After some heated cogitation, I believe I've figured out the function of extreme sports. I was up at the rec center working up a sweat (because it's too cold and windy for a winter wimp like me to walk outdoors) while watching these Xtremely insane young men compete in a series of Xtraordinarily ridiculous events in the Winter X Games, and at first I couldn't figure out the point.
You want to drive a snowmobile up a steep ramp and then flip it upside down while swinging your feet from side to side and doing a little can-can kick? That's got to violate a whole mess of rules--if not the laws of physics, then certainly the conventions of common sense. Snowmobiles are heavy, clunky chunks of equipment full of moving parts that could splatter your body all over that pretty snow, sort of like the wood-chipper scene in the movie Fargo. If God had intended for snowmobiles to fly, He would have equipped them with full-time orthopedists and traction gear.
And yet here were a bunch of guys willing and eager to go out in the cold and do Xtremely dangerous things with vehicles capable of killing them. Why? Granted, the medals look like lethal snowflakes you could use to disembowel your worst enemy, but even a good old-fashioned disembowelling is hard to enjoy if you're on crutches. People willing to fly through the air on and under twirling snowmobiles must fulfill some sort of redeeming social purpose, but what could it be?
The answer came to me when I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the glass: a middle-aged, pudgy professor wearing mismatched floppy workout gear to climb steps to nowhere, hair flapping and sweat dripping down her face, looking about as ridiculous as a person not wearing clown shoes can look and feeling not a whole lot better because she's spent a little too much time obsessing over stupid decisions, missed opportunities, failures large and small, and summing it all up, the person I saw reflected in the glass struck me as just hopelessly clueless.
And that's when I understood: no matter how many dumb things I may have done, I've never tried to make a snowmobile fly. I'll never earn a lethal snowflake medal, but when it comes to common sense, I'm way ahead of the pack.
1 comment:
Up here, my students tell me, it's popular to try to ride a snowmobile across open water; evidently, it works if you're going fast enough.
I think there's a lot of alcohol involved in the design and instigation of such sports.
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