Having told my athletically inspirational friend (CW-who by the way is on his way to Vermont for the national mountain biking championships!) about my dream yesterday, I was introduced by him to the amazing story of Kathryn Bertine. ESPN took this 31-year-old, a great but not-yet-world-champion-level athlete, and sponsored a project to see just how hard it really is for someone who is good but not great to qualify for the Olympics. She was trained as a figure skater and triathlete, and competed in the coveted Hawaii Ironman competition. She tried out for the events of the pentathalon (swimming, running, horseback riding, fencing, and pistol shooting) but was 27 seconds too slow in the running competition. And, as Kathryn points out, there’s no second chances in the Olympics, nor even in the tryouts. Undaunted, she went on to try out for the women’s handball team. She failed at that too (who even plays handball, anyway?), and decided that since she was already an accomplished biker through her triathalon training, she would train for the Olympic cycling.

Hers is a fascinating, and hilarious, story (she calls herself, and others like her, “type-A wackletes”. I can only hope to be considered part of that definition someday). It gives an amazing perspective into the world of world-class athletes, people whom the rest of us hold up almost as gods, people whom we could never be like even if we tried. She puts a human face on them, showing that they too have struggles and limits. She made the untouchable touchable. Although ultimately she fails in making it to Beijing this year, the story should inspire the rest of us to strive for greatness ourselves rather than writing greatness off as something that only the elite do. Because at least then we can say we’ve tried.

I have absolutely no good excuses as to why there’s a two-week gap in my writing. (Ok maybe I do have a pretty good one, and it involves a guy…boy those guys can be so emotionally exhausting…but in a good way :)) However, I wish to extend my most sincere apologies and please be assured such a long gap will never happen again, barring death, honeymoon, or act of God.

Lots has been happening! But first, I want to tell you about my dream.

I dreamt I went to the Olympics, just as a spectator. I was watching the swimming competition, and just before one of the races, the announcer told the audience that although teams from the various countries were participating, anyone else who wanted to could race as well. I was like, sure, why not. So I swam one of the races, and didn’t even finish because I got fatigued very quickly. My brothers were there and told me that they were disappointed in me. Rather than being upset, I told them that they were right, and it was quite a disappointing race. But what I was really there to see was the Taekwondo competition that was happening the next day. I recall making the decision that as soon as I got my black belt in ITF Taekwondo I would find someone to teach me WTF so that I could participate in the next Olympics. I was quite happy and excited about this decision.

The dream got me thinking. What differentiates an Olympic athlete from a normal one? Like, can I just make the simple decision to go to the Olympics, and then practice my butt off until I get there? Am I extraordinary enough? Am I too old starting out? How does one make such a decision?

It wouldn’t hurt to start training as an olympian and see where that gets me. At the very least, I’ll be amazingly fit.

Long hair and traditional gender roles. I could have told you that. Best of all though, and I’m REALLY excited someone high-profile sees this too: “Men have to learn to be men. Women have to learn to be women. The feminization of men has made them metrosexual, lazy or both.”

Beautiful. I love you Patti.

Check out this article about the Millionaire Matchmaker.

So yes, this is copyrighted material, and I do not have permission to reprint it. But I will give all credit, props, and appreciations to the marvellous Dave Barry, from whose book “Guide to Guys” this is taken. It is dedicated to all of my fellow tortured souls.

“Let’s say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.

And then, one evening when they’re driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: ”Do you realize that, as of tonight, we’ve been seeing each other for exactly six months?”

And then there is silence in the car. To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: Geez, I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he’s been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I’m trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn’t want, or isn’t sure of.

And Roger is thinking: Gosh. Six months.

And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I’m not so sure I want this kind of relationship, either. Sometimes I wish I had a little more space, so I’d have time to think about whether I really want us to keep going the way we are, moving steadily toward . . . I mean, where are we going? Are we just going to keep seeing each other at this level of intimacy? Are we heading toward marriage? Toward children? Toward a lifetime together? Am I ready for that level of commitment? Do I really even know this person?

And Roger is thinking: . . . so that means it was . . . let’s see . . …February when we started going out, which was right after I had the car at the dealer’s, which means . . . lemme check the odometer . . . Whoa! I am way overdue for an oil change here.

And Elaine is thinking: He’s upset. I can see it on his face. Maybe I’m reading this completely wrong. Maybe he wants more from our relationship, more intimacy, more commitment; maybe he has sensed — even before I sensed it — that I was feeling some reservations. Yes, I bet that’s it. That’s why he’s so reluctant to say anything about his own feelings. He’s afraid of being rejected.

And Roger is thinking: And I’m gonna have them look at the transmission again. I don’t care what those morons say, it’s still not shifting right. And they’d better not try to blame it on the cold weather this time. What cold weather? It’s 87 degrees out, and this thing is shifting like a goddamn garbage truck, and I paid those incompetent thieves $600.

And Elaine is thinking: He’s angry. And I don’t blame him. I’d be angry, too. God, I feel so guilty, putting him through this, but I can’t help the way I feel. I’m just not sure.

And Roger is thinking: They’ll probably say it’s only a 90-day warranty. That’s exactly what they’re gonna say, the scumballs.

And Elaine is thinking: Maybe I’m just too idealistic, waiting for a knight to come riding up on his white horse, when I’m sitting right next to a perfectly good person, a person I enjoy being with, a person I truly do care about, a person who seems to truly care about me. A person who is in pain because of myself-centered, schoolgirl romantic fantasy.

And Roger is thinking: Warranty? They want a warranty? I’ll give them a goddamn warranty. I’ll take their warranty and stick it right up their …

”Roger,” Elaine says aloud.

”What?” says Roger, startled.

”Please don’t torture yourself like this,” she says, her eyes beginning to brim with tears. ”Maybe I should never have . . Oh God, I feel so …

” (She breaks down, sobbing.)

”What?” says Roger.

”I’m such a fool,” Elaine sobs. ”I mean, I know there’s no knight. I really know that. It’s silly. There’s no knight, and there’s no horse.”

”There’s no horse?” says Roger.

”You think I’m a fool, don’t you?” Elaine says.

”No!” says Roger, glad to finally know the correct answer.

”It’s just that . . . It’s that I . . . I need some time,” Elaine says.

(There is a 15-second pause while Roger, thinking as fast as he can, tries to come up with a safe response. Finally he comes up with one that he thinks might work.)

“Yes,” he says.

(Elaine, deeply moved, touches his hand.)

”Oh, Roger, do you really feel that way?” she says.

”What way?” says Roger.

”That way about time,” says Elaine.

”Oh,” says Roger. ”Yes.” (Elaine turns to face him and gazes deeply into his eyes, causing him to become very nervous about what she might say next, especially if it involves a horse.

(At last she speaks.)

”Thank you, Roger,” she says. ”Thank you,” says Roger.

Then he takes her home, and she lies on her bed, a conflicted, tortured soul, and weeps until dawn, whereas when Roger gets back to his place, he opens a bag of Doritos, turns on the TV, and immediately becomes deeply involved in a rerun of a tennis match between two Czechoslovakians he never heard of. A tiny voice in the far recesses of his mind tells him that something major was going on back there in the car, but he is pretty sure there is no way he would ever understand what, and so he figures it’s better if he doesn’t think about it. (This is also Roger’s policy regarding world hunger.)

The next day Elaine will call her closest friend, or perhaps two of them, and they will talk about this situation for six straight hours. In painstaking detail, they will analyze everything she said and everything he said, going over it time and time again, exploring every word, expression, and gesture for nuances of meaning, considering every possible ramification. They will continue to discuss this subject, off and on, for weeks, maybe months, never reaching any definite conclusions, but never getting bored with it, either.

Meanwhile, Roger, while playing racquetball one day with a mutual friend of his and Elaine’s, will pause just before serving, frown, and say: ”Norm, did Elaine ever own a horse?””

If only I had been married in high school, the ideal of a modest, blushing bride could have been genunine.

Like many Christians, I was raised to value my body and taught to never defile it with sexual activity before marriage. I believed in these ideals and found them to be beautiful, and even took pride in my purity, enduring insults and accusations of prudishness. Even through my bouts of teenage angst when I wanted guys to like me, I still never wanted to give away my greatest gift.

I did, however, want to dress immodestly, toe the sexual line in relationships, kiss men alot, and be ‘normal’. I was a two-faced coin: I loved the idea of saving myself for marriage, but I also wanted pleasure. The real, genuine understanding of chastity as the perfection of love was years away for me; it wasn’t until junior or senior year of college that I really, finally understood that this virtue is amazingly beautiful and one that I desired.

Because I didn’t understand this virtue, I made a few mistakes, and although they weren’t serious, they still affected the way I viewed myself and those around me. I also approached sexuality with a scientific curiosity, finding out from friends and books all the things I wanted to know about sex. I would also catch glimpses of sex on TV or movies or images. Most of these things I did or were exposed to weren’t really sins for me, in the legal sense of the term, because of circumstance. But for the thirteen years I have been post-pubescent, there has been a long, slow chipping away of the mystery of sex.

Something of the mystery is now gone for me. I dont know if I could have avoided this worldly knowledge or kept myself totally innocent in such a world as we live in. But although my status is still “virgin”, I don’t feel pure. I know too much.

I don’t really know what the answer is to this, or how to get the mystery back. I hope it’s not gone for good, because now that I finally truly understand how beautiful chastity really is, I want it even more.

So since I work for a biotechnology and read about germs all the time, and also because I seem to be suffering from an antibiotic-resistant form of acne vulgaris, I’ve been thinking about how to solve the problem of antibiotic resistance. As many of you know, this resistance is caused by both oversanitization and too many antibiotics being proscribed.

My solution? Get dirty!

Roll in the dirt! Don’t wash your hands before eating! Eat with your hands! Don’t shower! We need to become breeding grounds for regular bacteria, so that the regular bacteria outnumbers the antibiotic resistant bacteria. Let’s crowd the antibiotic resistant bacteria out of this planet! So starting now, I am no longer practicing hygene in the name of better health.

I’m so brilliant. This may be my second-best idea ever, second only to when I thought poking holes in the condoms at the front desk of my dorm would be a great way to promote abstinence.

I was lazily sipping my Monday-morning coffee, booting up my computer for another fruitless day at the office. I surveyed the news, hoping for something juicy related to men/women relationships to blog about. But instead, I found out that after August, men might be the least of my worries- joining my pantheon of stress will be black holes, killer particles, and the ultimate destruction of the Earth.

Apparently the BIGGEST PARTICLE COLLIDER EVER located underneath Switzerland and France has just been completed, and they will turn it on in August. For those of you not up on your particle physics, a particle collider is a great big vacuum in which they have two beams of particles travelling opposite each other and speed them up until they are going 11,000 times per second around this circular vacuum tube. At determined locations around this circle, they bend the particle streams using electromagnets, crossing them and allowing the particles to crash into each other. They will then take pictures of these collisions using digital cameras that wiegh thousands of tons which take millions of snapshots per minute which amounts to 15 petabytes of data (fyi- that’s alot). They’ll then study these photographs (surely they have an intern to go through all that) to essentially see what happens.

A little boy physicists dream (ooh!! lets make these invisible particles go REALLY REALLY FAST and CRASH them into each other!!), this multibillion dollar device will be a great asset to the field of physics and the study of matter (why does any of this matter, anyway?). One small crash for particles, one giant leap for mankind, that sort of thing. There’s just one small drawback- the possibility of destroying the earth and killing all humanity.

There is a lawsuit hoping to stay the “off” switch of this collider, claiming there is “a significant risk that … operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet.” Apparently sometimes this particle crashing process creates mini black holes which can swallow up our planet or lets loose strangelets, a never-before-seen-on-Earth killer particle.

The scientists in charge of the project insist that “sometimes” is a very low number- like one in 50 million. But, as the article states, that’s the same chances given in some lotteries. And people often win lotteries.

“The [collider] is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years,” said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist.

Sure, cuz we know how great we humans have been at reproducing nature in other areas of science. This whole situation kinda reminds me of Doctor Octopus. Maybe instead of a lawsuit, the critics should hire Spiderman to save us all.

Pregnancy is a bad thing. At least that is what I get out of the continued pregnancy pact controversy.

“You lose everything,” Callahan told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Friday in New York. “You lose your friends. You lose being able to go out. I know a lot of people that like to go out every night. You can’t really do it. You lose — you lose everything.”

There are two ways that selfishness leaves people. They can give it up willingly, or it will be taken from them. I prefer the former.

Along the same lines of yesterday’s post, I have a quote I’ve been reflecting on for several months now. What do you think of this?

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural speech.

The person I first think of with this quote is Mr. C, my TKD sabonim. He has liberated me from my own fear, and given me permission to see myself as talented and pretty. This in turn has allowed me to see the good in others, and encourage them in thier journeys. I think it goes deeper than just a simple boost in self-esteem; I think it is really a change in attitude and worldview. Take Mr. C for example. He makes no secret of the fact that he’s one of the best in his field. What differentiates him from arrogant jocks is his humility and his constant, child-like joy in his sport. This continued enthusiasm for what he does can only come from freedom from the sport itself; he sees it as serving a higher purpose (God) and thus is not enslaved to its demands.

This should be a wakeup call to all men out there: fufill your potential! Stop shrinking in fear! Expand into your bodies; don’t make your bodies a cave where a frightened boy dwells, but rather make it an extention of your amazing strength of character, strength which, despite your greatest fears, you all have inside of you and which you must, for the good of us all, let out.

But you can only do this if you are free. Pray for freedom from whatever binds you: addictions, self-doubt, abusive or manipulative family or girlfriend situations. See these as not just annoyances or crosses you must silently bear but rather as things that are holding you back from becoming your own full person. Only when you are fulfilling who you were meant to be can you ever be truly happy. I am praying for you all.

I was told by someone I know yesterday that I am out of his league. I need to discuss with you all this concept and see what you all think about it.

I know that there are different upbringings and inequalities in money and talent. This is an inescapable fact. But inequalities in love? Is there such a thing?

I’ve been told by a total of three guys that I am out of thier league. No, really, I have. Some are impressed that I am good at Tae Kwon Do, others that I am good at languages and speak Spanish fluently, others that I have traveled, others that I want to start my own business, others that I studied art and can cook. What I always tell these guys is that nothing matters unless it is used to better oneself and God’s world. What really matters is what I have done with these gifts God has given me. Have I saved an immigrant family by using my Spanish? Have I started my business yet? Have I helped anyone, anywhere, by my knowledge of Carravaggio? Don’t give me a Nobel prize for having potential. Rather, help me to further develop these talents so that maybe sometime they could be of use to someone.

Saying I’m out of your league says to me “My life isn’t nearly as interesting as yours, so I have nothing to offer you”. These guys keep thier lives to themselves because they want so badly to be a part of mine, thinking that someone who has traveled and is accomplished and can appreciate the finer things in life has no use for someone who has lived in Arbutus or Ft. Meade their whole life.

Do you see what a life you are condemning me to? This means, in your opinion, that I have to marry someone who has studied abroad, who knows several languages, who has money and can appreciate fine wine. Or maybe this guy must be a brilliant and talented entrepreneur. Whoever he is in your mind, you have already planned out my life for me.

Let me clue you in on a secret. It is REALLY not that hard to please me. Really. Believe me. Need a list? Ok how about this. There are some things that all women need: flowers occasionally, a nice dinner once in awhile, plenty of compliments. Things that I specifically need: someone to converse with about both rediculous and serious matters, someone who is strong in their faith, someone who challenges me to be a better person and doesn’t just take me as I am. That’s only six things total. Is there no man that feels that they fill those requirements?

It’s just like the proverbial prom queen who never gets asked to homecoming and is forced to sit around in her pjs that night as her dad tries his best to make her feel better. I guess the lesson I can take away from all this is that it’s lonely at the top. And I’m not even at the top yet, nowhere near it. God help me if He ever gives me more talents.

I just want you all to know that my auditions are open to the public, and not closed to anyone. Unless they’re ugly and smell. Then they can go brush their teeth, watch the Style channel, and come back.