Fucking insomnia.

Earlier this evening, a car horn somewhere outside of my apartment blared for at least thirty minutes. At first I feared that it might be a scene recreated from Chinatown, but there was enough variation in the noise (such as a few short pauses sandwiched between long stretches of "beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep") that I figured it probably was not caused by the weight of a corpse. I'm guessing it was probably just drunken lout behavior. Here's hoping.

I love Dick Button (or as I've called him over the years, "Dick Butt"). He's a figure skating commentator who bitches at inadequate layback spins and voices the desire to pinch the cheeks of chubby faced Russian female skaters. He's the cantankerous one who bluntly says when a skater sucks ass, while Peggy Fleming hurriedly reminds us the viewing audience how nice a person the skater is, to draw attention away from the shitty performance. I watched the U.S. National Championships today, and thankfully Dick Butt was there to give his opinion sans bullshit. He cracked me up when he began to bitch about the first male skater's "flailing of his arms" which distracted from his program. But he was right; it was distracting. The entire men's skate was sort of an odd experience; there were all these tall, slender, lanky men who looked like Japanese anime characters, who twisted themselves into all sorts of insane positions as they leapt and spun and danced across the ice. I liked their sexual ambiguity, their androgyny. Since Rudy Galindo's win several years ago, there has definitely been more freedom in U.S. male skating for men to look pretty and skate prettily (or in a "feminine" way, to use the stereotypical meaning of that word).

ABC Sports tried to help us get to know the skaters better by adding little bullets underneath their names shortly before they skated. I know now that Michael Weiss "works with a hypnotist," and Johnny Weird "idolizes Justin Timberlake and likes to roller skate." Oops, I meant Johnny Weir, but I kind of like that typo, so I'll leave it be. In any case, I did not want to know that Johnny idolized Justin Timberlake and liked to roller skate, and my enjoyment of his gold-medal winning performance might have suffered because of that knowledge. He did have a beautiful skate, though. And it was pretty inspiring that he had such a disastrous long program skate last year, including falling through the boards and having to restart his program and fucking up all his jumps, and ultimately withdrawing due to injury. It's goofy, but I get all warm and tingy over these sorts of inspirational stories. After all my fuckups the past couple of years (which are relative, I know, but I'm a critical person), it's nice to think that with determination and hard work, I could overcome them and become a champion of some sort (a "champion" as I define the word). Provided that 1) I have the talent, and 2) I find that determination and hard work. Iffy at the moment.

My favorite had to be the guy with the rainbow tiered sleeves who skated to some sort of pulsating drum-filled tribal music, who ended up in 4th. He had such a fluid style, with such attention to the music as he illustrated its rhythms by twisting his torso and carving spaces with his arms. He seemed like the type of guy who regularly did yoga and had a collection of crystals, and who only drank herbal tea. He had a sort of unselfconsciousness about him which reminded me of the performance artists and dancers I've known. The commentators spoke about how he and his wife did community service work, and taught Sunday school to underprivileged children; I wasn't surprised.

I saw the ladies' free skate as well, and of course was completely enthralled by Michelle Kwan's skate. It was gorgeous. Perfect. Her excitement during the last minute of her program, after she had completed all of her jumps, as she raced across the ice doing her footwork...chills, baby. Chills.

Outside of opera, figure skating is one of the few somewhat mainstream realms which irony has not yet penetrated. It's truly a sport for romantics, with its overblown emotions, its ridiculous costumes, its gaudy story-telling, its intense now-or-never competition. Your worth is solely judged by those three or four minutes on the ice, not how good you were in practice, not how good you were in the last competition. Just those three or four minutes. And the skaters feel it, the audience feels it. It's so intense. I love it.