Last night, in a continuing effort to acclimate myself to cold weather-type things, I went ice skating. I am probably doomed to never be able to skate well, since I never learned how to roller skate or rollerblade when I was a kid, and my first ice skating experience occurred at a shopping mall in Alabama. This doesn't stop me from every year going skating two or three times, but the infrequency in which I skate is not helping the learning process. Each year I go through the same progression from taking small steps while grabbing the wall to skating next to the wall with my hand above the railing to walking on the ice away from the wall to "skating" proper, but then I go 9 months without laying eyes on ice skates and have to repeat the whole process the next year. "Muscle memory" apparently doesn't work when you've only done something ten times in your life.

And even at the end of a winter of skating sessions it's not like I am able to skate like a normal person. For one thing, I am never totally in control of where I'm going or what I'm doing. Sometimes I spin around in a circle, sometimes I veer off to the side in the path of many people, sometimes I go perfectly straight, but all the time it's painfully clear that the skates control me rather than vice versa. Most people go push...glide...push...glide... while my skating is more like push...stumble stumble stumble...push...spread my arms out like wings so as not to lose my balance. There is also the whole issue of stopping. My method of stopping involves either gliding until my velocity slows to zero or running into a wall.

I am convinced that if I just went skating on a more regular basis I could at least master a few basic skills, like not endangering the people around me, but I don't think I'll ever have the balance to play alongside Full Professor Cytron on the Blast.