All smiles

Disclaimer: This is a completely self-indulgent blog. Read at your own risk of disgust. And enjoy!

Climbing! What’s next?

I’ve taken a few days off, working and feeling sore when I wake until I wrap myself around a cup of coffee and allow the caffeine to jumpstart my mind and muscles.

I’m reading Lynn Hill’s Climbing Free, her memoir/autobiography. The stories are exciting and provide insight into early climbing years, giving the big names like John Long, John Yablonski, Warren Harding and other classic crazies real personalities, quirks that make them real people, like hearing about nicknames and their fireside stories and what they’ve turned into now. I imagine Lynn (they used to call her Lynnie!) hanging out awkwardly amongst these literal and figurative giants, the teenage prodigy looking for her niche, and I identify with that. We all look for our niche, and some of us are lucky enough to find it in the climbing community. I wonder now if there’s still a dirtbag community in Yosemite, and I remember that yes, there is, they work in the lodge as servers, I’m working with one now.

My climbing community has changed over the years, and I’ve grown more comfortable in the midst. Part of that is growing up and becoming comfortable in my skin, no longer relying on my climbing ability to prove myself. I don’t have anything to prove. I’ve realized I climb for myself, to satisfy myself.

Unless I’m climbing with an unfamiliar partner and he’s climbing really hard stuff. Then I feel like I have to show that I’m hardcore too, because I’m a woman, because I despise the crag girlfriend, because I live to shatter the female stereotype. Then I’ve got something to prove.

It’s a good thing this blog is just for me, since the above contradicts itself right and left. Your problem, not mineJ

The reason I picked up Climbing Free was for inspiration. If Beth Rodden had a book out, I’d read that and hope there was a section on The Optimist. But she doesn’t, despite her English degree (Tommy, we know who writes your articles), so I look to climbing’s greats that are old enough for memoirs. Suggestions for who’s next? I’ve got Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, but I think that will be pretty quick – if you’ve seen the movie, how much more could there be?

This week is exciting for several reasons: I’ve got two solid climbing days lined up, I’ve got a new hat design in the works and a pair of glovelets halfway done, I’m reading climbing history and literary classics (My Antonia), AND,

Nate and Shan are coming to visit this weekend!!!

Can you not tell how excited I am? Maybe you can. I’ll let you into a little piece of my brain: Nate and Shan are coming and maybe Morgan to and they’ll get here on Saturday night so we’ll meet at the pub and I’ll get to introduce them around – who will be there? Kurtis and JC and whoever’s working the door and we’ll sit at the Lbar and drink a beer and maybe have an app and I’ll be smiling so hard my face will hurt and do I want to invite anyone else to come or do I want to have these guys all to myself to start with? Maybe later that night, we’ll head back to my place and make some dinner, maybe we’ll have a huge house dinner since Kaylie’s friends will be in town too and we’ll all drink a lot of beer and fill up our house with light and noise and cooking smells and the neighbor lady might or might not yell at us it probably depends on how drunk she is and maybe our neighbors will come over, depending on what happens at the Valentine’s Bonfire.”

This is what’s going thru my head right now. Every minute I want to squeeze from these guys. I cannot wait!!! (There’s the three exclamation points again. Bad writing technique, I know, but effective).

I love having friends like these guys.