Remember in my last post when I talked about going skiing for New Year's eve? and not ziplining? well that, mofos, is what you call foreshadowing.
I think. I'm a little rusty on my literary tropes now that I spend the majority of my days feeling my eyeballs slowly dry out in a cubicle. But here's the whole sordid story, which I shall call "Carolyn goes Skiing and Not Ziplining which Very Nearly Resulted in her Death but through Perseverance she was able to Survive and even got a Burrito out of it at the End, although she did Lose her Lips and the Use of her Major Muscles for the Next Few Days."
Here's how it starts.
December 30th, 2010
8:00 AM: I have a cold. This actually started several days ago, but I don't want to recount my entire winter vacation.
7:00 PM: Isabel, Mike and I head over to Clayton's to hang out with him. We're actually there to pick him up for the snow trip, but we figured we might as well get some fun out of it so we went early enough to fit in a few games of Black Ops.
7:30 PM: We play those missions or whatever they're called. It's like a free-for-all but with special conditions. Like you only get one bullet or your gun changes every 45 seconds. I forget what they're called but they're really fun except for the part where I practically get a blister on my thumb from hitting x to respawn. Because I'm not so good at the video games. Mike is, though, and he has so much fun he says, "can we just do this instead of going to Big Bear?" Which is more foreshadowing.
7:45 PM: Isabel gets bored of not watching us play video games and borrows Clayton's computer to look at a naked picture of T.I.
7:50 PM: Isabel reports that T.I. "looks awkward" naked.
8:00 PM: We head to Brian's house because it's closer to Big Bear and we won't have to wake up as early the next morning. By which I mean 5:30 instead of 4:30. Yeah, AM. It was that kind of vacation.
9:00 PM: We get to Brian's house and his mom makes us red bean soup which is usually delicious but I can't taste anything because of the phlegm. From my cold, not the soup.
10:00 PM: Marc arrives and the whole party is there except for Rohit, who missed out on a night of all four boys sleeping on the floor of Brian's "bonus room," and, as Mike put it the next morning, "performing a symphony of snores."
New Year's Eve
6:00 AM: I wake up and put on my silly bands.
9:00 AM: We get to Big Bear and make our first stop at the ski rental place. At this point I was naively unaware that I was strapping myself into a torture device. Also I have to pee.
10:00 AM: We get to "Snow Summit" (a misnomer -- it should've been called "The Icy Gates of Hell") and luckily they have a bathroom or my day would have been even worse.
10:30 AM: Brian is the most experienced skier and tries to teach the rest of us on that little flat part of the slope where all the little kids are learning to snowboard. Everyone slides around uncontrollably except Marc, who is athletically inclined, and me and Isabel, who practice standing very still.
12:00 PM: We head for the actual slopes. The ones where you have to take the lift. Going into this day, I thought the lift would be my mortal enemy. When I was small it seemed really big and fast, and getting on and off was a tricky matter full of planning and coordination, neither of which little Carolyn was good at. My most ingrained memory of skiing in my youth is tripping off the lift at the dismount area, getting knocked on the head, and the operator stopping the whole thing while a dozen strangers watched me struggle to get up. Also I was wearing a snow jumpsuit. It was red.
12:20 PM: We get on the lift, which isn't nearly as fast or big as I remember. It was actually quite enjoyable. I didn't know at this point, but it would turn out to the best part of skiing because it doesn't involve moving or falling. Although, toward the end, falling off the lift would've been a sweet release.
12:30 PM: We go down the bunny slope. I discover there seems to be a problem with the brakes on my skis. Despite Brian's very helpful advice to "Wedge. Wedge, Carolyn. You're not wedging. Pretend your skis are pizzas," I find that the most reliable way of stopping is to fall onto the snow and then spread my body out to cover as much surface area as possible so that there is more dragging force and I can come to a quicker halt.
1:30 PM: We find Clayton, who has escaped to the baby bunny slopes. The ones that have the moving flat escalator thing instead of a ski lift. I am able to get down this without falling, but it is tiring because for every thirty second run down the slope there is a three minute wait on the moving escalator, and standing has become a chore of epic proportions.
2:00 PM: I can't feel my face. Or my fingers. I didn't eat lunch because a $5 hot dog would have been wasted on my frozen taste buds. I have approximately 30 bruises and still haven't learned how to stop. I'm pretty sure I was born without the muscles one uses in "wedging." On the plus side, I haven't mowed over any children or fallen off the side of the mountain. Incidentally, two of my biggest skiing fears.
3:30 PM: We get in line to go to the summit. The sign says the route is "the easiest." It literally says that on the sign. This little bit of false advertising would be my downfall. Also literally.
4:00 PM: We get to the top of the mountain. And I mean the top. We soared over all the other skiers and trees and small animals and landed at the peak. It was almost like ziplining except at the end you get abandoned and have to find your own way down.
4:00 PM -- 5:30 PM: For the next one and a half hours (yes, one and a half hours) I followed this time tested routine:
1. Ski fifty yards.
2. Start going too fast.
3. Freak out.
4. Fall down.
5. Stare at the sky, wishing I were dead, as small children zip past me on their skis.
6. Brian comes to a stop about six feet from me. While looking around pretending he doesn't know who I am, he says "come on, get up, we're almost there."
7. I continue to stare at the sky. "Go on without me," I say, "I can't make it."
8. "Well you have to," Brian says, "there's no other way down."
9. A concerned passerby stops and looks at me. "Is she okay?" he asks Brian, who reluctantly acknowledges my existence and says, "Yeah. Well, I think so."
10. I laboriously get up and look down the slope with trepidation. Brian and I stand there for up to five minutes before I can urge my body to once again hurtle itself down the side of a mountain.
Once in a while I would switch things up on steps #2-4 by falling on accident.
Later on, when I finally got off the slope and was feeling mildly human again, Marc told me that after he got down the mountain in "three minutes" (that SON OF A BITCH) he stood there "in the cold" waiting for me and Brian to come down. When we finally came within view, this is how he described it:
"Yeah, you would ski for like a few seconds, and then fall down. And Brian would ski over to you. And then you'd get up and you two would just stand there for like five minutes. What were you doing? During the one and a half hours I was waiting, I saw a couple of snowmobiles go by and I thought they were for you."
Needless to say I detest him.
7:00 PM: In a stroke of New Year's luck, across the street from our motel was a DELICIOUS Mexican food place that the nice owners kept open for us. I had a ground beef burrito.
8:00 PM: I call first shower and discover that the entire back half of my body is bruised. I have trouble stepping over the two inch ledge thing into the shower.
9:00 PM: We watch "Minute to Win It" Christmas edition. There is a task where the guy has to put a gingerbread man on his forehead and move it to his mouth using only his face muscles.
11:30 PM: Everyone wants to sleep but it seems like a waste to stay awake this long and not wait 'til midnight.
12:00 AM: We watch the ball drop for the third time that night and Isabel immediately turns off the light. We all knock out.
3:00 AM: Someone is snoring.
New Year's Day
9:00 AM: My lips are so chapped. Also I cannot walk.
