in sporting news...

[avrelia]

... I don't watch Olympics. I love the Games, but as I don't have cable, and antenna works awful here, I am out of NBC coverage. I don't miss it per se, but other options aren't available. In Canada I could always choose between NBC and CBC coverage. (CBC is better). I would have thought that there would be online viewing options, but it's either NBC (that I have to pay for) or not available in USA.

So I mostly just read about it. And commentaries suck. I hate them. Why random sportsfans that crowd all sport-related places are so entitled? Why do they feel that the athletes owe them gold medals, and if they don't deliver, they are so loser or unpatriotic or stuff - and this I can see in any country I read about (meaning: USA, Canada, Russia). I should stop reading anything but bare news...

I did manage a bit of watching today, just to show D. a bit of Olympic fun. We saw a tiny pieces of gymnastics (beam - women and vault - men) and he asked me to jump like this. When I refused, he went and tried a routine of his own on our mattress.

then we saw a clip of synchronized swimming, and he laughed the whole time. then a bit of men's diving, and he was waiting for men to start dancing in the water, too. :)

But he is swimming pretty well for his age now, though he is far from having a proper technique(I am even farther, as I am not even trying rotary breathing.) We also finally bought him a proper bike, instead of a tricycle, and he is learning to ride it. But why are kids' bikes are so heavy? Mine is way lighter.

I am having a sporting event of my own, if you consider writing essays a sport. I do.

Here is my essay about Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass


There is a lot of nonsense in the Carroll's books. Familiar gets turned upside down or inverted; words lose their meanings, time and space change their laws. But if we examine the nonsense closer, we find that it is perfectly reasonable and serves several purposes.

The nonsense lets us look closer at the language and at the conventions of thought expressed in the common phrases. Carroll makes us re-examine the meaning of words we use every day and become their masters, as Humpty Dumpty puts it.

It introduces new metaphors that help us think about our lives in new ways. A perfect example is the scene where Alice and Red Queen are running fast only to stay where they were. It is absurd, yet it is also a good metaphor for our life: we have to keep moving, keep learning only to stay where we are because life around us doesn't stay still.

Nonsense makes us think beyond commonplace, beyond habitual. The White King remarks, “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!” Who is Nobody that Alice saw? We know what Alice meant, but could it mean something else? Can one help growing up? What about two? What does it mean to live backwards, like White Queen?

And finally, nonsense entertains us. It is often hilarious even when the deeper meanings and subtexts remain hidden. “I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” Unicorn says about children when he is introduced to Alice, and we smile at this inversion together with Alice. The solemn promise of Alice and Unicorn to believe in each other underlines the joke.

So nonsense has a lot of sense. Or, as Red Queen said, “I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”



I am bad at writing formal essays, and here is my attempt to learn...