We are approaching mid-February. This is the time when the light at the end of the tunnel begins to peek through and I have hope that maybe the snow and cold won’t actually last forever and maybe sunshine and happiness will return to the earth. The tragedy of this month, of course, is that this hope is often trampled. I have no idea why I feel so sure that when January ends, the snow will end with it, but this expectation is equal parts exciting and soul-crushing.
I am often chided for being a Grinch about the snow. Other people seem to love this shit. I do not understand these people. Snow is cold. Very cold. And cold is one of the worst things ever. It is associated with sadness and death. To be a “cold” person is a bad thing. To be a “warm” person is a positive thing. Everyone likes warmth. Why people choose to vacation in cold places in lieu of, say, the beach, I will never understand. Unless they are from a warm happy place and are occasionally struck by the urge to go experience cold in order to better appreciate their warm happy place. Which still isn’t my idea of a vacation.
I should begin by saying that this treatise on the horror of snow comes at the heels of what shall now be known as The Big Bear Debacle, in which I attempted to ski and only succeeded in humiliating and injuring myself. Three days later it is still uncomfortable for me to sit here and type this post because my ass hurts. As does everything else because the only body part that I did not actually land on (as in, being the part that bore the brunt of the fall) was my head…and even that hit unpleasantly when, in a staggering aeronautical feat, I managed to get air on a fairly nonexistent slope and land on my back, skis in the air. As I will explain later, I suffered approximately equal damage to both body and pride. But we’ll get to pride later.
I understand that day one of snow can be kind of pretty, but that’s a rather fleeting thing. Aside from momentary beauty, it provides no other benefits while possessing an extensive list of tragic consequences. First of all, within a day or two all of that pretty typically vanishes and it becomes slushy and brown and gross. It requires the outside temperature to be really cold and unpleasant. It gets all over your windshield and gives you one more stupid thing to do before you have to go to work in the morning when you are already tired and cold and grumpy. And it makes the roads icy so that people drive ridiculously slow and if you don’t drive slow, you’ll probably spin out and die. Or maybe you won’t die, but it’ll be really terrifying and unpleasant.
I am a big proponent of the idea that the most fun things are often the most terrifying. There are lots of ways for terrifying things to be fun things. Like roller coasters and sky diving. And watching Jersey Shore.
Ice does not present any such opportunities for fun-and-terrifying. The terror is not that I could-die-but-probably-won’t. The terror is that I will end up stuck in the cold waiting for someone to rescue me, thus combining most of my least favorite things: cold, waiting, and helplessness/incompetency. Throw in someone telling me pointless lies [Lion suggests that in this hypothetical I could have the radio stuck on Rush Limbaugh] and make Shia LeBeouf and Anna Paquin be present along with some spiders, and it would be like my own personal hell. (For real. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about this explosion of awful. Or maybe I have goosebumps because it’s negative miserable degrees outside and there’s only so much we can do to heat the house with that shit.)
Snow and I have a long history of not getting along. Even before The Big Bear Debacle, it has done awful things to me. Once I did in fact spin out, and added to that earlier list of awful things, I really fucking had to pee. We’ll add that to my personal hell too. Can you imagine feeling the need to pee for all of eternity? That would really suck. During D.C. Snowmageddon 2010, I was walking home from work and that awful ice decided to knock me over and in addition to leaving me seriously uncomfortable for days, it broke my computer. Bitch.
And then of course, there is skiing. I will say that if you know how to ski, much of the horror is eliminated. You still have to be really fucking cold, but if you are a skier, you probably have unnaturally thick skin and some sort of mutant aversion to warmth. (I may or may not be deliberately picking on one of my very close friends who is, in fact, a phenomenal skier.) I was reluctant about the concept, given my relationship with snow. And my relationship with balance and coordination. We will now digress from the larger diatribe against snow and ice and cold to relate The Big Bear Debacle.
But I tried. I did. On my first run down the bunny hill, I ended up basically side-by-side with a 9 year old who had never skied before. Eventually, she was able to get herself down the hill, with me still about a third of the way down, unable to stand up. After that, I sat out for an hour or so, refusing to get back up. My pants were not waterproof, and I obviously spent a lot of time sitting in the snow, so I was now exceptionally cold, and my pride had suffered a rather intense beating. Eventually, my mom decided to take a lesson with me. Unfortunately, the timing was not on our side, so she decided to just teach me herself. At first, it was more of the same. Me falling. Me getting frustrated more with my own incompetency than the cold itself.
Speaking of which, why do people say the same thing over and over again when trying to explain how to do something? Clearly that explanation wasn’t working. You’re going to have to give me something else to go on, because if you tell me to push my heels out one more time, I’m going to throw my pole thing at you.
Anyway, being my mother, she was eventually able to (a) calm me -and- (b) communicate with me. After disaster-trial-run, I managed to get down the hill twice without falling. Based on this information, it was decided that we should go to the green slope that starts at the top. of. the. mountain. Within about ten minutes, it was perfectly clear that this was radically different. And not at all a good idea. I would like to point out that I anticipated that this would be a bad idea. I went along solely because I felt bad for my mom, hanging out on the bunny hill with me, with only so much time left before we had to go. I did, however, repeatedly express my concerns. Let that be known.
We gave it about 30 minutes. Thirty minutes of me repeating the episode of bunny hill attempt 1. I would go about ten feet. Then I would fall. Then I would find it nearly impossible to get up. I would get angry with myself. Eventually I started crying. Around this time, my mom decided it would be a good idea to call the entire family to come help me. Because the strangers skiing around me were apparently an inadequate audience for my humiliation. It would be best if my entire family could come witness me in all of my shame and horror.
It’s not just that I wasn’t able to ski. It’s not just that I was equally unable to get myself back up each time I fell. It’s the larger issue that I don’t deal well with not being able to do things. Add it to my long list of tragic flaws. This is something I know about myself and do try to work on. But given that I was inherently miserable because I was cold, it was pretty much impossible for me to keep this character flaw in check. So rather than accepting my situation with grace and laughing at it, I lost my fucking mind. All I could think was: THIS IS A BIG FUCKING MOUNTAIN AND IT IS REALLY COLD AND I AM REALLY FUCKING STUPID HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT FIVE YEAR OLD SNOWBOARDING LIKE A BOSS AND MOTHERFUCKER WHY CAN’T I STAND UP AND HOLY SHIT I AM FLEXIBLE BUT MY LEGS JUST CAN’T BEND THIS WAY AND OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO DIE ON THIS MOUNTAIN POSSIBLY OF COLD BUT PROBABLY OF SHAME AND HUMILIATION. And then I just kind of cried and yelled a lot. The advice of my parents (both now present) got more frantic and thus more repetitive and therefore not at all helpful. And knowing how ridiculous I looked crying and yelling (mostly crying; the yelling was usually in response to people’s insistence that I do things that I had been trying to do the entire time) the feeling that I would die of humiliation multiplied by about a thousand.
Of course, my poor mother heard my feelings on this subject at the time. I was terrified. I rode up the lift, so I knew how long the trail was and how little of it I had gotten through. At my current move-fall-struggle-repeat pace, it would have taken me hours to get down. My misery was eventually put to an end with the arrival of a snowmobile to get me to the bottom. Or, rather, first some guy came to tell me to take my skis off and walk to the side, and told me that he would wait with me for said snowmobile. Around this time, I had to be reminded of the absurdity of my behavior by the presence of my mom and cousin. My mom made it clear that my hysterical tirades had been unfairly directed at her, not by being mad at me for it (which would have been its own form of inappropriate response and thus somewhat vindicating for me), but by expressing concern that I was angry with her. Which is just the worst. I assured them that I would be fine and I could wait with this stranger alone, in order to have some additional time to semi-privately wallow in my own shame. Not only was I too pathetic to keep up with the gaggle of children in our group, but I was also behaving like a child. Insert fatherly jokes and advice from Big Bear Guy along with a somber ride with Attractive Snowmobile Guy and my humiliation was complete.
Clearly, I have recovered enough from this experience to tell you about it now. But that’s not the point. I’m getting to that. The next day, I was prodded to go back out with them. I did not. While I support their ability to have fun in that awful cold place, nothing about the experience amounted to things that make me happy. See also: things that make me seriously unhappy. See also: cold and incompetency.
I have included this ridiculous anecdote (this is a phrase to alert you to the impending revelation of the aforementioned “point”) partially because it is the sort of thing that comprises the entirety of this blog, but also because I feel it serves as Snow’s Triumph Over Nicole For Winter 2010–2011. Last year it broke my computer. The year before it got me stuck in The Middle of Nowhere, Illinois. Snow has done its job. I get it, snow. You win again. Now you should stop suppressing my beautiful hopeful light, and simply go away. It is time, snow. We’re done here, all right? Seriously. Stop it.