When I was sick a couple of weeks ago, I watched a lot more TV than usual. Since my set at home is strictly a DVD monitor, there are a lot of shows I don't see when they originally air. Dave's got a billion channels on DirecTV, so the options were seemingly limitless. What a perfect opportunity for some guilty pleasures.
I know I kind of missed the boat on this one, but yikes! The existence of a show like The Swan freaks me out. What are we allowing ourselves to be told? We're insecure fat losers, but if we desert our families and friends for three months, total strangers will be happy to give us fake teeth, fake noses, fake hair, liquid diets, and liposuction. Once we put ourselves through that holiday, there's a fifty-fifty chance we're still not good enough. Especially if we're the non-white, non-blonde, non-young one of the two. There's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be healthy, to lose weight, to go to the dentist, to be one's best, but I find it hard to believe that these women's lives are suddenly perfect.
Programming like that really highlights what I like about watching NHRA drag racing. I'm not really a sports person, much less a car person, and never even knew about drag racing besides scenes in movies like Grease until a few years ago, and I sometimes find it difficult to explain the attraction. How about this? This may be the only sport out there in which men and women can truly compete against each other. Each of the four professional classes currently has one or more competitive women in the ranks this season. There are two women in the top three in the pro stock motorcycle class so far this season. Erica Enders is struggling a bit this year, but recently took out last year's pro stock champion in the first round. Melanie Troxel is number five in top fuel dragster.
And then, there's Ashley Force. This is her first season as a pro funny car driver, and she's number seven in the points, which means she could have a realistic chance at the championship this year, even though all of John Force Racing, the team she drives for, sat out a race this season, after the death of her teammate Eric Medlen. Ashley has been inthe semi-finals already, and she's only entered six events as a pro. No woman has been in a funny car final yet, but Ashley is not just beating other girls or even other rookies. She's competitive with people who have been racing longer than she's been alive, including her father, John Force, who has been recognized as the #2 NHRA driver of all time and won his 14th NHRA championship last year.
That's another cool thing about NHRA: there are drivers in their fifties who routinely wipe up the track with drivers thirty years their junior. You hear a lot about equal opportunity, but we all know that it rarely exists in actuality. It's a real joy to see the true competition that occurs in NHRA drag racing. I should also mention that it's the norm in this sport to see drivers whose engines need serious rehabilitation between rounds get help from drivers whom they just beat in the last round. These people want to win, but want just as much to be human.
I tend to consider myself fairly girly, but I'll take nitro-burning, beer-drinking, noisy, smelly drag racing over plastic surgery pageants any day.
