👟👠 Bonjour? (#17)

Hi !  Welcome back! This week I am thinking (and writing) about how time changes things, trad wives on farms, and of course the Olympics 🤣 . My daughter is basically hyperventilating with excitement because she loves the two week sport event so much, so I’m dedicating this newsletter to her 😃. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can join here or by clicking the button below. - Eve D.❣️

WEEK IN REVIEW

🐘 I am now in full-on training for my Kruger walking safari, which is quite funny because my daily walking “max” is probably your average day minimum. I’m just historically not very active. I regale my kids with stories of the shenanigans I used to pull at my high school to make sure I never did any sport. It was compulsory to do 2 sessions a week after school, I think, and I went through the whole 5 years not doing one day. (To my credit, I have about half of the oxygen-carrying haemoglobin that you do, so - although I did not know that at the time - my choices were based on survival, not laziness. Well, a little bit of laziness. Ok, maybe more than a little).

⏰ I am also neck deep in writing my book, under strict deadline, and can tell you (in secret!) that I now feel as if I have bitten off more than I can chew. I shall continue to unapologetically complain and moan until it’s done, so bare with me.

☀️South Africa had a 3-day winter, and now - at a time I should be sitting under blankets and in two turtlenecks - I am wearing a T-shirt, all my windows are open and I am contemplating ice-cream for lunch. Even the nights are divine. Of course, this can still turn, but the climate is changing. How can anyone deny this?

OTHER INTERESTING OLYMPIAN FACTS

🥇 Paris hosted the Olympics before, exactly 100 years ago in 2024. This was the opening ceremony:

🥇 Argentine football training camp was robbed before their game vs Morocco. Watches and other jewelery were stolen. Then they lost the match 2-1, so I guess they were robbed twice? 😅 

🥇 Did you catch that the Olympic flag was raised upside down? I thought that was the case, but then the cameras cut away quickly. But yes, it was. Kind of shocking, to be honest. Whoever was responsible for that either did it on purpose or died of shame.

🥇“Rafa Nadal, a Spaniard, is so inextricably linked with excellence in Paris (14 Roland Garros titles) & the Olympics (2 golds) that he was featured in the final torch handoff at these games in France although that honor is usually reserved for athletes of the host country.”

🥇 Each medal contains 18gr of the Eiffel Tower. The iron was removed and preserved during renovations and is infused into the medals.

🥇 48 Olympians participating in the surfing events will compete 15,000 km away from Paris. The events take place in the French territory of Tahiti.

🥇 Paris 2024 will be the first Olympics in history to achieve numerical gender parity on the field of play, with an equal number of female and male athletes.  Out of the 10,500 athletes participating in the Games, 5,250 will be men and 5,250 women. That’s amazing.

THE HARE WON THIS ONE

When impostor syndrome is valid…

Not sure if you heard the idea/joke that every Olympic event should have a “normal” person do it as a control, so we can really appreciate how accomplished these athletes are. Well, funny enough, this did inadvertently happen, (not at the Olympics but at an almost-as prestigious running event held last year).

Nasa Ali Abukar from Somalia participated in the 100m woman’s race, and finished last last, in 21 seconds. For reference, just to qualify to be on the US 100m running team, you need a max time of 11.15 sec. Enquiries revealed that she had no background in running, or in any sport, and had been training for just over a month for the event. She was given a spot due to “nepotism and financial irregularities”.

She embarrassed her government, caused an outcry in the IOC and a mini-revolt among other athletes. But, she did manage to go viral on social media, so there’s that. And she made the race winner (11.4 sec) look Bolt-fast.

Kind of reinforces the argument for the control group, if you ask me. It would be hilarious.

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY (MAYBE?)

I was reading the other day that a language transforms itself completely in less than 1,000 years. In 1024, people spoke Old English, which was a version closer to German than what we speak today. And although the printing press might probably have slowed down the pace of change, it’s remarkable to think how much language - and everything else - changes in just 100 years. As Tim Urban pointed out in a tweet, if you had to ask someone just in 1990 to “help you find that lit meme about crypto podcasts everyone was posting on their insta stories.” they’d be very confused. It’s a foreign language already.

And it’s not just language. The short video below is how the Olympic Games were played just a little over 100 years ago. I mean, 100 years in not 1,000 years. It’s not recent, but it’s also not “ancient times”. And yet…it’s a completely, totally, different world.

The scary/exciting bit? This also applies to the future. The world in 100 years will be unrecognizable to us. And given that change of pace is exponential, and that lifespans could possibly increase dramatically in the near future, there are (many?) people alive today who are going to look back at the 2024 Olympics as ….extremely antiquated???? Mind blow. 🤯 

INFLUENCERS

Ballerina on a Farm

Changing topics slightly. Have you heard of the Ballerina Farms saga? I’ve only recently started to pay attention, but basically it’s an IG account (@BallerinaFarm) of a Hannah Nelman who is 34 years old, a mother of eight children (all under the age of 12, she doesn’t use birth control and “leaves it up to God”), and is married to the son of the man who started JetBlue airline (plus many, many other businesses). She is also a “trad wife”, which I understand to mean she is a “traditional wife” accepting of traditional gender roles, who cooks, bakes, pops out and looks after the kids and abides by her husband. I could be wrong, though 🤷‍♀️ . It’s kind of seen as the antithesis to “girl bosses and frazzled mothers”.

Both her husband and she grew up Mormon (they’re both one of 9 kids) and although she attended Julliard School for her ballet (so prestigious!) she gave up any dreams of being a ballerina when she got engaged three weeks after meeting her husband, and quickly becoming a mother within 3 months of marriage. As she says, she was “first Juilliard undergraduate to get pregnant in modern history”. Hannah now runs the Ballerina Farm, which produces milk, meat, cheese etc that she then sells. She also runs her social media accounts, with just under 10 million followers.

None of this is how I would choose to live my life, but also there’s not much wrong with it, provided all choices are made voluntarily, and there is no exploitation. But, of course, there is drama.

In a recent interview (I think I got rid of the paywall, so click if you want to read it), it came out that “sometimes [Hannah] gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week”. She certainly looks happy, but when asked privately if this is the life she wanted, she says “No…My goal was New York City. I left home at 17 and I was so excited to get there, I just loved that energy. And I was going to be a ballerina. I was a good ballerina.” When the husband is asked if this the life he always wanted, he says “Yes…I expected Hannah to be more at home with the kids, but she said, ‘I watched my parents working together and so whatever we do, we got to do it together.’ So now they are co-CEOs of the (very successful) Farm.

“Daniel wanted to live in the great western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any. The only space earmarked to be Neeleman’s own — a small barn she wanted to convert into a ballet studio — ended up becoming the kids’ schoolroom.”

Like I said, I’m new to this story so will be observing. But what do you think? Happily ever after, or will she break free?

Thanks for reading!

That’s it for this week. (Want more? You can find past editions here). I hope you have a great weekend and upcoming week. Please keep sharing /forwarding to your friends/groups 😄 . You can also email me privately by hitting reply on this email.

PS