Ciao, Turin!

This is always one of the more melancholy days for me: the Closing Ceremonies.

Naïve as I still may, I still believe in the goodness of people. There might be doping in sport. There might be rivalries. There might be glares, curses and riffs.

But tonight is one of the nights that I lose sight of all that is negative and I focus on all that is good. I love the Olympics and I love what they stand for.

I get sad when they extinguish the torch, the ultimate symbol of yearning, desire and hope. I love that each Organizing Committee try to create the most creative, most stunning, most meaningful and most memorable way to light the torch. And with its extinguishing, we realize that even the most powerful things sometimes will come to an end.

I love that they played Madonna’s Hung Up on the Stadio Olimpico floor for the athletes to dance to.

I still love Bode, but Joey Check has to get my praise. He donated his Olympic bonus to the charity, Right to Play, which uses sports and games as a tool for helping children in the most needy corners of the world. His donation is earmarked for children of the Darfur region in Sudan.



"For me, the Olympics has been the greatest blessing. If I retired yesterday, I'd have gotten everything in the world from speedskating and from competing in the Olympics. So for me, to walk away today with the gold medal is just amazing. And the best way I can say thanks that I can think of is to try and help somebody else."

Joey, have you thought about applying to Penn?

Travelogue - Philadelphia to London, June 2006

Being on a plane while angry is not the best combination. I was in coach class on US Airways. (As time had progressed, my old "boy"cott had fizzled. Though, I don't think that I had personally purchased tickets on the airline, I was not as militant anymore about my avoidance of the airline.)

I mention this because a week prior, I was in the Raffles Class on Singapore Airlines returning home. The 18 and 1/2 hour flight from Singapore to Newark was comfortable in my chair pod. Selections of Nintendo games, movies, travel shows and music were at my finger tips. Availing myself of the choices, I remembered that I watched a show about Queensland and I enjoyed seeing places that I had known inimately only a month ago: Cairns, the Great Barrier Reef and Daintree National Park.

I interrupt: As I'm on the train to NYC, I was jolting this text on a legal pad while next to me, an older man works on his thinkpad, drafting a memorandum on Liberia.

I was happy with the memories and wished I had visited the Gold Coast, went to Fraiser Island and traveled to the end of Far North Queensland. I made my notes mentally about my future return trip.

Going to Australia, I mused, was a life-long goal. I was there with someone I loved and had with him a common bond of always wanting to go there. We had some common experiences, too. He might have Sydney more under his belt than I due to his five months there, but Cairns and its environs were ours. The flying foxes in the palm trees were ours. The tropical nights overly warm but colded by fans were ours. Secretly try to feed the turtles in a creek in Daintree were ours.

These memories, though I share them, are only creations by him and me. They are events and recollections that no-one else had in common with him and me. They are whispers of musical phrases in the midst of a symphony.

I, however, wasn't there, in the beautiful tropical surreal world of Australia. I was cramped and warm in an envelope of anger and rage. So I stewed.

Only two says before did I found out that while I was above the earth traveling at 350 miles per hour, suspending from all gravity and grounding, with the thoughts of him -- his return to the States in six weeks and holding him and loving him -- keeping me calm and steady through my near day-long flight that he slept with an Australian.

Oh, when I found out, I yelled and spat out my fury. I ranted for hours. Literally, he paid for it. He, yes, he called me from Sydney when I cracked the code from our IMs. I still feel that it's the only thing he's paid for in terms of his dicking me.

Added to this, I moved the next day. Moving was more than just a chore. It was mourning. The apartment which my rommate found while I was on my southern-hemispheric vacation, albeit stellar, was new and not yet familiar to me. I didn't have the time to adjust to the new domicile. I realized that my life was more than just in flux -- it was foreign to me.

Doubly exhausted from the lack of sleep and moving, I poured myself into the flight from Philadelphia International to Gatwick. In this cramped and stuffy seat, I finally stopped to breathe. I didn't realize that I was just starting to feel all of the emotions that I didn't yet have time for.

I wish I could remember what the inflight movie was. I watched it and it was the key to my unlocking the kinetic energy of my sorrow. I bubblerred as I watched. The movie itself didn't move me, but it was the power of needing release. Once I could see my hand in front of my face from when the emotional and exhaustive dust settled, I keened like a loved one had died.

Looking back, I sometimes think that a loved one did really died.

Curling

You know, they never show enough curling on tv.

Coke had a commercial highlighting that the US is close to getting its first medal in the sport.

During the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, I found out that the head of a local governing body of curling lived about two blocks away from me. I would walk past her housing, thinking, I should curl. I could do that and get into the Olympics!

Obviously, I never took it up or I'd be blogging from Torino. First of all, the practices were out in the far Philly burbs, and I am such a city fellow. Could you imaging lugging curling stones on the R5?

It looks like it's chess and bocce's love child on ice. (A note, here, I just came up with this anology and then I thought, I should link to wikipedia for curling, chess and bocce... and I laughed out loud when I read the wikipedia entry on curling.)

They never show enough curling on tv.

New Year's Resolution Update

I've been trying to go to the gym about 3 times a week. For the last two weeks in a row, I did. Now I'm going to add weight work in the next. Tomorrow morning, cardio and shoulders.

I just wish my MP3 player that I ordered would finally come in.

Maybe it's not blog worthy, but I needed to write something.

The 101 is on my songline

I'm at a kiosk in LAX, killing a bit of time before my flight. I've been up to Westwood, down to Carson for the USA rugby sevens, and out to Joshua Tree National Park for a little hiking.

I loved driving in LA, with the exception of the horrible traffic. Outside of that, there's something so captivating about the highways and the sideroads. Eachtime that I found myself on the 101, I would get excited again that I was in Los Angeles and that I was driving.

Most of my travel surrounded the Hollywood Freeway and I get the same thrill as when I get on the 101 in San Francisco. There's something about that highway that speaks to me. Therefore I've included it in my personal songline.

As much as I don't like LA, I love it too.

Ik Ben Droevig

I know that I mentioned that my mom reads my blog (and I think that my dad does, too.) I had a night similar to the mentioned in "Blog gratia blogis" last night: flirted a wee bit, and really enjoyed dancing.

Well, I enjoyed dancing! The music was loud, and, like I have an inate skill to recongize Madonna songs by the second note, I crossed the room to tell Q that the club was playing "Sorry."

I darted over to Q for the line, je suis désolé. I told him it was "Sorry" just before the line, lo siento. But the time she finished the line, ik ben droevig, a bunch of us were on the crowded dancefloor expressing ourselves.

When I really love the song, I get euphoric dancing. A lot of time, I love to be dancing in the middle of a crowd of people. They are all there before they love the song and they want to dance to it. You feel that energy go and flow among you. Then, you sing along.

I don't wanna hear
I don't wanna know
Please don't say you're sorry....

You're not half the man you think you are
Save your words because you've gone too far
I listened to your lies and all your stories [I listened to your stories]
You're not half the man you'd like to be

Q and I realized that we were acting out the words while dancing. It was interactive dancing.

Seeing that "Sorry" is one of my songs, it was just the right way to end the night for me.

Early Gay?

The setup: A large group of us is having dinner to celebrate a birthday. Among the crowd we some youngster and some of our conversation was conducted in pig latin. We were talking about one of the kid's Christmas gift, which was a kitchen set. The chat was about how the mom proceeded to look for a toy kitchen that would be appropriate for a boy. The actual sentence said was:

"She went with a different kind [of toy kitchen set] because that [one which was purchased] was the least irly-gay."

To which I quipped, "Oh, was it too 1969?"