Were we This Bad in our Youth?

So we go skiing this past weekend to celebrate our friends' son's 8th birthday (Happy Birthday, Conor!) and we're up in Keystone during the "36 Hours of Keystone" annual event. Basically the lifts are open for 36 hours straight where teams of skiers/boarders are encouraged to go for all 36 hours for some kind of prize. So you can imagine the person who is interested in skiing in the middle of the night.

Got it- not anyone over 24. Nor anyone sober.

It was quite a weekend. 3am awakenings of the kids coming off the slopes- "Whoo-hoo! Yea! That was AWESOME!"- yelled as loudly as possible outside of our window. And this had already gone on since the evening- when I tucked the kids in about 9:00pm, Ethan asked me to close the windows (they weren't open).

Ten years ago I'm sure I would have found this all a real hoot, not so much at the ripe OLD age of 36 (ouch!).

Well, the good thing about all of this was that these youngsters who had caught big air all night were too hung over to ski/board in the morning. So the rest of us had a great time with no crowds and no lift lines until about 11:00am. This is about when I noticed the fashion statement:

Ski pants below your butt.

What is this?! I barely understand why it's vogue to wear your jeans down to your knees, but SKI PANTS?? It's cold. Really, really cold. Normal people are wearing 18 layers of long underwear, turtle necks, balaclavas, double layered jackets, hats pulled down to meet our goggles which meet the gators around our necks, and these guys have their pants down to their knees. Maybe there's a thing for this type of fashion- like super-wicking, warm thermal, double layered underwear to go underneath. What do I know?

And that's just the guys. At -2 wind chill, the girls choose looking good over staying warm ALL the time. A long underwear shirt under a really cool, tight-fitting bubble vest with fuzzy hood, goggles but no hat, giant pants. I swear, this is totally what they look like. And it's -2. At about 18 degrees they switch to short sleeves but still have gloves.

Meanwhile at lunch when we doff our heavy clothes, I have my gay, ribbed turtleneck with the too-short sleeves tucked into my billowy ski pants and I take off my hat, even though I have TOTAL hat head and NO makeup whatsoever. Nobody would EVER try to pick ME up with the way I look on a ski day. And, I don't even care.

I think I've officially become an old fuddy-duddy.