You know you’re good friends with somebody when they can ask you to blow off your usual evening mall hop together so she can watch the Olympics, and you say it’s fine.
My best friend of over 25 years usually goes to the mall with me, but the other day she called me and said she really wanted to watch Michael Phelps win more gold medals in swimming. We humans are set upon doing certain things, liking certain celebrities, harboring certain rituals. The mall will be there next week (though Macy’s may not be, judging by their decision to close 100 of them), but the Olympics only happen for two weeks every four years, and watching big events like swimming on demand is impossible to enjoy with the same fervor, because you will likely have accidentally found out the results beforehand. I understand completely.
The summer games are not really my thing, though I will watch gymnastics or synchronized swimming if they are on at a good hour. The networks of NBC have events on all of their main and spinoff channels, but won’t be more specific about when certain events are going to happen, so I feel content to watch the news later on, or read the paper the next day, to find out what happened.
Mostly we–meaning the United States–seem to be staying at the top of the leader board, and we have some seasoned competitors like Michael Phelps who can really rack up the gold medals and hold the attention of swim fans worldwide. He won the evening my friend watched, but did lose an event later on. Hey, it can be that way, just like getting a bargain blouse at the mall but missing out on that purse that caught your eye.
Next week there will be a lot of track and field events, which neither of us likes, so the two of us will do what we do best: Olympic-style mall walking.
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