Esto es très fun!

Well, my two hardest finals are out of the way. It was a bit of a personal hell - Dante has nothing on organic chemistry. In any case, provided I did not actually fail organic chemistry (despite the fact that the final made my soul bleed), I'm done it and good riddance. This was the course whose coordinator (a four foot tall fat man with round glasses and a nasal, high-pitched voice) made me cry during my first day at McGill when I asked to switch lab sections. This was the course where I was next in the alpahbet to a girl who regularly overdosed on ecstasy and attended all of one lecture during the entire semester, and hence she became my lab partner. This was the course where I spent three hours doing a microscale filtration and then proceeded to evaporate ALL of it in the vacuum. Add to that late-hour study sessions that induced slight delirium and significant panic while the Management students play loud rounds of beer pong below, and needless to say, if I pass the course, I will thank the gods and move on with my life.

The counterbalance to this hell is nordic skiing. There is absolutely no activity more fun than nordic skiing on a really really good day. There are some pretty bad days too - Klister and laclustre form and overly cold - but on good days it's really good (and on bad days it's still not bad, hehe). I went for the first time two days ago and it was as though the world was fixed. I used to love running, but I'm starting to think that it pales compared to coming to the team room, taking out my ancient combi skis, waxing with whatever comes to mind, and then flying through the deadly still white, the world muffled under my grooves. In the stillness of the smaller paths there is no evidence that the throbbing city has a chokehold on this mountain park. The branches bend under the snow, creating an archway of glory that seems somehow not quite as cold. And the best thing is that it need not end - the mountain is my backyard and playground until the snow thaws in late March.

There are few good ways to describe the weather and I dare not attempt it - in my school's poetry club we used to laugh at the poetry contest entrants who wrote tritely and predictably about things like rain and snow. (To be honest, that was a bit silly, given our respective levels of poetic prowess - i.e. not nearly good enough to be so pretentious.) But come. Find a pair of old skis- they don't have to be the flashy $900 Madshuses that the fat salesman tried to push at me in the ski store- and come to the trails of Mont Royal, to the Vermont backcountry, to the fjords of Norway, to the hills that we call mountains in the Czech Republic. (Don't tell the douchebags of the world, though. Perfection is better uncrowded.) And we'll ski and fall and cover the ground with not even a footprint left to tell the world we were there. Afterwards we can brush the snow off our hats and drink powdered hot chocolate and laugh easily, rejoicing in a world where the bullshit gets left behind and all that is left is the feeling of flight.



This is my backyard. Sure beats suburbia.

As regards the title of this post, it regards the incident where I fell flat on my face in front of the quebecois who was kindly letting me pass. I grinned shamefacedly, and he replied amiably, "C'est bon." As I got up and dusted myself off, I smiled back and said, "Gracias!".