The personal narrative.

A staple of grade school writing teachers, in our family we had a running joke that I was the one person without a single personal narrative. Every writing assignment became a struggle to come up with an idea, any idea, that could be expanded into narrative form. A shy, cautious child, I tended to avoid situations that could result in high adventure, major embarassment, and/or significant bodily harm. Nor was I creative enough to string a narrative through the mundane. (I still need to work on that... while I have since managed a few adventures, I have substantially more mundane.)

Thus, I have a fond appreciation for the narratives of others. This is one of the reasons I look forward to the Olympics. While I do enjoy watching the sports for their own sake, I love the stories.

This year has been generally lacking in drama (Quote: "I miss the Cold War." -- Jake Ricks), but my favorite so far has been Alexandre Bilodeau, the Canadian who won Gold in Men's Moguls the other day, out-skiing Austrailian spam-king Dale Begg-Smith.

Canada's first gold medal ever on Canadian soil! He gave up a promising turn in ice hockey and chose freestyle skiing instead to be near his brother with cerebral palsy!

How can you not love these? Syrupy sentiment and all!

A favorite among Olympic stories = Dan Jansen, flashback 1994: