2008-08-25 - 10:13 p.m.
Inspire me with your Greatness (PART II)
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After many wasted hours reading the blogs of Olympic athletes, three offered me reasons for why they pursued their Olympic dreams. (In retrospect, I probably should’ve kept track of my sources. Alas, it’s too late now.) They are:
-It’s better than working a 9 to 5 desk job.
-It’s a living.
-Sponsors give you free stuff.
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Awesome. Thanks for your insights Olympians. I feel inspired by the fact that many of you seem to actually be schlubs like me, and also mildly disgusted.
I guess I was expecting people who have near super-human capabilities to have more interesting things to say about that.
For example, sometimes when I’m floating around at the Nambu-Yama pool I decide to swim as fast as I can to the other end of the pool and back.* Then, after I’ve actually done it I feel really proud of myself. More proud than I should be for simply swimming fifty meters, though distance has nothing to do with it. It feels good to be able to make my body do what I tell it to. It feels good to swim really fast. It makes me feel strong and healthy (even though I still haven’t quit smoking and am almost certainly less healthy than I think I am) and like I’m good at being me (in the uncomplicated, strictly material sense of me-being). And I imagined that being an Olympian would feel like that times two thousand. That would, I thought, be a pretty good reason for devoting one’s life to sports.
Other times, when I’m dealing with things like nightmarish line-waits, overcrowded public transportation, know-it-all public servants and bossy, ugly women who have too many kids, I handle the situation calmly whilst secretly thinking to myself that the people around me have no idea of how strong I actually am** and entertaining notions of violent outbursts in my mind. And such evil daydreams help me to be more patient when people are bothering me. And I imagined that Olympians would be really good at putting up with annoying people too because they would know that, if they wanted to, they could easily jump over, run away from, throw, pin-down and/or otherwise kind of maim that person and anyone else who got in their way. That too, I thought, would be a good reason to be an Olympian.
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The Colonel stopped by and I asked him what he thought about all of this. Why do you, Colonel, do what you do?
Because I love chicken.
Yeah, I know that, but you aren’t even exploring all of the possibilities of chicken. All you do is fried chicken. And you do it really well, but how did you manage to narrow your focus like that when there are so many other choices?
There’s still lots of choices. Original recipe. Extra crispy. Popcorn chicken. Chicken strips. Chicken burgers.
But those are all fried. And there’s a whole world of chicken out there. What made you decide not to boil, saute, bake, stir fry, stew, fricassee, BBQ or grill? What made you decide to get really good at making only fried chicken?
Because I love chicken.
And so our conversation continued, in circles, until I eventually gave up and suggested that we go for, what else, fried chicken whilst beginning to strongly suspect that people who are extremely focused may actually be aided in that by the fact that they are kind of dumb.
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*Breast stroke, back stroke and with a Styrofoam board are the only components of my repertoire. The front crawl is too splashy and nauseating, and trying to do the butterfly is embarrassing and stupid.
**For real, I’m stronger than I look. I snuck into the weight room at the Nambu-Yama pool to test my powers and lifted 90 kilograms with my legs. That’s like two hundred pounds! I might have been able to lift even more if I’d known how to put more weights on the machine. I don’t know how much an average person can lift with their legs, but I think that’s a lot.
