pharmacy:

the city-acy

the phlegacy

the pharma-sky

The pharmacist:

the pharma-boil

…that was pretty much it.

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I try to clean out my purse every so often because it’s generally full of garbage, but today I cleaned it out because I discovered, en route to work, that my metrocard was missing.

Though I know that the staple women’s-magazine feature “What’s in YOUR purse?” is likely about as true to life as YM Magazine’s “Say Anything” column–which is to say, partially true and heavily edited–I always snicker/grimace when I think about what my response would be if someone posed the question to me.

What’s in my purse (a sampling):

7 straw wrappers (yes, 7. I buy iced coffee and a bagel across the street all the time and I unwrap the straw there (so as to more quickly transmit the coffee into my veins)…there’s no garbage can at the counter, so instead of hanging onto the wrapper and throwing it in the trash on my way out, I shove it in my purse. Frequently, it seems.

Ear plugs in various states of newness. For concerts.

Graphing calculator that I took for tutoring and then forgot to take out.

Hunting the 1918 Flu.

Pink and green earbuds that I got for free, with one of the little green earbud-softener things missing.

Packet of sugar.

Sad, scraggly hair ties.

A bra that I left in my purse after I did yoga and didn’t change out of my yoga clothes, and then forgot to remove.

A silver dog tag that says “Superhero,” which I found smashed into the gravel at a campsite.

A lifesaver. Bonus!

What is not in my purse: My metrocard.

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