Blase - that's the way I felt about the Winter Olympics. Still grumpy from the end of football season, I wasn't caring much about the competitions happening north of us.
Then my attention was caught by the horrible tragedy of the luge competitor who lost his life on a training run and it all became a much more sobering reality. While I might have a terrifying paper cut or get hemorrhoids from sitting on my a** all day, there is little chance I'm going to die pursuing my dreams. He did.
I tried to put it in perspective, failed. I kept watching, trying to find some sense of this, failed again. I couldn't shut down the television. I felt like if I did, Nodar Kumaritashvil's death would be too soon forgotten.
Still, I was underwhelmed by my brief taste of the opening ceremonies, tired of Bob Costas and his drone, defeated before I started by NBC's inanity...
Eventually, the coverage I was watching shifted to speed skating. I was hooked by the short track speed skaters and the dramatic Korean miscalculation in the 1500m final that propelled Apolo Ohno to silver and J. R. Celski to bronze when both Americans seemed out of the medals.
Perhaps had it been someone else I would have shrugged it off. But I knew about Ohno - not from "Dancing With The Stars" but from the Salt Lake City games when a Korean was DQ'd 
and Ono was given Gold because of it. I knew his journey. Knew that the Koreans were his nemesis. I remembered how dramatic that moment in Salt Lake was. I was beginning to remember it all - how there is nothing more compelling than these stories of insane success and devastating failure where a split-second miscalculation can kill your hopes.
The silver that Ohno was awarded in Vancouver gave him six medals - tied for the most of any single U.S. Winter Olympian. What a story - and it's only the first few days.
Then gold medalist Hannah Kearney who didn't even qualify at the last Olympics because of mental errors but never lost faith in her ultimate goal of competing and redeeming herself medalled. Her golden run was inspirational and totally insane when it seemed as if her knees were going to pop out of her snow gear as she raced down in the moguls and finally lifted her arms in victory
Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau - who? Exactly. He became the first Canadian to win an Olympic gold medal on Canadian soil. Wow. How's that for success? And he dedicated his gold medal to his brother, Frederic, who has cerebral palsy and is his biggest fan. My eyes teared a bit, my heart beat for his and his brother's joy.
The Chinese skating couple who met as children in training, fell in love, retired from skating, got married,
got back into skating in their mid-thirties and won the ultimate prize - gold. What satisfaction in their faces - the long journey had paid off with their dreams coming true both personally and professionally.
On and on and on. But also, for every success, a dozen painful, heartbreaking failures as years of training come abruptly to a halt. Didn't matter if it was American, Candian, Russian, Chinese - it was hard to watch and impossible to dismiss anymore.
I'd forgotten all this somehow. Even though the Summer Olympics had been a mere two years away, I'd somehow lost the intensity of this ongoing drama of competition. And the Winter Olympics are so much more dangerous and I'd fogotten that fact too - people die and are seriously injured out there. They lose lives going too fast on surfaces never meant for that sort of speed. Die for a dream. My Lord. Where exactly was my head at to be so dismissive of this incredible drama?
So I re-evaluated my perspective and once again began to truly appreciate all the stories that I was now vicariously living. Because at the end of the day, these people all have the same goals of excellence and accomplishment I have - to do it over and over and over again until you're so good that you outpace, outshine and out-perform anyone else in the field.
And still you can fail. For all reasons, for no good reasons. For vagaries of systems and weather and circumstances.
How about Lindsey Jacobellis who was a lock for gold four years ago and blew it on a hotdog move at the end of her run and had to "settle" for silver - and then came to Vancouver to redeem that failure and hit a gate and was DQ'd? How do you deal with that sort of failure? Amazingly so, she is, even if it's with a slightly trembling lip on the verge of tears.
What a bloody idiot I am. It's those stories, the ones that put my life in perspective that seem to catch and hold me at every Olympics. They're painful, joyful and everything in-between. What they aren't is boring. Not one of them. Because they represent hours and hours of sacrifice and single-minded dedication to a goal. They tell the entire human tapestry of life in a few short weeks of intense competition.
I'm full-on hooked in now. I've dumped John Stewart's and Steven Colbert's shows into the Tivo queue so I can mainline the nightly coverage, scour the Internet for details, read the online stories of how these amazing people gave up almost everything to get to where they are. I do get it - it's all of us out there on that hill, on the ice, in that sled or bloody and still on that icy track.
These are the stories of life; the ones I want to understand and channel everytime I sit down to write. They mean something to me because they mean something to us all. They are as simple as a smile and complicated as a life extinguished for no good reason.
It's the stories, stupid. The ones you want to tell. The ones you want to live. The ones you don't ever want to forget.
