My back’s been bugging me—I did something to it in my break dance class last Wednesday that seemed to go away, and then after modern dance class Saturday (felt nothing unusual) I went out to brunch, and as I stood up from the hard wooden bench I was sitting on, that tweaked spot suddenly grabbed me and bent me double. For a moment, just a moment! But I was hobbling all weekend. Monday, some better, but bad enough for me to skip Salsa class (damn!) for fear of re-injuring it. Wednesday (yesterday) still some twinging, and I stayed home from breakdance (damn!) because I had planned to try again at going snowboarding tonight. But today! Still hurting a little, just enough to make me feel like maybe I shouldn’t take my first crack at snowboarding in this particular physical state. My fear is of injuring it for real before it heals, and staying home from fun things for a month instead of a week. So here I am, updating my blog a record second time in a single month when I’m not traveling. Crazy! (damn!)
If you know me, you know that my tendency is to fill my days up with pre-planned activities. I can’t seem to stop acquiring hobbies and friends and interests, and so my calendar is solid blue. If you want a date with me, you have to schedule it two weeks out, and I never, never, am just hanging out at home alone unless I’m sleeping.
But there have been three evenings this week that were filled with activities (salsa, breakdance, snowboarding) that I have been forced to cancel at the last minute, without having time to make other plans to fill them. This is a little bit of a revelation to me.
So, Sunday night I had actually planned as an unplanned evening, saying no to a fun-sounding dinner so that I could satisfy my own craving for relaxed time alone. (If I had only known…) so what did I do, that Sunday night?
I discovered MySpace.
Now, I didn’t pimp my page or anything, but I posted some recent pictures, wrote a little blurb about me, practiced my pathetic and fledgling html skills by coding some links and paragraph breaks (thank you, MySpace, for being so barebones and making me remember things!) But then the dangerous thing happened—I started looking up friends.
Jesus H. Christ, is everyone in the WORLD on MySpace? I feel like I showed up late to a party I thought I was too cool for, only to find out all the cool kids had beat me there. People I thought wouldn’t touch MySpace with a 30-foot shishkebab skewer had glorious pages with background graphics and embedded songs and like 350 friends. I am clearly behind, so I got my clicking finger in gear and pushed the “invite” button over and over.
But then, when I ran out of the every day friends and monthly friends I could think of, I started expanding my reach—I still only had 40 friends! I had to look popular! And started looking up people I was once introduced to at parties, my high school teachers, the boy I had a crush on in San Francisco in second grade…and I found some of them. Now this is cool. In the past few days, I’ve been exchanging messages with people I haven’t spoken to in…well, 9 years is the farthest-past one I’m in touch with so far.
So anyway, that’s how I spent Sunday night.
Now, Monday, I was unexpectedly without plans. This is a little different from planning to be alone. I got home and found myself a little at a loss. What do you do when you planned to be wigglin’ your hips to South American music with dozens of other people, but instead are faced with your own messy little studio apartment?
Well, I started the way I usually do—by sitting down at my computer to check my email. But oops—look! I have some new friend requests from MySpace! And a few new messages! So I logged in—and came up for air hungry, tired, lonely and depressed THREE HOURS later.
This will not do, MySpace. The way to cure loneliness is NOT to look at pictures of people clearly having fun with other people who are not me. To read their comments praising, teasing, sharing things with each other publicly on the page, flaunting their private conversations for me, the lonely person at the computer, to longingly devour with sadder and sadder eyes. MySpace, you purport to bring people together, but you are only mocking those who are not currently having a super fun blast with their friends. MySpace, why did you hold me captive for so long that night? I have learned your unfriendly wiles, MySpace, and I shall be wary of you in the future.
So at 9pm I saw the light and left the apartment—it was an emergency response. I had to get as far away from that glowing screen as possible. I needed food, anyway, since my larder was completely emptied of everything except the popcorn I was vapidly munching while I compulsively eavesdropped on other peoples’ lives. I walked up to Bleu and they sat me in a cramped little table in the very very back, and I had a delicious glass of wine and a caprese salad, and I sat there in a funk trying to write. But I was bummed! and lonely! And sometimes it’s fun to go out by yourself for dinner, but I wasn’t in the right mood, and the seat was uncomfortable, and I was right by the drafty entrance to the kitchen, and I couldn’t fit my notebook on the table with the food…
So it went until the 8th or 9th sip of wine. O but then, raising my glass to my lips and lowering my eyes to my glass…what startling colors! What strange lights! The shiny dark surface of my wine looked like some mad luminous angel-child had opened a box of angel-crayolas and scribbled all over the wet slippery surface—and was continuing to edit, as the liquid jiggled and the colors broke, zipped, bent, and re-formed under my very (literal) nose! It was ridiculous and startling and incredibly beautiful in the hyper-neon burner-art way that I usually privately scoff at. I was completely moved.
Over my head were the best Christmas lights ever, thickly placed and long, more purple ones than there ought to be in a decent, self-respecting set of Christmas lights. It was their casual, sexy, ghetto-chic luminescence that had descended so forcefully into my alcohol and my brain, completely shattering my grump and bringing life back around to pretty dang cool. I swear. Christmas lights. I’m serious, guys, this is all we need to put the world back together—just get everyone, every single person, alone at a cramped little table with a dark and tasty glass of red wine and a cosmos of colored electric lights over their heads. Just don’t let anyone leave until they’ve seen the reflection. It will change them all.
So anyway, emerging from my gloomy introspection to greet the world with a joyful eye, I noticed the couple at the table in front of me clearly having a first date. And they clearly liked each other, and were trying to impress each other, being a little cautiously flirtatious, saying witty and interesting things. And—funny—here I just left my apartment to run away from vicarious living and here it is again in front of me, but so much better this way, live, with strangers. But then—then! I heard the following exchange between them:
(after some conversation about the restaurant-rating website where he had apparently discovered Bleu):
Girl: So will you write a review of this meal?
Boy: No. But I’d like to write a review of YOU. (seriously, he said this. AND it seemed to go over well. Go figure.)
Girl: (oblivious? intentionally? Hard to say) Do people do that on those culinary sites?
Boy: No, they do THAT on MySpace.
I will never escape.
So a month or more ago, in December, the Thursday night of the big windstorm; do you remember? Trees came crashing down on hapless parked cars! Power died all over Washington for days! I had the next day off work!
Anyway. So that evening, Thursday evening, after work, I had planned to go to the slopes with my work buddies Marc and Josiah. They were going to head out to the slopes, do a few night runs; I was going to rent my first snowboard and take a lesson. The weather freaked a lot of people out, and they told us we should NOT drive out to Snoqualmie, but we’d been planning on going for weeks, there was a ton of fresh powder, and we would not be deterred.
The drive out was a little hairy, even in my coworker’s AWD workhorse. There were people ranged along the side of the road, putting on chains; we passed at least one fresh accident; but we made it all right through the snowy nighttime madness. At Summit Central, we parked and I bid adieu to the work peeps and headed in to sign up for the class.
But oh! The perils of showing up without calling! The instructor couldn’t make it out, because of the weather. So there were no lessons available. Marc and Josiah were long gone; I could have tried their cells, but it seemed unlikely they’d be answering as they whizzed down the mountain. Damn. Well, to make the best of a disappointing situation, I rented skis, thinking that even though it HAD been about 10 years since I’d ridden them, at least I could probably get back up to speed by myself without killing myself. I pretended like I knew what I was doing as I answered the questions I needed to answer to rent the skies, and I must have been reasonably convincing, because the unconcerned staff completely ignored me after loading me up with boots, skies, and poles, none of which I quite remembered how to put on. I muddled through and got it mostly right. Relearning how to walk through the place in ski boots was a little embarrassing (friends, where are my friends? I needed moral support like nobody! It’s cool though, I’m strong…) and then being completely clueless about how to attach my lift ticket was another adventure that eventually I solicited help for from the sympathetic woman behind the glass window. She gave me a map of the mountain, too, which the yawning kids in the rental shop had neglected to provide, and pointed me firmly toward the bunny slopes, thank god.
So I fumbled my way over, relearning how to hold the poles, not trip over my own skies on flat ground, and make forward progress. Fortunately for me, thanks to the inclement weather, few were around to witness my pathetic thrashings. When I finally made it to the base of the chair lift, no one else was in line, so the very accomodating lift operator could coach me on how to get on the chair without any other witnesses. I did okay. Getting off–little scary–hey, now, it had been ten years! And I’d only ever been skiing four times before! And I was alone! Stop snickering. But I made it, I was on top of the little bunny hill, and I went down hesitantly, swooping back and forth, going about 2 miles an hour but not falling down, anyway, slowly gaining confidence and figuring out how to hold myself to not exhaust my legs immediately and starting to have a little fun by the bottom.
I went down the bunny hill several times, warming up, loosening up. And you know, night-skiing on an empty slope turns out to be awesome. You’re whizzing down this big white hill, there’s floodlights lighting up the main run but the trees are shrouded in darkness and mist, the silence is rushing past your ears like a frigid ghost, whispering, deepening the hush. And snow was still falling, and my cheeks were about ready to fall off my face from the wind, but my core was warm and I was starting to go FAST and weave around and get a little daring, and I thought “Okay!” I can do this. I thought I was finally ready for the next step up–the blue square, or whatever, instead of the green dot. So I forge my way over to the run next door, a blue one on my map. There appeared to be two lifts going up it, but the near one was out of service, so I slid over to the far one, got onto the chair with my now-confidently-practiced technique.
And went up, and up, and up. This new run, it turns out, is a nice long one. And–looking down on it–some parts seemed even a little scary. But no worries! All by myself, I had relearned to ski, and I was certain I had graduated from the greenies! My nervousness grew with the height, but I told myself I was being a weenie.
Disembarking at the top, I took my first look at the run from the ground, and quailed. Jeebus! It was steep! But I had vowed to challenge myself a bit, and this was the result. No going back now (the humiliating return trip on the chair lift did not occur to me for one moment.) I started down the slope. But I couldn’t go straight down without going *way* faster than I was comfortable with, so I tacked and jibed
one.
painful.
foot.
at.
a.
time.
And JEEZ, it was slow going, and DAMN, it was hard. I was not a very large fraction down the run, and I was already exhausted. And the occasional snowboarder bombing gleefully past me was NOT doing much for my self-confidence, and when no one was around, it was cold and awfully dark, and at some point I had lost sight of the chair lift so I wasn’t even sure I was going the right way any more, but I didn’t have much choice but to keep going a little bit at a time.
Finally, out of impatience and exhaustion and why-aren’t-I-having-a-better-time frustration, I began to allow myself a little more speed, a little more rein, a little more space between zigs and zags. I sped up. It was scary. A small relief to my screaming thighs, though. Pretty quickly, I fell for the first time that night. I happily recalled my dad telling me once when I was small and complaining about falling down while ice skating, “If you don’t fall down, you’re probably not learning anything.” I’m learning! I beatifically pondered this as I relaxed back into the super-comfy powder. Gosh, I was tired. A nap right there on the slope seemed like a great idea, except that I remembered tales of people freezing to death by sleeping in the snow, and there was a pair of skiers across the slope from me who were looking at me lying there in a concerned-stranger kind of way that was, once again, a little embarrassing. So I struggled back onto my skies and continued down, gradually more freely. Once I had fallen, I lost a little bit of my disinclination to fall, and my lessened fear made me stabler. By the bottom of the slope, I was feeling positively daring again, and the night’s earlier exultation had returned to me, a little bit.
I was going fast enough at the bottom that I wasn’t really in control of myself, and I missed the spot where you go to get on the chair again. And frankly, that run had been so epic that I wasn’t really prepared to do it again right away–on the way down, it had become clear to me that I was not quite ready for the blue square runs. It would be back to the bunny hill for me. So I ended up circling around the back of the lift machinery, and looked up at it, and saw the name of the run printed on it.
!!!That wasn’t the run I thought I was on at all! I stopped in my tracks and pulled out my map. Sure enough. That was no blue square run; that run, my friends, was a bona-fide black diamond! That I, a lone skiing novice, had made it down (albeit v-e-r-y slowly) with only one soft spill!
Well. That’s nice. I still wasn’t ready for another big challenge, so I went back to the bunny hill, this time with renewed confidence, speed, and daring. I even pushed myself enough that I took another spill, this one a major wipeout in which my neck cracked alarmingly and snow got into my pants, but man! What fun! And when it warmed up and started raining, I made my way into the cafe, where Marc and Josiah were waiting for me, and took me back to my car parked at work.
One of the best parts of the night was driving home from work once they dropped me off at my car over the 520 bridge about 20 minutes before the city shut it down, swinging back and forth in the wind and being blinded by giant waves craashing over the bridge and onto my windshield. Yay big storm! Yay solitary fear conquered! Yay winter!
-Undefeatable A