I've got this whole entry to write on my trip last weekend to the San Diego Zoo and the fight between Pants and I that almost kept it from happening, and then ended up causing the weekend to be so much better and brighter, like how water droplets in the air will catch light and make a rainbow where there would otherwise have just been light, but something far more urgent has come up.
My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.
I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.
From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:
* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!
* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?
* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.
* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.
* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?
Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.
My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.
The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...
Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Trapdoor Spider has plans for the study
You know trapdoor spiders? That's how my depression acts these days. There will be the brushy, twiggy landscape of my normal life and then along comes the vibration of stress, and for a tense little while, nothing happens. And then BAM! The Crazy jumps out and starts devouring things.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Call the Ball
Our computer screen is black, and no sound comes through the speakers except for occasional radio transmissions, the low whine of electrical instruments and wind, and the jagged, irregular sound of someone trying not to hyperventilate.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Burly, Brah
My officemates are talking passionately about Lost, the TV series. Kate is apparently a slut, everyone's met Jack's dad, no one's sure what the deal is with Lock or Sawyer and there's some psychic kid running around having visions. I'm just as caught up in another fiction, the Philip Pullman book series His Dark Materials upon which the new movie The Golden Compass is based, but I have no one here to talk to about armored talking polar bears or world-cutting knives. Such is life.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
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