How To Disappear Completely

Skiing on fresh powder is like taking a cruise, except there's no water and you don't go anywhere...

Thanks to one of the Muppet movies for that adapted quote (if anyone remembers which Muppet movie had gonzo and kermit working for an advertising agency, please tell me. I can't remember.)

Anyway, my home group of friends went skiing yesterday. Fresh powder guaranteed. In fact, we'll powder while you wait. And throw some wind in the bargain for swirling, vertigo-inducing, white-out conditions. "Trust your inner ear," said Luke (of the VanderHart variety, not Skywalker). Such advice was the only way to keep one's balance.

Perhaps the weather was inclement, but the company was good. We drove up in one truck, a Suburban, and a friend of a friend's car. We listened to Newsboys. That was cool. Then we listened to Steven Curtis Chapman. That was not. SCC has too much country flavor for me. And not just any country flavor; we're talking Nashville country, which in my opinion is just torture. When someone in the car voiced a longing for Metallica, I almost agreed with them.

The snow and the wind kept company all day, retiring but for a brief interlude: long enough to squeeze in fragmentary choruses of "Here Comes the Sun," "Good Morning, Good Morning," "No More Thoughts of Darkness," and "Climb Every Mountain," on the journey up the ski lift. Apparently these musical choices were not classy enough for the Flying Dutchman, since at our journey's end, he tried to belt out some Wagner at the top of the moutain, lost his balance, knocked Anna down, and left her in a tumbled heap that surpassed even her flexibility skills. I don't think she has done the splits since high school ballet.

Tom avoided getting a concussion this trip, but Luke and Eddie managed to collide in a spectular highspeed tangle of snow, skis, and legs. Apparently white-out conditions are not conducive to maximum peripheral vision. I half-expected the two to start an avalanche, rolling down the mountain as an ever-increasing snowball.

The drive home was severely impeded by traffic and falling snow. Cell phones are handy for updating parents on one's progress, and my sister Christa maximzed this utility: "Hey, Papa, we'll be home someday. We're going 7 mph right now....no wait! We just sped up to 10. We are now going TEN miles per hour!"

Despite our slow progression, the car I was in experienced never a dull moment: if we weren't arguing over whether worship music could appropriately be used as background noise (ironically enough debated while WOW was in the CD player, ignored by all but those rolling their eyes at "those philosophy types"), the twins could always find something to cat fight about. Amusing they were. And then we discussed their pyschological problems and wondered if these problems were genetic or socially constructed...the elder twin complained of being obsessive compulsive and other "eldest child" symptoms. The younger twin accused the elder of always trying to be first. The younger twin would have been first, if the elder hadn't been holding onto her foot and thus caused the doctors to resort to C-section. So...is the fact that the elder child suffers from "eldest child" personality traits due to everyone treating her as the eldest child and not because she was genetically predisposed to have that personality? Her identical twin was a hairsbreadth from being the eldest (and she could arguably be called the eldest, if one goes by who would have come out first the natural way). The fact that the elder was the eldest by a more manmade selection process kind of argues for the socially constructed birth order personality theory (I guess). Then one of the twins (the younger) remarked, "I bet they didn't even know which of us was which. They probably got us mixed up, and arbitrarily decided." Freaky.

After nearly (but not really) leaving first Christa and then her purse behind at Chik-fil-A, we finally made it back home. Today I should find out what my grades were for last semester. Unfortuately, the school server is overloaded or something, so I might have to wait until 3 in the morning to find out. Ah! The agony of suspense.