All in.

I love watching the Olympics. All that skill, dedication, exhilaration...seemingly normal people doing extraordinary things. But it's the "seemingly" part of the athletes that tends to get overlooked.

These young people dedicate every waking moment to the sport they love, for better or for worse, like when your sport involves hurling yourself down an icy shute while balancing precariously on a toboggan.

I could never be an Olympic athlete. Yes, I own a mirror and can plainly see that my lack of muscle definition would probably ban me from being a spectator let alone a competitor. But I couldn't forsake all other things in my life in the pursuit of one thing. I don't find that healthy. So do I find it admirable?

Life is about hope. About chances. About redemption. These are common themes throughout the Olympic stories as well. Bode Miller blows his chances at Torino, and seeks redemption at the Vancouver Olympics. That means Bode Miller has dedicated the past four years, FOUR YEARS, striving mindfully (mindlessly?) toward a state that will be achieved, or denied, in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. Not to be a complete skeptic, but his achievement or denial of redemption/his dream might be forgotten by the majority of the public in the ensuing thirty seconds.

So what makes "it" worth it? I really want to know. I want to know what the elusive "it" is that will make me lay my head on my pillow each night and say, "I did good."

Usefulness

I work in a medical setting, poring through patient charts day after day after day after day after...where was I.

Sometimes the transcriptions for the chart notes gets outsourced to other countries, such as India. This can make for some entertaining malapropisms.

One caught my eye this week. The doctor surely meant to say, "The patient has outlived the influence of their genetic history." The transcription report that I read said:

Patient has outlived their genetic usefulness.

That made me think. Is there a point where we outlive our usefulness? Does it matter?

Love in all the wrong places

Last night, I went on yet another first-and-last date. This one actually scared the crap out of me, and I'm pretty lucky to be sitting here writing about it, and not recouperating from injuries on the hospital, or worse, adding to the nitrogen content of a cemetery's soil.

I'm going to abridge this as, judging by my mom's reaction to the entire story, it's not something that should be posted for public digestion. So why am I posting at all. I can't believe that I am the only person stupid enough to find myself in situations such as this, and if another girl (or guy, for that matter) can learn something from me, then this awful experience was worthwhile.

Long story short, a dinner date gets extended into a date to go see a movie, and I allow near-stranger into my car. My car. Oh well, I figure, we're going to the mall to see a movie, right? No, he wants to go to his cousin's house to watch movies that the cousin rented. I made sure the cousin and cousin's girlfriend would be there. Okay, can't be too bad, right? Only later did I remember that the murdered girl in the "Foxy Knoxy" murder had another girl present, too, and that didn't turn out too well for her.

We get to the cousin's house, and let's just say I should have turned around on my heels and left. I didn't. Why not? What the hell was I thinking?

I know exactly what I was thinking. I got stuck in between two societal norms: Be unfailingly polite, and be true to yourself. Sometimes, like last night, those two go head-to-head. Why was I so quick to sacrifice myself in the name of politeness, then?

My upbringing actually played a role in my wrong decisions. (When I say "wrong decisions", please don't let your mind go there, because that's not the case. The "wrong decisions" are all about hanging out with and spending time with people that are just absolute scum of the earth and were very, very disrespectful toward me.)

I in no way, shape, or form am blaming this on my parents or my brother. But my brother, being who he is, has sort of desensitized me to things that would normally be red flags to other people. There's a big, serious difference, however: for all the outside accoutrements that made my brother and his posse appear dangerous and menacing, there were always good souls in these people. Probably better souls than my own, as if I had a dollar left, I would keep it for myself, and my brother and the people he associates with would rush to give it to someone who needed it more than they did. I think I stuck around so long and allowed myself to be pulled into increasingly dangerous situations with this date because I was waiting for the revelation of the good, true soul that I've been taught to assume is in every human being.

As I pulled into my driveway at the end of the night, I almost started to cry. I've come too far. Too, too far. Society tells us we are nothing if we have no one to share life with. Everyone, myself included, assumes that "someone" to share life with is a romantic connection, husband, wife, etc. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to find the perfect someone, and when that someone is the wrong someone, we feel like failures in the eyes of our friends, family, and society.

I actually did find someone last night to spend the rest of my life with. This person is smart, cute, funny as hell, entertaining, original, and full of hope and optimism for the future.

And I was right here the whole time.