Tips for Winter, Tips for Life

If you closely followed my suggestions on how to become a surfer babe (HERE) and are interested in applying the same kind of fool-proof plan to your winter lifestyle, I happen to have paraphrased a few tips that some crazy broad wrote after she (temporarily) got over her insecurities and realized that life is for living, especially if you’re manic depressive.

Set some realistic goals: stick a double backie off a natural feature, get a 6-pack, compete in and win the FWT, find everlasting love and have an article written about you in a ski magazine titled “Who the Hell is Katie Burrell?”
On the first day that the resort opens, fall on the cat track underneath the chair lift and sprain your thumb. Download. Go home and watch Gossip Girl in your bottom bunk.
Finally take an avalanche course after years of blissful ignorance, during which you had no idea that you were about to die at ANY MOMENT. An hour in, find yourself on your back with your bare feet in the air while your instructor duct tapes the blisters on your heels. Say yes to the chocolate he offers you. Try to black out.
Fall HARD for (become infatuated with) your gay boyfriend’s step-brother. He is an unnervingly close-talker. When he takes a lover (who is not you), get drunk for a week and say impossibly cryptic (not that cryptic) things to him like “when are you going to DUMP her?” Go skiing with the two of them. Feel bittersweet joy when he falls and slides face first down a chute that you lead him into. Relish in collecting his scattered skis and poles, casually throwing them over your shoulder and skiing them down to him. Make a comment like: “nice line” and put them down in front of him. This is your moment. This is all you have.
Ask a local superstar to give you some tips on taking your skiing to the next level. Get so nervous when her friend shows up with Instagram that you lose all bodily control (idea of online presence is terrifying). Put face to knee with significant force, lose all sense of time and space, BUT GET UP FAST BECAUSE YOU’RE TOTALLY OKAY. Play off soul-shattering humiliation. You can laugh at yourself (you are actually so fucking hurt). Sit your concussed ass on your front porch with a bag of frozen french fries on your neck for the rest of the afternoon. You cannot move. Already crippling self-doubt issues go through the roof. Do not go to the hospital in case a nurse tells you that you don’t actually have a concussion.
Lose your Canadian virginity** to a very skinny body of tattoos (demons, ghosts, swirls, etc.) who says things like “welcome to paradise, have you been served?” Abruptly find out about his girlfriend, deliver an “oops” with wide eyes and spend a solid month in mourning. This is the closest thing to unrequited love you have felt since this rapper you knew in college who asked you to be his hype girl in a music video.
**You literally had only had out-of-country sex up until this point. Except for an uncategorized experience with this fifteen foot tall basketball player (JTT/doesn’t count/weird exit involving a cab driver and you breaking back in to his house to get your bra). Other than that, there was a tiny part of you that thought you might have to move to Africa for your body type to ever be properly appreciated.
Clarify that you know that saying “Africa” is ignorant.
Be put on forced vacation by your boss because you’re being such a cunt at work due to feelings of general purposelessness, sexual angst and abandonment. Spend two dreary weeks filming yourself talking about having a quarter life crisis. Write “The Quarter Life Crisis Project” in sharpie on an empty pizza box and film it in different spots around the house. Tell everyone you’re “making a documentary.” You are not making a documentary. You are lost.
Shelve the project.
Send ferocious late night emails to the rapper.
Fall in a creek.
Begin to think that you should maybe have your own room.
Read Demon-Swirls’ twitter feed and get deep into some good self-loathing.
Sprain your other thumb.
Get BACKNE?
Decide that going to the Olympics in 2018 is not THAT far out of your scope of ability. On Family Ski Day, announce your Training Plans and insist that your parents follow you through the park so that you won’t be alone if you fall and hurt yourself. Bail out of every approach while they look at you like you are an absolute idiot. Decide that ski camp with teenage boys is the only way you will ever achieve your goals and find happiness. Look at price of camps. Change mind IMMEDIATELY. Find alternate route to camp (and destiny) through video intern contest: hack together edit and sit at top of gondola to accost every boy with a LINE Traveling Circus sticker on his helmet to go “like” your edit on Facebook. Feel intense shame.
Abandon Training Plans and take up full time Drinking. Goal-setting is overrated, said the lone girl at the bar in a backwards hat. Find out that it is aVERY specific type of guy that you can hit on while wearing a backwards hat.
Cross off: “manipulate a player into liking me for real just to see if I can do it.” Bike around town holding hands. Try not to smile when he moves wood and says “blue job.” Pretend that you don’t think it is ADORABLE when he piggy-backs you to breakfast. End up handling a few road-blocks pretty poorly. Cross off “have coming-of-age moment where you realize that you can not change people, but you can use sex to get things you want for a finite period of time.” (SUCH a good thing to know)
Clear up your backne with a MAGICAL POTION you find at the grocery store (soap). Make Top Bunk run her hand across your back. Vow to never grow out of the bunks.
Come back to work recharged and ready to shine. Host war veterans. Have a funny feeling before they arrive that one of them might be kind of hot. Take it quite seriously when your boss asks you to show them a bit of respect because of the hard times that they’ve been through. Smash cut to you reporting for duty – Against a wall. On the floor. Under a table. Beside the fireplace. Be amazed at how easily he abandons all ethos and leaves you behind (apparently, you are exempt from soldier creed). I don’t know what you’ve been through, Star Spangled, but at least ask for my fucking e-mail.
Top Bunk moves in with boyfriend. Don’t blink for an entire day.

Retire from yourself. Shit’s exhausting.