The Passions We Ache For

I Remember watching the Olympics before I even knew what I was watching. My very first concrete memory is of Oksana Baiul in her swan outfit.

For me, the Olympics have always been a family event. For two weeks, the family TV would be tuned to ESPN, NBC or whatever channel that was broadcasting events (live or replayed footage) at any given time. My mom would read newspaper articles about the athletes, and I would cut out the pictures to save. My dad faithfully taped events for us in case we missed them because of school, and my sister and I compared notes on the athletes we loved best.

In the summer, there was always swimming and gymnastics. In 2000 I actually taped and studied the swimmers, and my breaststroke time improved by more than five seconds. I loved the summer Olympics because I felt connected to the sports, I'd competed in some of those sports too. I did gymnastics, I swam, I played water polo. I fell in love with Ian Thorpe along with the rest of the world, I loved-hated the arrogance of Gary Hall Jr. and Inge de Bruin started my obsession with the Dutch.

In the winter, there was skating and hockey. I remember the scandal between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi amazing me by being Asian because I had not seen an Asian succeed in the sport before (I was too young to remember Midori Ito), Michelle Kwan the young prodigy, Irina Slutskaya the darling girl who became a darling woman. I remember Todd Eldrege, Elvis Stojko, Scott Hamilton...and then Ilya Kulik, Alexei Yagudin, my Russian men. In 2002 there was the double whammy of joy when my Detroit Red Wings captain came back with a gold medal, and then won the Stanley Cup.

Every two years, the Olympics would come along and turn my life into a two-week frenzy of diving into a sometimes brand-new, sometimes renewing fandom (although I didn't know it was called fandom at the time). I didn't understand why there were people who didn't care, or even worse, didn't like the Olympics. To me, it was never about winning or losing - well okay, sometimes it was - it was about watching awesome people do awesome things, giving blood, sweat and tears for a dream. That kind of spirit is worth celebrating. It's worth putting life on hold for two weeks to acknowledge these people who have worked so hard to be so good.

And no matter how tired or busy I am, I always make time for the Olympics. It's something I will always share with the rest of my family, but more than that, it's an addiction. Every time I see a grinning face on the podium, I fall in love all over again.

I Remember my brief flirtation with delinquency in high school. Or at least, it was delinquency by my standards.

I went to Troy High School, one of those magnet schools famous for their AP/IB/Tech programs, and when I entered, I was expected to be a full IB student, with Honors. Calculus and physics quickly disabused me of that notion. I hated math, I still hate math, and Trigonometry/Intro to Calculus classes pretty much made up the most awful time of my life. Chemistry seemed okay, but it still involved a lot more math than I would have liked, so when it came time to pick a science my sophomore year, I decided not to do Honors Chemistry and went with the nice, non-accelerated pace chemistry class. To make up for it - because of my mother's outrage that I wasn't in an Honors class - I signed up for Oceanography, figuring two science classes equaled one Honors class.

And that was how I met Steve. He was a senior in my Oceanography class, taking it because the teacher was easy and he needed an elective to fill his schedule. I sat at the same lab station as him, and to be honest, I was scared of him at first.

It's an untold story of segregation at Troy High School. There are the IB-track kids, who all take the same Honors classes and come from the same social backgrounds and have the same goal of becoming lawyers or doctors or engineers. And then there are other kids, who have normal high school lives and don't worry quite as much about Honors and APs and etc. And rarely the twain shall ever cross paths. Which was why when I first met Steve, I wasn't sure how to handle it. Someone who doesn't study all day or stress over tests? Someone who wants to be a mechanic? What a curious thing!

That was the how sheltered I was my freshman year.

But back to the point, I was scared of Steve. He wore a leather biker jacket and loved Ozzy Osbourne and had a goatee - so he wasn't just non-IB. He was one of those kids. You know. The ones TV shows always say are from the "wrong side of the tracks." And I was so scared of him that every time we had a lab assignment, I'd try to just do the work on my own, so I wouldn't have to bother him. To his credit, he didn't let me. Steve wasn't the best student, but he didn't try to ride on my coattails, even though he could have. And for some reason, he thought I was a genius and seemed proud to have a lab partner who always knew what was going on.

He liked me enough to let me join his little group of friends, in any case. And being part of his little group of friends meant that I was sneaking off campus for lunch (only juniors and seniors could go off-campus), hanging out with random guys I barely knew unsupervised in their houses, and going for crazy car rides that should have gotten us arrested (five counts of reckless driving and numerous more for knocking over traffic cones around road construction sites). This is all fairly tame by most standards, but by mine? I was walking on the wild side. It was the most exhilarating three months of my life.

Then Steve graduated and we lost touch, and I never did get that ride on the Harley he bought. But I still think back on those times fondly, especially because it marked the point in my life when I realized I didn't have to be "special." Being normal - not setting the curve on every test and maintaining a ridiculously high GPA - wasn't really all that bad. So I stopped worrying so much, relaxed a little, and high school became a lot more fun.

I Remember the first time I got detention: I was in sixth grade and I cried. I don't even remember what it was I got detention for, but I recall making a tearful phone call to my mother, telling her she would have to pick me up an hour later that day.

At the time, I had no idea why I cried over something as stupid as detention, and neither did my friends - they all made fun of me for it. But when I thought about it later, I knew why I did. Growing up, I was rough around the edges, but I was basically a good kid. I mean, I got warning notes and time-outs in elementary school, but everyone did! But detention - detention was a serious offense to me because of (have you guessed it yet?) TV.

Television had me convinced that only deadbeats with no futures and potential gang members got detention. That "good" kids who went to detention suffered mightily. That it was a black mark on your record that would stay with you FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. (I might have also had some misconceptions about permanent records when I was in sixth grade, like believing they actually meant something.)

So the day I got detention, I truly believed it was my first step on the path to delinquency, and I dreaded having to tell my mother that her first-born was going to have to join a gang soon. It was horrible to think I could be so far gone.

Then I actually went to detention and found that it was merely an hour of sitting in a cold classroom in silence. Kind of like meditation hour. Boring, but it wasn't so bad. And the people with me, they were some really good students who were in for silly offenses, like writing English homework in math class, or something. It made me reconsider the whole "detention is the gateway to hell" idea.

I probably racked up a few more detentions during my middle school years, but as they were no longer a big deal, I don't remember them.

I Remember when the main interests in my life were Sailor Moon, Ronin Warriors and Gundam Wing. This was when Cartoon Network showed them in their Toonami lineup, and it made up my evenings Monday through Friday, from five to six - I didn't watch Sailor Moon on Cartoon Network, other than the marathon specials. I watched Sailor Moon before school on UPN.

If you ask any American anime fan in my generation, you'll find out that Sailor Moon was a guiding force in their forays into anime. Sure, eventually they would get into other shows, or perhaps lose interest altogether, but at the time anime was scarce, and Sailor Moon was our main staple.

What's interesting is that my sister never got into anime, and eventually fandom, the way I did. We both liked Sailor Moon, but I was the only one who wanted more. I wanted to see the Sailor Scouts in different situations, I wanted them to crossover with other shows, I wanted to see what would happen if I took the girls and made them dinosaur hunters, or ninja. Terms like "alternate universe" had not yet been introduced to me, but that was what I wanted.

So I wrote little stories in my notebooks, and as this was around the time the internet was starting to catch on, I joined mailing lists. I found fansites, which led to fanfiction sites, and suddenly I found a whole group of people who were just like me! I made my first penpal, a girl who liked Ronin Warriors, and we exchanged letters for awhile. It was amazing that fandom could lead to such things.

My father, of course, warned me of the dangers of the internet, but I really couldn't find any danger in talking to people about my shows. We rarely exchanged any kind of personal information. All we had to know about the other was that we shared a love for these characters. Everything else was simply not important.

I never posted any of my first horrible attempts at fanfiction anywhere online, which I am extremely grateful for now. But even though the writing was terrible and the plots contrived (half of them were Mary Sue, the other half based off of books I'd just read), I'm still glad I wrote it. It opened a gateway to something that, ten years later, has been a profound influence in my adult life.

I Remember when I was seven or eight years old, I used to play pretend with my sister. At the time, the coolest thing around was Power Rangers (first generation), and we would always fight over who got to be the Pink Ranger because her uniform had a little skirt, which clearly made her the girl. The Yellow Ranger, in the American version, was also a girl, but she had no skirt...and it wasn't until later I realized that this was because in the Japanese version, the Yellow Ranger was a boy. But anyway.

So we would fight over who got to be the Pink Ranger, and my sister usually won because she was younger and could scream like a banshee. For the most part, I didn't really mind being the Yellow Ranger because she was Asian, and so was I! Plus, the Yellow Ranger kind of had this little thing for the geeky Blue Ranger, which I suspect is where the beginnings of my geek!love grew from.

We included our dad in our games, even though he wasn't aware of it. His name is Jason, so this made him the Red Ranger. Things mostly centered around having to tell him things, or not telling him things. But his part in our games ended when it looked like the Yellow Ranger also had feelings for the Red Ranger. And that would be the first time canon ruined my vividly perfect fantasies.

Looking back, liking the Power Rangers led me down a disastrous path. The show taught me some basic stuff, like self-respect, integrity, sticking up for your friends...but it also taught me that I could defeat bad guys by getting into a kick-ass giant robot and yelling out attack names. Around the time I came to this realization, Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors took over my TV, and that was the end for me. From that moment on, all I wanted was to live a fantasy.

Title: Mazurka
Summary: Time moves and worlds change but the dancers stay the same.
Turns 7-9


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Title: Mazurka
Summary: Time moves and worlds change but the dancers stay the same.
Turns 1-3


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