woensdag 29 augustus 2007
The number one sport for masochists
I have now been to the Alps.I have now been skiing.I have now been skiing in the Alps.I have now learned how to walk as if I had no ankles.I now have a sunburned face thanks to stupidity and a giant bloody blister under the nail on my right big toe thanks to rental boots being a tad too small.I now have a bruise the diameter of your average orange on each hip.I now have a very large repertoire of ways to fall down a mountain and a very small repertoire of ways to avoid doing that.I have now set a new record for the most number of times I've seriously feared for my safety in a three day period.I have now been twenty yards away from a helicopter as it lands on a ski slope to pick somebody up and fly them to the hospital.I now have a very large desire to go skiing again, which will probably not be satisfied until next winter, unfortunately.But, I still can't understand more than two consecutive words of the Austrian dialect.
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I hear a lot of falling happens. People also say that snow is a soft surface to land on, but I don't believe them. People say the same thing about sand. Yes, sand is soft for about 1/8 of an inch, and then it's fucking HARD. I figure the same is probably true for snow. I would like to try skiing, and snowboarding. I think I would get hurt also. But, I dig pain. Do you remember that episode of Silver Spoons where Ricky Schroeder and his Dad went on a ski trip, and ended up getting lost and kept wandering around in circles and finding the same large boulder again and again. Genius as always. Did you get in some good runs?
The helicopter and injured person sounds the best to me. I went skiing a couple times when I was little. I didn't like it, but probably more because it was with my stepmom and stepsister than because of the skiing.Or maybe it was because I swear that goddamn ski lift pole was magnetic and attracted my skies. Every time down the slope (this is the kiddie slope mind you) wooooosh THUD!. No matter where I pointed my skis to start, no matter how much I tried to turn wooooosh THUD. EVERY FUCKING TIME!Ahem.. anyway, yeah, snow is cool.
I'm a little upset here, because I don't remember that episode of Silver Spoons. Did it have Alfonso in it? If it didn't have Alfonso, then I don't care about it anyway.A lot of falling does indeed happen, though I think that applies mostly to beginners like me. Skiing seems to be a sport where it's best to start when you're ten years old so that you can enjoy it properly as an adult. I took a two hour intro class which kept me from killing myself, but I really need lots more practice because I have very little ability to control my speed. It's quite fun to go tearing down a hill, not being able to stop, and hoping that no one gets near you so you don't end up hurting anyone besides yourself.The second day I actually started getting the hang of it a bit. I went off to a small, easy course on the back side of the mountain and had a nice time for a couple hours, but then I had to get back down the hill, and there was no easy way down. At one point I just said "fuck it," took the skis off and slid down the slope for a couple hundred yards. Meanwhile, eight-year-old kids are tearing by with no problems at all.
Well, I'm quite happy to say that I avoided running into any fixed objects, though I did almost nail some lady as I was flying across the course out of control. Somehow I ate it hard and lost one or both of my skis, but the lady kept going just fine. I also crashed into some lady waiting in line for the lift because I couldn't stop in time.The helicopter was pretty cool. I had actually just taken off my skis and slid down the mountain a bit because the slope was too steep at that part. As I came to a stop, a guy setting up a sign to stop the people coming down the hill asks "what's up with you?" I told him that it was just too hard there and asked for the easiest way down. He said that if I'd help them stop people so that the helicopter would land, they would help me down (in some unspecified manner). Anyway, I stop and help, the helicopter comes, picks up the injured guy, and this guy disappears. Needless to say I wasn't very happy about that. I wanted to ride in the helicopter, damnit! It took me two more hours to get down that damn hill.
That's okay, the eight year olds might be able to ski better than you - but can they get an erection? That was pretty mean of that guy to bail you out as you mentioned down below. Seems like it would suck to have to trudge down a hill for two hours. If you're going down a hill, is hard to start once you've stopped? I really have no idea how the whole thing works, only that it's very white and you should wear goggles. Were the alps themselves all that they are cracked up to be?
Actually, I believe that eight year-olds can get erections. At least the male ones.I think the guy probably just forgot about me. He was more concerned with putting some seriously injured guy in a helicopter than helping some guy who could barely speak German, which is understandable. Of course, if the whole thing had resulted in me getting seriously injured and having to be flown away in a helicopter, he might have regretted it. And I didn't actually trudge down the hill for two hours. I tried walking a little bit, but it's really damned hard to walk in ski boots since they are basically just pieces of plastic that don't allow you to bend your ankle at all, and the skis were heavy to carry. So, I put the skis on again, and ever so slowly criss-crossed my way down the hill, stopping at pretty much every criss and cross to ensure that I didn't get too much speed and fly off into the woods. Of course, stopping also meant that I had to do quite a bit of waiting as the other people went by. As a comparison to illustrate my retardedness, the trip that took me two hours would take an actual, real skier about five to ten minutes.I find it much harder to stop than to start, since to start all you have to do is point the skis downward.I wore sunglasses, not goggles. But you definitely need something to protect your eyes from the brightness or you get snow blind.The Alps were pretty interesting. They just kinda shoot straight up out of the ground. The valley is relatively flat, and then there's the mountains right next to the valley (obviously) which are like a mile and a quarter high at the top. The valley had no snow, but the tops of all the mountains were covered. The whole thing was somehow, in a demonstration of Disney's success, like a whole bunch of giant sized Matterhorns right next to each other (Matterhorn actually being the tallest peak in the Alps, of course, and not just a lame roller coaster).
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