Awe-Style

We are not going to lie, the Winter Olympics register a high 8 on our excitement meter here at the blogspot. We get in on the whole international scuttlebutt, the debate over whether the Italians are correct in the pronunciation of their own city. Is it in fact “Turino”, as the natives call it? Or do we go with the more American-sounding “Turin”? My father sides more with the American pronunciation. “It’s the ‘Shroud of Turin’, he tells me, “not Turino”. Whatever. We love these fiery debates. All of it. The insane opening ceremony, with its pyrotechnic display. The Italian gymnast who pounds an anvil-looking device which creates fiery blasts to fly up and into the air while throngs of insane-looking Italians in costume do acrobatic exercises. It elicits in us here at the blogspot a reaction that is best personified by red haired American snowboarder Shaun White, who stands with his mouth agape for a full 40 seconds while the camera does not move from his stony visage. What is still undetermined, however, is if he was looking at the crazy Italian artist on a motorcycle doing donuts or if he was just in awe of the choice song selections that each country marched out to. Albania arrives to “We are family”, while meanwhile the Ethiopian delegation marches out to “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer. You wonder how the Ethiopian athletes interpreted the lyrics to that song, I need some hot stuff baby tonight. And just what all that was about. The all time greatest moment occurs when the Slovakian delegation marches out to “YMCA”, which confounds just about everybody in attendance. We here at the blogspot are still trying to figure that out, all the while maintaining our poise, Shaun White-style.

We are digging deeper, though, too, trying to further understand our own love for these crazy games. It was something imbued on us circa 1987, no doubt, when we broke our kneecap falling from a sleigh. We were insanely standing up on the sleigh, parodying our best Shaun White move, before very anticlimactically falling and shattering our kneecap. We lied in the snow for a full ten minutes looking up at the gray sky, the various tendons and ligaments in the knee pulling at different places in our leg. The white-hot feeling of heat at various points along the leg where the knee was cracked. Wondering at how we were going to get home, just how we were going to explain to our parents our precarious predicament. And hoping they would not spazz out on us. Our Olympic dreams shattered. It could be, too, just the Norwegian heritage talking. Growing up, there were always the stories about my Norwegian grandfather doing ski jumping back in his native country. The romantic notions of crazy sweaters and skiing down big slopes. Something like this. More predictably, we conjecture that it’s probably just the whole insanity of the sporting event. The flying down hills at 60 mph on two fiberglass boards, the bobsledding, the skeletoning. The cross country skiing while brandishing a rifle. We love that up here in the B-rist. And we will be watching the proceedings in Turino, holding our knee, and thinking about how if only we maintained on the sled that one day. Because we are pretty much sure that we could rival Shaun White in our awe-style.