Wednesday, February 21, 2007

I Heard on the Ski Lift or How Some People Have No Sense of Geography

One of the most distinctive features of skiing is conversations on the ski lift with complete strangers or overhearing sometimes some very personal discussions on the ski lift. I don't know why some people suffer TMI on the ski lift and share way too much so not only can I hear all their intimate details, but so can the lifts in front of and behind us. At least these people aren't debating the best way to get to wherever or some guy isn't bragging about some secret road that he took to get here five minutes faster than it took all the schmucks who took the highway. Having a conversation like that on a ski lift is like leaving your lift ticket on your jacket all year long. Both scream "SKI TOOL."

Anyhow, I struck up some conversations during my day at Heavenly a couple weekends ago. I don't really remember any individual people who I spoke to, but I do remember the biggest theme was "How about that snow you guys had?" They were referring to the 100 or so inches of snow that New York got, that's New York State. I tried not to be too condescending, and I think I was pretty nice about it, since I'm an all-around nice guy, when I said to them, "Um, dude, that was up by Canada."

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. No one cares about upstate New York. It might as well be our version of Deliverance and most people just think they're Canadian up there anyway.

1 comment:

teahouse said...

I saw "Deliverance" on a first date once. It was inadvertent; we'd just heard there was a good movie that had won awards showing at a local artsy theater. But the damage was done; the relationship went downhill from there.

I'm from a southern state that everyone assumes is one huge swamp, so I'm used to having people make generalizations about where I'm from. It's annoying.