Teenage Girls Are Deflating My Ego

My Saturday night was like any 20 something year old's Saturday night. I was dolled up and ready to get my....gymnastics on. That's right, Saturday night it was just me and my closest teenage girlfriends, Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson and the rest of the Olympic hopefuls competing to earn spots on the 2008 American Women's Olympic Gymnastics Team in Beijing.

Now, there is nothing like a bunch of over achieving high schoolers to make a college girl feel bad about herself. The biggest tv show I have been on was on my campus channel that I'm fairly certain my roommate didn't even watch while 16-year-old Shawn Johnson is being interviewed on National tv in front of millions of viewers. I am stressing out over my first summer swim meet of the season while Chellsie Memmel gets to agonize over if her 3rd place finish at the trials and her performance in the training camp coming up are going to be enough to send her to the Olympics. I made grill cheese for the first time in my life and Nastia Liukin is a two time World Champion, 6 time World Medalist, and a 4 time U.S National Champion at 18. Oh and did I mention that Nastia, despite her nasty name, is super hot? Life is so cruel.

I have always had a love for women's gymnastics. In fact, I thought myself to be a future Olympian Gymnast for a very short period of time in my life. At the tender age of 10, I attended my first summer gymnastics camp....with a broken wrist. That should have been my first clue, especially for my mother, that maybe an accident prone child shouldn't be involved in a sport such as gymnastics. To make things worse, the genius' at my YWCA gymnastics camp decided it would be a grand idea to have the injured super tall 10 year old try her luck at the balance beam. And you know, there is nothing like a heavy cast on one arm to really help one find their center of gravity. But really, who needs balance on a balance beam?

Long story short, I fell rather quickly off the balance beam hitting the beam on my way down in a place that made me thankful that I wasn't born a boy. I spent the rest of my time at camp playing Connect Four. Glad my mom got her money's worth out of that camp.

Anyway, I was super excited that the trials were on because it gave me a chance to live out my dreams of what could have been through a bunch of girls, most of whom have neither graduated h.s., taken the SAT's, obtained a driver's license, or remember the 80's. God my life is sad.



Johnson and Liukin. Image from www.usa-gymnastics.org


But I am sort of glad that I wasn't competing at the trials because for some girls, their dreams were crushed in front of thousands of fans in the stadium, millions more at home, and a bunch of reporters ready to descend upon them and really rub in that sense of defeat. At the end of it all, two spots were secured by Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson and four are left to be decided by the training camp in Houston and the Visa Championship's in Boston in a couple of weeks. But I did take some notes from the trials and here's my thoughts:



Nastia doing a sick flip on the beam. Image from usatoday.com

- Nastia Liukin can do a flip on the balance beam and land on one freaking foot. It almost makes you warm to her, but then you remember that she is Russian and she flashes the camera her cold Soviet stare and you loose all feeling in your body and start to fear her.

- Ivana Hong didn't qualify and I think I know why. She has some deeper issues to work out, mainly how she ended up with an Eastern European first name and an Asian last name. I'm still confused over it.

- Chellsie Memmel deserves to qualify. She is one of the older girls at the competition (I know 19, what a granny), and she has waited a long time for this moment and done everything on her own terms. Or at least that's what Bob Costas told me. She seems to be sort of the rebel of women's gymnastics (if that is even possible).

-Shawn Johnson is being painted as America's Sweetheart in this competition. This is the main reason I despise her.

- There are less scrunchies being used in women's gymnastics. I applaud that.

-Bella Karolyis should not be sportscasting along with Bob Costas. He sensationalizes everything and I have no clue what he is saying. Ever.

So, eventually I pulled myself away from the tv Saturday night and went out like any normal 20-year-old to a normal college party and found plenty of less than intelligent, intoxicated girls to boost my ego right back up to it's normal position. Now, I'll just have to sit back and wait for the Olympics to come around and puncture my ego once again. But, there will always be one thing to make me feel better about myself: Men's Gymnastics. Unlike the women's trials, the men's gymnastics trials were held on Saturday from 4:30-6:00 when no one watches tv, and although I may not be as cute as Nastia Liukin and the rest of the girls, I'm a whole helluva lot better looking than a majority of the men's team and I have a manlier voice than Paul and Morgan Hamm can ever hope to have (that may not always be a positive thing, but in this case, it is). So, thank you Men's Gymnastics, for always being around to help remind me that I am not nearly as irrelevant as I think I am.