Dammit, Jake. (Prophecy Girl Reviews End of Watch!)

Two days ago, I put up an entry about Taylor Swift's attempt to outdo me in the arena of artistically expressing irritation toward the common-sense-challenged man-child known as Jake Gyllenhaal.

"HAHA, THAT TAYLOR," wrote I (well, not literally; I'm dramatizing). "She is saying some of the same things I say, except is less pathetic for it because Jake has acknowledged her existence in public."

I was speaking, of course, of Tay-Tay's Jake-bashing breakup hit, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," and its accompanying scarf-filled video.  I thought the song was hilarious, and the video even more so, both because of the Jake-specific details, and because the song itself comically lent itself to the preset narrative about Jake that I, personally, wrote about online from 2006 to 2007 and then 2010 to early this year.

But Jake, you see, occupies a certain role in my life:  to call him a "weakness" does not do justice to the word "weakness."  He is the crystal meth of my pop culture world.  I took one hit, one time, back in late 2005, and it took me years to kick the habit.  And then I was stupid enough to take another hit in 2010, and I'm still dealing with the aftermath.

Upside?  My tolerance has improved greatly with time.

Downside?  That doesn't mean I'm fully resistant.

An hour into End of Watch...goddammit...he had me rooting for him all over again.  Do you hear that, Jake?  Are you happy?  I was rooting for you.  I was rooting for you because you did a really good job with this movie, and you took a risk in making it - not like the risk you took in making a Viagra-themed love story or a sand-filled Disney video-game flop (which I now look at as part of an experimental phase as you attempted to find yourself, and I forgive you for them because I know you learned from them).  But a risk in going back to being Jake Gyllenhaal.  That guy who makes weird indie (or at least indie-esque) films that are maybe hard to watch but that make people think and bring Big Issues to average movie-goers.  The Jake Gyllenhaal who's not in it for the money, but for the art.  The Jake Gyllenhaal who yes, was probably a total effing dick to Taylor Swift but you're a dick to everyone, and you know what, part of growing up is learning that sometimes guys are dicks.  That music video, which I garnered an unhealthy level of voyeuristic pleasure from, I now see as kind of mean.  Taylor Swift isn't exactly a saint, and Jake, maybe I don't give you enough credit for being a real person in a world where you earn your living by being fake. 

End of Watch was a good movie.  Not the type of movie I would ever see under any other circumstances, but that's maybe the entire lesson of my futile exercise in being a Jake Gyllenhaal fan:  he has always pushed me a little outside my comfort zone.  Sometimes that's meant jetting off to a poetry reading, or going to Los Angeles completely on my own, or pushing my way through the press at a film festival to demand I get what I came for; and sometimes it means watching movies that upset me - that push the boundaries of what I want to believe about humanity and that make me think just a little differently about things in my own life that I take for granted.

So FINE.  There you have it.  I will never watch End of Watch again because the camera-work gave me nausea and the storyline full-on dry heaves.  But I have to give it two thumbs up, because after I watched it, a teensy part of me - a part that is small but whiny and persistent nonetheless - wanted to punch Taylor Swift in her smug face for being so bitchy in that video.

Dammit, Jake.  You came back a little bit with this one.  You may annoy the hell out of me at times, but it's only right to give respect where respect is due, and you got some from me with this one.

Taylor Swift Sums Up My Feelings about Jake Gyllenhaal by Summing Up Her Feelings about Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal, the mid-sized, bearded famous person best known for being more interesting six years ago than he is today, has a new movie out this weekend.  End of Watch is a police drama, and one that assuredly will have critics utilizing such phrases as "gritty" and "gripping" and "shot on the cheap."  The movie was filmed back when I was still writing ISJ! (the blog!), and thus it has the honored distinction of being the last Jake movie whose filming I covered.  Having covered the filming of every Jake movie (at least in some capacity) from Zodiac to present, End of Watch - truly - marks an End of Era.

Circa 2007.  I couldn't handle the hipster glasses, so I bailed.

Will I be seeing End of Watch?  Um, does the pope shit in the woods?  Look, Jake and I have kind of a complicated history.  It was great at first (2006), but then we called it off because we both needed space (2007), but then we got back together (mid-2010), and then I remembered how annoying he is (late-mid-2010), and then I swore him off for good after realizing he was never going to change (2012). 

It was exhausting, y'know?  Like, I am never starting a blog about him again.  Like, ever. 

But that doesn't mean I'm not going to see his movies anymore.  It just means I'm not going to see his movies on opening weekend anymore. (Although, if you've read my book, you know that even during the height of our power-couple-dom, I never saw his movies on opening weekend...but that's beside the point.)

In summation, I will be back sometime (I don't know when) with a movie review.  But in the meantime, here, please enjoy Taylor Swift's breakup song about this Jake character, which is literally the best thing she's ever done, although only the second best thing ever written about Jake.  (The first being my book, obvs.)  TaySwift is, lest we forget, famous for her Top 40 Romeo-and-Juliet-you-belong-with-me-back-to-November brand of saccharine love songs, but three months with Jake and she cranked out an I-can't-believe-how-lame-you-are breakup anthem, and of course she did, because HE IS THE JAKE GYLLENHAAL OF MOVIES. 

(TaySwift has NOT, however, ever come up with a Civil War album internet rumor about Jake, and for that reason, this song is best enjoyed if you pretend it's me singing about blogging about him instead of her singing about her "actual relationship" [or whatever] with him.  It's all about me, always.  Never forget.)

THE END.

Dear Mitt Romney,

Literally - literally - the only positive thing I can think to say about your campaign thus far is that you chose a running mate who has not (yet) caused me to projectile vomit.  (More than we can say about John McCain in 2008.)

Regards,
Becky, Registered Democrat

[Normally I have a lot of fun during election season bashing the other team.  This year, I feel like the more humane thing would be if we could somehow put the Republicans out of their misery already...]

Fifty Shades of What the Fuck Am I Reading?

You wanna know why I like Britney Spears?

Because a respectable percentage of her songs are dedicated to challenging other people to man the fuck up.

"Spit it out 'cause I'm dying for company," she says in "Till the World Ends."

"[Time to] be a little inappropriate, 'cause I know that everybody's thinking it," in "I Wanna Go."

"Piece of Me" is the Britney equivalent of Eminem's final battle in 8 Mile (I'm not perfect and so what, asshole).  And "Do Somethin'" (a personal favorite) is exactly the challenge its title suggests; it can be applied to a plethora of scenarios.

In the way that people do, people have done a lot of talking (and writing) recently about what the wild popularity of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy "means."  Much of what I've read on the subject has reminded me of Britney Spears, who can convincingly sell a line like, "When I crack that whip, everybody gonna trip," who can make a number one hit out of daring someone to join her in a threesome, but who also somewhat pathetically mopes around in her real life like the real and flawed human being she is.

The success of 50 Shades of Grey, which tells the story of the unlikely and (supposedly) kinky BDSM relationship between Anastasia Steele (*cough*Bella Swan*cough*) and Christian Grey (*cough*Edward Cullen*cough*), has - according to much I've read - volumes to say about women like Britney.  Women who are now a major force in nearly all corners of the business world.  Women who are in charge of their own lives, who are self-sufficient and successful, but who, at the end of the day, maybe have a secret yearning to surrender completely to a man bold enough (strong enough) to think he could add something to her life.  Literally, it's "hit me, baby, one more time."

Newsweek sold that idea fairly well in the cover story it ran on the 50 Shades phenomenon a few months back.  I hadn't read the trilogy when I read the article - didn't have any desire to - but the article stuck with me.  I started to think that maybe this was one of those things that I should be familiar with because of its influence on pop culture (Vanity Fair reported last month that it's on track to become the bestselling book series of all time)...and that maybe, just maybe, my own inner Britney would enjoy a story about a guy who loves to take control.

So I started to read.

Five chapters in, I was underwhelmed.

Ten chapters in, I was still waiting for it to get better.

Fifteen chapters in, I was wondering if God was playing a joke on all of us in making this story this popular.

I am currently exactly one-half of the way through this trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey down, Fifty Shades Darker at the halfway point), and here are my thoughts so far (very minimal spoilers below):

1.  This is a Twilight fanfiction story.  Yes, it has been set in an alternate universe, yes, the names have been changed...but nothing else has.  This is Twilight, right down to the piano-playing and the bad weather, except with more sex.  And since no one in their right mind would call the Twilight saga a celebration of female empowerment, that brings us to...

2.  How the fuck did Newsweek (or anyone else) wring out of this that this was somehow a side effect of a cultural shift toward women in powerful societal roles?  That has absolutely nothing to do with this.  This is nothing more (or less) than a side effect of people liking to read smut.

3.  Which, full disclosure, I've read my fair share of.  So I can say with authority that even by X-rated fiction standards, this is pathetically devoid of plot.

4.  And of editing.  Grammatical and punctuation errors are all over the place.  As are gaping plot holes.  (Which, come on, really shouldn't be an issue considering point #3.)

5.  Word and phrase repetition are being redefined in front of my very eyes.  Oh my, this is some lazy writing.

6.  In terms of specific complaints about criminal-level stalker behavior being treated as acceptable, and about a self-conscious and ambiguously bland heroine being badgered into giving up her entire life for said stalker, whom she endlessly feels she's unworthy of because of his physical perfection, please refer above to the fact that this is a series based on Twilight.

7.  In thinking a little more about that, is that even legal?  I thought all those disclaimers on fanfiction stories made stuff like this not possible...

8.  And you know, I wouldn't even care about any of this if it were a compelling story.  I read shit all the time that is terrible on a logical level but entertaining nonetheless.  But this is so incredibly bad.  I don't understand!  There is so much better fanfiction out there!  And you don't have to pay for it!  (For the record, I did not shell over any money for my reading experience.  I am all about sharing my media these days.)

IN CONCLUSION, even though I still have five billion more pages to read, I can't help but pause at this point to grimace at the utter mediocrity of it all.  The story that may someday outsell all other books is just someone's middle-of-the-road fanfiction story, lifted directly from the internet and stuck in a binding.  It's not a cultural indication of anything.  Except maybe that the free market really does place way too much value on blind luck and word of mouth.

Then again, this far into the story, it hasn't really delivered on its kink aspect either, and that might be part of my problem with it.  Christian Grey, the "fucked up" disciplinarian, proved himself pretty vanilla when he allowed himself to be flummoxed by someone as pliant as Anastasia Steele.

It's fine to sell this story for what it is (bad porn), but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Christian is some kind of token fantasy guy for all the women out there who regularly challenge the posers on the sidelines to "do somethin'"...

The Elevator

The remnants of Hurricane Isaac are making their way through the Midsouth right now.  It’s dark and drizzly and there’s an almost constant tropical breeze – very atmospheric.  I love weather like this.  It makes the world seem just a little bit creepier, but in a good way.

I work in a multi-story building and park in a parking garage that has me entering on the third floor, from which I take the elevator up to my floor.  This morning, I walked into the building, hit the elevator button, and from the depths of the building, I heard a voice traveling up through the elevator shaft, wailing, “Please!  PLEASE!  SOMEBODY HELP ME! ”

Now, hearing someone in such a state of distress would send a shiver down my spine under the best of circumstances, but with this Wuthering Heights weather and me being dramatic by nature anyway, standing alone in the hallway and listening to a distressed woman scream about being stuck in an elevator somewhere beneath my feet chilled me straight to the bone.

And then suddenly I wasn’t alone in the hallway.

And then suddenly the elevator was opening.

And in the elevator was a maintenance man, and walking up beside me was a man who works on the same floor as me, and up through the elevator shaft came the woman’s voice again.

“HELP ME!  I NEED HELP!”

I literally had goosebumps by this time because she sounded like she was one yell from fainting dead away from fear.  I looked at the maintenance guy, who seemed to be hearing her for the first time, and watched as he…well…as he rolled his eyes.

“What floor are you on?” he yelled down.

“PLEASE HELP ME!”

“Ma’am!  Ma’am, tell me which elevator you’re stuck in.”

[unintelligible] “I’M TRAPPED!  I NEED HELP!”

The man next to me chuckled a little, the maintenance guy grinned and motioned for us to come in, and then we, you know, just took the elevator like normal people to our respective floors like nothing unusual was going on.  The man from my floor did at one point say, “I guess there’s a woman stuck in the elevator,” and then the maintenance man said, “I should probably call security.”  And all I could come up with was a forceful, “That’d be a terrible way to start the day!” though I could have just as easily been selfishly describing my own reaction as that of the woman who was stuck.

I got to my office and turned on all the lights and got situated, but then I had to go back down to the lobby to pick up the mail and newspaper for the day.  The thought of getting back on the elevator wasn’t particularly enticing, but when I got on, I wasn’t alone.  There was a woman on board who said as soon as she saw me, “Did you hear the woman stuck in the elevator?!”

So we talked about hearing her otherworldly cries for help and speculated on whether or not she’d been rescued until we were deposited on the ground floor and went our separate ways.

I sometimes go whole days without riding the elevator with anyone, and whole weeks without talking to anyone I do happen to ride with, so after all the earlier conversation, I was surprised that when I got back on the elevator to go up, after getting the newspaper and mail, I was joined by a young man who said to me, “Hello!  How are you?”

It’s just so incredibly rare for anyone to initiate small talk…so I said to him, “I’m fine.  But did you hear about the woman who got stuck in the elevator?”

He had not, but he had himself once been stuck in the elevator, but managed to force his fingers between the doors and claw his way out.

“That is so creepy,” I said to him.  He agreed, and then disappeared as the door closed behind me and the elevator took him to a higher floor.

And that was why today was the most interesting elevator day I’ve ever had.

85 Things That I Hated in 2006

(From a handwritten list, titled "Things I Don't Like [no order]," dated 2006.  I was twenty-four...and a brat.  Punctuation and parentheses original.)

1.  Republicans
2.  The Pussycat Dolls

3.  Friends
4.  Julia Roberts
5.  Brangelina (word and entity)
6.  being bored
7.  The Lion King
8.  religious proselytizing
9.  waking up in the morning
10.  Mariah Carey!!
11.  J. Lo movies (shudder)
12.  The Dave Matthews Band
13.  George W. Bush
14.  those "W:  The President" stickers
15.  writing on people's Facebook and MySpace pages and not getting a reply
16.  American Idol (though I can't deny my affection for Kelly Clarkson)
17.  making phone calls at work
18.  corruption in corporate America
19.  the movie Crash
20.  most '80s music
21.  acne
22.  being called "weird"
23.  spending money on non-fun things
24.  being the object of an unwanted and unsolicited crush
25.  heartburn
26.  "lol"
27.  compliance departments
28.  snot
29.  ER promos
30.  Donald Trump
31.  Texas state pride (too much!)
32.  making my lunch
33.  people who hate cats
34.  people who mistake their dogs for children
35.  paparazzi
36.  Rush Limbaugh
37.  pronouncing coupon "coo-pon"
38.  feeling lonely
39.  most McDonald's ads
40.  Yoko Ono
41.  nausea
42.  ringworm
43.  being called "honey" by someone who isn't a loved one
44.  "springing forward" time-wise
45.  liars
46.  humid days (for hair purposes)
47.  gore in movies
48.  my overbite
49.  not knowing what I was to "be" when I "grow up"
50.  growing up
51.  people who irrationally hate/fear/kill snakes
52.  going up a jean size

53.  dry lips
54.  jazz
55.  The Simple Life!!!
56.  pain in my neck
57.  going to the gynecologist
58.  having to wait on people
59.  dress codes
60.  buying gasoline (too expensive!)
61.  much of classical literature
62.  reading out loud
63.  public speaking
64.  snoring!
65.  gum that gets rock hard after you chew it a while
66.  feeling inferior
67.  tornado sirens
68.  lack of turn signal use
69.  guns
70.  war
71.  gory horror movies
72.  morning breath
73.  stubbing my toe
74.  dogs barking at night
75.  feeling powerless
76.  Ryan Seacrest
77.  cold feet
78.  indecisiveness
79.  not being able to see a movie because my friends are LAME!
80.  songs stuck in my head
81.  people not coming through
82.  Starbucks
83.  long commercial breaks
84.  the smell of sewage
85.  London licorice

(Yes, there is a complementary list of things I do like; thankfully, it's almost twice as long.  Funny how the older I've gotten, the more like and the less I don't...)

Tom Denniss: Circumnavigator

This past Monday night, I had the privilege of meeting someone who is in the middle of a pretty remarkable journey.

Tom Denniss, native of Sydney, Australia, is trying to become the first person to run around the world by Guinness World Record standards.  This is a man who has been running almost nonstop since December 31, 2011, and has clocked 10,000 kilometers already.  He's got about 19,000 more kilometers to go, and he's ticking that number downward by putting in an average of 50 kilometers a day.

He met me and a bunch of the Breakaway folks downtown for the Salty Dogs run that leaves from Bardog Tavern here in Memphis every Monday night.  He didn't run (no one expected him to) and I was happy to skip the run myself to socialize because I'd put in 16 miles in the previous two days.  I was "tired."

This man runs twice that - 32 miles - EVERY FREAKING DAY, seven days a week.  And he's committed to doing this for the almost two years it's going to take him to complete his journey.

And no one seems to know that he's doing it!  So I'm going to tell you he's doing it, because an accomplishment of that caliber is something so unfathomable I can't even wrap my head around it; I have nothing but admiration and awe for what he's doing.

Check out his website HERE, his blog entry about Monday night HERE (not only does he run an ultramarathon every single day, he also blogs every single day...that's almost more grueling for me to think about than the running), and if you're a member of the Memphis Runners Track Club, watch for my article about him in next month's magazine.

Pretty damn amazing, if you ask me...

A Poet from Hollywood - My (Mostly!) Spoiler-Free Response

On page 37 of I'm Stalking Jake!, in the middle of a chapter called "The Saga of Stephen, Father of Jake," there is a footnote alerting readers to the fact that there's an alternate version of the story they're reading:  A Poet from Hollywood, by Cantara Christopher.  I offered no commentary on Cantara's take because at the time of publication, I didn't know what Cantara's take was.  None of us did, actually, until a couple of weeks ago, when Cantara herself started to circulate an advance PDF copy of A Poet from Hollywood, having at long last finished it.

If you've read I'm Stalking Jake!, you undoubtedly already have an opinion of Cantara herself.  She is a character if ever there was one, and my relationship with her has had so many ups and downs in the last six years that I've lost count.  As I finished reading A Poet from Hollywood last week, I wondered how best to comment on it.  At first I thought perhaps a short review here.  Then I thought maybe just a private e-mail to Cantara.  I compromised with what's below:

Cantara,
As someone who knows full well the cathartic release of writing a book to work through the complex aftermath of expending emotional energy on a male member of the Gyllenhaal family, I hope that you feel the relief that I did once my story was written down and out in the world.

It was somewhat surreal for me to read your book. It was a little less than six years ago that I walked into a poetry bar in New York City and learned one of the biggest lessons of my burgeoning adulthood: that fame is hollow, and so is the act of admiring it.

Optimistic art from my pre-Babygate self.

I remember that night a little differently than you do (my meticulously detailed account of that weekend in New York and its immediate consequences takes up three lengthy chapters in my own book) and I don’t recall the conversation with me that you recount from months after… I was so angry about it all. Angry at Stephen.  Angry at you. Angry at myself for giving the two of you enough power over me to invoke anger in the first place…

But where we don’t differ in our accounts is in the honest acknowledgment that emotions were running very high in October of 2006. You were at that reading for one Gyllenhaal and I was there for another. That Jake was supposedly outside the poetry bar, waiting with his mother, was a detail you offered casually, but it amounted to probably the biggest shock of the entire book for me. If true, what a tragic miss for my 24-year-old self. Maybe more tragic, even, than my miss the following night. I have never felt more invisible than I did on a cold sidewalk in New York City, bundled in a ratty coat and ripped jeans, while a movie star in a tuxedo turned his back to me and kept walking as I yelled his name.

No, wait. I take that back. There was a time when I felt more invisible. Ten minutes later, when the movie star’s father, who had dressed me down at length at his poetry reading less than 24 hours earlier, caught my eye and looked away again without the slightest hint of recognition. Nothing.

For the longest time, I took that as a reflection on me, an indication of my memorable-ness and worth. It’s hard to believe, thinking back on it, that there was ever a time in my life when I would have cared that much what he thought, or (and I say this without any hostility) what you thought. I truly believed you guys had it figured out – you, the Gyllenhaals – and if I could just prove to you that I was worthy, you’d let me into your club, and I could have it figured out too…

Yes, the 24-year-old me would have fallen all over herself had she seen Jake Gyllenhaal standing with his mom in the shadows outside that poetry bar…

A couple of troublemakers.

By my own recollection, Stephen listed Jake’s whereabouts as Martha’s Vineyard that night. Although with the portrait you paint, it’s difficult to know whether or not Stephen ever really knew what the hell he was talking about, so I guess that one will remain a mystery. What isn’t a mystery is the inaccuracy of my initial perception of all of you, the misguided outcome of youthful naiveté. Of course you didn’t have it all figured out. No one has it all figured out. And I applaud you for so openly laying out the faults of the characters in your book.

There were parts of the book that made me sad, because they reminded me of the lost potential of that era. They reminded me that as late as 2008, I cared enough to slog through all 332 pages of the grim, disturbing mess that is Stephen's unpublished novel, Liquid Motel. And they reminded me that it wasn’t until March of this year (less than six months ago!) that I posted a final entry on I’m Stalking Jake!, the blog I wrote in the spirit of Jake Watch to promote the book of the same name. Writing that blog almost broke me. Putting on my “Prophecy Girl” costume and trotting out cutesy one-liners required putting aside all the hard-won peace I’d gotten from writing my book. While I waited for it to be published, I had to pretend. Pretend to value fame.  Pretend I still cared about Jake. Pretend I wasn’t bitter that after all I’d accomplished with my writing, I was reduced to selling myself in order to sell a few books, because despite all the traveling to New York for poetry readings, instead of connections, I’d walked away from Jake Watch with nothing but dead ends.

But here I am now. And it’s been a long, slow, but oh-so-rewarding process to move past all of it. None of it has any power over me anymore. Everything that I wanted to say about that era of my life has been written down and released into the world. Both literally and figuratively, the end of my book - and its blog - meant I could let it go.

Stephen infamously once told me that “it’s all about learning,” and over the years, I’ve hijacked that phrase for my own personal use; I like the sentiment behind it. I don’t know what he learned, if anything, from the many failed creative ventures you detail in your book. I think what I learned while reading was just how distant my past has become.

And as for you, Cantara, I hope that you now feel the unique freedom that comes from having told your story the way you want it told – having given it life outside of yourself. We don't remember it the same way, in some cases not at all, but a common theme in our two stories is the two men with the same last name who never quite managed to live up to our expectations. Wrapped up as they were in their own lives, they failed to see the bigger picture.

Their loss…
Becky

I CARE ABOUT SWIMMING.

Every four years, I develop an irrational 16-day crush on America’s man-fish, Michael Phelps.

Earlier this year, I indicated to my friend Kathryn that I wasn’t sure what this Olympics would bring; I was willing to entertain the notion that it was dreamboat Ryan Lochte’s turn in the spotlight, both in the pool and in my heart.

But the second Michael clinched that 19th medal, reacting and reflecting with a calm maturity that brought a mist to my eyes and a wistful sigh to my melodramatic lungs, I knew that my heart lay where it always had:  with the man with the abnormally floppy feet.  By the time he won his 22nd medal, the last of his career and a gold to boot, Michael Phelps had me – and rest of the world – feeling guilty we had ever looked at another swimmer…

Michael, however, has apparently not had any guilt about a roaming eye.  Now that he’s finished doing the honorable thing by the American public, winning his weight in medals for our country and giving us all a reason to celebrate the chlorine industry, he’s all like, “AH WAIT, I HAS A GRRRRRLFRIEND, Y’ALL.”  And because we’re only on Day 11 of my current 16-day crush cycle, from now until the Closing Ceremonies, I’m morally obligated to care.  (Afterward, I won’t care at all.  This is the magic of the Olympics.)

My problem here is this:  This woman is reminding the rest of us that Michael Phelps is human, and no one wants to think about Michael Phelps being human.  The dude spiraled into massive not-giving-a-fuck-ed-ness after Beijing, and he still managed to pull it together and do what no human on Earth has ever done before, or maybe will ever do again.  He’s part of a generation (my generation!) that has already been written off by the generations before us as lost and unproductive, but even at his lowest, he worked harder than most humans ever will at anything.  HE IS NOT LIKE THE REST OF US.

But his girlfriend, as witnessed by her Twitter feed, is.

“This probably will get lost in your tweets but since i cant text i miss you and cant wait to spend time with you for real xo."

What?  Can a bitch get some capital letters for the greatest Olympian of all time?!

Also [pausing for a moment to close my eyes, shake my head, and lift a hand to my forehead in feigned dismay], if he’s going to unveil a secret girlfriend, I just…I want it to be someone who’s different than those people who fill up my Facebook feed with cloying digital PDA directed at their patiently tolerant boyfriends.

No, the conclusion here is as inescapable as it is tragic:  Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete in history, really is just a 27-year-old boy.

The Olympics are awesome.  Twitter, not so much...

The Obligatory Olympics Blog

Originally published four years ago, on August 11, 2008...

I remember the moment when my Olympic dreams died.

I screamed in protest, crying as I ran out of the gym.  I had just stepped outside when my gymnastics coach appeared in the doorway, having chased me, and angrily yelled, "You step out of this gym and you're leaving gymnastics behind!  I don't think you want that!"

I was nine.  I had been doing gymnastics for only a few months.  And she was wrong.  I did want that. Seventeen years later, I have yet to regret my decision to walk out of that gym.

Despite being as inept at (and interested in) school gym activities as the next pre-pubescent female, I discovered a surprising talent for tumbling when my parents enrolled me in gymnastics in the third grade.  I did an aerial cartwheel without a spot on my second lesson.  I had mastered the round-off back-handspring by my fourth.

The owner of the gym used to give me private lessons after my regular lessons, something I went along with because it meant more tumbling; his ulterior motives soared right over my 9-year-old head. He also kept moving me into more difficult classes, and at an alarmingly fast pace.  The gym taught up to level 8 ("Elite") and I was in level 4 ("Pre-Team") within a month of starting.

But level 4 was where I got stuck.  Though I could do more handstand pirouettes than anyone on the Elite team ("Did she just do eight?!" I remember a coach screaming.  "Keep going!" he yelled.  And I did), I couldn't do the splits, or a cartwheel on anything higher than a low beam, or propel myself over a vault if my life depended on it.  My first level 4 class was four weeks after my very first lesson, and some of the girls I trained with had been doing gymnastics for years.  None of them could do aerial cartwheels...

All of them could do the splits. 

What no one told me at the time was that the owner of the gym and a couple of his coaches had talked to my parents about fast-tracking my training to get me into contention for the Olympics.  Sometimes, when I get on one of my existential kicks, I think about the multiverse theory, and wonder if there's a Becky Heineke out there who's 5'2" and has an Olympic gold tacked on her wall...

But I kind of don't think so.

Over in this 'verse, I quit before my first competition (practicing for which was the source of the tantrum that ultimately ended my gymnastics career).  I didn't want to compete.  I've never wanted to compete.  If my coach had yelled, "Fine!  We'll put you back with the level 1 people and let you do cartwheels all day!" I'd probably still be doing gymnastics.  But she didn't.  She mistakenly assumed that I had a drive for athletic competition when, in reality, all I really had was a lack of fear of falling on my head.

And so ended my bid for Olympic glory.  Which I didn't even know about at the time.  It wasn't until years later that my mom mentioned the Olympics to me...and it wasn't a dream of my own making, but the dream of the well-meaning but ultimately overly-excitable coaches at River City Gymnastics.

At regular four-year intervals, I watch the women's gymnastics team during the Summer Olympics in honor of the competition I so desperately wanted to avoid in elementary school.  And I notice how gymnasts never smile or look happy until after a routine is over.
 
But I must admit, the tumbling still looks fun...