Skating Dreams

So my body may not have been feeling the competition excitement last night, but my brain apparently was.  In general I’m a pretty average dreamer; with the exception of the month I was on malaria medications while in Ecuador, I generally only have/remember really strange, vivid dreams on occasion.  Last night, however, was a doozy.  I dreamt about the competition all night, but it was like one of those school-nightmares where everything goes wrong.  I kept getting lost trying to get to the rink.  For some reason, I was riding a bike there, and I got that sensation of “I can’t move my legs anymore” even though I knew I was running late, so for a while I couldn’t physically get myself to the rink.  Then I had planned on brining candy for my fellow competitors, but I didn’t have it, so I was going to go out to a Target and buy some, but I was scared I didn’t have enough time.  I couldn’t decide if I should walk or drive (because I had a car again at this point).  And I was convinced that my search for targets had turned up false results.  I don’t remember how this resolved itself.

Anyway, then I started watching the competition only to discover that other skaters were doing big, Vegas style productions, with other skaters backing them up doing circus tricks.  I didn’t have that and got really stressed about that.

Anyway, I’m heading to the rink in a few minutes now.  My goal for the day is to be a good, supportive friend and to take lots of pictures. Hopefully none of the skaters today have bit circus numbers.  But if they do, I promise to write about it!

Vegas so far: lacking in family and skating, though oddly productive

The drive to Vegas was uneventful.  I did it in 3 hours, 51 minutes, 51.5 seconds.  Yes, I timed myself.  You see, I got into an argument friendly workplace discussion with my boss last week about how long it took to drive here from LA.  I maintained that it was 3.5-4 hours, and he said closer to 4.5-5, 4 if your’e driving really really fast.  He thought that it was impossible to do in 3.5.  Of course, I wanted to prove him wrong, empirically.

Granted, there are lots of things in play here, not the least of which is when you go and where in the respective cities you are heading from/going to.  Still, I maintain you can do it in 3 and a half hours from my apartment (In Los Feliz) to my cousin’s house (which is probably 15 minutes closer to LA than The Strip).  I was 20 minutes above my goal this time, but I didn’t leave my apartment in LA until 3:30, which means I hit the beginnings of rush hour on the 210.  I was only going ~25 mpg there for a good 20-30 miles.  Full freeway speeds would definitely make up that 20 minute difference.  And to my parents: I kept it on cruise control at 80 mph when possible, and drove slower when I needed to to navigate heavy traffic.  I don’t think that’s unreasonable for desert freeway, do you? 

Bam. I WIN! LA to Vegas is totally doable in 3.5 hrs. Not like I’m trying to be too competitive this weekend or anything… 

Anyway, I’m staying with my cousin and her husband instead of at the competition hotel.  It’s sort of surreal because I definitely haven’t really gotten the skating/excitement vibe yet.  By the time I arrived it seems everyone else had already eaten dinner, so I just nuked a frozen pizza, holed myself up, and watched some Thursday Night Must-See-TV on NBC. 

Things feel even weirder because my cousin is not actually here at her house.  Her mom (my aunt) is apparently in the hospital, so she flew back to Chicago this morning to help take care of here, so I’m hanging out with my cousin-in-law, who is bedridden and on pain killers from a knee injury, and his mother.

Tomorrow I will definitely be at the rink most of the day, and may see my other two cousins who live in the city, so hopefully the weirdness factor will die down a bit.

On the plus side of things, however, I managed to get a job application done tonight.  I was definitely not planning on being productive this weekend in that regard, so that made me happy!

Anyway, I’m rambling. Good luck to all those who skate tomorrow!  I’ll be there modeling my new LAFSC jacket and hopefully tossing some fun stuff onto the ice after your programs.  Maybe Lauren will even let me have a go with the beanie baby cannon!

I’m hijacking my own blog!

Sooo… I haven’t been so good at blogging thus far this year.  Oops!  Decided to remedy that by live-blogging from an event that I know you will all find absolutely fascinating: The Pacific Coast Adult Sectionals Figure Skating Competition.  Woo!

I had my last practice here in LA this morning and I’m feeling pretty good (wood knocked).  My dress is glittery, my blades are just the right sharpness, and I finally have my official LAFSC jacket (check out the photo below: they wrapped it up all cute for me with a good luck card.  Aww!) I’m packing up the last of my stuff and I will be driving to Las Vegas in about an hour.

Want to follow all of my posts from this event? I’ve created a separate category for them called PCAS2011. 

This is why my family doesn’t go to church on Christmas anymore

I did not grow up in a very religious family; most of my knowledge of the bible comes from my freshman year in (public) high school, when we studied the old and new testaments as literary texts.  Yet every Christmas Eve of my childhood, my sister and I were dressed up in ribbed tights and whatever semi-formal dress we hadn’t managed to outgrow, and carted down to the Methodist Church in Estes Park, Colorado; my mother liked their bell choir.

The church had wood paneled walls and high, swooping ceilings that were buttressed by thick beams.  The pews were long benches of creaky oak, slightly curved to fit a human spine, with bibles and hymnals tucked into wooden pockets on the backs of the anterior rows.  The floor was carpeted in dark, burgundy patterned berber and the pulpit and aisles were lined with potted poinsettias.  Most of the parishioners were older, slightly frumpy men and women in ill-fitting outfits from the previous decade. They managed to smile sweetly at us, while still giving us the stink-eye-of-guilt for our regular church-going truancy.  

Every year the sermon was the same: the preacher would recite the story of the birth of Jesus, interspersed with classic Christmas carols played on the choir’s multi-sized silver bells.  Women in white gloves would jingle teacup sized bells to hit the high notes, and a bald man with a copious belly would swoop his arms in sinuous, robed arcs to clang out warm, sonorous, low tones.  It was easy to get lost in the sights and sounds of the church, allowing the melodic, familiar story to waft around you as you concentrated on the tights bunching at your waist or the off-kilter toupee of the man two rows up.  That’s exactly what happened to my sister, the year that I was ten and she was eight, and the church decided to change things up a bit by offering the eucharist.  

Methodists aren’t known for being particularly strict in their devotion to religious traditions.  Some churches devoutly offer eucharist services, while others do not.  Most of the time they use grape juice instead of the more traditional wine, and the type of bread is unimportant.  It had never been given out at a Christmas service before, but that year, it seems the ladies of the church committee must have had a couple extra loaves of Wonder Bread sitting around and figured why not.  They cut the slices up into little, soft foamy cubes, and passed them around on a tray, along with dixi cups of Welch’s grape juice.  As my family sitting relatively near the front of the church, we had to hold onto our bread and juice for a while as the rest of the congregation was served.  The minister kept speaking and the choir kept playing.  

That’s when I looked over and noticed that my sister, Shannon, had absentmindedly flattened her cube of Wonder Bread into a disk.  Just old enough to begin to understand the significance of the ritual, I leaned over to my mother, and half in horror, half trying to make a joke whispered, “Mommy, Shannon smushed Jesus.”

My mother has a laugh that sounds somewhat like the call of a carnivorous bird, and more often than not it is preceded by a low, rumbling snort.  When she tries to hold it in, her whole body shakes and she makes a sound like a deflating pool toy.  And when a person is shaking, trying to hold in laughter, and they’re sitting on a creaky, oak pew, the entire row knows something is going on.

The minister held up his cube of bread, “On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread, gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”

My sister looked at me in horror, just starting to comprehend the symbology. 

“You smushed the baby Jesus,” I reprimanded her.  

All around us, fellow parishioners were swallowing down their cubes of Wonder-Christ.

“This is Jesus?” 

I nodded, “And now you’re supposed to eat him.”

She nibbled on the crust of Jesus.  I couldn’t hold it in any longer and started to laugh as well. 

The minister continued: “When the supper was over, he took the cup, gave thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘Drink from this, all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”

And that’s when the bell choir started playing The Twelve Days of Christmas.  It was the absolute worst song, at the absolutely worst time.  You see, just a few days prior the local Oldies radio station had played their own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, except instead of being about gifts given, it was about the twelve things that happened to a poor guy who accidentally went into the women’s bathroom at a restaurant.  Instead of a partridge in a pear tree, this poor sap was left with a high-heel up his behind.

We couldn’t contain ourselves any longer.  My mother’s full snort and squawk ricochetted off the buttresses, I was shaking so hard I accidentally kicked the row in front of ours, repeatedly, and my sister was doing her best to keep from accidentally spitting the blood of Christ out of her nose.

Needless to say, we didn’t wait in line to shake the preacher’s hand and the end of the service that year.  And as far as I recall, that was the last time we were ever forced to go to church on Christmas Eve.

Merry Secular Christmas to all, and to all a good night.