Oh Yeah, I'm Totally Doing It Again, But With A Helmet Next Time, And Maybe That Mesh Body Armor Knights Wear

Christmas time with my family is . . . there wasn't as much alcohol as there was last year so . . . this might be the fact that my present to myself this year was to have Jack in the Box seven days in a row, but things were a little nicer and a little weirder than usual.

I love my family. I really do. I really, really love them. I do (she says repeating it as a mantra, a reminder to herself that she does not want to go looking for her birth parents, but does in fact love when her grandma's house narrowly escapes catching on fire because the 70 degree day wasn't enough - the people wanted to start two fires at the same time; and she loves when her little brother decides to try and jump out of the car doing 50mph just to make Christmas eve interesting, and then because said brother is still trying to wildly jump out of the car and, I don't know, run around on the highway spreading the Christmas spirit (?) she and her sister spend the majority of the evening standing in the cold in nothing but flip flops and t-shirts, waving to the passerbys and shouting, "No, no, we're fine. That's our brother we've got locked in there. Merry Christmas!"; and she loves that her cousins got her noise stoppers for her bedroom door so that she can't hear when the dog pukes just outside her door as a little wake up present for her feet.) (Apparently she also loves talking about herself in third person.) (She's so obnoxious.)

Anyway, I love my family, but there are two times a year that I'm so overstimulated with the 20,000 people crammed into one room that by end of day three of this the familial joy and love fest has started to wear off and is slowly replaced with a deep urge to commit a major crime and then act out in the prison mess hall so I can get some solitary confinement.

So what do I do for some peace and quiet? I decide to go hurtling down the side of a mountain with my feet trapped into long, sliding things they call skis - I call sticks of terror - and nothing to hold onto except two long poles I discovered are really good at swatting away children you don't want to murder with your 90 mile an hour, six foot one, a hundred and blah blah body. You know how James Bond says his body is a weapon? Or maybe it's ninjas and not James Bond. Well, mine is too, except less in a sleek and sexy strong sort of way, and more in a flailing, awkward blinding sort of a way.

The woman teaching me to ski was soooo nice, and soooo patient with me, and repeatedly let me crash into her at the terrifying speed of 5 mph. That sounds pretty slow but 5mph in my head, and with my complete lack of control over my own limbs, can turn into 75mph and gliding treacherously like a flying squirrel with my jacket puffed up to the perfect sail-like size over the middle of a cavernous glacier headed toward my rocky death in about 2 seconds flat. In fact I narrowly escaped one such death in which I almost went off a cliff by making the graceful move of going crotch first into a tree, and probably would have impaled myself on a stomach-high branch if I hadn't tried to use one of my, uh, ski canes (?) as a weapon to attack the branch as I fell to my back and slid with my legs in a position I haven't used since prom night into the huge trunk of the pine tree. (If I get pregnant I hope they look like him.)

(Just kidding about the prom night thing, I'm pretty sure I just curled up in bed with Gige that night and let her boyfriend share the other bed with mine because they both passed out before we even made it to hot tub time - but did manage to wake up in time for Denny's the next morning, during which we ordered seventeen plates of Moons Over My Hammy and then stopped for Taco Bell about an hour after that. *sigh* I miss teenage metabolism.)

Anyway it was a really great experience - life danger or no. And I just kept telling myself that if these three year olds zooming past me could do it then I could at least try to go down again without wishing I had some sort of harness they use in plays to make people look like they're flying. Plus when I actually let myself get a little speed and found that I didn't immediately explode and die it was so much fun. Totally terrifying and awesome all at the same time, which I quickly realized is not unlike spending lots of quality time with my family. They are terrifyingly awesome - with the added bonus of not leaving me bruised and shaking from fear at the end of the day. You know, most of the time.