Definitions of Winter Olympic Events

I wrote up some satirical Definitions of Olympic Events last year, figured it was about time to write the second part. Living in Oklahoma, I don't know much about most of these things, which takes away most of the fun...
Anyway, let's try this refresher course...

Alpine Skiing - First of all, skiing is strapping a pair of sticks on your feet and pushing yourself along. The downhill portion is sailing along on these sticks down a hill as fast as possible. The slalom is doing the same thing, but weaving in and out of brightly-colored poles. If you miss a pole, there's a penalty.

Biathlon - A mix of skiing and target-shooting. If you miss, you have to ski in huge circles for a while as a penalty, and the first person across the finish line wins.

Bobsledding - Two or four people leap into a souped-up sled and sail down an iced waterslide at fifty miles an hour. WHO thought this was a good idea? 

Cross-Country Skiing - Using skis to get from one place to another. In the individual competition, starts are staggered, and the fastest clock-time wins. In the mass-start, everyone begins at the same time and the first across the line wins. There are also relays in this. 

Curling - This must have been invented out of necessity to prevent someone from dying of boredom(and also to get the house clean). Bowling on ice, with rocks for balls and pins, and there's lots of ice-sweeping. Takes longer than baseball, too. You get points if after every frame/inning/section you have more of your rocks inside the target area than the other guys.

Freestyle Skiing - "Skiing" always looks like I've spelled it wrong. Anyway, freestyle skiing is the type where you do all these tricks, skateboard or snowboard-style. Moguls is a race down an extremely bumpy slope, with two jumps somewhere along the way. Aerials is like moguls, but all about the tricks. High scores win. Ski slopestyle is doing tricks on rails, jumps and whatever other random obstacles are thrown onto the course. Ski halfpipe is pretty self-explanatory, doing tricks while wearing skis on a massive snowy halfpipe.

Figure Skating - This is the Winter Olympics' version of gymnastics, except it makes a little more sense as far as practicality goes. Still, that's not much. Consists of leaping and spinning and kicking your leg wayyy up into the air, skating to a piece of music, and each step has a special name that means somethin'. The women's event is the best to watch, the pairs can sometimes be interesting. "Ice dancing" is extremely dull, and men's figure skating is almost as horrendous as men's diving, and also should be outlawed by the FCC.

Hockey - Violence! Action! Sharp skates! Flying rubber! Mullets and beards. Cool sweaters! And wearable murals on the goalies' helmets! And it gave us the Mighty Ducks movies. It's also the favorite sport of MacGyver and Joey Gladstone, and pretty much hockey is soccer on ice, with neat stickswords. Tow teams of six players try to get the puck into the net, after an hour or so, the team who does this more often is the winner.

Luge - A French word meaning "sled", jumping on a Radio-Flyer sled and hurtling down that icy waterslide at fifty miles an hour. Again...WHO thought this was a good idea?

Nordic Combined - A boring cousin of pentathlon for the wintertime, combines ski jumping with a 10 km ski race. Probably to give you a good long time to think about the stupidity of jettisoning yourself through the air very fast without a parachute.

Speed Skating - The most basic of all winter Olympic sports: If you can skate, you naturally want to see if you're faster than anybody else. Same principle as track. Racers clad in Spandex onesies race against the clock for 500m, 1000m, 1,500m, 3,000m(women only), 5,000m, 10,000m(men only) and team pursuit events.

Short-Track Speed Skating - Take speed skating into a hockey rink, and an extremely high-energy event follows, great for TV. The closest thing we humans have to Jack Russel hurdle racing. 32 skaters race four at a time in an elimination tournament-style bracket, collisions and wipeouts are quite likely. A team relay is - never mind, you guys know what that is.

Skeleton - Named for what you become after taking that Radio-Flyer down the icy waterslide head-first. ...WHO would have thought this was a good idea?

Ski Jumping - Parachuting sans parachute with skis on down a killer mountain incline, then launching oneself into the sky. The farthest distance, assuming nobody died on landing, wins. Who thought thiswas a good idea, either?

Snowboarding - This sounds awesome, just sayin'. Never had a chance to try it, but it sounds great. The halfpipe competition is just like with skateboards, sliding around a gigantic bowl and doing physics-and gravity-defying tricks. Scored on style points. The parallel giant slalom is a head-to-head tournament-style series of races down a mountain while weaving between brightly-colored poles, and the last person left standing wins. Boardercross is like dirt bike racing on snow; sailing down the mountain four at a time in a race over a course filled with highly-banked turns and unexpected jumps.

Description of My Dorm

     It’s just another no-sleep night, just after midnight, to be exact, and nothing much is out of the ordinary around here. There’s the late-night hockey game on the TV, I’ve got the sound muted to not wake any of my neighbors up. It’s one of those 12, 13-inch cubes, about ten or fifteen years old, the kind of TV set that folks set in their closet after an upgrade and give away five years later when their wife is organizing a garage sale. No plugs or anything, so I can’t even hook up a VHS or a DVD player. And the cable’s not the greatest around here; mostly a grainy collection of really strange niche channels that completely blacks out in bad weather. Anyway, Edmonton is at home against San Jose, the score is tied at 1-1 late in the third period.

            Looking around the small, confining space I live in, the TV is perched atop my refrigerator, one of those mini-fridges that has a high capacity of very small items. Right now it’s full of about nine cans of Diet Coke, two cans of Rockstar, half a Subway sandwich that’s tomorrow’s breakfast, and three receipts. Next to the fridge is one of the desks, in need of cleaning, pencil-marks adorn the flat, scarred surface. Makes sense, though – that’s where a broken pencil sharpener sits, spilling sawdust everywhere on the rare occasions it gets used. (I hate pencils, and try to use them as little as possible.) Next to the pencil sharpener is a desktop Christmas tree I found in October at Wal-Mart last year, unplugged at the moment because it doesn’t fit the tone just right now.

            Above those items is my bookshelf; home to a select company of my most treasured friends. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Princess Bride, Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s Web, The Book of Virtues,  To Kill A Mockingbird, the first book of Jan Karon’s Mitford series. There’s three or four well-worn reporter’s notebooks, four songbooks, a battered paperback dictionary, three books of poetry, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Over off in their own section I have Associated Press stylebooks from 1994 and 2012, together with a Grammar Girl and a couple other useful books for journalistic pursuits and essay-writing. One of those titles included in the communication section is a Biblical-focused guide to dealing with the underlying issues our comm disputes cover, fantastic book that I bought from our pastor’s bookstore several weeks ago. There’s my Bible sitting on top, kind of above everything else, within easy reach. The spine came loose about six years ago and the cover is only very loosely attached, much of Deuteronomy is stuck together by time and elemental damage, but it’s a good copy of the NIV, well-marked. There’s a shot glass next to the Bible, decorated with some of the major landmarks of Washington D.C., I got that while visiting my junior year of high school. It’s filled with guitar picks. Light-gauge, medium-gauge, one or two extremely stiff and unforgiving high-gauge picks. All different colors; red, purple, white, lime green, a kind of tan for the plastic fingerpicks, the shining chrome of the metal fingerpicks. A stuffed toy dog, yellow Lab named Dusty, guards the shot glass on one side and my videocamera on the other.  

            There’s a poster with a quote from Emerson taped with sticky-tack to the cold off-white cement-block wall, the only other decoration on the walls is the glow-in-the-dark basketball hoop above the bed that my sister sent me freshman year.

            There’s my “couch”, in reality the spare bed, but since I don’t have a roommate, the space is there to use. My backpack sits there; holding all my textbooks, several notebooks and planners, a stapler, calculator and pepper spray, among other things with the Snoopy keychain on the outside. My leather jacket is spending the night there with my jeans, since it’s supposed to be pretty cold in the morning, it being winter and all. Abby Lee the guitar and Summertime the mandolin live on the couch, too.

             A towel hangs on the rack atop the closet door, I try to keep my bed neatly made. My CDs are arranged in alphabetical order next to the CD player which needs to be replaced, the microwave sits just above them on the other shelf. A pair of sunglasses lie next the microwave, which must be at least twenty years old and makes alarming noises like it’s going to blow up every time food is cooked inside.

            I keep the laptop on this desk by my bed, along with my phone, wallet, keys, watch, things like that. In the drawers you’d find about nineteen pens waiting to be used, nail clippers, scissors, a hole punch, flashlight, paper clips, several necklaces, glasses case, my camera, quite a few charger-cables belonging to various items, several old newspapers, a pocket book of logic puzzles, condiment container of honey mustard, and old letters, along with jars of peanut butter and Nutella, paper towels and a powerful bleach-based disinfectant inside the file cabinet.

            I keep the volleyball and soccer ball in the closet, where a half-eaten box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch converses with the shampoo bottle.

            The arrangement of belongings is designed that the essential items can be gathered up in a hurry and you can be gone instantly in case of emergency. It’s considered very clean, but there’s a certain amount of messiness just in daily living. Which can be maddeningly solitary at times….I never have guests.

            It’s not that I don’t have friends or anything; more like it’s just that the few people I really enjoy hanging out with around here are also mostly introverts, and private, so it’s like there’s this unwritten code that says we’re don’t usually come into each other’s territory. There’s some exceptions, but I don’t really qualify for any of them. So most nights are spent watching TV or surfing the Internet, doing exciting things like homework and having thrilling adventures like catching a marathon of The Rockford Files. It’s part of being a writer, I suppose.

We scratch out ideas as they come, sometimes using anything from cardboard boxes to discarded sandwich wrappers, and then transfer them into our “scrap bag” of potential items notebooks, which are usually dog-eared and well-thumbed through. Sometimes they come frantically and your hand almost matches your brain’s processing speed, and other times new ideas don’t come very often at all, more like a slow leak in the roof. Sort of like the leak in the bathroom of Grandpa’s trailer, never quite fixed, but usually usable, if a headache to follow.

Anyway, we’re part of a tight-knot drama group, an outreach of the BCM here on campus, and besides that, several of us are writers and other creative types, so we occasionally bounce ideas off each other while hanging out. Not just friends, although we are that. We’re a family. Extremely dysfunctional at times, but we’ve got each other’s backs through rough times. College is miserable alone, and a lot of us know that from personal experience. So we’re there for our siblings and cousins and mom and drill-sergeant aunt.
 Eating a late dinner of some microwaved food, it looks and smells like cat food. 

Copper

     This is an obituary for Copper the red heeler. Originally appeared on Another Lover of the Blade.

    "You'd think I'd be used to it by now, wouldn't ya?

     Seems like I ought to be...and in some ways, just numbed to the pain...but...no, not really, I'm not. 

     It hasn't been the best week ever. In fact, it's been a hard, unpleasant one. Sick with a horrible sinus infection all weekend, so I sort of stumbled through a bare minimum of homework. Had a psych quiz Monday, that went okay. Then a psych test Wednesday, nutrition quiz in the afternoon, still wasn't feeling completely well, had to write an essay - one of those self-reflection type essays - by Thursday morning, it was finished on Wednesday night, and I didn't really like it at all. Course, I don't like those where you have to talk about yourself. But it was better to have something to turn in on time than nothing, right? 

     Playing catch-up all week to get the stuff I should have done earlier while I was sick...it's tiring. And not much fun. And a little overwhelming. Tuesday was a bad night. Overslept Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings, which is a very bad way to start the day. It was pouring rain all Wednesday morning into the afternoon, which is right where I'm in the middle of it. Killed several wasps this week. 

     I think I've been to church about three times in the last two months. I don't like that. But I've either been sick, or had a ton of immediate homework, or something else, and well, there you are. Don't like Halloween much, though I did actually dress up for about an hour. (MacGyver.) 

     Friday was a beautiful Oklahoma fall day, one of the rare times you can slip out of "distressed college student" mode and just be able to marvel and appreciate the trees and colors and sunshine. Nobody showed up for an extra-credit nutrition assignment of walking two miles, so I went down to Morgan's and got some snacks, a mile-and-a-half trip. Came back home yesterday afternoon, found a new Lucy Maud Montgomery book to read, played music with Courtney, heard about her trip, petted the goats, etc. Did laundry today(Saturday), watched Amy, got a little bit of homework done. And said goodbye to Copper. 

     I was reading a book in the living room, possibly a Thoene book or Mitford, on the night of Sept 13, 2010, sprawled out sideways on the blue chair. (I know the date because I mentioned this in my journal that I kept then.) I hear this bark. And it doesn't stop. So eventually I tune into it, don't recognize the tone. It isn't Sunny, and not Sport. Not Skeet, either, or any of the neighborhood dogs. Dad looks out the window. "It's a dog." Someone sets some food and water out on the porch. "Come here, dog! We've got some food for you!" The dog retreats farther down the sidewalk.
     "You try it, Wes." I crouch down, set the bowls on the weathered boards. "It's all right, it's okay. We've got some food here, you came to a good place. You knew that, didn't you?" The dog scurries into the far corner from the door, but still, that's on the porch. She wags her tail slightly, thwapping it on the wall. (During the Depression, hobos had this special sign that they made on houses designating the good places, I think animals have a similar system, and ours is marked as such.)
     The red heeler's hurt leg eventually heals, she sticks around and becomes Copper, sort of fills the void left by Eclipse and all the cats. She was a little of everything - watchdog toward the UPS man, barking menacingly and scaring him to death; friendly to Mrs. Perry or whoever else might be visiting. Once in a while she'd kill a chicken, but it was usually one of the neighbors'. She would placidly endure Amy tugging on her ears and tail, or getting right up in her face while trying to eat. She was always hanging around somewhere near the porch to bark the Welcoming Committee Song and wag her entire body happily. She'd sometimes eat up the leftover scraps from dinner, but she was a picky eater. Didn't like dog food much at all.
     Always there to cheer you up when you looked like you needed it. If you were worried with school or whatever, a happy thumping tail could be heard as she made her way over to wherever you were, slipping her nose under your hand and gently smiling. She really didn't like me going off to college. Always would leap up excitedly and give me a bear(dog?) hug and lick me all over with kisses whenever I came back to visit.

    She got hit by something on Hwy. 16 either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, we wondered where she was. Finally searching in the evening, we found her, with a broken leg, head slightly burned...I was watching Amy, keeping her distracted. There wasn't anything possible to do, though...other than try to say goodbye, and "thank you", and weep bitterly.

     I know, life isn't fair. And I know she was only a dog. But dogs are family. Most pet-animals are. But now, to be dogless in the space of four months... Completely dogless, surrounded by people and ice-cold concrete and thinking way too much. And when I'm still trying to deal with Sunny being gone...I just...I don't know what to do. How do you cope?"