I'm a sucker for the Olympics.

I love spending hour after hour glued to the set watching the Olympics. While I'll (obviously by now) never be an Olympic athlete myself, I've spent a lot of time over the past 25 years or so becoming a much more sporty person than I ever thought I'd be. (It's not ability, it's just determination, and the fact that I've learned to love a bunch of more or less weird sports because they make me more like the heroes in the books I read (and write), and because it feels really good to work up a sweat while having some sort of adventure or other.)

I usually don't spend much time or attention on the opening ceremonies. However, today I was glued to the Vancouver opening ceremony. Reason? All the teeeeeeny tiiiiiiiny countries, all the hot countries, all the poor countries, all the sparsely populated countries, who somehow managed to cobble together a team of about three people and scrape together enough money to send them to Canada. I find these people, and their countries, fabulously heroic. "We don't have a hope in hell of winning against the US or Switzerland or Norway or even bloody Australia which hardly even has snow, but by God we're going to send a team and they're going to have the time of their lives." It's so extravagantly bold and insouciant, it practically makes me weep. (This impulse is aided by the fact that so far today I've had half a bottle of wine and one and a half, soon to be two, beers. For me, that's an overindulgence of epic proportions.)