Preperation

Lindsay prepares me for the bad jokes I may face should I ever decide to get the deviated septum I've had for years fixed once and for all, so I can, for the first time since I can remember, breathe through both nostrils.

No, really. When I had a hairline fracture on my nose my senior year of high school, I went to an ENT specialist and he said, "Well, you have a deviated septum, but it looks like a very old injury. Tell me, can you breathe out of both nostrils?"

And until then, it hadn't even occured to me that this was a problem.

God damn, I'm dense enough to sink in a sea of lead.

Yay!

I've seen my first end of the year compilation of silly AP items!

Ah, reinforcement of my thesis that everyone in the universe is completely fucking insane...and that a couple of 'em might even be crazier than me!

Sensitive palate

I hate spicy food. I'm inclined to think it doens't like me much, either.

When I eat spicy food (and what to me is "spicy," to most people is "kinda spicy," and to anyone in most of Asia is "ridiculously bland"), it's no good. It sets my mouth on fire and then decides to pretend my gastrointestinal system is a mechanical bull.

The problem with being extremely sensitive to spice is that unless you're eating with other people who are, they tend not to notice when a restaurant has a predominantly spicy menu.

This is how I ended up eating about half an order of chicken and a huge bowl of rice for dinner.

My dad, who has a fine tolerance for spice, didn't realize that the place we were going tonight had almost all spicy food. The only thing that wasn't spicy was the Caesar salad, which in retrospect, I probably should have had instead.

But I decided, okay, chicken shouldn't be that bad. Ha! I ended up drinking about half a gallon of water and had to ask for a seperate bowl of rice after I thought my mouth was going to literally burst into flame.

I know I'm a wimp, but that hurt, goddamn it. But whatever, it happens. I just know I'm not going to be going to sleep anytime soon. Yay for that.

However, tomorrrow, I think, will redeem. It looks like tomorrow night we're going to one of my favorite restaurants here, which has the most hilarious name ever if you speak Italian: Il Naso.

For those who don't, that translates to The Nose.

The Insanity of Skiing

When you get down to it, skiing is a really bizarre sport. The old "explain this to someone who's never heard of it" test confirms this:

"Okay, so what you do. You put what are essentially highly modified, fiberglass barrel staves on your feet. Well, not directly. You also wear extremely uncomfortable boots that make your ankles immoble so you walk like some sort of hunchback.

Then, you get on a moving chair attached to a teensy wire, which pulls you waaaaaaaay up in the air over a bunch of trees and very sharp rocks, and then you have to get off it while you're still moving and without crashing into anything or anyone.

You also do this when it is ridiculously cold. The colder, the more disgusting the weather, the deeper the snow, the better.

So you're up at the top of this mountain, and you have to get down it without crashing into any of the following:
1) trees
2) other people
3) signs
4) chairlifts
5) snowmaking equipment
6) rocks
7) anything else that might have managed to meander into the middle of the trail, like a moose.

Then, once you get down, you do it again!"

Not even mentioning the risks of breaking a leg, blowing out any one of the many tendons that hold your knee together, or just generally wearing yourself out. It's a really dumb sport.

Yet I do it anyway, despite the fact that I'm afraid of heights. For some reason, if I'm on anything but a chairlift, I'm terribly afraid of heights. Well, even on some really high up lifts (especially gondolas...fucking hate those things).

This clearly has a lot to do with the fact that I started skiing when I was about five years old (I first put on skis at 2, I first agreed to get on the chairlift at five), so it seems quite a bit more natural to me.

Some people ask why I never switched to snowboarding. I did think about it for a while, but when I was about fourteen, two of my friends from camp blew out their ACL's snowboarding within about 2 months of each other.

As much as chicks dig scars, I don't dig physical therapy and being on crutches for months.

Snowboarding also falls into the same stupid realm, replacing "modified barrel staves" with "modified skateboard that you are attached to quite firmly." At least in skis, if you fall, your skis come off so you don't fuck up your knees too badly.

In the end, I guess I realize what I'm doing is dumb (even without the notice on the back of the lift ticket that "SKIING CAN RESULT IN SERIOUS INJURY AND/OR DEATH"...gotta love the and/or), but some part of me still really enjoys it.

That part of me is definitely not my knees right now though. Anybody got some Advil?

Promises, promises

I promise my diatribe on the inherent insanity of skiing will be forthcoming once I've skiied again. Like I said, I took today off cause I still felt kinda crappy, and obviously I took yesterday off since I felt like total shit.

However, I am going tomorrow, come hell, high water, or the predicted 1-3 inches of snow that's supposed to fall overnight.

Sound Advice

I really like the Washington Post's "Under 30" advice columnist, Carolyn Hax. Her advice, while theoretically geared toward the young, is really funny and quite applicable to everyone.

She had a gem earlier this week when she was asked by a man who felt "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" were too immature for him what appropriate other terms would be.

Her response:

"I've always been partial to 'hoochie.'

But I won't bore you with my personal problems.

It may be a minor annoyance but, by numbers, I'd still call it a major affliction, since any unmarried couple with a functioning nausea meter has faced the same dilemma. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if terminology and health insurance were the top two current incentives for marriage -- though 'husband' and 'wife' have been known to land with a thud, too, especially when used in more than three consecutive sentences by said husband or wife.

Unfortunately, 'significant other' makes you sound New Age silly; 'partner' gay, which you aren't; 'my man/my guy/my girl' like a leisure-suit merchant manque; 'friend' like you're hiding something and 'lover' not hiding enough. So, unless you have the wit to pull off 'main squeeze,' boyfriend or girlfriend it is."

Side note: My dad and stepmom, who were both in their late 50's/early 60's when dating, still called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, so I suspect this guy was simply insecure about being young.

I think she's probably the second best advice guru around right now, after Dan Savage, and I'm specifically thinking of this column.

Apologies

Sorry I haven't posted for a couple of days, the little cold bug I've been fighting off for the last couple weeks came back to bite me squarely in the ass once it realized I was relaxing, and I felt like garbage yesterday.

Plus, I went and saw the late show of Lord of the Rings with daddy-o, and by the time we got back, my single thought was "sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep," so my apologies.

I hate being sick, but almost as much, I hate being almost better, because you can't tell if you're in good enough shape to go out and have fun or if you get to have another day of staring at the wall and/or reading. That was today.

So allow me to pick up the nonsense where I left off.

Names have been changed to protect the drunk

I really love IMing with drunk people:

(anonymous): you graduated from NU
(anonymous): that is a huge acomopsiuhment
(anonymous): DNT EVER FORGET TIT

Don't worry, I never forget tit.

Potatoland

You know, I tried to type a bunch of this shit yesterday, and what happens? The second I try to post, Blogger crashed AOL, eating the post and severing my connection. Figures.

Anyway, I have finally managed to make it out to Idaho in one piece, only taking five days and 1900 miles of driving. I picked up my dad in Salt Lake yesterday, and we drove up pretty much without incident.

Although I don't like listening to my dad criticize my driving for several hours, it is nice to have someone else in the car, if only to notice things that you can't notice when you're trying to keep your eyes on, you know, the road.

Like the sign at the end of someone's driveway just outside of Twin Falls, Idaho: "El Rancho Costa Plente." After fifteen years of watching such asinine signs as "Judge Ranch" pop up on the drive to Sun Valley, this was a welcome retort.

It's also nice to be back where they have real Idaho Potatoes instead of the impostors they sell at Jewel. Putting aside the link for the moment, the potatoes they sell here are 3-4 times the size of the ones that make it back to Chicago.

The one thing that really seems to be getting to me is the thin air. I think it's thinning my brain cells, because I'm having a hell off a time forming coherent thoughts. Then again, it could be that I haven't really slept that much or that well since I left, so I dunno.

Speaking of which, I think I'm gonna shove off to bed, but tune in tomorrow for my riff on why, if I hadn't taken up skiing when I was two, there's absolutely no way in hell I'd be doing it now.

Progress Report

I made it into Salt Lake City yesterday, after a tour of the fabulous flatness that is most of Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, and the ear-popping joy of driving over multiple mountain ranges in Wyoming and Utah.

It's an entertaining little drive (ok, not so little...more like 1400 miles...), a vast amount of nothingness interrupted by cities with odd little names (What Cheer, Iowa; Friend, Nebraska; Egbert, Wyoming).

When I told people I was making this drive, they looked at me like I was absolutely mental. "You do know about this wonderful new contraption called the airplane, don't you?" seemed to be the general gist of the responses.

But I really love driving. If I have time to do it, I'd much rather drive somewhere than fly. Maybe it's the idea that travelling seems so much more concrete when you actually have to go through and see everything that normally you just see as a speck in the vast set of blocks of farmland.

Or it could have something to do with the fact that I'm a masochist, but you never know.

I'll post further about this later on, but I did want to let anyone who particularly cared know that I did not slide into a snowbank (yet: the drive from here to Sun Valley is predicted to be snowy), and that I'm here in Utah, doing what I normally do when I'm in Utah.

Which, like most non-Mormons who are not here to ski, is wondering how the fuck I ended up in Utah in the first place.