Too much work (too much play)

and i look around and another more-than-a-month has passed, the weather has changed and the world looks like a new place. Today the biggest, wettest snowflakes i have ever seen are streaming from the sky in mesmerizing torrents. It is a perfect excuse to do nothing except watch the beauty and eat lots of food. It also started snowing on the mountain again. We cried with the rain in January and now we rejoice with the powdery perfection lying on the mountain daily. It is lighter, I awake with the light and watch gentle sunrises on the bus and see the sunset after I am home. Light is good. Light is light.

I turned a year older (well a day older but a year when i tell people) and yes i am displeased about being 23. I feel like at this age there is a semblance of maturity and responsibility i am supposed to display. And occasionally i feel like i am up to this task BUT i . don't. want. to be. Sometimes i hear myself having sensible responsible thoughts, safe thoughts, sort of "stop and look before you jump over that" thoughts and i think "WHEN did this happen?" so yes, i am displeased but similarly excited because it is change and change is good.

Regardless of my displeasure of being 23, turning 23 was radical. i had an amazing birthday party. My friend Tim told me a few days before my brithday that he and a friend, Bailey were having a surprise birthday party for me. I was surprised when i was told i was to have a surprise but then, well, it's weird to know you are having a party and then you wonder if you should do anything like inviting people to your "surprise" party. Anyway, it worked out fine, rad people showed up, Tim had decorated his house with balloons and streamers and I got presents which consisted of a fake tattoos, 6 bottles of wine, a metal lizzard and a drawing of hippopotomi (and i don't think anyone could want anything more). It is amazing to have friends, people i did not know existed a few months ago turning into people who are so important now- I am so blessed. It was delectably raucous and we danced and did silly things and i tattooed anyone in my vicinity.

My biggest problem with time moving on, is that in moving on it was slipping away and it became apparent that I had to start thinking about what possible path i could take after this American stint. And the problem I had, have and will probably always have comes from the root of all evils. that is, money. If you have a bunch of money then there is the security that you could go somewhere, fail in finding a job or anything good and then move on somewhere else where prospects are more possible. But if you don't have money then figuring out the next step is pretty pivotal to whether it will be possible to even make a step after that.

So i hummed and haad and internetted and found a job on a cruise ship that promised a ridiculous (and i mean ridiculous) sum of money for waitressing for something like 6 months and going to all sorts of exciting continents. And my eyes lit up at the possibility of saving money and not having to worry so much in the future and then i realized that i would be stuck and i would be WAITRESSING.

I have tried waitressing before, in many different contexts, for many different time periods and most experiences has gotten me in a whole lot of trouble, repeated trouble littered with lots of tears. Remembering details in order and time is not my forte and the idea of doing this in an enclosed place for a couple if months with no quick escape route was mortifying me. So some worries later, I saw an email from a friend from Ireland and i thought, well, I want to go to Ireland. Work on an organic farm and go to Italy in June. The thought took route and i said goodbye to the buckets of money I could earn and to the caribbean and the idea of being warm again and decided Ireland it is.

But with the prospect of not obtaining any income for 2 and half months led me to realize that i need to definitely pick up some extra money right now where i am. So i started picking up a series of double shifts at the mountain. This is a good deal most of the time because i spend a good 2.5 hours a day on travel time to and from the mountain so if i spend that much travel time on 13 hours of work it is more worth it. So one week i picked up 3 doubles in a row (where i get home at 11pm and get up 5.45am) and a single shift but when i almost punched a friend of mine for being annoying i realized that too many doubles in a row is not a safe way to live your life, even if you are raking in more cash in less time, you are still never receiving any downtime to just sit on your couch or enough sleep time and it is precarious to relations with the world around you.

So now i am trying to complete 7 shifts a week and summon the energy on my 2 days off to do exciting things. But it is hard to do exciting things when you are exhausted. But not to worry, work is still a good pass time so it isn't simply pain and torment,. Yes there are days of monotony and mad cold but there are times when one does, literally, get paid to ski (well we aren't supposed to, but we are). The night lift attendants, for some reason have more people stationed on their lift in the evenings and so invariably people become obsolete and so one just takes turn to ride the mountain. I had to evenings where I was tag teaming with another liftie, I took half an hour to ride, then he took half an hour and we completed our shift in joyness. One of those nights i hired some skis and improved my skiing ability, somewhat out of control, getting paid to rent free skies and learn another silly mountain sport.

And yes snowboarding continues to be precarious. There's this section of the mountain called Private Reserve and it's full of cliffs and crazy terrain. To give you an idea, one of the sections of private reserve is called "S&R cliffs" which stands for "Search and Rescue cliffs". Anyway I made a proimise to myself that i would never go in there alone which i promptly broke one day and sooner or later i found myself sitting inbetwen two cliff drops with ice above and ice below and well, nowhere really to go unless i wanted to risk hurtling down onto some little trees. I sat there, somewhat amused at how i am so good at getting myself in sitautions and then i realized that my cellphone had reception and furthermore, i knew the extension for ski patrol as i phone it all the time for people at work. So i phoned them and explained my situation and the Ski patrol dispatcher was like "You work here right?" and i replied "Ummm... yes" (Lifties shouldn't be calling ski patrol for their own needs, that's just embaressing) and he said "You're that South African girl right?" and i knew tha t my accent had blown any semblance of cover i was trying to have and by the time the ski patroller had thrown a rope to me and helped my haul myself out of my cliffed-out status and i had made it back to the lift operations building all the managers were asking if i was alright because ski patrol "had to" phone lift operations to let them know what happened and who it was (of course). However i have never been officially rescued before and i enjoyed the experience and the trees were really pretty where i was waiting for them to be rescued.

I have 2 more weeks left working at this mountain and then new things await and hopefully I will be able to make it comfortably to Ireland to learn about beekeeping and I can eat millions of honey and live a sort of Winnie-the-Pooh esque life with the simple wisdom he displays.

In the words of Cake; "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps..."