enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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My tongue still hurts, if you can believe it. And it never even wags. Except on here.

Ah yes, I forgot that I was planning to mouth off about the torch relay protests. In general, too, it makes little sense for me to harp on and on about men who are *not* interested in me. :)

Actually, on that last topic, I really do think that there is *something* about me that is preventing me from being asked out of late, since there are a few different men flirting and circling around and yet doing nothing. I really wish I had the secret. I might have to...just ask.

:)

So the torch relay. I've been thinking about the torch relay and a potential boycott of the Olympics given that I was once an athlete trying to make the games and therefore invested in them.

I felt a great surge of some kind of "world pride" when I heard the voices of the protestors in Paris on the radio last week. That the movement has swelled is very pleasing to me.

I've been thinking and thinking about the young athletes who have been training and training for ages. I've concluded the following:

1) If I were an athlete now and had I made the Oly team, I still wouldn't go to China. I actually believe that I know myself and my ethics well enough tp say that I would not be able to bring myself to go;

2) One thing that no one talks about is that really the competition tends to be better or at least just as good at other events. In track, for example, world records are often achieved at the World Champi0nships and not at the Olympics. At the Olympics everything is tactical because people are trying to win medals. To be honest, the very best event in running is the world cross country championships - 170 countries or so gut it out in the mud somewhere. All of the best runners in the world - from middle distance up - are running together. Everyone just wants to go to the Olys because they are the "glam" event, not because there are no other fora for world-class competition. On the contrary, there are events all the time.

(Incidentally I don't classify sprinters as "runners." They don't run.)

In any event, even when I was training in the past and projecting to Beijing, it always seemed incredibly stupid for one's health to contemplate running a marathon in Beijing. If one wanted to breathe properly again in life. :)

That's about all.

I shouldn't be so flippant. I just find the whole Tibet thing not to mention pretty much everything else about the Chinese government totally disgusting.

I recently watched the movie M@nufactered Landscapes. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it. In it a photographer (Edward Burtynsky) shows landscapes and people ruined by economics and the economic policies of governments. Among them are the people flooded out of their homes by the Three Gorges Dam, forced to demolish their own homes, in fact.

This is yet another reason why I don't shop at dollar stores, and otherwise try to shop locally. I felt for a long time that it was reasonable to give jobs to people in China by buying goods produced there. And there is some merit to that argument. There is also some merit to the argument of development dragging governments into submission, but I'm not there right now.

Ah sigh. I could go on and on. You know the story. The thing in a nutshell is the fact that the Olympics have always been political. Athletes have never represented themselves but have always strictly represented their countries. There's no reason that it can't be a stage for a lesson in individual and collective responsibility.

But those are my foolish opinions only.

I think I'm going to go and do some more Firenze research.

I wish I could eat a pizza.

7:12 p.m. - 2008-04-10

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