Michael Phelps is not a fish.

A fish has certain advantages in water that even Phelps, the preeminent water-based athlete of our age, can only aspire to simulate.

Fish don’t need to break the water’s surface to breathe.

Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air.

Or so you would think. But as you stare at the eerily still surface of the new pool at the Qwest Center in Omaha, into which Phelps has just lunged, it is possible to imagine, momentarily, that the figure undulating like a mass of kelp in the shallows of Lane 5 might just prefer to stay put, indefinitely, there in his element. I was watching a video from June 29, cueing the finals of the 400-meter individual medley at the United States Olympic Team Trials again and again with the hope of determining, somehow, the precise factors that enable Phelps to thrive, as few ever have, in an environment so unaccommodating to humans. It’s not a simple task. Of all Olympic sports, competitive swimming is perhaps the most resistant to casual analysis. When the contestants are not entirely submerged, they are typically face-down; the strokes they carve through the water tend to look the same, and much of what they do is in any case concealed by the splash of their effort. Unless you have an intimate knowledge of the athletes, there are few physical characteristics to distinguish one form in the water from another, an effect compounded by body shaving and the uniform of caps, goggles and bodysuits. (The new, much-publicized Speedo LZR bodysuit that Phelps wears, for instance, is a peculiar cross between a piece of lingerie and a tourniquet; fabricated by ultrasonic welding rather than by stitching, it molds the swimmer’s trunk into a drag-reducing form, can take 20 minutes to don and is proving to be a great improvement, speedwise, on old fashioned, no-tech skin.) The swimmer, pursuing his obscured course, is not one of us. Any attempt to fathom Phelps’s liquid mastery must, I thought, free itself from landlubberly prejudices and grapple with Phelps’s uncanny fish-ness.

[	Current Location	|	messy desk.	]
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[	Current Music	|	Dreamgirls Soundtrack	]

I ate too many Swedish Fish....uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I feel like I'm going to explode! Ah

Those little fuckers go down so easy...Dammit I love them, but they're making me sick!

Anyhow...Tonight we find out who the final four will be on the Biggest Loser. SO EXCITED. 

I fucked up my back this morning on the fluidity bar. Twisted just a little too far to the right. Owies in the lower back.

Clearly, I have nothing to actually say today.

[	Current Location	|	work	]
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[	Current Music	|	silence.	]

my mother called yesterday. i was at home from work early, not feeling well. she tells me that my cousin sandra has breast cancer. stage 2, aggressive. so aggressive that my sister the doctor's recommendation is double mastectomy with a radiation follow-up. sandra is in her 40s with a 4 year old daughter. my cousin sheila is in the middle of her breast cancer battle. i'm thinking about scheduling a mammogram for next week.

wpax00