We have been on vacation, spending some time with my lovely adopted nephew and niece. This week we are on our own. I have a little more time to myself, time to blog. What a treat.
This is the conversation I started having with myself on Friday night:
If you aren't careful, the Olympics can take over. It's subtle. First you watch something you are actually interested in, like tennis in my case. While you are watching tennis, they broadcast a little blurb about some athlete who has a great story and wouldn't it be great if they won the gold medal. (Which of these athletes DOESN'T have a great story?) So then you are sucked in to watching that athlete's event, perhaps an event that you really couldn't care less about, or even think is kind of silly, like synchronized diving or table tennis. But the athlete has a great story and it would be nice if now that you know the story you could see that person win the gold.
Suddenly you are up day and night, watching every event you can find. Water polo (who really wants to watch people treading water for that long?), womens trap shooting (I happen to hate guns, even if they are shooting at dayglo orange targets and not living creatures), soccer (I know the rest of the world loves it, but it is SLOW...). But who cares? The US womens water polo team has a chance to win, the US woman in trap shooting was teased about a physical challenge as a kid, and who wouldn't root for the Iranian soccer team?
Well, it's Monday, 3 days into the games and I am well and truly enraptured. Poor E. He is saddled with a mother who is a total sucker for sports events and now will get limited parenting during the entire run of the Olympics. Hopefully he will see a sport, get interested, and some day be an Olympian, thereby erasing my motherly guilt over cutting short his play time so that I can watch beach volleyball, handball (we had no idea what game they were playing), and weight lifting (voting for the Iraqi guy).
Well, it's better than soap operas... Isn't it?
Posted by grrlTravels at August 16, 2004 11:08 AM