This post is supposed to be all philosophical and about something completely different, but searching for that video has made me all nostalgic. So let me pause here to discuss ABC's Wide World of Sports and what an important part of my 1970s childhood it was. But before we get to that--we watched a lot of TV as kids in the 70s (when we weren't running around outside all over the city unsupervised) and I blame this for why people of my generation are stupid. That and the fact that all our moms smoked when they were pregnant and no one was breastfed. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Wide World of Sports. (If only mom had nursed me, there'd be 45% fewer digressions in this blog. Well, maybe.) Wide World of Sports was on every Saturday afternoon, not long after Candlepins for Cash, the local television bowling show. (My 8th grade boyfriend, the first person I ever made out with, later appeared on and perhaps won Candlepins for Cash. This is the closest I personally have ever gotten to sex with a professional athlete, though I suppose it's not too late. Mikey Lowell, call me! Okay, digressions end...now.)
Saturday afternoons were also an awesome time in my childhood home because the 'rents usually went grocery shopping on Saturdays and that meant the refrigerator and cabinets were full of Good Shit to Eat by the time WWoS came on. So your blog hostess could sit down in front of the television with a bowl of Chunky Sirloin Burger soup and a real-sugar Coke and watch two hours or ninety minutes of obscure sports like curling, ski jumping, and oly lifting. Good.times. ESPN of course destroyed all that. Now with 600 sports channels we all can watch all the obscure and non-obscure sports we want any day of the week. And all the charm is gone.
Get off my goddamn lawn.
Now let's get down to business. The agony of defeat. I had a really bad gym day last Saturday, boys and girls. I was weak as fuck for reasons that were, and are, totally unclear. I came home Saturday night totally demoralized and I haven't stepped foot in the Y since. Oh, Sunday I had a perfectly good reason: a prior obligation that meant leaving my house early in the morning and getting home late in the afternoon. Monday I had a fairly good reason: worked late and then had some shiz that needed to be done at home. Tuesday? No excuse other than overwhelming fatigue that led to my taking a long afternoon nap instead of going to work out. Now, I am battling what is (hopefully) a minor health problem and it's easy to blame that for why I'm tired and sluggish and not chomping at the bit to get to the weight room. But if I'm being honest, I'm also psyching myself out, afraid I'm gonna have another crappy day. Which is all the more reason to Just Do It. Today. And I will.
Thrill of victory, coming right up!
xoxo
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ReplyDeleteOh Andrea, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE that video! Always did, so thank you! Also, I exchanged a few letters with Jim McKay as a kid, when I got mad that one of the translators did a shitty job, completely mangling an Austrian skier's reply to a question. He was so incredibly gracious and I was so flattered and stunned that he would communicate with me. Ahhh the innocence of stressing, as well as being thrilled by such things, at 15. Actually, now that I think of it, I STILL do that (stressING and thrilling about irrelevant crap, not writing to sportscasters).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I really hated it when NBC took over the Olympics. I also hated it when they split the summer and winter olympic years. It was always THE OLYMPIC YEAR, you know, the one by which I remembered life events, as in: "No, no, we went there during the Grenoble Olympics so it must have been 1968". Now I get it all muddled and get the years mixed up but wait, this was not really the topic of your post , was it? I really AM sorry for the way you were feeling when you posted this and assume that you are over it by now? I hope?
I swear to god, some errors show up ONLY after the comment is published. DAMN!