Friday's Fantastic Flops

It's been a wild weeks of ups and downs for me at work, but I'm so happy to say that the week ended on an up. There is a problem person at work and they were dealt with; it's been a long time coming, but it has made for a fabulous start to the weekend. It also made for a slightly messy start to the weekend because this good news was greeted with an impromptu social outting with some of the work colleagues I do enjoy. Add to this that I had agreed to another skating session with AB. Apparently alcohol and skating are not the best combination, who knew? At least I wasn't actually drunk, just pleasantly buzzed, and the cold air helped me sober up pretty quickly.

AB had bought herself pretty new hockey skates and, and as I laced up my fabulous rented skates with one lace too long and the other not long enough, I felt that twinge of jealousy creep over me. I want new skates! No, scratch that, I want skates! Alas, being a student and being cheap, this is a purchase that will have to wait until the summer when I'm working fulltime and can justify it (and by justify, I mean 'pretend I have money to burn'). I looked around at our fellow skaters and felt a bit disappointed. Last week there had been a few older people, parents with younger kids mostly, but this week I was the oldest person by a dozen years, maybe even a baker's dozen. Great, just how I wanted to spend my Friday night when I'm buzzed.

Part of the problem with the group skates like this is that you have a collection of the following:
1) Really bad skaters who hang onto the board, and step-step-step
2) People who can go forward and look like they know what they're doing but can't stop (me)
3) People who are decent skaters who can stop among other things (AB)
4) Little sh!t kids who dream of becoming professional hockey players who zip in between people with the speed of a hummingbird but without the awareness that not everyone can change direction as quickly as they can.
Tonight's skate was full of #4. FULL! There was one particular kid who was an amazing skater, but he must have measured all of 4'6"; he would just pop out of nowhere, give me a heartattack, and then continue around the rink. I may have made a snarky comment about tripping him up on purpose, and AB may have agreed with and even encouraged it on a few occasions. But all this was forgotten when the MOOA arrived (Men Our Own Age.)

Unlike last week where the few men our age were with a cow girlfriend, there were five guys around our age all without a girlfriend in tow. Now I'm not assuming that one doesn't have a girlfriend just because she's not there, but if I can't see her then she doesn't exist until you tell me otherwise or she comes racing from the shadows and slaps me.. So here I am, happy that there's finally some eye candy which doesn't make me wonder if I should be on some sort of registry, and I make a complete fool out of myself. This wasn't a surprise to me; as I once said to a friend "my game's so bad it doesn't make it out onto the pitch for a warm up session" and I wasn't joking.

Two of the guys caught my single eye and I kept casually glancing around the rink to see where they were just so I knew when to look like I knew what I was doing. During one of my casual glances, I missed seeing the big divet in the ice. When I say 'big', you could lose a Cadillac in that thing! A Smart Car? Tonka Truck? Fine, a matchbox car. At the very least, it was big enough to lose the front of my pick into. I was going with such speed that I flew forward doing my best angel imitation, came crashing down on my left knee, bounced back up (I know, knees bounce?) to land on my well-padded chest and then slid forward about two feet before my skates reconnected with the ice's surface and stopped the forward momentum. I actually slid foward on my chest; my legs were in the air! And who comes sailing by after this moment of grace? Why one of the hot-hot men. He was laughing... at me. It wasn't an evil laugh, just a 'that was awkwardly awesome' laugh as he cross-stepped away from me. I looked over my shoulder at the divet, trying to figure out the quickest way back to it so I could crawl inside.

I get up and get over myself. So some rather hot but nameless guy watched me make a fool of myself, so what? I've done worse (no really, I have; much, much worse); I'm not here looking for someone, I'm here to have fun with AB. We go around a few more times, every trip around the rink builds my confidence, and we come to the inevitable point where we're behind some slow people. AB pulls to the left of them to go around, I pull right to head between them and the boards. I start swinging my arms to help build my momentum around the slow pokes and my right hand accidentally punches hottie #2... in the groin... as he tried to sneak to the right of the slow pokes as well. He appologizes to me (don't know why, but wasn't that nice? I hit him, he says 'sorry') and skates off a bit slower and shakier than he was on any of the other times he lapped us.

Sadly that is probably the best my 'game' has been in a while, and my friends wonder why I'm single...