Gymnastics Sayings And Quotes

Romanians have a saying, 'Not every dog has a bagel on its tail.' It means that not all streets are paved with gold. When I began my career, I just wanted to do cartwheels.

It’s rare to see a man step up and say “I can be a great father and learn about gymnastics with my daughter and take her to dance lessons because I love her.” I can make time to blow bubbles on the back porch. It doesn’t cause your man card to be revoked.

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

Yes, I said; and there cannot be any worse fault in a guardian of the State and of the laws. True. The guardian then, I said, must be required to take the longer circuit, and toil at learning as well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the highest knowledge of all which, as we were just now saying, is his proper calling. What,

I was glad to put the whole thing behind me, because I wanted every child, regardless of race, to be able to look at my Worlds win and say, I can dream big too. I wanted them to know that following your dreams—not just in gymnastics, but in everything—shouldn’t have anything to do with the color of your skin. It should only be about finding the discipline and the courage to do the hard work.

Gymnastic as well as music should begin in early years; the training in it should be careful and should continue through life. Now my belief is,—and this is a matter upon which I should like to have your opinion in confirmation of my own, but my own belief is,—not that the good body by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary, that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be possible. What do you say? Yes, I agree. Then,

Violence never solved anything.” This platitude is so patently and obviously false that it takes some pretty special mental gymnastics to say it, much less believe it. The fact is that some things, especially dangerous things happening very fast, can ONLY be solved by violence. This adage frequently infuriates professionals because sometimes the problem they have solved with violence was their own survival or the survival of someone they loved. Survival is pretty hard to devalue.

Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they differ only in their comparative strength or weakness. Obviously. And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character? Very true. And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits? They ought. Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians—to that point we come round again. Certainly not. The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature. That appears to be true. We

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Throughout this process, I have clung to a quote by C.S. Lewis, where he says, my argument against God was that the universe seems so cruel and unjust. But how did I get this idea of just, unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he first has some idea of straight. What was I comparing the universe to when I called it unjust?

I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say ‘two’ I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

There is nothing that you can do to win someone or something that is not meant to be yours. You can fight with everything you have. You can hold on for as long as you can. You can force yourself into mental gymnastics to pick apart signs. You can have your friends read into texts and emails. You can decide that you know what’s best for you and right for you. Mostly, you can wait. You can wait forever. What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion. You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right. When you try to force it into a place in your life in which it doesn’t belong. You get split; you breed this internal conflict which you cannot resolve. The more it intensifies, the more you mistake it for passion. How could you ever feel so strongly about something that isn’t right?

I was thinking about Leon and our affinity for busyness, when I happened upon a book called In Praise of Slowness, written by Carl Honoré. In that book he describes a New Yorker cartoon that illustrates our dilemma. Two little girls are standing at a school-bus stop, each clutching a personal planner. One says to the other, “Okay, I’ll move ballet back an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano. You shift your violin lessons to Thursday and skip soccer practice. That gives us from 3:15 to 3:45 on Wednesday the sixteenth to play.” This, I suppose, is how the madness starts. Pay close attention to the words Honoré uses to describe this fast-life/slow-life dichotomy. “Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity…. It is seeking to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed.”* Which of those lifestyles would you prefer?

And can there be anything better for the interests of the State than that the men and women of a State should be as good as possible? There can be nothing better. And this is what the arts of music and gymnastic, when present in such manner as we have described, will accomplish? Certainly. Then we have made an enactment not only possible but in the highest degree beneficial to the State? True. Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same. And as for the man who laughs at naked women exercising their bodies from the best of motives, in his laughter he is plucking 'A fruit of unripe wisdom,' and he himself is ignorant of what he is laughing at, or what he is about;—for that is, and ever will be, the best of sayings, That the useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base. Very

Both Jew and Gentile enjoyed complexities, especially the Greeks with their philosophical systems. They loved mental gymnastics and intellectual labyrinths. They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds. This system later became known as gnosticism, a belief that certain people, by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, could move beyond the hoi polloi and ascend to the level of enlightenment. At the time of Paul, we can trace at least fifty different philosophies rattling around in the Roman and Greek world. And the gospel came along and said, “None of it matters. We’ll destroy it all. Take all the wisdom of the wise, get the best, get the elite, the most educated, the most capable, the smartest, the most clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic; get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts, the great debaters, and they’re all going to be designated fools.” The gospel says they are all foolish. Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 29:14 in verse 19, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” had to be an offensive statement to his audience.

Classic Eastern and Western spiritual traditions identify three ways of approaching life: the way of action, the way of knowing, and the way of feeling. It is assumed that a full life involves all three, but at any given time a person tends to prefer one. It is not important to do psychological gymnastics to figure out which orientation you might have. It is critical, however, to recognize that neither love nor anything else of consequence can rightfully be reduced to one narrow vision. Love is feeling – tenderness, caring, and longing – but it is also much more. Love is action – kindness, charity, and commitment – and again, it is much more. Love is knowing – openness of attitude, realization of connectedness, expansion of attention beyond ourselves – and still it is more. . . In both Eastern and Western spirituality, there is a fourth way, an appreciation that embraces action, feeling, and knowing and also seeks the “more” that love always is. . . In the West, it is called the contemplative way. Contemplative moments can happen in crisis, excitement, and great activity, or in quiet stillness and simple appreciation. However it happens, contemplation and immerses us in the reality of the moment. We are no longer standing apart and reflecting upon our experience, we are vitally, consciously involved with what is going on. Everything is more clear, more real than it usually is. . . . Contemplative appreciation is the fullest possible realization of love. The contemplative moments that come to us all as flashes of immediate presence or glimpses of the way life yearns to be lived. They are hints of the vast, graceful gift of love that has already been given to the family of humanity. The contemplative heart says, “only open your hands, receive the gift.” This does not mean we can control contemplation or that we can be contemplative at will. It is a gift that we can accept only as it is given. But it is given far more frequently, for more steadily than we could ever imagine.

I still had moments when my nerves got to me, but whenever I’d start to get anxious, Kyla Ross would remind me, “Simone, just do what you do in practice.” And before I went out for each event, she’d high-five me and say, “Just like practice, Simone!” I’d say the same thing to her when it was her turn to go up. “Just like practice” became our catchphrase. As I walked onto the mat to do my floor exercise, I held on to that phrase like it was a lifeline, because I was about to perform a difficult move I’d come up with in practice—a double flip in the layout position with a half twist out. The way it happened was, I’d landed short on a double layout full out earlier that year during training, and I’d strained my calf muscle on the backward landing. Aimee didn’t want me to risk a more severe injury, so she suggested I do the double layout—body straight with legs together and fully extended as I flipped twice in the air—then add a half twist at the end. That extra half twist meant I’d have to master a very tricky blind forward landing, but it would put less stress on my calves. I thought the new combination sounded incredibly cool, so I started playing around with it until I was landing the skill 95 percent of the time. At the next Nationals Camp, I demonstrated the move for Martha and she thought it looked really good, so we went ahead and added it to the second tumbling pass of my floor routine. I’d already performed the combination at national meets that year, but doing it at Worlds was different. That’s because when a completely new skill is executed successfully at a season-ending championship like Worlds or the Olympics, the move will forever after be known by the name of the gymnast who first performed it. Talk about high stakes! I’ll cut to the chase: I nailed the move, which is how it came to be known as the Biles. How awesome is that! (The only problem is, when I see another gymnast perform the move now, I pray they don’t get hurt. I know it’s not logical, but because the move is named after me, I’d feel as if it was my fault.)

we should take what is of value in knowledge, and leave the dross. Intellectual gymnastics are necessary at first. We must not go blindly into anything. The Yogi has passed the argumentative state, and has come to a conclusion, which is, like the rocks, immovable. The only thing he now seeks to do is to intensify that conclusion. Do not argue, he says; if one forces arguments upon you, be silent. Do not answer any argument, but go away calmly, because arguments only disturb the mind. The only thing necessary is to train the intellect, what is the use of disturbing it for nothing? The intellect is but a weak instrument, and can give us only knowledge limited by the senses. The Yogi wants to go beyond the senses, therefore intellect is of no use to him. He is certain of this and, therefore, is silent, and does not argue. Every argument throws his mind out of balance, creates a disturbance in the Chitta, and a disturbance is a drawback. Argumentations and searchings of the reason are only by the way. There are much higher things beyond them. The whole of life is not for schoolboy fights and debating societies.

A sudden yowl from up ahead had them all starting. A small tree smoked on one side, the faint glow of fire darting from a burning patch of dead foliage. The yowl came again. Matt hurried over and peered up the tree to see a calico cat, its green eyes staring down, as if in accusation. "No," Reyna said, stopping beside him. "We are not rescuing the cat." "But the tree -" "- is on fire. I see that. Have you ever owned a cat? If they can go up, they can come down. Guaranteed." Matt eyed the feline. It eyed him back, then yowled, as if to say Well, hurry it up. "It might be too scared to come down," he said. "It's a cat," Reyna said. "They don't get scared - just annoyed, which I'm going to get if you insist on playing hero and rescuing that faker." She scowled at the cat. "Yes, I mean you. Faker." The cat sniffed, then turned to Matt, clearly sensing the softer touch. Owen stepped forward. "If you'll feel better rescuing the cat, Matt, then go ahead. We aren't on a tight schedule." Reyna waved her arms around the smoking street. "Um, Ragnarök?" "And the longer you two bicker ..." "Fine," Reyna said. "I've got this." Before Matt could protest, she walked to the base of the tree, grabbed the lowest branch, and swung up. "Rodeo girl, remember? Also, five years of gymnastics, which my mother thought would make me more graceful and feminine. Her mistake." She shimmied along a branch. "Come on, faker. I'm your designated hero for today." She looked down at Matt. "And if you ever tell anyone I rescued a cat from a tree ..." Before Matt could answer, the cat sprang to the ground. "Arggh!" Reyna said. "You scared him out," Matt said. "He just needed the extra motivation. No, wait. It's a she. Calicos are almost always female." "Are they? Huh." Reyna swung out. The cat sat on the ground below, watching. "See?" Matt said. "She's grateful." "She's gloating. Let's go.

The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked smile: 'Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that danger affords you. Wouldn't it be thrilling, if his sweaty hand failed to grip the bar? The velocity acquired by his rotation about the bar would break his spine quite cleanly, and perhaps a little of the cervical matter might spurt out as far as this! It would be most sensational, and you would have a rare emotion to add to the field of your experience - for you collect emotions, don't you? What a pretty stew of terrors that man in tights stirs up in us! 'Admit that you almost wish that he will fall! Me too. Many others in the auditorium are in the same state of attention and anguish. That is the horrible instinct of a crowd confronted with a spectacle which awakens in it the ideas of lust and death. Those two agreeable companions always travel together! Take it from me that at the very same moment - see, the man is now holding on to the bar by his fingertips alone - at the very same moment, a good number of the women in these boxes are ardently lusting after that man, not so much for his beauty as for the danger he courts.' The voice subtly changed its tone, suddenly becoming more interested. 'You have singularly pale eyes this evening, my dear Freneuse. You ought to give up bromides and take valerian instead. You have a charming and curious soul, but you must take command of its changes. You are too ardently and too obviously covetous, this evening, of the death - or at least the fall - of that man.' I did not reply. The Marquis de V... was quite right. The madness of murder had taken hold of me again; the spectacle had me in its hallucinatory grip. Straitened by a penetrating and delirious anguish, I yearned for that man to fall. There are appalling depths of cruelty within me.

just one generation ago, kids were potty trained at seventeen to twenty-two months. I truly believe it’s because our moms, for the most part, were stay-at-home moms. I mean stay at home. They didn’t work at home, they had no computer for email and Facebook, no cell phones, no identities to preserve, no mommy groups, no playdates, no baby gymnastics, no music classes, and no swimming lessons. Now, I’m forty-three, so maybe I’m talking to a younger audience here, and I’m certainly not saying our moms exhibited the best parenting. But I do believe it was that stay-at-home factor that made potty training so easy.

There are interviewers who try to trip up the candidate,” says Hanold. “If you make people do intellectual gymnastics, you’re not getting their true self. There is no right answer to any question I ask. I want an authentic response.” To

This was a media beat-up at its very worst. All those officials reacting to what the media labeled “The Baby Bob Incident” failed to understand the Irwin family. This is what we did--teach our children about wildlife, from a very early age. It wasn’t unnatural and it wasn’t a stunt. It was, on the contrary, an old and valued family tradition, and one that I embraced wholeheartedly. It was who we were. To have the press fasten on the practice as irresponsible made us feel that our very ability as parents was being attacked. It didn’t make any sense. This is why Steve never publicly apologized. For him to say “I’m sorry” would mean that he was sorry that Bob and Lyn raised him the way they did, and that was simply impossible. The best he could do was to sincerely apologize if he had worried anyone. The reality was that he would have been remiss as a parent if he didn’t teach his kids how to coexist with wildlife. After all, his kids didn’t just have busy roads and hot stoves to contend with. They literally had to learn how to live with crocodiles and venomous snakes in their backyard. Through it all, the plight of the Tibetan nuns was completely and totally ignored. The world media had not a word to spare about a dry well that hundreds of people depended on. For months, any time Steve encountered the press, Tibetan nuns were about the furthest thing from the reporter’s mind. The questions would always be the same: “Hey, Stevo, what about the Baby Bob Incident?” “If I could relive Friday, mate, I’d go surfing,” Steve said on a hugely publicized national television appearance in the United States. “I can’t go back to Friday, but you know what, mate? Don’t think for one second I would ever endanger my children, mate, because they’re the most important thing in my life, just like I was with my mum and dad.” Steve and I struggled to get back to a point where we felt normal again. Sponsors spoke about terminating contracts. Members of our own documentary crew sought to distance themselves from us, and our relationship with Discovery was on shaky ground. But gradually we were able to tune out the static and hear what people were saying. Not the press, but the people. We read the e-mails that had been pouring in, as well as faxes, letters, and phone messages. Real people helped to get us back on track. Their kids were growing up with them on cattle ranches and could already drive tractors, or lived on horse farms and helped handle skittish stallions. Other children were learning to be gymnasts, a sport which was physically rigorous and held out the chance of injury. The parents had sent us messages of support. “Don’t feel bad, Steve,” wrote one eleven-year-old from Sydney. “It’s not the wildlife that’s dangerous.” A mother wrote us, “I have a new little baby, and if you want to take him in on the croc show it is okay with me.” So many parents employed the same phrase: “I’d trust my kids with Steve any day.

the art of growing i felt beautiful until the age of twelve when my body began to ripen like new fruit and suddenly the men looked at my newborn hips with salivating lips the boys didn’t want to play tag at recess they wanted to touch all the new and unfamiliar parts of me the parts i didn’t know how to wear didn’t know how to carry and tried to bury in my rib cage boobs they said and i hated that word hated that i was embarrassed to say it that even though it was referring to my body it didn’t belong to me it belonged to them and they repeated it like they were meditating upon it boobs he said let me see yours there is nothing worth seeing here but guilt and shame i try to rot into the earth below my feet but i am still standing one foot across from his hooked fingers and when he charges to feast on my half moons i bite into his forearm and decide i hate this body i must have done something terrible to deserve it when i go home i tell my mother the men outside are starving she tells me i must not dress with my breasts hanging said the boys will get hungry if they see fruit says i should sit with my legs closed like a woman oughta or the men will get angry and fight said i can avoid all this trouble if i just learn to act like a lady but the problem is that doesn’t even make sense i can’t wrap my head around the fact that i have to convince half the world’s population my body is not their bed i am busy learning the consequences of womanhood when i should be learning science and math instead i like cartwheels and gymnastics so i can’t imagine walking around with my thighs pressed together like they’re hiding a secret as if the acceptance of my own body parts will invite thoughts of lust in their heads i will not subject myself to their ideology cause slut shaming is rape culture virgin praising is rape culture i am not a mannequin in the window of your favorite shop you can’t dress me up or throw me out when i am worn you are not a cannibal your actions are not my responsibility you will control yourself the next time i go to school and the boys hoot at my backside i push them down foot over their necks and defiantly say boobs and the look in their eyes is priceless

Thou art That". This is the essence of Vedanta; after all its ramifications and intellectual gymnastics, you know the human soul to be pure and omniscient, you see that such superstitions as birth and death would be entire nonsense when spoken of in connection with the soul. The soul was never born and will never die, and all these ideas that we are going to die and are afraid to die are mere superstitions. [...] The Vedanta teaches men to have faith in themselves first. As certain religions of the world say that a man who does not believe in a Personal God outside of himself is an atheist, so the Vedanta says, a man who does not believe in himself is an atheist.

It is no great secret that cooking is, in essence, seduction. As with amour, pleasure does not bloom in the body so much as in the mind. One may be a "gymnast in the sheets," as the coarse say, but without passion and internal fire, without longing and anticipation, one may as well be doing calisthenics. So food. Tho most rarefied tastes on the unprepared tongue may be ignored or, worse, misunderstood. How then is the mind prepared for delicacy? As with Don Juan, reputation stirs desire. But even the best chef must entice interest, use aroma to flirt, caress and kiss with silken soups, reassure and coddle with a dulcet pudding.

God is holy. A lot of people say that whatever you believe about God is fine, so long as you are sincere. But that is comparable to describing your friend in one instance as a three-hundred-pound sumo wrestler and in another as a five-foot-two, ninety-pound gymnast. No matter how sincere you are in your explanations, both descriptions of your friend simply cannot be true.

Gymnasts don’t become dizzy, because they have kinesthetic body awareness, which is a fancy way of saying they know where they are at all times. Gymnastics made me so flexible that I could do the splits. It made me so strong that at one point I

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

Two pairs of strangers performed. Jane watched them. Mr. Nobley watched her. Then it was her turn. She curtsied to the audience, to Mr. Nobley, and faced him in the center of the floor. All eyes watched them. Jane looked for Martin in the crowd. Maybe I really don’t want this, she thought. This is summer camp. This is a novel. This isn’t home. I need something real. Root beer and disposable umbrellas and bare feet real. “I believe we must say something.” It was Mr. Nobley who spoke. “Sorry,” she said. “Are you unwell tonight?” “Do I look unwell?” He smiled. “You are baiting me. It will not work tonight, Miss Erstwhile. I am completely at ease. I might even say, I am quite content.” Jane pushed the air out of her lungs. Part of her very much wanted to banter and play, to twirl and laugh, to be Miss Erstwhile and fall in love with Mr. Nobley (fall back in love?), but she felt herself on that razor’s edge, talking toe to heel like a gymnast, and when she fell this time, she wanted to be on the real world side, away from heartless fantasy, into the tangible. Then, with his hand on her waist to lead her through another figure, Mr. Nobley smiled at her again, and she clean forgot what she wanted. Him, him, him! she thought. I want him and this and everything, every flower, every strain of music. And I don’t want it wrapped up in a box--I want it living, around me, real. Why can’t I have that? I’m not ready to give it up. The first number ended, the group applauded the musicians. Mr. Nobley seemed to applaud Jane. “You look flushed,” he said. “I will get you a drink.” And he was gone. Jane smiled at his back. She liked a man in tails. Something bumped her elbow. “Excuse me…of, it is you, Jane, dear,” said Aunt Saffronia. She’d been watching Mr. Nobley as well, and her expression was still misty with contemplation. “Where is your partner off to?” “He is fetching me a drink,” said Jane. “I’ve never seen him so attentive. Or so at ease.” “Nor I, not in the four years I have known him. He is acting like a proper gentleman in love, is he not? I might almost say that he looks happy.” Aunt Saffronia was thoughtful, and while she stared, she idly bit her fingernail right through her glove. “Is he in love?” asked Jane. She was feeling bold in her bridal gown. “Hm, a question only hearts can answer.” She looked fully at Jane now and smiled approvingly. “Well, you are a confection tonight! And no wonder.” Aunt Saffronia leaned in to touch cheeks and kiss, and Jane caught a trace of cigarette smoke. Could the dear lady be the unseen smoker? What a lot of secrets in this place, thought Jane. She’d never before considered that Austen didn’t just write romances and comedies, but mysteries as well.

It is no great secret that cooking is, in essence, seduction. As with amour, pleasure does not bloom in the body so much as in the mind. One may be a “gymnast in the sheets,” as the coarse say, but without passion and internal fire, without longing and anticipation, one may as well be doing calisthenics. So food. The most rarefied tastes on the unprepared tongue may be ignored or, worse, misunderstood. How then is the mind prepared for delicacy? As with Don Juan, reputation stirs desire. But even the best chef must entice interest, use aroma to flirt, caress and kiss with silken soups, reassure and coddle with a dulcet pudding.

One German-American friend of mine, an architectural historian my own age, can be counted on to excoriate Woodrow Wilson after he has had several strong drinks. He goes on to say that it was Wilson who persuaded this country that it was patriotic to be stupid, to be proud of knowing only one language, of believing that all other cultures were inferior and ridiculous, offensive to God and common sense alike, that artists and teachers and studious persons in general were ninnies when it came to dealing with problems in life that really mattered, and on and on. This friend says that it was a particular misfortune for this country that the German-Americans had achieved such eminence in the arts and education when it was their turn to be scorned from on high. To hate all they did and stood for at that time, which included gymnastics, by the way, was to lobotomize not only the German-Americans but our culture. "That left American football," says my German-American friend, and someone is elected to drive him home.

The last option (tell her she didn’t deserve to win) seems hardhearted under the circumstances. And of course you wouldn’t say it quite that way. But that’s pretty much what her growth-minded father told her. Here’s what he actually said: “Elizabeth, I know how you feel. It’s so disappointing to have your hopes up and to perform your best but not to win. But you know, you haven’t really earned it yet. There were many girls there who’ve been in gymnastics longer than you and who’ve worked a lot harder than you. If this is something you really want, then it’s something you’ll really have to work for.” He also let Elizabeth know that if she wanted to do gymnastics purely for fun, that was just fine. But if she wanted to excel in the competitions, more was required.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there’s a difference between being skeptical and being cynical. Skepticism is an important virtue, and it leads to better understanding. But cynicism is a trait that’s been romanticized and conflated with intelligence. It is not. Cynics have their mind made up regardless of what a reading shows, no matter how profound. They use confirmation bias to validate their vitriol when they can, and do mental gymnastics to accuse all mediums of being deceptive. Scientism masquerading as healthy skepticism is regressive. If science can’t quantify it right now, then proponents of scientism say it doesn’t exist. Yet they ignore the fact that there were countless times in history where we hadn’t yet made a discovery because of technological, scientific, or quantifiable limitations.

She does not always agree with us, but she's always straight." Over and over Bill sticks the landing, as they say in gymnastics, every applause line hits via a potent combination of elder-statesman gravitas and gleeful good fun; he is a granddaddy lion romping with the cubs. We get the full treatment tonight, the twinkly eyes, the coyly bit lip, the curl of devilment in the grin, and so we're reminded that seduction is his basic unit of being, every transaction a form of charming the pants off someone. One has to say it worked out pretty well for him, a large life by any measure though not without its lumps and bumps, an impeachment here, humiliated wife there, not to mention the histrionic "values" backlash that brought us George W. Bush. But Bill Clinton's so smooth you might forget all that, for an evening at least. Whoever said the man's lost it has rocks for brains. Perhaps he just needed a few days to strike the proper frame of mind, a trick of the Method actor's craft—he has to walk onstage pretending he's the candidate here.

The more you allow your kids to feel jealousy, the more you can problem-solve around the moments the feeling comes up; the less you allow jealousy (“Don’t say that about your sister!”), and the fewer skills a child develops for dealing with it when it arises, the more likely it is that jealousy will come out as insults (“Maxie is the worst gymnast here, she sucks!”) or behavior (making loud noises while spectators are supposed to be quiet, running away from you and screaming loudly).

Now let me tell you about Satori a Zen concept. Satori is the warriors state of being, it occurs at the moment when the mind is free of thought, pure awareness the body is active, sensitive, relaxed and the emotions are open and free, Satori is what you experience when the knife is flying towards you.” "You know, Soc, I've had that feeling many times, especially during competitions. Often I'm concentrating so hard, I can't even hear the applause." "Yes, that is the experience of satori. And now if you grasp what I say next you will learn the correct use of sports or painting or music or any other active or creative gateway to satori. You imagine that you love gymnastics but it is merely the wrapping for the gift within Satori. The right use of gymnastic is to focus your full attention and feeling on your actions; then you will achieve satori. Gymnastics draws you into the moment of truth, when your life is on the line, like a dueling samurai. It demands your full attention: satori or die!" "Like in the middle of a double somersault." "Yes, that's why gymnastics is a warrior's art, a way to train mind and emotions as well as the body; a doorway to satori. Your final step is to expand this clarity into daily life, then satori will become your reality your key to the gate.

Ockham didn’t use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn’t true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn’t mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

So this is Paris, where my great-grandparents came from...the place that gave me my roots...and new friends! My house has a thousand rooms...one for every place we've passed through! My ceiling is sometimes a dome of stars...other times a fiery sunset...and still other times...the wild dance of storm clouds... My time is that of the seasons... My family speaks all languages... But we don't have to open our mouths to understand each other. One look is enough... We work together to create something that none of us alone would be able to. We mix our diversities with passion and what comes out is infinitely better than what is mine or yours... Grandad Tenzin would say it's alchemy. While it's true that I don't have a tiled roof, brick walls or a fixed address to write on an envelope...if you think about it I have much, much more... Swimming pool with a view... Gymnastics and acrobatic lessons every day... Ethnic cuisines and nightly entertainment... And day after day I can enjoy everything...without possessing anything! I read somewhere --WHERE YOUR TREASURE LIES, THERE YOUR HEART WILL BE. Well my heart lies with this big family of travelers... They are my treasure! That's why I can feel at home anywhere, though I have no home anywhere... Deep down, wanderers are like flowing rivers.. which, with their twists and turns, are always looking for their own way to reach the sea... If you think about it, isn't the same true of everyone? We may go along our separate ways , but our hearts must beat the world over!

Where am I going with all this? I’m merely stating that it’s all right to say no. To all the young mothers out there who are beginning to feel the pressure to sign your preschooler up for soccer, basketball, or gymnastics simply because everyone else is, you have a choice. If your child shows an interest in or a talent for something, then, by all means, foster that. Encourage it. And sign him up. But if not, if your little one has no interest in soccer or basketball or gymnastics, then allow her to find her own interests and activities. Don’t feel pressured to spend precious hours of your little one's childhood sitting in a gym or at a soccer field just because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do. You have a choice. Put it in perspective. And enjoy your children's childhood, because it goes by so very quickly. Your memories remain. Make them happy ones. Be it sports or art or movies or childcare, let your child find his or her own thing. Put it in perspective. And enjoy. Stoltz, BillieJo. Afternoon Coffee: Thoughts on Motherhood, Family, Home, and All Things Cozy . Kindle Edition. Stoltz, BillieJo. Afternoon Coffee: Thoughts on Motherhood, Family, Home, and All Things Cozy . Kindle Edition.

Yeah because he don't want to debate me, I'm too intellectual. One thing about me, you know, I'm the equivalent of an Obama, you know what I'm saying. My intellect is very deep. I have linguistics and dialects that he probably couldn't comprehend. My mental gymnastics which is overcapacitate his train of thought. So I wouldn't you know even be in the same vocabulary with him. You know. It would hurt him for him to have me on television and me to have more conversation and more intellect than him. And him being some old, blue eyed, whatever the fuck coloured hair guy bald spot having dick sucking son of a bitch.

To speak and to be understood is a freedom. It is perhaps the most fundamental freedom. To summon words intentionally, and have another person understand your meaning and connect with it, is to be unbound. Conversely, without it, a part of you is caged. You feel betrayed by a spotty brain-tongue connection. And you notice when others don't catch your full drift. Maybe it's the context of what you mean; maybe it's the inflection in your voice; maybe it's undercutting yourself by putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. This trapped feeling is far more acute when you move in a language that isn't your own. There are intricacies andsubtleties that matter a great deal to communicating. Without them, your meaning is stuck in your throat. This is how I felt after arriving in Canada, where I had to translate simple thoughts into English, with all the added social cues, before I could get them past my lips. This translation work is labour. It's time and effort spent trying to wrangle unruly words that won't fit in your mouth. God, have you tried to say "parallelogram"? Have you tried to differentiate it from a rhombus? When will I ever need to say "parallelogram?" Anyway: it's mental gymnastics, and the only reward is blank looks on the faces of people who can tell you're trying to say something but hear another. Maybe I messed up the syntax? Maybe my pronunciation was off and now I have to spend twenty minutes convincing you I'm not stupid? Damn, I can't believe some people can just speak and be understood. The luxury!