There’s a whole lot of people that enter the Olympic games every year. Only a handful of them win. What happens to all the losers who go to the Olympics? They don’t get gold medals. They don’t even get their picture on the box of Wheaties, the breakfast of Champions.
Why doesn’t the Hostess cupcake company put the photo of the Olympics losers on their box after the Olympics are over. It could say “Eat Ho hos, the snack cake for losers.” Because hey, we can’t all be champions.
I wonder if there’s a point during the Olympics where a contestant realizes that there is no hope for winning. They can’t just quit when they realize they’re doomed. If I were at the Olympics and I realized that I wouldn’t even be getting a medal made from chocolate, I think I might just make a spectacle of myself. I mean, if you are going to be a loser, why not just be a famous loser?
If I was running the hurdle race and I knew I wasn’t going to win, I would deliberately knock down all the hurdles.
Or if I was definitely going to loose the swim race, I would just stop and play dead. All the cameras would be on meas I floated lifeless on the surface of the water.
Why not just take off all my clothes and do the swim race in the buff, now that would make me famous. I heard that the original guys in the Olympics all competed naked. It would be like making a symbolic statement.
Speaking of swimming in the Olympics naked, there is a legend in Japan about a naked swimmer. According to this story, a guy was swimming in a competition when his Speedos came loose. The guy was so focused on winning the race that he didn’t even notice.
The guy won the race, and then jumped out of the pool and jumped up and down with sheer and utter excitement. I believe that this incident made him so famous that he was all over the news in Japan.
I know about this story because while I was in Seattle, I met a guy named Jake who told me all about it. The same exact thing happened to him. He wasn’t a competitive swimmer, he just played on on TV.
Jake was a bit of a screw up in school, even though he had yuppie parents who lived in a posh house in Bellevue. He didn’t want to go to college, so he went to Japan. He got a job working as an actor while he was over there. They have a need for Americans to play actors over there to play the part of the “white guy” in their TV shows. Jake didn’t speak Japanese, they just dubbed his voice.
There is this TV show in Japan that everybody loves to watch. The show about real crazy stories that happened to people. This one time, Jake was asked to play the part of the swimmer who lost his trunks during the swim race. They told him the story about what happened and gave him instructions on what to do. Unfortunately, the exact instructions must have got lost in translation, because they didn’t actually want him to kick off his Speedo and jump for joy in the buff. They weren’t going to film that part. They just wanted him to act like he was. So when he turned up naked by the end of the show, everyone was a bit embarrassed. I’m pretty sure that this happened, because Jake had the video of all the tv shows that he was in and he showed me all of them.
I can definitely feel his embarrassment. Someone told me that when you go to have a massage, you have to take off all of your clothes. Well, I was offered a free massage at a massage school when I was pregnant. They told me to take off all my clothes and cover myself with a sheet. So I did. Nobody told me to leave my underwear on. They could have told me that right off the bat instead of acting all weird-ed out and strange. That was humiliating.
The worst thing about being pregnant is that you can’t drown your problems away with a nice bottle of rum.
I had to wait a while for that one.
After the twins were born, Jake came over to our house for a dinner party. He brought a bottle of Absinthe and showed us the way to properly serve it the European way.
Absinthe is a bit of a novelty here in the United States. Especially since it’s illegal to sell it here. Jake had a bottle of it, because he had figured out a loophole in the law that enabled him to sell it on the internet. He found some friends in Prague that would buy it and ship it to him. He would take orders from people and then ship it to his customers. We were worried about his crazy business, but he wasn’t.
One Christmas season he advertised on the radio and he got so many orders that he thought for sure he would strike it rich. However, his European friends on the other side decided to slack off and they forgot to ship him more Absinthe.
Too bad for Jake. At least he had a nice woman to stand by his side in times of trouble. Jake is one of those kinds of people that likes to do things his own way. He needed a wife, so he went to Lithuania and found one there. She came with her own kid. Her daughter was named Anastasia, but in Lithuania, they called her Nastya. It was a cute name, but Jake spent a lot of time trying to explain to his foreign wife that when Nastya got to school the children would call her “Nasty, Yeah”
Jake bought a condo in Kirkland so he could get in on the real estate market in the Seattle area. My husband helped him move. I never did get his address and phone number, so we’ve lost touch.











































