{"id":39765,"date":"2019-11-08T16:03:49","date_gmt":"2019-11-08T21:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/?p=39765"},"modified":"2019-11-15T15:12:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T20:12:50","slug":"skating-for-the-first-time-at-moveus-scary-skate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/2019\/11\/08\/skating-for-the-first-time-at-moveus-scary-skate\/","title":{"rendered":"Skating for the First Time at MoveU’s Scary Skate"},"content":{"rendered":"I didn\u2019t actually know how to skate when I showed up at MoveU\u2019s Scary Skate on Halloween. (I still don\u2019t.) I\u2019ve wanted to go ice skating for a while now, ever since I\u2019d known that it was a possibility (and not just in the abstract.) So I stood in line with (at least) a million other people who had also decided that ice skating was a fun thing to do on the night of October 31st<\/sup>.\r\n\r\n
\"The<\/a>
The poster for the MoveU Scary Skate.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\nI had never really considered the possibility that skates might be more than just shoes with blades attached. However, holding the figure skates (rented for free; thanks MoveU!) in my hands, I was confronted with the reality that they are a phenomenon unlike any other. I started threading the laces through the holes, as one does with regular shoes, and soon discovered that my progress was inhibited by the presence of small metal obstacles, affixed directly above each hole. This was puzzling. The metal hook seemed to be placed in precisely the correct position to prevent me from doing what I was trying to do.\r\n\r\nIn the long tradition of people who realized that they didn\u2019t know what they were doing, I glanced around for someone who did. I was assisted by a cheery girl from Brazil, who showed me how to cross and loop the laces around the metal hooks. Victory! I had thwarted the ill-intentioned metal hooks! I stood up. I took a step. Immediately, my ankle rolled, and I nearly lost my balance. I\u2019d read somewhere that they teach people to skate by first walking on land, and I decided that that was a good idea. Forty minutes of practice later, I was able to walk in skates with a mere thirty-five percent chance of collision with the floor. I decided that this would have to do. I managed to get on the ice. And then a moment later, I successfully got off.\r\n\r\nTrue, I hadn\u2019t actually <\/em>skated. But I had taken some necessary first steps, I\u2019d talked to some interesting people, and I had fun wobbling back and forth along the mat. That was when I overheard the conversation that was occurring not two feet away from me. Someone was saying, \u201cI saw this girl who was like\u201d- he mimed his knees going soft and knocking together- \u201cand I was, like, yikes, <\/em>what is going on here.\u201d His friends laughed loudly at his knock-kneed pantomime.\r\n\r\nThat girl was probably (definitely) me. It\u2019s funny how the older we get, the more entrenched our fear of failure becomes. We don\u2019t want to \u201cembarrass\u201d ourselves, and there\u2019s nothing more embarrassing than being bad at something. And because everyone is terrible when they begin, it also follows that we don\u2019t attempt unfamiliar things. We become entrenched in our habits and ways of thinking. That\u2019s a pretty dull way to live.\r\n\r\nI was awful at skating. <\/em>I had a good time. And it'll be an even more enjoyable experience the next time I go.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\nI didn\u2019t actually know how to skate when I showed up at MoveU\u2019s Scary Skate on Halloween. (I still don\u2019t.) I\u2019ve wanted to go ice skating for a while now, ever since I\u2019d known that it was a possibility (and…\n<\/div>
Continue reading “Skating for the First Time at MoveU’s Scary Skate”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>
Continue reading “Skating for the First Time at MoveU’s Scary Skate”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":393,"featured_media":39887,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1758,7204,62,65,61,70,58,67],"tags":[78,24,1733,12517,88,9307,15863,176,9420,27654,1734,15642,1896,25506,9353,27655],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39765"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39889,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39765\/revisions\/39889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}