Skiing

It is ALMOST winter break. What are my fantastic plans for winter break? I don't have any.

I would love to go somewhere warm and wonderful. However, I am happy to just be without plans. Perhaps, Joey and I will go skiing. Well, I'll go skiing and he'll go snowboarding.

I am a good skier, not amazing, but not bad either. I attribute this to my above average rollerblading skills. In middle school, I rollerbladed (Is that a verb? Sure, why not?) anywhere from 3 - 8 miles every day after school. I would carry my discman. Wait, your wait? My discman, a portable CD player. It was a thing. The iPod hit big in 2001 while I was in 8th grade. Before that, we had portable CD players. They were large, inconvenient, and unreliable. If your CD had a scratch, it wouldn't play the song or it would get stuck in a loop. 

Just to give you an idea of the size, I googled, "holding a portable CD player." 

That's right, as a middle schooler  it took two hands to hold this bad boy. I played one song over and over again, I can't believe I am even admitting this due to the fact that this song is so embarrassingly awful, it was O - Town's All or Nothing. Simply watching the first thirty seconds of the music video makes me cringe. 

The outfits, the serious boy-band addressing the camera, the outfits, the hair, the combination of the hair and the outfits. 

 They were really an amazing band with countless #1 hits, such as "All or Nothing", "Liquid Dreams", and... nope, that's it. Two big songs. Then they faded from the spotlight, never to be heard from again. 

O-town, lovers of the color red and denim.

Please note, I did not drool over these guys. They weren't close to the Backstreet Boys' Brian Littrell level of cute. Look at this adorableness - 

Adorable Brian Littrell circa 2000

From the ages of 9 to 11, this was my celebrity crush.

Wait, PAUSE THE STORY, Joey just walked in the door. He didn't say anything, he just let the door swing open. He then stepped aside to reveal that my keys were sitting in the door's lock. I looked at him and he shook his head and started to laugh. I am silly.  

Back to the story, I was really sidetracked. For rollerblading, you use each leg individually, so skiing came naturally. Snowboarding, well that's another story. 

I AM TERRIBLE AT SNOWBOARDING. I've tried many times. I'm just awful. You strap both feet to one board. Ew. Then, once both feet are strapped in, you contort yourself into an uncomfortable crouched position. You stay in this position for the duration. Ew. And because you have to be in this crouched position to keep balance, if you want to come to a stop, you have to fall down. FALL DOWN? What? That is the exact opposite of what I want to do. Fall into ice and snow? Pass.

I don't care if snowboarding "looks" cooler, I am a skier. My mom is a skier. My dad was a skier. Oh, that reminds me of ANOTHER story. 

This is the story of how I learned to ski. I learned to ski at the age of 5 or 6. Somewhere in that age range. 

Our family took a trip one winter to ski. We packed the car and headed to the mountain. Wearing a giant poofy winter jacket, which covered uncomfortable waterproof snow overalls, they're a thing, I was ready to take on any mountain.

We arrived at the resort. At the ticket counter, my parents enrolled my younger sister, Jessa and I in skiing lessons. I didn't want to take lessons. I just wanted to ski. 

After setting up the lessons, my family headed to the equipment center. A nice woman fitted my boots and skis. At the tender age of 5-6, you are required to wear a helmet when skiing. I guess requiring helmets benefited me, seeing as how much damage I managed to inflict on my head over the years. That just left the ski poles, which hung along the wall. I walked up to the wall, looking for poles appropriate for my small height. 

"You're too little for those" a voice boomed behind me. 

I spun around to see an adult, a man, a stranger. I looked at him with big eyes, frozen in fear. When the feeling returned to my legs, I bolted back to my parents and Jessa. 

I wanted those poles. How was I supposed to balance on skis without the use of poles? I couldn't wrap my little 5-6 year old brain around the idea of skiing without poles. 

To be fair, I can imagine giving small children poles seems like it would be a major safety concern. If you a bunch of kids poles, I imagine at least some of them would use them as swords, light sabers, and hit each other with them, leading to accidents. Without a doubt, someone would be without an eyeball very quickly. 

We left the equipment room and headed outside. My parents brought us over to a group of kids, who looked just as confused, terrified, and excited as I was. I noticed they too were lacking poles. This was ski school. This was lame.

I stood around for a few minutes, anxiously awaiting my chance to glide down the freshly powdered slopes. As I stood there, day-dreaming about my time on the slopes, two college-aged instructors introduced themselves. 5-6 year old thoughts while the instructors talked: They look nice. They talk a lot. Why are they still talking? Please, stop talking and let's ski already. Why do I have to wear these pants? Why are these pants connected with straps? What did Mom call them? Overalls? Well, overall, I don't like them. I don't like these poofy clothes. Can we ski? "Ok, everybody line up  at the lift" they announced, snapping me back to attention. We lined up for the mini ski lift that would take us to the top of the bunny slope.

At the time, the bunny slope looked HUGE! Sitting next to my sister, I felt a knot in my stomach turning as we ascended. I looked behind me to see how far the ski lift had traveled, when who was in the lift behind me? My dad! What? My dad wasn't supposed to be there. The other kids from the group were supposed to be behind us. I thought it was the COOLEST THING EVER that my dad managed to secure the lift behind us.

I kept looking back to make sure he was still there. This was very good as the options were a) still be seated comfortably behind us or b) laying on the ground after a traumatic fall from the ski lift. At 5-6 years old, option B hadn't crossed my mind. I just thought I would turn around and he would be gone. You see, my dad was magic. If something needed to happen, he made it happen. That sounds slightly old school mafia-ish. My dad was not in the mafia. My Zeide knew some men in the mafia, but that's another story. 

Anyway, as we got off the ski lift, we shuffled off to the bunny slope. All twelve of us lined up at the top of the hill. Now, in the eyes of my 5-6 year old self, I was looking down a GIANT mountain, not some easy-peasy bunny slope. 

Instructor: "To go, your skis should be french fries, side by side. If you want to stop, make a pizza. Let's try together."

They still teach this. 

This is the worst advice EVER. You DON'T make pizza to stop. If you do this, the tips of your skis will overlap, you will lose your balance and fall down. 

In the above picture, you see two girls trying to stop by making the pizza shape with their skis. The girl in the front is about to have her skis overlap, lose her balance, and fall. The girl behind her is already has her skis overlapping, she is going to fall. This is how it works because small children don't have the strongest ankles, so when the skis overlap, your ankles turn inwards, you start to feel wobbly, you try to use your arms to regain balance, but because they refuse to give small children the poles, the child is left with nothing. All they can do is wave their arms in the air, trying to grab onto anything within their arm's reach, but alas, there is nothing to grab, and instead, the child crashes to the ground, face covered in snow. All because of the pizza shape and a lack of poles. 


 To the left of the bunny slope was the ski lift while to the right of the bunny slope, woods. The instructor ushered us closer to the woods. We lined up prepared to descend down the colossal slope. "Alright, ready, set, go!" The instructor called to us. I watched as different kids attempted their way down the mountain. At first, they all appeared to to have a handle on this new activity. "Well, that's easy enough," I thought to myself. 

With that, I took off, repeating, "french fries, pizza, french fries, pizza" over and over again  in my head. I looked up and panic overcame me with the realization that I was headed directly into the woods, more specifically, I was about to run into a giant, snow-covered pine tree. 

Does anyone see me? Does anyone realize that I am about to be lost in the woods? TREE!

I can only imagine onlookers watching my struggle. The slope couldn't have been at more than a 10 degree angle. Therefore, I barely gained any speed and inched my way down the hill. Then, for no reason whatsoever, I turned and made my way towards the woods, at a crawling speed. I am sure the onlooker would think, "There she goes, down the hill. She is doing ok. Hm, why is she turning? She's turning to the right towards the woods. She is headed straight towards that tree. Well, she isn't going fast enough to reach the tree. She won't hit it. I'm sure she will stop in time. -pause- She's not stopping. Uh-oh.  -Watch me hit the tree - Oh, I hope she is alright. She looks alright."

That's right, I crashed into the giant pine tree. And by crashed, I mean slowly approached and bumped the tree. I was fine, but I decided at that point that perhaps skiing wasn't for me. 

I didn't ski again until I was 12. This time, I made sure I used poles. It turns out, I am really good at skiing. Again, it is probably due to its similarity to rollerblading. After going again and realizing that the pizza method is quite useless for me at least, as using a different method to slow down, which I call weaving, I found myself hooked on skiing. Joey and I make sure to go at least once a year. However, we usually go more frequently than that. 

Well, I guess I do have plans for the break now. I am going skiing. Hooray!

Point of the Story: Just because you don't do something well the first time doesn't mean you should give up. If I had, I wouldn't know how much I love skiing. Other point, my middle school years were fantastically embarrassing, but I'm ok with that.