Snowboarding Misadventure

So this should really be a post about the amazing Christmas I spent in Thailand, or the wicked New Years in Tokyo, but I`m going to catch up on the present first and work back from there. Just thinking about all of the places I went and the things I saw over those two weeks isn`t exactly encouraging me to take the 10 hours it`ll probably take me to write about it, but I promise I`ll get to it...eventually.

And it`s official. I passed in my contract for another year here in the Niigata countryside a few hours ago. I was expecting to feel a heavy weight in the pit of my stomach, but thankfully all I felt was hunger and a lightness of knowing that yes, I do have a job for at least another year. I think this calls for a celebration, once this stupid ailment that has a good grip on me ever decides to screw off. I`ve been warned that most ALTs get sick in February, but mine has been ongoing since getting back from Christmas break, so anytime now, right?! haha

As usual my weekends have been spent doing musical rehearsal all over the prefecture. It`s really coming together now, which is great since our first performance is about a month away! Due to some scheduling conflicts and some of the other musical members` families coming to visit them (where are MY visits by the way?!?! I hope you`re detecting the bitterness. You know who you are!), the performances have been pushed back into May. Not exactly what I expected when I first got into this thing, but I`ve accepted it now. Plus, we`ve got some pretty great people in our group, so it`s just a nice excuse to see them for an extra two months longer than originally planned :)  I would have to say that the part I`m doing, one of the near-blind Moon Police, that`s right, I get to play a ghetto police officer from the moon (you know you`re jealous) in which we break out into Thriller followed by an amazing J-Pop dance combo, is a pretty sweet part. Mostly me, Bryan and Nicole, the other two ALTs from Murakami, get to bumble around onstage the entire time. Should be a piece of cake! I call this everyday life. Really hope that it all comes together and can`t wait to get it started!

(Warning: All criticism in the following paragraphs shouldn`t be taken to heart; it`s just how I really felt at the time)

In an effort to add yet another sport? skill? activity? to my already full calendar, I allowed Bryan to talk me into trying snowboarding last weekend. Not that he really had to try too hard, I`ve been wanting to try it for a long time now, it was just the poor geography of Eastern Canada keeping me from actually doing it. So bright and early last Saturday morning we cruised down to Wakabuna Ski Resort, which is only a 30 minute drive south of Murakami city. I rented some gear and got to learning the basics.

Why oh why was I not blessed with any sort of grace or heaven forbid, balance?! After being hauled up to standing for the first half an hour and then left to my own devices while Bryan and Nicole took off up the lift ( no way in hell I was going up so soon!), one of Aaron`s Japanese friends took pity on me and tried to teach the poor stupid foreign girl how to stand on the board. Now, I try to take criticism constructively, I really do, but when I`m just learning something for the first time and obviously frustrated just back the hell off. I`m not exaggerating or being humble when I say that I`m really just not good at sports in general.  This man didn`t understand this, and continued to `instruct` me for the next hour or so (`bend your knee, bend your knee`)..until I had successfully gotten down the mountain with all appendages intact and ran into Nicole, with whom I stuck like glue to for the rest of the day. I`m sorry that my long legs don`t bend as well as your short ones old Japanese man, and I`m sorry that no matter how many times I told you this fact (in Japanese) that you just didn`t get why I wasn`t already a snowboarding queen under your tutelage.  After that I more or less had a great day. I fell fewer and fewer times (minus the time we decided to try the `other` trail...which wasn`t the best idea we had all day), and by my 5th and last run, I had only fallen twice and was leafing (is that what it`s called?) back and forth across the slope at a fairly good pace, if I do say so myself. That`s not to say that I didn`t brilliantly wipe out, oh let`s just say more than you can count on one hand, but I just laughed it off. After years of (attempting) to play sports, what else can one do except to laugh at their own inability to stand on both feet?

I was SOO incredibly sore when 4 o`clock came around and a little woozy from bouncing my head off the snow like a basketball (read: earlier stated wipe outs), but I felt that we had indeed deserved to get us some curry from the Nepalese restaurant, which as usual was the right choice :) Naan=happiness, simple as that. The drive home to Sanpoku was an interesting time...not. I  had to pull over twice due to nausea, and actually drove the speed limit for once cause my head hurt so much. By the time I got home everything was wobbly and I couldn`t stand. Exhausted I went to bed and didn`t move until my alarm went off the next morning. Rolling myself out of bed, cause my legs and arms had more or less abandoned me, I noticed that the nausea and wobbliness hadn`t gone away. So I rested all of Sunday, and didn`t eat anything. Come Monday I dragged my sorry ass into work and somehow managed to get through my three classes, though thank god two of them was just a reading test and I was able to sit the entire time. Noticing that I wasn`t able to speak as loud as I usually did without getting a headache and that the nausea and wobbliness was still there in full force, I admitted defeat and decided that it was now time to go to the hospital. The doctor suggested a Cat Scan, which thankfully showed that my brain was alright, but had done some damage to the part that controls balance and nausea and would probably be out of sorts for the rest of the week. Of course I would be the one to have a mild concussion. And here it is 4 days since the cause of it all and everything is still looking pretty wonky. :( The only good to come of this is the lack of appetite that had begun to sneak up on me again over the past month. Not going to lie, it felt nice not feeling the need to eat all 900 calories of the school lunch today just because there was rice still left in my bowl. Take that rice gods! Go fatten up someone else with your over-leaden carbs! I miss potatoes :(

So there, that`s my snowboarding misadventure. Equipment is beginning to go down to clearance prices lately, which begs the question, do I keep up with this whole winter sporting facade or should I just bow out now while the majority of my braincells are still intact.

Any thoughts on this, concussion?