Board Hard

This is what I looked like, only not asian

 

I fell on my ass alot this weekend.  My ass, my side, my front.  Not on my head though in extra sad recent events, and let it be known, after not-so-tough negotiations, my sister is buying me a helmet for next season (well, I will buy it, she’ll pay me back).  Jeff (as in Apt 2 Jeff) and I went up to Okemo this weekend on one of those Get On The Bus trips (this always makes me think of the Million Man March (not the real march, though, just the Spike Lee version)).  This was through Emilio’s Ski Shop, and what they have you do is you get up before the bars close and you get on the bus at 4:30am and head up to Vermont (you sleep the whole way, though it’s really not comfortable).  You get there right when the place opens, which is great because it’s pretty surreal to be in Vermont at 9:30am when you were watching Siena beat Ohio State in New Jersey 12 hours earlier (so that’s two pretty surreal things).  Then, if it’s the second to last weekend in March, you proceed to fall on your thighs and chest and knees and you slide 16 feet every fall, at least, because the mountain is covered in ice.  At some point my right thigh always stops working.  It just quits.  And so I go down the mountain and try and do these turns but my thigh doesn’t respond and so my board just scrapes across the ice.  I also burned my face off.  It had to’ve been 40+ degrees and really quite gorgeous, beautiful blue skies, nice air, etc. But at some point I’m touching my face and it just feels tender.  So I’m falling and burning and I can’t get off the lift without falling, but I look good because I finally got a snowboarding jacket ($150 bucks at Macy’s, yeah!).  

Saturday was one of those snowboarding days that make you feel like you’ve learned nothing and that you’re not very good.  But at the end of the day, you always get a run in where everything (or at least a few things) click, and you get a glimpse of how to ride on the snow.  You carry that with you more than you carry all the falls.  That’s why I can’t wait to get out again next season.  And I’m pissed the season’s over.

Some other highlights:

Having gloves instead of no gloves.

Eating my quota of Chili in a bread bowl on the mountain.  I think chili just tastes better on a snowy mountain.

Jeff and I drinkin’ a beer after a full day of boarding (falling) before getting on the bus to head home.

Seeing McHale randomly after eating my chili in a bread bowl.  It’s strange to think that I’ve seen him at least one more time this month than his actual roommate, and it was 5 hours away in another state.

Stopping into PC Richards and Son after the bus dropped me off and using their bathroom without them complaining.  Then learning all about HD TV’s from Marc Anthony (very knowledgeable).

Some lowlights:

My gloves were my girlfriend’s (I lost mine). 

Watching Rise on the bus ride home.  Jeff was most disappointed in the editing.  I think he was very upset about the ‘bad cuts’.

Crawling up the mountain on my belly to get my sunglasses that fell off on one of my wipeouts

Inserting  my body into a bus seat for 8 hours in one day

Don’t Cheap Out

In this tough economy, some of us would like to cut our budgets in any way we can.

But there are some things ;in this life we can not cut out.  

There are a few things not to cheap out on in life:

Ice trays – Stinky ice cubes?  No way!  Don’t get soft when it comes to creating ice from your tap water.  Nothing will turn you off to a cup of water more than turning it into a cup of Ass-Freezer-Smell.  Be sure to get a solid, dependable, ice tray that will somehow keep ice from not smelling by using science.

Toilet paper – I hate going to people’s houses that I like and finding their toilet paper is so damn cheap.  Seriously?  You use cheap toilet paper?  You try to save money on your ass?  The one thing people always try to protect?  ’I gotta save my ass!’, ‘You’re not gonna find my ass in there.’ and, ‘I gotta get my ass to the gym.’   And then you’re gonna wipe it down with the next level up after newspaper?  I can recommend Cottenelle Blue.  Really make the effort here though.  I’m still waiting for the next best thing (a puppy dog?)    

Can Opener – There’s nothing worse than having a can opener that doesn’t work.  It’s so brilliant that they haven’t improved on it (except for all the improvements) for a hundred years.  It’s really the can though.  So impenetrable…unless you have a special weapon.  You can’t write this stuff!

That’s my list so far… It’s important to keep these things short.

 

Some tricks:

-Be a man and get a tray that requires the traditional practice of balance.  Be a bigger man and get an ice pick. Be a woman and kill someone with it.

-I always try to use two squares at a time (unlimited times).  I’ve been known to jump in the shower if paper up my butt is just not working.  Really?  But why wouldn’t paper work? Why would science figure out how to turn water into ice, but not how to clean my but without any effort?

-A good can opener is so great relative to a bad can opener.  You only know this if you’ve had a bad can opener.

 

"We sure did nail that account today! See you guys tomorrow!"

 

Today at work I discussed with a twin how she would name her baby only once she saw it.  That way she could name the baby appropriately based on what the baby looked like.  I suggested the name ‘Baby’ for the baby, since the baby would look like a Baby.  She found that amusing but thought the baby may look like something else.  I then suggested that people named ‘Tod’ must have looked like toddlers when they were born, to which I received less of a response.  My own name is Adam, but sometimes my family calls me ‘Ad’.  This could be because when I was a baby I looked like an ADult (though I doubt this.  Even now I don’t look like an adult.)  

The twin doesn’t work because she is having a baby.  Lucky.  I would give birth to have a few weeks off of work.  At work, I haven’t been able to get the song from Groundhog Day out of my head so I sing it at my desk.  ‘…why couldn’t I have had that day.’  Eventually I left at 7:30 pm.  

I wish I could have a zipline installed from my office window to my apartment building.  It sounds crazy, but that might be a selling point for me for whether I would leave my job or not, ‘hmmmm…..this job has better benefits, but my current job has a zipline to my apartment….hmmmm….’

If only ‘Naked’ was an outfit…

A miserable necessity is trying to edit ones clothes.  It involves going through each item in your wardrobe and deciding if and when you would wear every item.  The problem is, who knows how many outfits you need, how many varieties of shirts are enough that people won’t think that you’re dirty.  What the hell.  I don’t care if people think I’m dirty.  Even yesterday I went to a friends 30th birthday party wearing the same outfit I wore on Friday without a shower either.  But work wants me to dress up.  And I like it when my shirts say things more cleverly than I can, so my piles of clothing don’t shrink enough.

I make a pile of tshirts, a pile of underwear, a pile of “performance” (though that’s just a theoretical pile (as if I go to the gym), a pile of things to try on, and things to give away.  You also have to face up to certain things about yourself when sorting through clothes.  You have to admit that you bought those pants only cause it was a designer label, or that you’re not so young to wear some of the plaids you swore to yourself that your wardrobe would only consist of.  It’s like going through a mini biography of your life, I wore that when we went to Coney Island or I hooked up with so-and-so wearing that.  There’s the items of clothes that at one time held the title of Your Best Shirt that have now shirked down to the pile of ‘Salvation Army’.  

And those clothes that make it to the Second Hand Store, well, you hope some young kid picks it up and it becomes their best, their number one go to, their Yes-Pile.  

With that said, it takes two or three edits to really get down to the core, the juiciest of your stuff that you hope will give off the right impression of your personality and how you feel about yourself, and no matter what, there will always be a night when you think ‘Jeez!  I can’t believe I threw that out, it’d be perfect to wear tonight.’  But you need to accept that as a necessary evil, because now you have some room to go shopping with an excuse -yes, now you actually need to buy that shirt.

Meanwhile, a big thanks to UL, who has easily become the best commenter on abzme.com (No shock there since I don’t write enough and so new readers fall off pretty quickly.)