How to have a ski trip: an experienced skier's guide the futile process of preparation and execution

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Something that I have learnt is that there are two types of people in this world... People who understand snowsports and people who don’t.

I fit into the former category and recently I went on a ski trip to Japan. Allow me to explain to you the process of going on an international ski trip.

Step one. Select your country (prey).

If a country wants the Newby family to come and give it a visit, one way of dramatically improving the likelihood of our tourist dollars being spent there is to have had the foresight of developing skiable terrain over the past tens of thousands of years. Like moths to a flame we are called to visit countries that we know nothing about, drawn to them by stories of fresh powder and six-seater chairlifts whose hideous metallic and noisy presence cuts through the beauty of the surrounding serenity much like the ski runs themselves that viciously scar the formerly pristine mountain below.

In December of this year, like a woman possessed I screamed at my mother and brother “JAPAN! JAPAN! JAPAN!”. Because my mother and brother are both skiers they knew perfectly well what was meant by this ancient call of the snow lover... It was a request. As you know I am unemployed, poor and have only my dreams to keep me warm at night and as such my life requires Mum to bank roll any good times. The Bank of Mum despite receiving no assistance from the US government during the great financial saving of arses of 2010 found courage from deep within and replied to the call and said “It shall be so.”

Step two. The preparation.

Country now selected via the rash decision making process as outlined above, step two can take place.

Firstly skiing is so exorbitantly expensive that you must work yourself half to death in order to get the funds for the holiday. Additionally because you must have full time work in order to pay for this outragely expensive activity you will have little to no annual leave for actually spending time of the slopes. There will be no visiting of culturally significant places, no time. There will be no learning of the language, no time. We come, we ski, we leave. It’s a transaction. A country whores its mountains for money and we on our end support this industry via supplying the demand.

When you are not working to raise the funds to ski, you spend your time attempting to get remotely fit enough to actually ski. Skiing involves a series of muscles that no other activity on Earth requires and it can be really difficult to find the time to work out your ankle muscles and such. You also have to be flexible because falling over results in you balancing your entire body weight, ski boots and skis on your spine whilst your limbs flail wildly around to test out the amount of centripetal force that your joints can endure before you snap into eight pieces. Like a butchered chicken.

Step three. The last minute disaster.

Having now spent one gillion dollars on the ski trip which is entirely unrefundable, disaster must ensure. Passports being lost, crises at work and so on (use your imagination, that’s the only limit when it comes to last minute disasters). This year it was of the “you must endure some sort of inexplicable and entirely unnecessary injury” variety of disaster which is a popular choice of the Newby family. This time it was me. I wasn’t looking where I was going and I smashed my foot on the edge of a chair during a conversation with my cat about the progress of her recently lodged complaint to the catering department. Toes broken. Toes that are required to be squished into a ski boot for hours on end every day for 8 days straight.

But the show must go on. You tend to underplay this injury so that your already stressed out mother doesn’t flip out at the prospect of having wasted so much money. Quietly your toe turns purple, hidden in a shoe awaiting the verdict from your brain on whether or not you will be able to amputate it on a flight that does not allow knives.

Step four. The departure/arrival

The majority of your time spent in the gym is actually to prepare you for the immensely uncomfortable chair that you must spend a minimum of 10 hours in whilst on the plane to your destination. As soon as your spine has finished becoming chair shaped you must then jump up, run to your connecting flight carrying a huge suitcase, 6kg bag containing ski boots and another bag containing skis that are both heavy and ingeniously designed such that when carried, your body contorts into a position as awkward as a conversation between Tony Abbott and a pro-union indigenous lesbian who manages an abortion clinic in Brunswick.

The result of the preparation process is that you have no time to do any research into the country you are visiting. You also barely have any time to pack. Thus upon arrival to this country of choice you make a series of cultural faux pas and realise that you forgot most of your stuff.

My brother told people at work that he was going skiing in Japan and people were saying “Hokkaido?” and he was amazed at the number of people who knew the finer details of Japanese geography. It was only when he got to Japan that he realised that Hokkaido was the entire Northern island of Japan and not some tiny ski resort town. Now this sounds stupid but in order to have the time and funds to go to Japan in the first place he had been working 10 hour days for the two weeks before trying to install an entire vision based quality insurance system in a factory before he had to jet off. Both my mother and brother went to the airport straight from work and went straight from the airport to work when we returned. Like I alluded to earlier, skiing is not for the faint hearted.

To find original pink map of Japan see http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/travel/map_of_japan.html

Day one of skiing you have to go and buy one of the crucial and hugely expensive pieces of equipment that you left behind. Fortunately this does not take much time because you are pretty used to shopping for this piece of equipment because you forget the exactly the same item every year. At home a huge pile of sunglasses awaits your return and the induction of a new member to their crew.

Step five. The actual skiing

And now we ski.

Riding in chairlifts and sitting in the hotel give us plenty of time to discuss the shear effort of getting the slopes, chaos at work, the progress of a series of injuries, equipment malfunctions, frozen bits destined to fall off at some point and the slightly haphazard design of the networks of chair lifts that service the mountain that could have been done better if it had been planned by people as intelligent as us. Whinging and bitching are interspersed with the occasional piece of skiing.

This conversation is; however, dotted with the occasional question... “So where to next year? Utah? Canada?”

The truth is that we love it. When you are freely riding down a tree lined, fresh snow covered run looking out over a view of Mt Yoti, a gorgeous volcano who is calmly (for the time being) overseeing the proceedings, you feel like you’ve really been given something wonderful and for free. You live in the knowledge that if the volcano becomes upset, she will spew lava all you. Suddenly the pettiness of your life gives way to the extraordinary sensation that nothing else matters. Work, boys, injuries, money can all forget themselves because right now, I am alive and there is a volcano who is allowing me to fly.

 Step six. The trip home.

Much like the trip there except with nothing to look forward to upon arrival except a tonne of work, poverty and the abuse of a hungry kitty.

THE END

Oh and yeah... As for my toes and back, they’re doing OK much like our dear friend Shelley.

New Normals

Bonjour Shelley and others,

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I study economics at university. I have a tendency to apply economic principles to all aspects of my life which is indicative of the fact that it’s pretty miraculous that I have any friends outside my economics buddies.

In truth, I’m no economist. I mainly spend my time analysing the efficiency and decision making processes of things that have nothing to do with my study. A large part of my motivation to start this blog was in order to provide myself with further opportunities to apply economics to irrelevant situations. Here, I drew a graph to demonstrate the inverse nature of the relationship between the usefulness of economics to my life and the amount of economics applied.

It’s a negative relationship. Sigh.

Something that occurs to economies from time to time is that there is a huge shock to productive capacity. An example would be if there was an enormous shortage of peaches because of soaring fruit fly levels because someone didn’t throw out their fruit when they saw this sign.

The minuscule amount of now extremely expensive peaches sadly renders the Australian workforce so weak and miserable that they are unable to work at the same level of capacity. Here I drew you another graph.

Notice that at first the economy is in a stable equilibrium before the shock. Over time it ends up in equilibrium again. So things go from being normal to a new normal. You will notice; however, that the new normal is worse because there is less output and it’s more expensive. There is now less stuff in the economy and that stuff is more expensive. People are worse off and this is evidence that sometimes things change from normal to a new, shitter normal.

Now that I have spent some time discussing economics, I shall apply this principle to something completely and totally unrelated to my studies. Fear not, you won’t learn anything important, I know that you were worried.

I recently hurt my back. Turns out that you need your back to do just about everything so when I went to the doctor she told me to “avoid sitting, running, twisting, carrying anything, driving and jumping.” Lying down and being perfectly still was acceptable though, I was pleased to hear.

Normally when people prolapse a disc, they feel it go. For example, a person will be mid-wrestle with that rancor monster that lives in a cage below Jabba the Hut’s torture arena and suddenly feel it pop. I can’t pinpoint when I actually hurt it which was weird so now when people ask me how I hurt my bad I happily tell them that it was a ‘ninjury’.

The doctor seemed to find it hard to believe that I was a ninja (I know… weird, right?). So she asked me if I could think of anything at all that could have resulted in me hurting my back.

I couldn’t.

I’m not a doctor but this is how a prolapsed disc works as I understand it:

Firstly, something changes for no reason.

Secondly, this change has an effect.

I hurt my back six months ago and I think that it’s back to normal but it’s a new, shittier normal. My leg is pretty numb except for three of my toes which are for some reason really super sensitive.

You see because the nerves are blinded by inflammation, my brain can’t communicate with my right leg very well.

One of the consequences of this new normal is that I can’t do the things that I used to enjoy so easily. When I say the things I enjoy, I don’t mean sky-diving or Olympic sex sessions, I mean things like sitting, running, twisting, carrying anything, driving and jumping. It does make my life a little more interesting because I was pretty clumsy before so now my clumsiness has reached new and impressive heights.

Even though this upsets me, which is does, I am the first to admit that it is funny when people fall over. My friend Gigi and I were in Canberra early last year staying with a friend for a couple of days. Gigi was sitting on a chair drinking a glass of wine chatting to me. She decided to twist her legs around the chair which in hindsight was not really a sensible idea.

Naturally she fell off. Now this shouldn’t be funny. She was holding a glass which of course smashed everywhere. She could have been injured from the fall or by broken glass. When she sat up she looked a little dazed and said that she wasn’t feeling well. Like I said, not funny. Except that it was a little bit funny.

People falling over is a little bit funny.

When I was in year nine, my friends Marsha and Anche and I were walking along grassy area at our school’s rural campus when Marsha fell over for no particular reason. It was a pretty slow fall so we had time to enjoy it. Anche said it looked like a bad Backstreet Boys dance move. Marsha jumped up and did a pirouette and laughed it off but possibly went home to cry and apply band-aids later.

I guess over time my back may return to the original, pre-peach shortage better normal but for now I must tolerate having to fall over even more than I usually do but it’s OK because last I heard Shelley’s OK.

Love,

Elle.

Note: I wrote this post a little while ago (before school holidays).

P.S. Right now there is a swimming carnival happening at the public swimming pool that is located mere metres away from my house and all the children are screaming “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how ‘bout you?” and I really want to go over there and scream “FUCK NO!”. Then it occurred to me that doing something as proactive as screaming at children is pretty spirited so it would be oxymoronic for me to say anything. So I decided that it was best to share it with you, this way I can make the comment and still appear as cynical as ever.

 

endangering my relationship with my mother via a shopping trip

Citizens of Earth and Shelley I bid you hello!


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 As an unemployed member of society, the global financial crisis has not affected me much. I think you were substantially more likely to feel the effects of the changing structure of the economy if you were actually an active participant in it and not already a burden on it as I was.

I hear it’s been a bitch though and one group of people who is has most certainly affected is the baby boomers who are nearing retirement and have noticed a considerable decline in the value of their assets off which they intend to live once they quit their jobs.

Before the crisis:

Some testimonials:

After the crisis:

 Some testimonials:

An individual who fits into this category of baby boomers whose net wealth has been affected is my Mum. Mum is probably one of the most intelligent women you’ll meet.

Note: I showed this picture to my mother and she said “the apron is not embarrassing”. So you’ll most certainly understand that where I’m about to go with this is totally true.

Mum quickly realised that if she wanted to continue to provide herself with the lifestyle she deserves she would have to continue to work forever thus rendering the lifestyle she deserves of no value because she won’t have any time to enjoy it. Having said that, Mum is an asset to her industry and when she’s at home with nothing to do for a long period of time she goes a bit more nutty than she usually is so it’s not all bad.

One problem she does face; however, is that she is afraid that if she says at work too long people at her work will begin to view her like this:

I’m young you see and when I was little Mum was already really old in my opinion. As time has continued to pass I fear that she will have only grown older because time tends to age you as time is wont to do. So as far as I’m concerned, Mum is really old. Having said this, I could see that she was feeling a bit down so we decided to go shopping and get her some more modern clothes so that she could look glamourous for all her sales pitches.

So we went shopping in a bunch of older ladies’ shops and Mum tried things on whilst I negotiated with the sales people. Mum and I bickered about where to get coffee and if I had enrolled in uni and what was going to do over the summer and what’s my blog going to be about and why would I spend summer writing a blog and so on. Eventually we returned home with an exhausted credit card, plenty of new clothes in toe, tired but happy that it would be at least six months until we had to do it all again. Mum bought me a little outfit as payment for my styling efforts because I’m gen Y and material things make me happy. I selected a playsuit that looks a bit like I’m wearing PJs but I love it, perhaps because it’s as comfortable as PJs.

Now when Mum goes to work she looks like this:

The real issue here is not that my mother is too old; it’s that my mother isn’t interested in fashion or shopping. I have to go shopping with Mum because if it was up to her she would never go and eventually all her clothes would be so tatty and worn that she’d look like she’d been lost in the desert for an extended period of time. Also if she does go shopping, perhaps for work clothes, she buys two types of things. Either clothes that are comfortable but insanely dull and only draw the eye towards them by being so unflattering or pastel suits and such that make her look like the Queen’s Mother aged 100.

She went to my ex-boyfriend’s 21^st dressed as the Queen and I honestly think that she couldn’t have been any happier until I told her that someone asked if she was my grandmother.

So in order for her to look remotely youthful and hip she needs help. Why my mother has no taste is a bit of a mystery because she always tells me stories of when she was young and had cool outfits that she sewed herself. The words ‘hot pants’ have even been mentioned. I’ve decided that things go pear-shaped when mums get pregnant for the first time. 

Once you get pregnant you trade in your sense of style for a mum haircut and the joy of the 20+ year commitment to raising the leaders of the future.

Mind you, Mum was pregnant during the 80s so perhaps it was best that she missed out on that fashion experience. Naturally my mother has a mum haircut. Lately she’s been rocking a new look that is equally as mum-like as her previous hair but with one crucial difference… Her hair seems to be asking a question.

Contrary to the lies your French teachers told you, there are only two kinds of questions; happy questions and sad questions.

Eg:

“Did you hear about Jason’s infection spreading to his brain?” (Sad question)

“What is your opinion on the proposed legislation that will enable ice-cream to be tax deductable?” (Happy question)

My mother’s hair is definitely asking a happy question. You would think that this is a good thing but it’s rather misleading. You see sometimes Mum is saying one thing like “I can’t find the dividend statements from the Self-Managed Super Fund’s direct shares, have you seen them?” but instead the hair gives me the impression that she is asking another thing, for example:

Mum might be saying “We need to buy more cockroach baits.” That’s not even a question but still I’m thinking what she’s really saying is:

  

In the end I offer to go to the supermarket and buy cockroach baits because as much as I would like to go the pool, the queue for the waterslide is really long now because all the baby boomers can’t afford to go to the opera anymore and have opted for cheaper thrills. This is much to my inconvenience but it’s OK because Shelley’s OK.

Love,

Elle xx

P.S. I'm so glad that after four years of university education I spend my days making paper clothing for dinosaurs.