Waterlogged (The Dramatic Conclusion)

Ain't That Unusual - Goo Goo Dolls (mp3)
Drums of Death - Noel Gallagher (w/UNKLE + Mike D) (mp3)

Continued from Tuesday, my additional thoughts about swim meets, fueled by sun, sand, and plentiful suds...

YOU AIN'T GOT NO ALIBI

I am not a complete looks snob. When one looks like me, one cannot afford to be a complete looks snob.

That said, I enjoy eye candy as much as the next walking penis, and one of the ways I entertain myself (no... not like that) in any setting is to scope around and locate all potential eye candy in a given environment. It works very much like the Terminator as he's walking through that bar looking for Sarah Connor. I have a little red cross-hair that lands on particular people, and then a database pulls up their estimated measurements, age, marital status, and general emotional stability levels. Granted, my database and cross-hair works only slightly better than Ron Weasley's broken wand, so it's not "dead-on balls accurate," but at this point I'm just trying to cram as many different movie references into this paragraph as I can.

My point is, eye candy at swim meets is painfully, terribly disappointingly awful.

Chattanooga brags about all of its outdoorsy and exercise-y opportunities, but we're apparently quite awful at taking advantage of them, having recently been dubbed the Least Fit City in America. Sure, these kinds of rankings aren't worth too much, but it's tough to argue that we're a paragon of low body fat and cardiovascular conditioning at whose cracked and crumbling waterfront the rest of America should worship.

Still, in a land of the least fit and more obese, you'd think that cougars and lionesses would be at their best and most promising in the area of kid sports (PLEASE NOTE: Once in a while I'll acknowledge an attractive male in the name of equality). You'd think that kids who are involved in physical activity at a high level of competition would have parents who were most attentive to being physically conditioned and looking their best. Unfortunately, when it comes to swimming, this does not hold true. Soccer and baseball fall much closer to expectation in this area, although it's still not nearly as rewarding as it should be.

I recently made this observation to a friend who's always been fairly active in the sports realm, and he offered this theory: "Swimming is one of the few sports where parents can't participate in helping their kid improve."

Basically, his point was, soccer parents and softball parents and football parents tend to go outside with their kids and play with them. They practice with them. The kind of parent/kid activity that burns calories. Swimming parents? Not so much. Swimming parents grab the fold-out chair, the latest Jackie Collins novel and a Ding Dong and sit back while their kids swim laps. This does not bode well for the physique of a swimming parent. Thus, the horrific dearth of anyone worth a double-take at swim meets.

BUT I'M A PEOPLE PERSON

According to every psychological test I've ever taken, I'm an extrovert. And not just barely. I'm, like, a ragin' extrovert to the point that I'm sure the DSM II has several diagnoses for the deep-seeded and underlying problems that would explain my extremism.

Yet, at my daughters' swim meets, I'm nothing short of hermit-like. When I'm not dealing directly with the girls or cheering them on for the five minutes out of three hours they're actually competing, I plop into my chair and read on my book or magazine. Or I annoy friends with text messages. When other nice parents attempt to engage me in friendly banter, I'm sure I come across as seeming polite but not terribly interested, the kind of conversation where I'm not really asking any questions or doing anything to extend the conversation. Inevitably they withdraw and do not attempt to rekindle said conversation at the next meet.

Because my behavior in this realm seems particularly contradictory, I've tried to figure out why. Here's my best guess: I'm at my weakest, socially speaking, when my primary role in said environment is that of The Parent. If I'm The Husband, or The Educator, or The Immature Party Guy, I can mostly loosen up and find someone or several someones with whom to converse, and the conversations can be plenty enjoyable. But if I'm The Parent, I don't generally enjoy where those conversations will go.

I don't generally enjoy talking at length about my children. I don't generally enjoy listening to other people talk at length about their children. Conversations about my children, about how smart they are, or about their interests, or about their cutesy little habits or foibles, especially around other people who are engaging in a sort of quid pro quo "anything your child can do my child can do better" dialogue, just feels forced and depressing.

I would like to think that the very last measure of any significance in being a parent is how much said parent waxes glowing about their children. In fact, I tend to believe there's an inverse correlation. The more someone talks and talks and talks about the awesomeness or adorable-ness of their kids, the less awesome and adorable those kids probably are. Or, maybe more importantly, the less anyone with ears and a brain wants to talk to those parents.

Maybe that's just me. Maybe that's a misguided and warped way to see parental pride. But at least it helps make sense of why I tend to crawl into my own little hole at a swim meet. Well, this and the fact that they're pretty damned unattractive.

Ha.

Funny Bone Hairline Fracture

It Hurts When I Laugh - Love Spit Love (mp3)
You Don't Need to Laugh (To Be Happy) - Frankie Miller (mp3)
Paid to Smile - The Lemonheads (mp3)

I'm worried about the state of the American Funny Bone. It's not broken, but perhaps it's in need of some more calcium, stat. The American Funny Bone is like some 90-year-old woman's hips, and one good fall down a stair or two could shatter it into a bajillion pieces, leaving the American Sense of Humor stuck in a wheelchair for the short remainder of its miserable life, constantly bumping into the door frames and complaining about the crappy rest home cuisine.

Can someone please explain to me how, at a time when our society is almost as likely to get its news from "The Daily Show" as from some talking head on CNN or FoxNews, America risks losing its robust sense of humor, a sense that has arguably helped us almost survive numerous wars over the centuries, not to mention eight laugh-so-you-don't-cry years of King Dubya?

First, we get these scathing conservative responses to the Pixar movie WALL-E start sprouting up, accusing the movie of pissing on the Amur'kin Way of Life and mocking our culture of laziness and excess. (Disclaimer: I ain't seen the movie yet.)

And then this whole Obama v. New Yorker nonsense comes up, where apparently the racist morons who might not get the humor in the cover will now vote for McCain.

Excuse me, but just how many racist morons -- excuse me, racist morons who think Obama's a Muslim extremist terrorist -- were biting their nails, still unsure which way their vote was going? Hmm... should I vote for the American war hero or the neegra Muslim terr'ist? It's sooooo close! If only a cartoon magazine cover would offer me some guidance... 

I hate to pee in a big bowl of liberal corn flakes, but living in the South, I'm quite certain there's lots of folks who ain't voting for Obama either because they think he's Muslim, or they think he's a terrorist, or they think he's black. And really? When all is said and done? They mostly think he's a Muslim terrorist so they don't have to come out and say it's because he's black. (A black columnist for The Guardian UK makes some nice points.)

Further, how many racist morons even know where one can purchase New Yorker, much less use this cartoon -- it's a *#%&%# CARTOON, people!! -- in their nefarious propoganda. By that logic, if only Kim Jong-Il could plaster a few hundred thousand buildings with his visage, he could convince the American people he was actually a decent fella. Or maybe he would just need to sing "I'm So Ronery."

I have trouble envisioning the Ku Klux Klan using this cover as part of their recruiting materials. ("This one's guaranteed to double our membership!!") I don't see Republicans carrying large protest posters with this on them, like it was an aborted baby fetus, to their national convention.

But the talking heads are certainly right about one thing. This has hurt Obama's campaign. Even though he's personally tried to shake it off and act non-plussed about it, the reactions of everyone around him and media people and bloggers only serve to remind us that, if we vote Barack Obama for President, our sense of humor will take a serious blow.

Saturday Night Live won't even be allowed to spoof him, as every single spoof risks the overly sensitive taint of possible racism.

Back to the WALL-E issue. As numerous observers have rightly observed, observing our society as fat, lazy and wasteful isn't particularly original or groundbreaking. Nor, as they have noted, is it particularly inaccurate. But does that mean it can't be funny? Maybe not HaHa Funny, but maybe HurHuhmm Funny. Or maybe Oof!Ack!Ow! Funny.

Just how desperate are Republicans for some kind of grumpy upper hand that they're looking to a Pixar movie as proof of the vast left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood? Hell, Michael Moore practically looks like the captain, so I'm not sure Pixar could be skewed too far to the left.

More to the point with both of these examples, have we come so close to the fat bastards in WALL-E that we have to have our humor spoon-fed and spelled out for us? Are we so completely numbed and dumbed down that anything requiring more than a half-second of contemplation is tossed aside or feared? Would Jonathan Swift be bogged down as a barista at Starbucks, unable to sell his essays or novels because he can't write a good juicy tell-all memoir that involves Lilliputians?


"It Hurts When I Laugh" is on Trysome Eatone. "You Don't Need To Laugh (To Be Happy) is from Once In A Blue Moon. "Paid to Smile" is from The Lemonheads' Come On Feel... Amazingly, none of these songs are available on either iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. Go figure.