When I was a little tyke in elementary school, my sister and I spent a couple summers at Summer Day Camp since both of my parents worked and we were untrustworthy prepubescents who would probably burn the house down unattended. One time, in an ever-so-eighties kind of way, they ran out of things for us to do, so we all went on a field trip to the roller rink. I had never roller-skated before and lacked the innate sense of rolling balance that everyone else seemed to have (no doubt because in my homeland, the streets are made of sun-baked cow dung and the wheels on roller skates are oblong). However, I amused myself by standing upright and pulling myself along the wall around the outside of the rink. In roller rinks, you see, you have to roll counter clockwise around the rink, like you're a track star on wheels. On a tangent, why do we run counter-clockwise on a track?

So there I was breaking the sound barrier at six inches per second when the hip 80s DJ put on some notably denim bubble gum band and said, "All you guys off the floor, it's time for the ladies to roll!". This segregation by gender occurred just when I was at the halfway point on the opposite wall, equidistant from the two offramps at the ends of the rink. I spent the next five minutes laboriously tugging myself towards the exit, as gaggles of girls swooped past me in the left lane, giggling and goggling at my ineptitude. Perhaps this traumatic experience is why I never really got into any activities requiring a lot of balance and forward movement, like skiing and skateboarding (I used to sit on the skateboard and roll down the hill -- that was more fun).

There's a better reason for my lack of skiing enthusiasm though. I simply hate being cold, and feel like the effort you make to buy all the sharp, pointy gear, bundle up, trudge out to a hill, and stand around like an Eskimo is not worth the five seconds you're going down a hill. Cold apathy first grew on me as a kid, when the nearest sleddable hill was at Polk School, half a mile away (Heaven forbid they ever block off our street and let kids sled down that hill). Sure sledding was tons o' fun, especially when there was enough snow to build ramps that induced panic in all the mothers at the top, but what happens after your five sceonds of fun? You get off and walk back up a hill. Then when you can't feel your feet and you want to go home, you still have to walk the half mile back. I think yesterday's post on dooce.com sums up my own feelings nicely:

And this is one of my biggest hang-ups with winter sports, that it requires so much work to even get out the door. I can't get over how much easier it would be to just sit inside where it's warm and fondle the inside of my nose with my finger.

So should my friends ever drag me out to a ski resort, I will probably be the wise, bearded, professor-looking guy camped in front of the fireplace with books and hot chocolate with snow bunnies on each arm, watching cold people fall on their asses through the thick double-paned windows. Bearded might be a stretch, since I'm Asian, but I'll work on it.