Princess of the World

I don’t care if you find it outrageous that I can have the February blues having just spent a month in Australia (guys! we got back SIX WHOLE WEEKS AGO, get over it already). It’s true I think. I am sad and mopey for no good reason.

I am getting enough sleep, I am exercising, I haven’t given up wine… so it must be the miserable month. It has been forever since it’s been sunny here, there was really only that one week last September when it was nice – the rest of the year was chilly. I feel far from my family and despondent about how impossible it will ever be for Graeme and I to both be near family. I feel unsure about where my future is going to take me. I feel like getting back to being fit is so hard and my clothes so tight (DAMN YOU AUSTRALIA).

Today a telephone system salesman came calling into work. He was German or Eastern European, I couldn’t quite make it out, very smartly dressed. He was cold calling. Our new office guy told him we had a system and that it was fine. The man asked politely what system it was, nodded and then said ‘Thank you, have a nice day’ and left. He was incredibly polite, not pushy and I felt so sad. I had an image of him going outside and pulling up his collar against the miserable day outside. I imagined him heading into the subway and not getting a seat as rude, fat women with bad hair put their bags filled with polyester walmart clothes on the only empty seats. When he eventually made it home, he would hang his hat and sit at the kitchen table with his shoulders slumped as he wondered how he was going to pay his bills, why life was so hard. Eventually he would sigh and hope that tomorrow is a better day. I hope it is.

So that’s not normal thinking, I can’t cry for everyone or I’ll never be able to leave the house.

I remarked to Jenny that I just want to go live in a village in a beautiful, grey stone house with flowers overflowing from pots. I will bake bread and eat it with freshly churned butter from my neighbour and drink great wine. I wouldn’t mind being fat if I lived in a village. Life would be so easy… But only in my imagination.

That’s all. I’m going to go to bed early so I can get up early, go to the gym and trudge through the middle of the week.

It’ll pass.

On Saturday night we went to a fundraiser at the Danforth Bowl. There are 6 lanes, it’s 5 pin bowling and the centre pin may or may not be anywhere near the centre (but probably not). You score yourself on paper and press a reset button after every turn to make the pins reset, it is bowling 1.0 and it is THE BEST. As a natural athlete, I won the prize for highest game score for a female (OBVIOUSLY). I got to choose my prize and because I’m not a proper Canadian I didn’t choose the Keg voucher – pretty lame of me right? I got a book voucher to the evil empire and I shall use it to buy biographies about other elite sports people like me, to see if anyone understands how lonely it is to be so great at sports. Like me. Sports.

Also, 5 pin bowling was apparently invented because 10 pin bowling was so strenuous, how hilarious is that? I feel like that was a sport made by someone with whom I would get along jusssssttttt fine.

I’ve been watching the Olympics, despite all the sports involved being very stupid. The opening ceremony was a total dog’s breakfast but perhaps I’ll go into that another time, to give my husband a small break from hearing me go on about what a travesty it all was. Despite feeling most of the sports are a bit boring (ice skating? Puh-lease, foofy hands and wildly gesticulating eyebrows do not make for riveting television), I do cry every time anyone wins a medal in anything, no matter where they’re from. I cry when someone falls, I cry when they don’t. I cry when their families cry and when their team mates are happy for them. So the story of Alexandre Bilodeau has pretty much ruined me. My emotions are being played like a fiddle by goddamn CTV. Oh man, he and his brother keep popping up in 5 minute “inspirational stories” and they just (sob) love (sob) each (sob) other (sob) soooooooooooooooo much (sob) so when he won that gold I was an absolute wreck.

Anyway, it’s been a rough couple of days as there’s a lot of medals being given out and a lot of proud families for me to weep at. The only other things that have made a splash for me at this ‘lympics are that the Olympic flame has been fenced off with a big chain link fence so the public can’t get close, nor get a good photo. Good one Vancouver. (Update, apparently the Olympic Committee have asked VANOC to get rid of the stupid fence, hilarious).

The biggie is of course the awful tragedy of the Georgian Luger dying on the day of the opening ceremony. A terrible tragedy that will hopefully never happen again. The thing I found most upsetting was that the footage and images of Nodar Kumaritashvili hitting the poles was shown repeatedly on CTV (who are broadcasting the games here in Canada), and was front page of the NY Times and the Toronto Star. I’m all for freedom of the press, of course, but I don’t really think it’s an issue of that. For me it is an issue of respect and decency. I felt that watching him die over and over, and the shots of his bloodied face as they failed to revive him were gratuitous, and added nothing to my understanding of the situation. We shouldn’t have to watch it, nor should we be able to as it served no purpose other than pandering to the (very) human instinct to ogle the dead. Sure it’s natural but that doesn’t make it right. I didn’t want to see it, I imagine his family and friends and the other athletes felt similarly.

Anyway, that’s it really. I wish everyone all the luck in all the sports and look forward to my own budding prospects in professional sports. I think I’ll be more of a Federer than a Tiger, but I’ll keep my options open.