You loved Nadia and begged your mom to sign you up for gymnastics classes. You went two days a week until you were in junior high. But then your body developed and boys noticed and hanging out at the mall or trying out for the cheerleading squad seemed a lot more appealing than spending the afternoon in a chalky, musty gym scared out of your wits to do what the coach was demanding.

I was practicing 12 hours a week by the time I was 7, traveling up and down the New Jersey Turnpike each weekend for competitions. I moved away from home when I was 14, trained 40 hours a week while attending high school, endured untold abuses by overenthusiastic coaches who weighed me twice a day to make sure I didn't inadvertently get fat during my seven-hour practice.

I broke my femur at the 1985 World Championships when I fell from the uneven bars on my last event of the competition. My parents ignored my depression and starvation, assuming I was happy because I won medals.

I did gymnastics.

Um, okay.

"I get the feeling that regular folks believe that if they just had the heart to stick with it through 10th grade, they too would be celebrating on the medal stand in Beijing along with Michael Phelps and Dara Torres... Do Olympic fans understand how unimaginably hard it is to overcome fear, persevere through injury, come through in the clutch, give up one's entire life in the name of a few possible yet unlikely moments of glory?" she rants, before putting "the beast" back in its closet "where it belongs" and continue to watch Beijing. "And I will watch alone, where I can't offend anybody by acting like a total jerk. "

There is so much weirdness about this piece that it's almost hard to know where to start. According to this logic, does no amateur have the right to enjoy anything professional? There goes American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, Project Runway, to say nothing of theatre and movies. Is there only one way to enjoy these athletic feats — as athletes? Because this is how the author watches the games, she seems unable to comprehend that everyone's experience is not merely a cut-rate version of her own. It seems to me, most of us watch to marvel, specifically because we know we can't do it, not out of some kind of warped notion of projection. And if someone has dabbled in athletics, wouldn't that merely enhance their appreciation? If they've experienced the true difficulty of competing at even a high school level, wouldn't that serve to increase their respect for this degree of talent and discipline? Not to mention that it seems pretty irresponsible to implicitly criticize amateur athletics at a time when people should be encouraged to be active, not to mention appreciate feats of athletic prowess and the accompanying healthy physiques. And don't even get me started on the unconscious elitism of the piece — not everyone has the means (or, ahem, the stage parents) to devote this kind of time and training to athletics. It's not mere laziness and misplaced priorities that keeps all these laymen "in the mall" or whatever.

But the larger point, for me, is this: why is she admitting this? Why do people think that being confessional somehow automatically normalizes something or renders it appealing? Ugly, clearly highly personal feelings like Sey's are just as off when she bares them as when she keeps them to herself; confessing something doesn't mean everyone's gonna come forward in solidarity, nor should they. Because something is an emotion does not make it right, or universal. It's true that it takes a very particular brand of writer to render his personal thoughts universal and appealing, and it's no secret that plenty of folks who lack this facility have fallen into the trap of mistaking the inappropriate for the compelling. And clearly, by acknowledging this quality in herself, Ms. Sey thinks she's being brave, admitting something unpleasant but essentially patting herself on the back for her honesty. There's an undercurrent of self-righteousness to the whole thing that's very off-putting. "Yes, I'm a jerk," she seems to be saying, "but I'm still absolutely right." To Jennifer Sey, in a perfect world, we'd have no right to, apparently, watch an internationally syndicated television program. But she'd still have the right to bare her soul.

The Beast [Salon]

MEGAN: Good morning! I'm caffeinated this morning!
MEGAN: There will be a lot of exclamation points!

MOE: I'm...HUNGOVER! And it's kind of late. Did you have sex or something? Wait don't answer that in public!
MEGAN: Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you just said. Oh, well. Wanna talk about the news?
MEGAN: I feel like being a rapist, accomplice or apologist is practically a checkbox you have to have before going to Iraq for KBR these days.
MOE: Okay China is saying it broke up a terrorist plot to kidnap Olympians.
MOE: And yeah, we don't want the Crappy Hour to get too rapey
MEGAN: Yeah, I was listening to that this morning.

MEGAN: This terrorist plot to supposedly kidnap athletes and foreign journos is probably why China shouldn't have censored the movie Munich. I mean, other than the hottness of Eric Bana and Daniel Craig and that French guy from Amelie, that is.
MOE: Dude, I never saw that movie, dammit. I wonder if it's OnDemand. Fuck New York and all its deleterious outdoor social obligating. Here's the thing about the Olympic protests: they really did seem to come from nowhere, right? Even the Dalai Lama seems surprised.

"Right from the beginning, we supported the Olympic Games." Speaking of pro-Tibetan protesters, he said nobody "has the right to tell them to shut up.

MEGAN: The Golden Gate bridge people should be in the Olympics. That was some epic shit.
MOE: Uh-oh, the wheelchair girl was interviewed by the Chinese press. I can't figure out whether that's good or bad.
MEGAN: I mean, it seems like a lot of the torch runners are Asian, so maybe it's designed to highlight the Chinese diaspora? Is there such a thing?

MOE: And then in London you had the horrible Chinese thugs issue..
MOE:

Miss Huq, one of 80 torchbearers said: "The men in blue perplexed everyone. Nobody seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were very robotic, very full on, and I noticed them having skirmishes with our own police and the Olympic authorities before our leg of the relay, which was confusing.
"They were barking orders at me, like 'Run! Stop!' and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, who are these people?'
"They kept pushing my hand up higher when I was holding the torch, so they were...interesting."
Miss Huq was nearly knocked to the ground by a protester as thousands of campaigners disrupted the procession to demonstrate against China's human rights abuses and brutality in Tibet.
It was reported the men have been recruited from Chinese special forces brigades. Some came from the feared Flying Dragons and rthe Sword of Flying Dragons counter-terror units.

MOE: Obama joined the boycott bandwagon. Angela Merkel isn't showing up, incidentally.
MEGAN: Or Gordon Brown.
MOE: Yeah, but he's attending the closing ceremony? I guess since London gets the Olympics next there's probably some important torch duty to attend to there. Anyway, meanwhile in China executive compensation is stoking outrage!
MEGAN: Hahaha. So much for "Communism" suckers. Faux meritocracy FTW! You'll get your own mortgage crisis just as soon as the government lets the peons own property!

MOE: Well, um, the government lets the peons own property, they just get backsies if someone wealthier wants to build there. What's interesting is that these "multimillion yuan" salaries are inciting such a huge outcry from Chinese citizens. Do they have any idea of the magnitude of the pay packages of the Western executives who created all that shareholder value outsourcing all their operations to China? I wonder how, or if, the Chinese press covers American corporate culture/excesses/etc.
MEGAN: I have to think they cover it to some degree, right? I mean, the Russians propagandized the hell out of that shit.
MOE: Yeah, but it wasn't an iconic Soviet autocrat who said "To get rich is glorious."
MEGAN: Oh, sure, but not to to people he was oppressing, I think. It's all lifting every boat and shit, work for your comrades, blah blah blah while the people at the top of the hierarchy convince you and themselves that they "deserve" to live better lives because their work is, like, harder and stuff. Just like here!
MOE: And speaking of, the dollar dipped below seven yuan. This is big news because the central bank sets exchange rates.

MEGAN: Wait, so they're actually letting their currency appreciate! Tell the unions! Shout to the steel lobbyists! Inform Congress immediately that there's no need to pass legislation to impose sanctions China for its exchange rate policy, not that it will have any effect on anything whatsoever because it's all about perception in Washington rather than actuality.
MOE: Well yeah and it's not like their policy changed, per se.
MEGAN: Yeah, it's just this thing in DC that has annoyed me for years as though China's the only country on the face of the Earth that doesn't manipulate its exchange rate. I mean, we don't but we sort of do, but the VAST majority of countries in the world don't float their currency.
MEGAN: It just gets shouted about in Washington because it's something to hang a political hat on because no one knows anything about exchange rates and you can make it sound really unique and unfair when it comes to China and the same people shouting about it have no idea of the downstream consequences to our own economy.
MEGAN: [/rant] Caffeine!
MOE: China has kept theirs artificially low, which for us, has been sort of like a reverse mortgage.
MEGAN: Right.
MEGAN: Just another way we in effect financed the universal right to a flat screen. Made in Korea.
MOE: Here's a decent piece on the Olympics and China and what it all means. Although by decent I do not mean "universe altering." Anyway, can anyone tell me, getting back to San Francisco, who were those guys?
MEGAN: They were members of Students for a Free Tibet. All but one of them was over 30.

MOE: Holy shit:

Reached by cell phone as he dangled from the bridge, Sutherlin said he was worried that the torch's planned route through Tibet would lead to more arrests and that Chinese officials

Ummmmm, so the hostesses pictured above are plump? Anyway, the best part of the story is that officials totally denied there were any physical guidelines, and a local newspaper turned around and printed the little red rulebook in detailing all the specifications, according to the blog Shanghai Scrap (The URL looks like "Shanghai is crap", which would have been a better name but still.)

really wish that I had picked up on what might be some of the weirdest Olympics news of the year, hidden - in clear view - in this sentence from Xinhua's reiteration of the Xinmin Evening News story:

It also set strict standards on facial features, including the ratio between the "width of the nose and the length of the face", "width of the mouth and width between the pupils", Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News reported.

Fans of Leonardo DaVinci and/or Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, should/could/will recognize what's going on here: the renowned Golden Ratio - 1.618 - has been enlisted to choose Shanghai's contingent of Olympic hostesses. There's a whole lot of internet literature on the Golden Ratio and its tenuous connection to Western aesthetics, so google around if you want a deeper explanation.

Golden Ratios And Other Forbidden Fetishes Of Shanghai Bureaucrats [Shanghai Scrap]