Scene: It’s Sunday morning and I’m watching the last gold medal match of the Olympics, and the French women are taking it to the Americans in a tight basketball contest that will ultimately be decided in the final second.
I’m also watching my blood pressure rise.
Why so anxious, Mom, Interrupted? Well, for one thing, the announcers of this game are getting a little edgy about the officiating, and there’s some history here. Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you about the 1972 Munich Olympics and the collegiate Americans who were dealt a silver medal after an absolute perversion of reffing that handed the gold to the quadrennial evil villains of the piece, the Soviet Union.
I’m also a little jacked up with the usual nationalism and American exceptionalism that surrounds the Olympics; this game just has to end the way they usually do, with dejected opponents and gold medals hanging around the necks of The Good Guys because ‘Merica!
My pulse hangs on a little more than that today, though: I’m also wrestling with the tension of these final minutes by staring at my phone and hoping that’s not my heartbeat I see blinking in my eye lids. It’s not that I can’t put the game or the phone down; it’s that I want nothing more than to Google the result, because this is happening in France and it has to be a replay, right, and take the sphygmomanometer down a few points by knowing how this little scene is going to play out.
You have to understand that when I watched my first Olympics, there was no internet. The Games happened in a distant land and on the weekends Jim McKay would show recorded snippets of The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat that didn’t reach our small town paper and I, a total sports junkie with her sights set on being a sportswriter, would watch with bated breath until the buzzer. Back then, we lived with the concept of Waiting To Know Things because we had no other choice.
I’m not so much with the sportswriting today (though I’ve unlocked Slob Level, à la Oscar Madison) but I have embraced technology and the thrill of Knowing Now. If a question is asked and no one knows the answer or someone wants to debate it, I am the first to whip out Google and pretend to be as clever as my smartphone. And I have apparently taken this ‘Gotta Know Now’ to unhealthy levels with pre-recorded sporting events as I repeatedly search out the results beforehand so I can know Right Now how I’ll be feeling at The End.
So what I want to do this morning is just relieve the tension of Not Knowing by indulging my habit and for better or worse discovering if those plucky American women were able to overcome lousy foul calls and take it to those cheese-eating surrender monkeys (I kid: the French make terrible villains because they all seem so damned gentille) but I am denied this because this is the rarest of rare events: an actual live contest that I am awake to watch as it is happening, so there is no relief for me. I have to watch this the old-fashioned way and Not Know until it is actually done. Or turn off the TV, wait until the game is finished and then watch a replay and google the results so I can know how it turns out, and even I’m not that crazy.
This is torment, and doubly so because once I have identified the problem it is impossible to unsee it. I am white-knuckling a game in which I have no real stake, other than that whole ‘Merica! thing and while the game is super exciting and you’d have to be dead not to be engaged, it does not warrant this level of stress for me but omigosh we just drained another three and I am keenly aware that I did this to myself by establishing the habit of sneaking a look ahead, event by event, all in service to the I Gots To Know gene inside me. All I want is to be able to peek into my future and see who will be crying tears of joy at the medal ceremony. Is that asking so much?
Apparently it was. I had to wait to the bitter end to see that it was the Americans wiping their eyes with their gold medals. Those surrender monkeys played a fierce game and if the scales had been tipped the other way by a feather-light croissant they would have pipped the Yanks and my home blood pressure cuff would have given up my ghost from the stress.
As it is I’m lying on the couch, a limp, dispirited rag, exhausted from all that anxiety and wondering where I could get some cheese.
So I whip out my phone…
Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.
