-Benjamin Franklin

I’m not exactly sure where I am as far as this quote goes, but I suppose that’s ok.  As far as I’m concerned, I’ve been doing things worth writing about.  I’m still riding high on the sense of accomplishment from climbing those four mountains last Saturday.  I’ve climbed 25 mountains this winter and have 2 left to go.  Of the 27 I set out to climb this winter, those four from Saturday were the ones I was most trepidatious about.  Not scared; just not particularly looking forward to them.

The part of my brain that likes to beat me up has been trying to figure out how I didn’t really “do it all the way” – how there must be some way that I cut corners or copped out and somehow didn’t really climb those mountains.  But there’s a canister at the summit of each of those mountains with my name and 3/6/10 next to it written in the logbook within.  I really wish my iPhone’s charger hadn’t crapped out and that I have the gps data for the whole trip.  But what the hell, I’ve climbed plenty of mountains besides those well before I even had the capability of recording the trip.  A map and a compass, dear reader:  that’s all I had to go by when navigating from peak to peak.  Well, there were some tracks in the snow for the portion along the river and between the last two mountains, but she-yit, that was about it.

The last two mountains should be relatively easy.  I’m looking forward to a break afterward, though.  My left leg is bone-sore below the knee.  It feels mostly like it’s a tendon thing, but it goes deeper too.  No worries, though:  I could climb those last two mountains on crutches if I had to.  Of course, I’d rather not.

I’m trying to figure out what’s next.  I was considering joining the local rock climbing gym, but I think I’ll save that for next winter.  Right now, it looks like it might be backpacking.  Oh, I’ll still be peakbagging, but instead of only doing day trips and returning home to a nice hot shower and a warm bed, I’ll be returning to my tent or lean-to for some ramen or other cardboardish fare.  I’m starting to research backpacks, tents and other gear.

Probably the Adirondacks.  Even with camping out, the five-hour drive is still a bit daunting.  We’ll see.

I have no idea if I’ve been writing anything worth reading lately.  I kind of don’t think so.  Most of my blog posts have been pretty sporadic and unfocused.  Too many ‘general update’ style posts for my tastes, but hell, it’s what I’ve been writing.  I kind of miss working on things for Weekly Writing Assignment, but whatever.  I belong to a couple of writing groups on LinkedIn, and one of them does a monthly writing contest.  I should probably just get my ass in gear and write something for one of those.

I keep up with a lot of blogs.  I’m sure you’re familiar with The Naked Redhead at this point, but there are plenty of other blogs I read on a regular basis as well.  At this point, I’m not even sure how many RSS feeds are coming into my Outlook at work.  Trust me, though, it’s A LOT.  I keep up with corporate governance and investor relations stuff for work, as well as other regulatory and finance industry blogs, and I read a lot of stuff for fun too.  As Matt Vallerini has said “Ted’s on Mashable HARD.”

One of my favorites now (and for a while before now) is Lauren Flax’s blog.  I don’t know that I can recommend it highly enough.  Lauren’s a yoga instructor in Baltimore and she just got accepted to a writing program at Johns Hopkins.  She’s pretty effin prolific, and it’s all pretty good stuff.  I enjoy her fiction as well as her thoughts/general update posts.  I often find myself comparing my writing to hers and falling short, but we’ve relatively divergent styles and subject matters, so a comparison probably isn’t the best of ideas.

Lauren practices the art of writing.  In every sense of the word ‘art’.  I can’t really describe it any better than that.  She has fully-formed and well-worked pieces, as well as fragments and bits that may never see the potter’s wheel again.  By contrast, writing for me has very much been a craft of late:  website copywriting and lots of editing non-creative pieces at work.  I used to just highlight things and add a note like “unclear” or something and tell the person to rewrite the sentence/paragraph, but of late I’ve been doing the rewriting myself.  There’s really no use in criticism without a suggestion as to how to improve something.  I really enjoy editing. . . which makes me think that I should probably finish plugging my edits into Franco’s novel and send them off to her (at this point, it’s been just over a year since she sent me her last draft).  Frig.

I’ve been meaning to give a shout out to Lauren’s blog for a while now, but couldn’t really find the words.  Hell, I still don’t have them; I don’t think the one’s I’ve written so far suffice, either.  “Check it out” is all I can really say; you won’t be disappointed.  Lauren does things worth writing when she’s not writing things worth reading.

I’m still enamored with her story Stanley that earned her a finalist spot at Weekly Writing Assignment back in August.  I can’t find the link to the story on her blog, so you’ll have to make do with the one to WWA.  I still think of it and wonder every time I’m scratching Laila Jo behind the ears.

Normally, my dreams fall into one of two categories:  muddled and forgotten re-hashings of the recent past, or clear and memorable conundrums that don’t relate in any linear fashion to what’s currently happening in my life.  Last night’s dreams were a mix of both.

It took me forever to fall asleep.  Before I actually did, I spent some time in that middling area where I’m dreaming but some part of me wakes and becomes cognizant of the fact that I’m dreaming without actually leaving the dream.  I dreamt that my ex-wife was lying by my side – in my bed at that very moment.  It was very comforting and comfortable.  But it wasn’t real, so I woke fully and walked a circle around my apartment to clear my head before it hit the pillow again.

There’s probably something buried there.  I’ve dated women since being married, but those relationships did not have the same weight and depth of my relationship with my wife.  I suppose I was just dreaming a pleasant memory – but not one in which I’d prefer to get lost.  What did Brad Warner say?

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea.  Stick with reality.  Reality’s all you’ve got.  But here’s the real secret, the real miracle:

It’s enough.

#truth.  I’m glad I woke and didn’t allow myself to get too far down that path of fantasy.

Later on, I dreamt of being on an island with a bunch of other people.  The water was rising and the island was being flooded – albeit relatively slowly.  But there wasn’t much time.  We needed to get things together and onto a boat so that we could get off the island before it was too late.

One of my companions had a huge dick – and I mean like fucking GARGANTUAN – and all he wanted to do was f*ck the big-breasted, wide-hipped naked women that somehow seemed to be flooding our little community.  I don’t know how many other communities there were on the island, but mine wasn’t the only one.

I mostly wanted to get everyone together, gather supplies, and get the hell off the island, but for whatever reason, I seemed to know that the gesture and my desires were futile:  that the dude and the brown-skinned sirens were going to spend their last days effing, instead of doing something to save themselves.

Again, my dreams are painted more in emotions and feelings than actual happenings.

Ha – one of the chicks picked up an STD from the dude (“it burns,” she said, “that’s what you get for being so promiscuous”) – but that didn’t stop her from being next in line to impale herself on him.

In retrospect, I suppose that those voluptuous young ladies were sirens.

I think I just either woke up or slipped into another dream sequence, as much as it might please me to write a happy ending to the story – maybe that I gave up and escaped on my own, or with a single just-right-for-me virgin – but I don’t remember anything like that happening.

So yeah, dreams of love, dreams of sex (with, lol, consequences), dreams of some semi-unnamed relentless, inevitable doom creeping ever closer . . . I’m really not sure what all that means or what I’m supposed to do with it.

I suppose I’ll just try to make it to work on time again tomorrow.

This past winter it was really cold, right?  Well, it was really cold here in NNJ – I don’t know where your readers are from, TNR.  So I was at the diner with a couple of buddies one evening:  we finish eating, go outside to smoke (in the freezing cold) and then peace-out.  As I’m walking to my car at the other end of the lot, I watch this dude pull in right next to me on the driver’s side – one of those really ugly hatchback something-or-others with the wide tailpipe and racing stickers on the back.  Anyway, he pulls in about 9 inches from my car – doesn’t hit it or anything, but he’s too close for me to open my door and get in on the driver’s side.  So, like 5 seconds after he gets out of his car, I pass him in the lot and say “hey man, could you move your car over a bit?  I don’t think I’m going to be able to get into my car with you that close.”  He turns around, looks at his parking job (there are other spots in the lot, and he had PLENTY of room on HIS driver’s side), and says something along the lines of “pfft.  Whatever dude; you got lotsa room.” 

Sure enough, when I get to my car, there’s like 9 inches between us.  I have to crawl in from the passenger side, which is kind of a pain in the ass because I drive a stick shift Mini Cooper with bucket seats (not that they make ‘em with bench seats – but if they DID, I’d sure as hell have one, a la that Cake song “stick shifts and saftey belts, bucket seats have all got to go…”).  Anyway, as I’m warming up my car – like you do when it’s like 4 degrees F outside – I’m getting more and more pissed at the dude’s plain lack of human decency.  And I start to have to pee.  Not because I’m pissed, but because I drank about 3 large glasses of water in the diner.  And then it hits me:  “it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on.”

So I back my car out of the spot I was in (my car is nice ‘n toasty now) and pull in to the spot on the other side of monsieur douchenozzle’s car.  I back in, so that I can open my door so nobody walking through the parking lot will see me pissing on the door-lock on HIS driver’s side. 

Now, Red, I know that most of your readers are women, but this is one of those times where men have certain advantages in life:  the ability to aim our urine and to stanch the flow via gentle pressure to the urethra.

I spent the next five or so minutes peeing in his lock, giving it a second to freeze, and peeing some more on top of that.  “Ha-ha,” you say:  everybody knows that car door-locks have those little metal things on them specifically to keep water (urine) out.  Yes, but I own several paperclips.  I used one of these to hold the little metal flap up/aside as I did my work.  No splashes or anything.

Power door-locks?  I thought of that too.  When I finished peeing, I took one of the half-finished gallons of water I had left from hiking and poured it in the joints of BOTH of his shitty little racecar’s doors.  Slowly.  A little at a time.  So it would have time to freeze.

I’d love to say “then I took a big dump on the hood of his car (and it was shaped like a mountain lion),” but I didn’t.  Mainly because I didn’t have to poop and, again, it was witch-tit cold outside.  The whole thing took about fifteen minutes and I totally boogied out of there when I was done.

Via: Online Schools

I parked at the Denning Road trailhead and headed along the Neversink about 5 miles to the summit of Friday, then looped back around, summitting Balsam Cap, Rocky and Lone.  It was pitch black when I found the canister on Lone.

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Yes, all four of these mountains were bushwhacks, but there’s no way I would have been able to physically handle that hike (probably between 12 and 14 miles) in the snow without other people cutting at least part of the trail for me.  Mad props go out to Drama and SoloJoe (aka John and Joe) for cutting the trail along the Neversink up to Rocky, as well as the trail from Rocky to Lone.  I wouldn’t have bagged that fourth peak if someone hadn’t been out ahead of me.

The Catskill 3500 Club had an outing to climb Rocky and Lone this past Saturday – 11 hikers total, from what I heard.  They followed John’s and Joe’s tracks along the Neversink and up Rocky.  I was well behind the club outing (they started a couple of hours before me), so I followed their tracks to the turnoff for Rocky and broke my own trail another mile to the summit of Friday.  Summitting Friday was a nightmare.  Thick pine trees all the way up, so I got wet, dirty and scratched.

I was kind of counting on someone having cut a trail between Friday and Balsam Cap, but no one had been there since February 22d, so I had to cut that trail myself.  Through more thick pine trees pretty much the whole way down & up.  Because it’s rare (I think) that the four mountains are climbed together, I wasn’t expecting a trail between Balsam Cap and Rocky.  And there wasn’t one.  I was, however, planning on being able to follow the 3500 Club’s tracks from Rocky to Lone, but they pussied out and followed their tracks back down after summitting Rocky.

By the time I signed in at the canister at the summit of Rocky, I was spent.  The charge on my iPhone was out, and, even though I charged it the night before, there wasn’t any juice in my portable charger, so I don’t have the whole hike plotted out, which is a major bummer because it’s probably the most badass one I’ve done to date.  You can view the first 7.3 miles of it on my EveryTrail page.

With no trail to follow, I just didn’t have the energy to get over to Lone, so I resigned myself to bagging it another day.  On the way down, however, I noticed two sets of snowshoe tracks that led off toward Lone, instead of back to the Neversink, so I followed them.  I figured they’d either be headed back to the trailhead via a shorter route or to the summit of Lone.  It was the latter.

I ran out of water and sunlight on the way up Lone.  As the tracks started going downhill, I turned back around, figuring I missed the canister turnoff.  Which I did.  What I found was a warren of showshoe tracks where John and Joe walked all around the summit looking for the canister.  At this point it was pitch black out and I could only see as far as the light from my headlamp.  The sky was clear and the stars were gorgeous.

Just after I started trying to figure out which of the myriad sets of tracks led back to the trailhead, I bumped into the cansiter, which was a real blessing.  I signed in and spent another fifteen minutes or so trying to locate the homebound tracks (on top of the fifteen or so I had already spent looking for the canister).  I’m guessing it was around 7:30 or 8 at this time.

As I was following the tracks back down the mountain, I saw a couple of lights ahead of me.  Then a couple of dudes voices were calling out to me, asking me where I was going.  I figured it was the park rangers and that they’d be pretty pissed they had to come this far to find my skinny ass.  (This was a few hundred yards off the summit.)  It turns out that it was John and Joe and that I was following their tracks down.  It was fortuitous that I met up with them at that point, because I had just come into a clearing where the night wind had blown snow over their trail.  Joe asked me if I was getting worried (it being pitch black outside and that we were in the middle of the woods with no trail to follow back home) and I said hell no in a tone of voice that kind of suggested it was a dumb question to ask.  What I meant was that I wasn’t worried because I had tracks to follow that could only lead back to the trailhead (snowshoeing – or hiking in general, for that matter – really doesn’t get any easier than that.  Joe later thanked me for putting his mind at ease, because he was getting a little worried at that point.

They asked if I wanted to roll with them back to the trailhead and I said hell yes.

So I spent the next three miles or so getting to know John and Joe on the way down the mountain.  We took turns breaking the trail and telling hiking stories.  Comradeship is fun.

I have some relatively philosophical things to say about the hike as a whole, but I think I’ll save them for another time.

After reaching the trailhead and warming up our cars and shooting the shit for another hour or so, we made our goodbyes.  As we were doing so, Joe said to me “hey man, nice traverse.”  I can’t tell you how good that made me feel.  I guess it ended up being repayment for my not-worried comment/attitude.

So that’s it for now.  Maybe more later, but I have to get to work tomorrow.  I only have Bearpen and Kaaterskill High Peak left to go in my winter peakbagging extravaganza.

Last night I dreamt of things biting my hands – I think they were smallish dogs, but I’m not sure.  Whatever they might have been, it would have been easy enough for me to kill them, but I didn’t.  My non-desire to kill things in my dreams (despite my eminent ability) is not unusual.  I can only conclude that I’m a pacifist at heart, and that any violence in my life is necessarily calculated and comes from my mind.  The violence itself (and I’m speaking more-or-less metaphorically here) isn’t any source of pleasure for me, but the sense of accomplishment resulting from setting my mind to something and completing it is.

A couple of nights ago I dreamt of zombies.  Nothing particularly creative:  the usual doomsday we’re-outnumbered-and-dwindling-whilst-they’re-only-growing-in-number-with-no-end-in-sight scenario.  I remember thinking that it was pointless to be fighting the zombies – not that they would undoubtedly win, but rather that there wasn’t any reason why they should be coming for us.  We were holed up in some sort of mountainside river enclosure, which is to say that the mountainside and river were enclosed by some larger structure.  As I think back, the best way to describe it would be that gravity acted differently there:  the pieces of the river flowed around mountain outcroppings at a steep angle, but though they should by all rights have been waterfalls, they were just deep, slow moving bits of water.  Zombies spread like a virus, and that virus kept breaking out within our theoretically sealed and secure holdfast, for no apparent reason.  I think I remember triage decisions to euthanize – to put it kindly – friends and whatnot who had been recently infected.

The night before that was more of the same, though it wasn’t dogs or zombies.

I’m kind of at a loss as to where these dreams are coming from.  They seem to speak of an underlying source of anxiety in my life – a feeling of being hunted or chased.  But when I examine these feelings in the light of day, they seem to be naught but dreams.  Because my dreams are generally so pedestrian and easily recognizable as my brain rehashing recent events, I rarely have cause to remember them.  So when I have dreams like these, it’s reason for me to pause and consider.  I don’t believe in discounting them.

Maybe I’ll get some clarity from the hike tomorrow.  I’m going to attempt the Friday/Balsam Cap/Rocky/Lone range traverse.  It looks to be around 12 miles.  Twelve miles isn’t unmanageable, but the peaks of these four mountains are covered with near-impassable pine trees, so the going will be slow.  I’m going to leave early in the hope that I’ll have enough daylight to bag all four peaks.  If the snow is too wet, deep and heavy, I’ll turn off the trail (which is a misnomer, because almost the entire 12 miles will be bushwhack) sooner rather than later and just climb Rocky and Lone.

It’s supposed to be in the high 30s in the Catskills tomorrow, and I’m not sure what that will mean for the snow cover.   If it melts evenly and I can stride atop it cleanly, all will be well.  If it’s heavy and deep, the hike will be a real pain in the ass.  We’ll see what happens.  I have six mountains left to climb in the next three weekends.  If I can bag all four in the range tomorrow, I’ll take Sunday off.  If not, I’ll go back and finish off Bearpen on Sunday.

Nobody likes blog posts that start off with anything that even vaguely resembles “…haven’t blogged in a while…”, especially not ones that include an apology to the reader.  So, to wit:

Fuck you, dear reader; I’ve been busy.

Blogging isn’t really any kind of a chore for me – I really dig it, in fact.  It’s cathartic and does wonders for the organization of my thoughts – past, present and future.  But I usually leave that for the end of the day, which has been getting later and later (again) of late.  It’s after midnight right now and I really should have been in bed a while ago.

Things are going very well at work.  I’m a fuckin’ animal.  Projects that used to take me a day or two to complete two years ago (or half a day, a year ago) are only taking me a couple of hours now.  I’m able to find answers to people’s questions in seconds – and some of said people have been doing this kind of work for many more years than me.  I blame regular chess for my refined ability to switch gears and come at problems from different angles.  In the last couple of weeks, my boss has seemed genuinely happy to see me every day.  And I’m not getting into the office any earlier.  I’m also a lot more confident – my answers and solutions to questions or issues have been coming quicker and with more assurance than ever before.

That said, I’ve been a little low on the self-confidence scale of late.  Not in any overt manner – I’m not all cowed or anything – but I seem to have something niggling at the back of my head, something stirring the hairs on the back of my neck that feels like a lack of self-confidence.  I’m not sure quite what it is.  Every time I turn around (figuratively speaking), there’s nothing there.  Any general inventory or stock-taking I’ve compiled in the last few weeks has come up well in the black.  I really have no idea what exactly is going on – and the funny/ironic thing is, whenever I examine my feelings, I’m not really all that worried about it either.  I’m pretty chill, which is pretty fly.  What will be, will be:  I’m cool with whatever comes.

So yeah:  writing.  I’ve been doing kind of a lot of that lately (I’m including editing in there, because it uses the same or similar muscles), most of which consists of emails and reports for work.  I have a couple of irons in the fire for copywriting work, which is pretty cool.

But I haven’t really been writing for me all that much.  Not much blogging; no real thought-recording.  I know that’s partly to do with the hour at which I tend to sit down to blog.  It’s also partly due to the fact that I’m verbose – I mean “loquacious” – for whatever effin reason, I can’t bring myself to write a 250-word blog post.  And certainly not during the work day.  WTF.  Everybody else does.

I really need a few hours to sit down and read – zone out from the world and get lost in fiction.  Soon, Ted, soon.

Anyway, I’m off to bed.  Here’s the video from Tuesday night’s Flogging Molly show of If I Ever Leave This World Alive (recorded on my iPhone – god I love that thing):

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?

Elephino.

So yeah.  I’m pretty psyched, but mostly because I enjoy attending dance-your-face-off concerts with my sister Katie (who never fails to bring the awesomeness).  Our cousin Danny (excuse me, Dan or Daniel) will be attending as well; our brother John bailed because he’s a poopyhead.

As long as they play “If I Ever Leave This World Alive”, I’ll be happy.  Here’s the album version (crappy video, though):

And here’s a live video:

That song rarely fails to bring a tear to my eye.  Happily, as it rolls down my cheek, that tear generally mixes with the sweat from the rest of my face, and I’m generally too smiling and out of breath from screaming the lyrics to notice.

That’s not true.  I always notice that tear – right around “…hey if I never…” and “…she says: I’m ok, I’m alright…”

No, I’m not getting all choked up right now.  I’m not.  At all.

Other than that, not much is going on.  At this point, I’m trying to come up with something that qualifies as “among others” so that the title of this post isn’t a total lie.

I had a good meeting with my friend Ed Pirone this evening, talking about copywriting, web design, CMSs, social media crap, iPhone apps and other computer/internet related stuff.  Ed’s got good energy and I dig being around it.

Thievery Corporation is on my playlist right now (big time).  I downloaded their album The Richest Man in Babylon last night and I’m really digging it so far.

My fucking Trails iPhone app is still effing with me (big time).  I have six or seven hikes to upload, but they don’t seem to be going through.  I hit “Export to EveryTrail” and get the “Export to EveryTrail Successful!” notification, but it doesn’t actually show up on my EveryTrail page.  Vly uploaded last night, and I was able to upload Windham High Peak this evening, but I haven’t been able to get anything else to upload.  If anybody’s interested, I can send the .gpx or Google Earth files to you via email for any of my winter hikes so far.  Just email me at QuixoticJedi[at]gmail[dot]com and I’ll shoot them over to you.

One of these days I’ll get some free time and figure out what exactly is going on with that.  I’ve also found a cool site called GPS Visualizer (via CatskillHiker.com) that will enable me to embed Google Maps with my hikes plotted out on them.  That’s going to take some finagling:  I’ll need to expand my Google account and copy & paste some code during the embedding process, but it shouldn’t be too hard.

One of these days I’ll also figure out how to upload some fucking images to this blog.  I’ve tried several times and spent quite a bit of time bouncing around the WordPress Codex/support forum, but for whatever reason, it just hasn’t been working for me.  I’ve tried both from here at my dashboard and from my cPanel on BlueHost, but no joy.  WTF.  Seriously, WordPress is one of the most user-friendly platforms (dare I say CMS?) out there, and it’s just not working.  It’s got to be something I’m doing wrong.

But I’ll tell ya, dear reader, when the day comes that I can upload images and other files, it’ll be pretty sweet.  I have a shit-ton of pics on my AyePhone just waiting for your eyes.

Imagine doing one of those tire-runs – you know, the ones where there’s a field of tires and you have to get from one end to another by stepping in the center of the tires.  Now imagine that they’re BIG tires:  not quite monster-truck-big, but like the fat tires that they put on Jeeps to do some major four-wheeling or mud-running.  Now imagine that you’ve got five pound weights strapped to your ankles while you’re doing it.  Then put the tire field on the side of a mountain and you’re pretty close to what my day was like on Saturday.

The five pound weights stand for the snow that was on the tops of my snowshoes every time I lifted my foot out of the hole my last step made.  I can’t tell you how many times I thought – seriously thought – about turning around.  As it was, I was only able to climb Vly mountain.  Bearpen will have to wait for another day.

Last weekend, on my way up Windham High Peak, I met an old hiker (I forget his name) who was “training” for the Appalachian Trail this spring.  He told me that he’s planning on giving it a shot, that only about one in five people complete the AT.  I told him there’s no reason he shouldn’t be one of the five.  Later in our story-swapping session, he told me about a few hikes during which he wasn’t able to find the canister at various mountains.  (Canisters are located at the summits of trail-less mountains, for which a bushwhack is required.  They’re for sign-in purposes.)  With the exception of the very first bushwhack Scott and I did, I’ve never failed to find the canister on any one of the peaks I’ve climbed.  Come to think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever climbed a mountain and not reached the summit.

There are many kinds of people in this world, two of which are those who find the canister and those who don’t.  The guy I talked to on Windham is one of the latter.  I’m not.

Bearpen and Vly are right next to one another, and the hike to climb both is not a hard one.  I now have three weekends in which to climb six mountains (Bearpen, Kaaterskill High Peak, Rocky, Lone, Balsam Cap, and Friday).  Notwithstanding my desire to climb the latter four in a single hike, that means I’ve got four trips left for those three weekends.  I’m technically behind schedule.

I’ve entertained the thought that I might not be able to complete my goal for this winter’s peakbagging extravaganza.  But not for very long.  I’ll finish what I started.

When I parked my car on Saturday, it was about a mile short of the snowplow turnaround at the base of the mountains.  I had to walk that mile up the road in about a foot or so of snow.  The snow was much deeper after the snowplow turnaround.

On the way back, that last mile had been plowed.  At that point, my legs were jelly, so I was pretty psyched to be walking on a flat surface.  That last mile is probably the only one that I’ve put on the actual soles of my boots this winter (the rest of the time, I’d been wearing either snowshoes or crampons).  It occurred to me in that last mile that the snowplow may have inadvertently plowed me in.  I figured I’d count myself lucky if my mirror wasn’t accidentally ripped off, or if the whole driver’s side of my car wasn’t FUBAR.

The snowplow did not, in fact, inadvertently plow me in.  It plowed me in on purpose.  The rest of the road was clear, with the exception of a couple of pretty big piles of snow right in front of and behind my car.  My rear wheels were off the ground.  There was no snow along the side of my car and my mirror and door were intact; I count myself lucky.  I’m actually impressed at the skill of whomever was driving the snowplow – there was no damage to either end of my car.  This wouldn’t have been some dude in a pickup truck with a plow on it, either:  I’m talking about a heavy duty truck with a plow on the front and a plow on the side.  The snow on the sides of the road was piled up about ten feet high.

Luckily as well, the lady who lived across the street from where I parked just got home as I was getting back to my car.  She let me borrow her shovel and it only took me about ten minutes to get my car loose.  I count myself lucky that I have all my teeth and that they’re clean.

Well, I’m considering dialing that vicarious experience up a notch, dear reader.  I have four trips left, comprising 7 mountains; I’ve climbed 20 mountains since December 26th.  Tomorrow (today) I’ll be climbing Bearpen and Vly mountains.  They’re outside of the Catskill “Blue Line” (meaning they’re not technically in Catskill State Park), so these mountains aren’t accounted for in my Catskills map set.  Which means that not only do I need to find my own way to the tops of these mountains (there aren’t any trails to the summits), I also need to make my own maps.

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It’s not really as hard as it sounds.  I have the National Geographic Topo! software, so I can isolate these two mountains and print out a topographical map on a regular sheet of paper.  It won’t be a very good map, but what the hell, that’s what experience is for.  I’ve climbed these mountains before, and I think I could probably climb them without even bringing a map, but I’m going to print one out anyway just to be on the safe side.

This hike shouldn’t be ridiculously long – maybe 7 miles round-trip – so I’m considering climbing Kaaterskill High Peak on Sunday.  What with all the snow we’ve had here in NNJ in the past week, I’m not sure how bad the Catskills got hit.  If there are three feet of fresh snow on those mountains and no tracks to follow, any of the trips I have left will be a total bitch.  So I’ll check it out tomorrow (today) to see what the conditions are like.  If I can climb Bearpen and Vly without being totally exhausted tomorrow, I’ll bag Kaaterskill on Sunday and be a week ahead of schedule.

That will leave two trips:  Friday/Balsam Cap and Lone/Rocky.  Those four are, in my opinion, the hardest mountains to climb in the Catskills.  The peaks are all covered with extremely dense pine forest – imagine wall-to-wall Christmas trees, then make the Christmas trees a little taller and closer together and you’ll be getting close to what it’s like inside of that obstacle course.  Almost the whole hike is spent ducking under, going around, going through, or getting scraped up by stiff branches poking horizontally out of the trunks of the conifers.

On top of that, the hike just to get to Rocky (passing the base of Lone on the way) is almost five miles in and of itself.  Which means almost five miles of hike on the way out as well (not counting actually climbing those two fir-topped mountains).

Friday, Balsam Cap, Rocky and Lone basically form a northeast/southwest ridgeline.

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I’m considering bagging all four peaks in one day.  Considering – it’s not a plan just yet.  But if the Catskills don’t get too much more snow over the course of next week, and if I can get my lazy ass up early enough next Saturday, I think I might just be able to do it.  That would mean I’d be finished two weeks early.

We’ll see.  It’s just a thought right now, and I have a lot of those that end up growing up into not-so-good ideas.

I think.

I feel good right now because I just turned around a 400-word piece of copy in about an hour.  And it’s not too bad.  I’m getting faster, which is good.  Maybe not so, because I’m paid by the hour, but I think I’ll just focus on the silver lining of my sense of accomplishment.  Once upon a time, a little writing assignment like that would have taken me forever - I’d have procrastinated right up until the due date and then spent hours agonizing with my procrastination while I was actually writing.  It feels pretty good to bang out some copy without too much mental stress.

And check my work.  I’ve never really done that before.  I was a philosophy major in college, so I wrote a lot of papers – short ones, mostly, but I never actually went back over what I’d written.  Now I do.  A couple of times.  And I make changes, too.  Who’uldathunk?  I don’t know that I actually need an apostrophe in that word.  Hm.

Way-back-when, I was convinced (for whatever reason) that everyone did things this way:  that authors dashed off books by writing from start to finish.  Outlines?  Yeah, those are for the kids in the remedial classes who can’t keep what they want to say organized in their mind while they’re typing.  Pshaw.  True genius – specifically my true genius – was best expressed (hell, only expressed) in one shot.  Go back and make changes?  Hell no.  That would be corrupting the sanctity of the original work.

So yeah, I’ve changed a bit since then.  Besides the copywriting, I do a lot of writing for work.  I’m all about outlines and multiple drafts today.  Sometimes I even ask other people for comments or suggestions.  Parenthetically, though, I rarely incorporate them – old habits (e.g. extreme appreciation for one’s own staggering genius) tend to die hard.  Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

Seriously, though, outlines and multiple drafts over time are the way to go.  I try to avoid that eleventh-hour pressure as much as possible.  Stress happens, but I don’t need to be a cause of it for myself.

Possible forthcoming instant karma:

• $5 says my client isn’t satisfied with my work product from tonight.

Caveat to the above (and an indication of hypocrisy):

• I don’t make outlines or edit my blog posts.

Anyway, I’m gonna bounce.  I have a bunch of things on my plate for my day job – a couple of which just hit this evening.  Stress I didn’t cause.  And my right eye is still blurry, so staring at the computer screen all day has been giving me headaches.  I’m looking forward to the return of unobstructed vision.

…a-aaand I’m sorely tempted to leave it at that.

I need to figure out how to get the files I downloaded from MediaFire onto my iTunes/AyePhone – any suggestions?  Clicking & dragging just ain’t workin’.  I’ve got these two Vasco albums I’d like to burn and listen to in the car, but I can’t seem to get my computer to store them in the right place.  The first is Godzilla vs. Vasco and the other is From Vasco With Love.  My buddy Matt Vallerini is Vasco’s something-or-other – I’m not big on music industry terminology – producer, maybe?  Agent?  Vasco spits the rhymes and Matt does pretty much everything else (I think).  Maybe Vasco makes music too, I don’t know.  I’d love to have some good critique of the music for you, BUT I CAN’T FUCKING GET IT WHERE I WANT IT TO BE.  Matt’s also a Smoothe Moose Laboratories and Recordings guy, btw.

So yeah, more technical difficulties.  Did I mention that my computer is still running slow as sh*t?  It’s as bad as when I was pirating my neighbor’s wi-fi.  I really need to spend some time cleaning this damned thing out.

Anyway, since I’m plugging sites and whatnot of my friends both IRL and from the interwebz, why don’t you swing over to The Naked Redhead’s facebook fan page and become a fan?  It’s so inexpensive I think it might even be free.  If you want to spend money on TNR, she also has a store on her site.  Feel free to buy me an “I Heart Aural” tee (S will do the best job of showing off my svelt physique).  Plug, plug, plug.

Anyway, it’s about time for me to hit the hiz-ay (or the riz-ack, for those of you who prefer the military ebonics); it’s after midnight and I need to let it all hang down in the horizontal.  Groovy.  It’d be great to make the beast with two backs tonight, but I’M STILL SINGLE, so whatever.  I’m really only ever lonely during those moments between getting into bed and falling asleep (after, of course, Laila Jo is done with her little-furry-engine-on-my-chest imitation).  Yeah, yeah, cry me a river.  Back in man-town (where I come from), we don’t dig on the pity thing any more than Jules digs on swine, so you can just keep yours to yourself.  We do, however, dig on your sister – and your mom – at the same time, doncha know.

But that’s why I live in Ridgewood and not man-town anymore:  I’m just not into that whole “progressive” relationship thing.  Yep, still a monogamist.  Who cooks and bakes and can fix stuff.  Srsly, ladies, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to check any of my internet dating profiles, but feel free to swing on over to OkCupid for a taste.  I’m on PoF and Yahoo Personals too, in case you prefer a different venue.

Holy shit, I’m plugging mySELF.  Not good, Ted, not good at all.

Frig.  Now I’m talking to myself – and tsking, no less – out loud AND on the internet AT THE SAME TIME.

Yeah, I know you dig it.  You should see me naked.

Due to the scratched cornea thing, I haven’t been at work for a week.  I’m going to have a shit-ton of things to do when I arrive in the office tomorrow morning.  Hopefully, that won’t be too much past 9AM; ideally, it’ll be closer to 8:30AM.

My eye’s doing fine.  It’s still blurry, but my brain isn’t really paying attention to the specific data from my right eye – it’s more just letting it help out my left eye.  It was healing pretty quick up until now, but I think that’s kind of plateaued.  No biggie – as long as it heals eventually.  I was pretty ok with my perfect vision.

Right now, I’m reading Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds.  It’s his eighth book (of nine so far), and the seventh of his I’ve picked up.  There’s one in the middle called Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days that I skipped over because it’s two novellas that aren’t part of what I originally thought was a series.  There’s not too much of a series-thing going on.  A couple of the books are linked, and most of them take place in the same universe, but I’m not currently reading the seventh of a series of nine.

This one isn’t even a full series:  it’s a collection of novellas and short stories.

I’m not all that impressed.  I think that Reynolds, like many authors, got lazy after his first couple of books.  The guy isn’t really all that great at writing endings – he just kind of wraps up one of the bigger chunks of the overall plotline and calls it a day.  He leaves too many ends untied for my taste.  Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s an excellent writer, just not a ridiculously great author.

One of the “rules” of writing goes like this:  “if you show the audience a gun in Act I, it has to go off in Act IV.”  Reynolds is continually introducing new guns – characters, plot shifts, whatever – right up until the end, many/most of which never actually go off.  As a reader, I prefer to have my questions answered by the author, not to have to make them up myself.  As a reader of fiction, I want to know what the answer is – whether I like it or not – I don’t want a novel to leave me with questions about the characters or the story.  I read philosophy stuff for that.

In any case, maybe I’ll give you a full run-down my takes on each of Reynolds’ books in another post.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but my new bass came in the mail on Friday.  I’ve played it a bit each day, which is a good start so far.

Blech.  Back to work.  I’m ok with that:  I’m neither dreading it nor chomping at the bit.  Back to work and regular routine.  At least my apartment is clean.  Today was a good day for that.  I cleaned everything I own and made a good dent in the overall clutter of my living space (which was becoming oppressive).  I’m psyched to start the week with good feng shui at my back.

Windham High Peak is one of the easiest hikes I can remember – a gently ascending 7 mile round-trip.  I’ll be parking at the end of Peck Road off of Big Hollow Road (Route 50).  The 3500 Club is hiking Bearpen & Vly on Sunday, so maybe I’ll even join them for that.

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I feel pretty good right now.  Composed and relatively serene.  When we had the snow day last Wednesday, one of my buddies beat feet over to my place because he was going “stir crazy”.  I didn’t invite him over, but I was ok with the company.  My point is that I wasn’t going stir crazy.  My apartment is a comfortable place for me, which, I suppose, is as it should be.

I vacuumed the rugs today – which is a stretch from my usual weekly cleaning (I usually do quite a bit more) – but that was enough to bring a sort of calm to my thought processes.  Make no mistake, dear reader:  feng shui works.

That said, I’d dearly love to stumble over the motivation to clean all this crap off my desk and to organize my kitchen-cum-workroom.  The clutter (though organized) isn’t getting to me yet, but I’m sure I’d feel a lot freer and be more efficient without it.

I have another appointment with the opthamologist tomorrow at noon.  The pirate patch is off and I’ve been putting the drops in my eye religiously as instructed all day, but I’m not looking forward to squirting that creme into my eye before I go to bed tonight.

I think I’m going to bake a cake or two tomorrow afternoon for the opthamologist.  I’m sure that my co-pays and insurance company will compensate him for his work, but I still feel like saying Thank You.  He’s Greek, so if anyone knows what the customary Greek TY gesture is (no matter how old – I dig anachronisms), please let me know.  A cake is the best I’ve come up with so far.

I had some work-related news this evening, but it’s a bit premature to discuss it here and now – it’s begun to occupy my thoughts, though.

On the serenity thing – it’s pretty cool.  I’m pretty effin mellow right now.  I have some financial worries niggling at the back of my mind, but I’m not paying attention to those voices too much right now.  I’ll probably always wish I had more money, so I think I’ll just keep on paying my bills for now.  It would probably be a good idea if I stopped buying stuff for a month or two.

That said, I bought myself a new bass the other night.  It’s going to cost me $329, but the website will take that out of my account in 3 $110 payments over the next three months.  Not too big a deal.  I’d still like to buy a (leather) loveseat, tv and dvd player, but I think that can wait for now (I’ve survived this long without those things).  Once I get my taxes done, I’ll hopefully have enough money to purchase or put a down payment on a motorcycle.  But that too is a “we’ll see” situation:  it may end up getting de-prioritized at some point in the future.

I think I’m going to hike Windham High Peak this Saturday.  It’s the easiest mountain left of the eight – about 7 miles round trip, on a trail the whole way, and not really all that strenuous.  I may even invite my fraternity brother from New Paltz along with me.  My right eye is still blurry and I’ve been saving this mountain for a “just in case” kind of situation – mostly if I somehow started running out of time and needed to squeeze a second hike into a weekend.  I think this eye thing qualifies as one of those “cases”.  My vision is still a bit blurry and mentally I may still be a bit gun shy about sticking my face into thick branches (which is exactly what I’ll be doing when I climb the Lone/Rocky and Friday/Balsam Cap combinations).  This weekend is probably a good time to take it easy.  Hell, I’ve been taking it pretty easy all week so far.

I’ve only had the use of my left eye since Saturday, and until yesterday, my right eye was in quite a lot of pain.

(Skip to around 1:23, please.)

Saturday’s hike was Doubletop and Graham mountains – both bushwhacks, though I started out for a short bit from the trail at the base of these two mountains.  I summited Doubletop and struck off for Graham.  Graham was truly a mountain-climbing experience:  there was a lot of snow on the ground and the climb was steep.  Lots of hands-and-feet work – in the sport, I suppose we’d call it “technical” (though not to the point where I really needed ropes and ice axes).  My snowshoes stood me in good stead for the whole trip.

About a hundred yards or so from the summit of Graham (on the way back to the trailhead), I got popped in the eye by a tree branch, and the day’s fun ended.  I spent the last mile and a half or two miles of the bushwhack with my right eye closed and in quite a lot of pain (see above), stopping every hundred yards or so to wait for the latest wave of acid-burn pain to wash over my eye, and/or attempting to flush out whatever debris might have still been stuck in there with water from my near-frozen water bottle.

At the end of the day, the flushing process didn’t really do more than take up extra time and possibly numb my eye – the NP at the emergency room later told me that there wasn’t anything in my eye:  that an abraded cornea feels like there’s something there, though.  I prefer to think that my body responded to my vocal request to “just digest the fucking thing, if you’re not going to flush it out (I’m sure there’s some protein in there somewhere).”

In the spirit of gratitude, this was also running through my mind.

The nice thing about the whole experience was that I was able to stay in the moment (though they were not exactly the moments in which I preferred to be) and not panic.  I stayed off the near-frozen river, as much as the land wanted to push me in that direction, and I didn’t freak out when it started to get dark (that’s exactly why I carry a headlamp).  My legs carried me the last couple of miles back to the car, and I checked my map and compass regularly, in deference to my underdeveloped sense of direction.  And at no point during the whole ordeal did I wonder why god or the universe or the mountain was doing this to me.  I just accepted the state of affairs as it was and made lemonade.  Not too bad for a one-time vice president of the pessimist society.  There’s no anti-Ted conspiracy; sometimes things just suck a little more than other times.

The 8 (or so) mile drive from the trailhead back to a main road where I could flag down a cop was pretty nerve-racking, but not nearly as bad as the 40 miles from the hospital to the Thruway.  Once I got just about to the Thruway, I called my parents and asked them to come rescue me – there was no way I was going to be able to make the 2 hour drive back home with only one eye not in excruciating pain and only able to see about 40 yards anyway.  It was exactly like the worst times I’ve ever driven drunk.  I am SO glad that’s no longer part of my repertoire.

Mad props to Ed and Betsy Wallace for effecting the rescue.

Sunday and Monday were spent in and out of consciousness.  Mercifully, I don’t remember much of those days.  I do, however, remember my mother bringing me coffee and food.  Thanks Mom.  <3  =D

I saw the opthamologist on Tuesday and again on Wednesday.  He put a bunch of drops in my eyes and a patch over my injured right one both days – the patch comes off Thursday and I’ll be responsible for the application of the drops and cremes after that.  My next appointment is Friday and the doctor said I can go back to work on Monday.  Work has been pretty cool about the whole thing – I’ve never missed this much time before (though I’ve been working a bit via blackberry and cell anyway).

I now have 8 mountains to climb in my winter peakbagging extravaganza (over 5 trips), and five weekends in which to do so before March 22d.  My plan was to get a bit ahead of schedule by hiking on Monday as well, but, well, that’s fucked.

So now I’m looking at Thursday and Friday off.  I’m sorely (no pun) tempted to hike one of those days, but I don’t know that I want to be off the air blackberry-wise for that long.  I’ll be out there this Saturday, though.

I drove a bit during the day today, but that wasn’t as much fun as it usually is.  I should be good once this damned pirate-patch is off.

So now I’m looking at two days of unrequested down-time.  I really should clean my desk.

Oh well, I suppose I’ll still have one, even though I can’t play it anymore.  I’m pretty sure the neck’s all bent.

So I need to get onto the interwebz to see if I can find an inexpensive (but good) left-handed bass.  Don’t ask me why I play lefty – I shoot pool lefty too (and something else, but I’m not going to say what, because c’mon, this is a family blog) – I suppose it’s because I always played air-guitar lefty.  The reason for that?  I dunno, probably because I was just mirroring the people on tv.

It seems to make sense to me, though:  my left hand is attached to my right-brain, which is the holistic side; and vice versa (sequential).  That means that I feel the beat and keep rhythm with my right-brain, while the more specific things (what notes to play and how to finger them) are done with my right hand (left-brain).  I suppose what I should be saying is that it makes a kind of sense to me.   I’m sure this isn’t necessarily an Intro-to-Psych compatible theory.

I’m not really any good on the bass, and I don’t practice nearly enough, but it’s a lot of fun and I really dig bass.  I’d love to learn how to play the double-bass (“standup”) – playing the double bass in a jazz band would be sweet.  I once saw a dude on the double-bass playing jazz with a dude on the grand piano and almost wet myself.  The steak was good at that place, too.  Why I don’t live there, I have no idea.

So yeah, it’s time for me to purchase a new bass to collect dust in the corner of my apartment and get played every once in a while.  Any suggestions?

In the meantime, I invite you to check out the recent Free Music Monday Post over at Mashable:  my buddies over at Smoothe Moose Laboratories & Recordings are featured this week.  Check out their stuff; it’s pretty fly.

This post has nothing to do with fruitcakes, cheese-monkey.

I’ve some interesting things I’d like to relate first:

I climbed Big Indian and Fir mountains this Saturday.  Got to the trailhead around 11, which is WAY late for me, even though I’ve tended to sleep a bit past the alarm lately (and the alarm is no longer set for 5:30AM, the way it used to be).  As I was finishing lacing my boots and strapping on my gaiters, an FJ Cruiser pulled up and two middle-aged dudes hopped out, remarking at how late “we all” were getting to the trail.  Then they asked if I knew “this area really well,” or at least, if there was a gas station around.  I said I didn’t know; that I’d taken a different route than they and certainly hadn’t seen any gas stations for quite a while.  Then I asked if they had a gps in their car and suggested I might use mine to find the nearest gas station.  The dude gave me a sour look which I interpreted as a negative for one or more of my queries.

As I was heading off, I heard them debating about whether to bring their snowshoes (there wasn’t much snow on the ground at the trailhead).  I told them that even if they might not need them on the trail itself, postholing the last half mile bushwack to the canister at the summit wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun.  I think they brought their ’shoes, but I never saw them again.

I suppose I got about a fifteen or twenty minute head start on them.  The first three or so miles of the trail to Big Indian are pretty flat and I was making good time (about 2 miles per hour).  As I was doing so, I wondered vaguely if I’d be able to hike both my mountains (they weren’t going to Fir) before they got back down from Big Indian.

When I was just about to the turnoff to begin bushwacking to the summit, I passed a little old lady coming back down.  We stopped and talked for a minute, in the manner in which hikers do when passing one another on the trail.  She was fucking ancient.  I’m going to guess that she was 75 or 80 – maybe subtract a decade if she’s a heavy smoker, but being that I met her coming down one of the highest peaks in the Catskills at a pretty good clip, I kind of doubt that’s the case.  She was wearing MSR Lightning Ascents – the same uber-badass snowshoes I was wearing – and had a smokin-hot French accent.  And she had more patches on her pack than anybody I’ve seen on the trail yet – Catskill 3500 Club, Adirondack 46ers, winter patches for both, one that said “something 400″ (I may have missed a zero and the patch refers to the 4000 footers in the White Mountains in New Hampshire), and a couple that I didn’t recognize at all.  None of these were rainbow unicorns or care bears patches.  This woman was seriously badass.

When we parted, she mentioned that she had to get back to the road because she didn’t have a car and had to hitchhike.

Last week I was talking to my friend Ed Pirone and I mentioned that I only had 12 mountains left to go in my winter peakbagging extravaganza, in response to his question of “what else has been up?”  He then said something like “wow, and you’re doing those all solo?  That’s pretty hardcore.”

Yeah, so hardcore a little old lady can do it.

So, needless to say I’m in love.  I have a vague idea that her name is Merguerite (something)-Webster (I think) “known as IHY” (whatever tf that means).  Her handwriting on the sign-in at the canister was pretty old-ladyish.  When I got back to the trailhead, I snatched her digits from the logbook.  Maybe I’ll give her a call this week and see if she’ll be hiking on Saturday.

Bagging Fir after Big Indian wasn’t all that hard – there was a trail broken by at least three people in snowshoes in the past week or so (I think one person was out there on Friday – or at least, that’s what the log indicated).  I made it back down pretty quickly.  So quickly, in fact, that by the time I was ready to leave – after re-heating my coffee and taking off my boots and such – the two dudes in the FJ Cruiser still hadn’t made it back.  So I gps-ed the nearest gas station (13.3 miles away) and left a note on their car with the location and phone number.  Not that there’s any cell service around there.

Meeting Merguerite was one of the coolest experiences of my hiking career.  I hope I’m still bagging peaks when I’m her age – whatever that may be.

And it’s not blogging.

I sent out my first invoice today as a freelance copywriter – or rather, I sent out my first invoice today to my client: not someone else’s.  Yay?  The day job is still busy as sh*t, but not so bad that I’m getting out of the office at 11PM.  As far as I can tell, I succeeded in what my firm was hired to do, which is increase the voting response from the foreign shareholders for a Taiwanese company’s shareholder meeting.  Last year’s meeting received about 80% response; this one’s at 88%.  The owner of my company is very happy.  He told me today that if the client isn’t happy they can pretty much go fuck themselves.  I’m not sure if the client is happy or not – I’ve hardly heard from them in the last couple of days.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the owner of my company is happy, but it’d be nice to know that the client is pleased as well.

Whatever.  Not much else is going on.  I’m going to sort-of take it easy for a bit.  I have 12 mountains left to climb in my winter peakbagging extravaganza – and seven weekends left to go.  I think there’s a holiday in there somewhere too – President’s Day?  Is the market closed for President’s day?  Is there an apostrophe in Presidents Day?

Most of the mountains I have left to go are going to be pretty tough.  I can rattle them right off the top of my head:

Friday & Balsam Cap: About 5 miles of tough bushwack through extremely dense pine trees.  I’m talking face-scratching, can’t see more than 10 feet bushwack.  While going uphill the whole time (except the col between the mountains – that’s down for a bit).

Lone & Rocky: About 9 or 10 miles, also tough bushwack through dense pines at the summits.  With Friday & Balsam Cap, these almost combine to form a range.  Doing the four together is nigh impossible; definitely so in the winter.

Bearpen & Vly: Um, I don’t know, maybe 6 or 7 miles?  These two are outside of the blue line (not in Catskill State Park), and they’re not on any maps, so I have to make one myself.  Both are bushwacks.

Graham & Doubletop: About a 15 mile bushwack.  I think I’m going to give these two some serious re-thinking.  I did them easy enough in the summer, but add snowshoes and no trail and 15 miles is wicked long.  I’ll probably have to split them up.

Big Indian & Fir: Probably about 8 miles.  There’s a trail almost to the summit of Big Indian; the last bit is a bushwack.  Fir is entirely trailless.  There’s a brook – Buttermilk Brook, I think – at the base of the trail that’s tough to ford if the water’s high.  Definitely not a hike to leave until the spring thaw.  Though if the groundhog was right this year, I won’t really have to worry about that before 3/22.

Kaaterskill High Peak: A relatively tough bushwack; maybe 7 miles, depending on my starting point.  I’ve hiked this mountain twice so far and neither route was particularly easy.  It’s not near any other of the 3500s, so it’s got to be done by itself.

Windham High Peak: The last of the easy mountains:  a smooth incline over 3.5 miles (7 round trip).  With a trail and everything.  The northernmost of the Catskill High Peaks.

Seven weeks and (notwithstanding the Graham/Doubletop issue) seven trips.  Piece of cake.

wtf – l33t is creeping more and more into my regular writing.  lol, brb, ttyl/s, etc. – I even used h8 once in an email this past week.  If it gets much worse, I’m going to have a serious talk with myself.  And those NEVER go well.

Work is still busy, but that’s cool:  I’m in a groove.  Copywriting in the evenings and trying to squeeze in some sci-fi reading.  Right now I’m reading Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds.  It’s the fourth book in his hard sci-fi space opera beginning with Revelation Space.  Best damned sci-fi I’ve read in a LONG time.  The editing kind of sucks, but that might just be me being anal.  I suppose a typo every fifty or so pages is to be expected.  I don’t remember reading with this critical an eye before – it’s only the last year or two that the quality of the editing of a book – or rather, the lack thereof – can have an impact on my reading experience.  Still, it’s a great story.

And that’s about it.  Like my seminal vesicles, my apartment needs a good cleaning.  I have no desire to look for someone to help me out with the latter, though.  The former, well…I suppose it’s good that I’m so busy right now.  I don’t even have time for reflective whining about my singlehood, much less extensive discussion thereof.

I’ve been listening to The White Stripes in my car of late.  I downloaded Elephant, Icky Thump and White Blood Cells from iTunes, though not in that order.  That’s the order in which I’d rate them, from more- to less-enjoyable.  That said, please don’t think I find White Blood Cells unenjoyable.

Overall, I like The White Stripes.  I enjoy the simplicity, and not just because Seven Nation Army is one of the few songs I can play tolerably well on the bass.  The albums aren’t albums, though.  I find them to be more of a collection of singles.  I’m an album kind of guy.  I like 45+ minutes of flow, not 2-5 minutes of head nodding with abrupt pauses and changes interspersed.

So I think I’m going to look for something else to download.  My tastes on Pandora (here’s my profile) have been leaning more toward electronic stuff -  trip hop and whatnot.  (Whatnot’s a figure of speech, not a genre.)  Pandora tells me that the attributes I’m enjoying right now include the following:

four-on-the-floor beats
latin influences
disco influences
blues influences
danceable beats
straight drum beats
subtle buildup/breakdown
use of modal harmonies
the use of chordal patterning
extended harmonic patterns
emphasis on instrumental performance
a tight kick sound
acoustic drum samples
the use of clean-sounding organs
a hand percussion layer
prevalent use of groove

I’m going to download this Supreme Beings of Leisure album I’ve been digging on lately and listen to that in the car tomorrow, I think.  I’m really close to downloading some Bhangra, too (heheee).

Work is still nuts.  Today one of the kids I have making phone calls for me asked me how they were doing – whether the two of them are achieving the results I expect.  I had no idea how to answer him, so I lied and told him I think they’re doing a pretty good job, and that I wish I had had a bit more time to train them.

The truth is, I think both of them are slackers.  Granted, I haven’t really had the time or the inclination to set high standards, but overall I’m really quite unimpressed with both.  Crappy-work-ethic-having-know-it-alls (who don’t really know anything).  Seriously, these two retards don’t even know a teeny piece of what I do and I’m still wicked inexperienced and jamming that learning curve into high gear.

Ok, take it easy on them Ted, huh?  And maybe stop mixing your metaphors.  What the ef was that last one supposed to be describing anyway.

Whatever.  They’re retards.  I work with retards.

Ok, that’s enough.  I’m putting him to bed now folks.  That was seriously just completely uncalled-for.  He’s really a sweet guy pretty much all the time.  It’s just that he gets a bit cranky if he doesn’t get a few hours of decompression time between work and sleep (to wake to work again).

I’ll tell you what really pisses me off is that I can’t use any metaphors that in any way might be construed as talking about or even touching on terrorism.  Not even funny ones.  And I’m good at those.  They’re all basically just hyperbole anyway.  But noooooo – I could get fi-yerd.  Stupid political correctness.  I don’t even have any politics except “don’t fuck with me”.  Wasn’t that like our first flag or something?  We should totally bring that back.

Ok – enough stream of consciousness stuff:  check it:  I consistently hear people talking about “those people,” “they,” “them,” and all kinds of other pronoun-type wordies that refer to imaginary beings known as “terrorists” who are out to get us all.  These people (the ones I hear) (in real life) (seriously, I’m not kidding) (stop sniggering, asshole) say things like “we’ve got to take the war to them” and generally talk about “getting aggressive with the terrorists” and how they (the retards to whom I can’t help but listen) “know where they are” and stuff like that.

Ok – W. T. F.  Terrorism isn’t a country, folks.  There isn’t a country “full” of terrorists out there.  Terrorists are people like me – they get tired of your crap and so they cover everything in your cube with tin foil and then help you clean it up the next day while promising “to keep an ear out for whoever did this.”  PS:  meanwhile you cried like a little bitch because you thought people didn’t like you.  Terrorism isn’t organized.  It’s not a movement.  It’s not a country or a people or a culture or an ethic.  It’s a nebulous CONCEPT.  It’s a PENUMBRA, a fucking SHADOW.

The guy who’s talking about “going after the terrorists” is the terrorist himself for spreading the idea that there’s such a thing as organized terrorism.  He should join the military and cry when he can’t handle all the pushups or the fact that “they’re not being very nice to me.”

Jesus.  Sorry for the rant.  I meant “jesus” as more of an expletive – not that I was asking any particular person’s forgiveness, feel me?  Breaking #3 can be a whole lot of fun in the right situation.

Anyway, I’m at like 600-something words right now, which is way more than I had planned for this evening.  I was just going to tell you about my day.  I’m kind of glad I didn’t, though:  it was relatively exciting, but the retelling of it would be incredibly boring.  Like paint-peel and grass-grow boring, not like – frig. – I can’t think of any other types of boring that might juxtapose with a sense of exciting and thus balance out what I was looking for just there.

So yeah.  Peace out, nucka.  I got a meeting with the Bobs in the morning, so I need be in early to finish up those TPS reports.  Tomorrow’s Tuesday, so I’ll wear my cornflower blue tie – which pretty sweetly matches the icon on my desktop for my PORN database.

I’m tired.  Work is very busy right now.  I’m working on a Taiwanese proxy solicitation and it’s eating up my time like crazy.  And I really don’t want to talk about it.  I could probably fill the page with a mildly interesting explanation of what exactly this project involves, but I’ve already done so in my emails to my client.  I’ve probably typed about 15 single-spaced pages worth of text via email alone in the past week.

The pain in the ass is that they’re in Taiwan, so there’s a time-lag in our communications.  They’re 13 hours ahead of us, which means I get to work on Sunday night and have two Monday mornings in my week.  Happily, that also means that Taiwan is halfway through their Friday right now, and I’ll have somewhat of a respite for the next 48 hours.

Unhappily, that’s only one way to look at it.  I still have enough work to do on other things to more-or-less fill my days on a regular basis.  Which means that I still have a full day of catch-up to play at work today.

Whatever.  I’m going hiking on Saturday.  I’ll climb two mountains, eat a big steak at Steve’s Sizzlin’ at some point this weekend and hopefully go see Avatar with Scott and Vallerini on Sunday.  Y’all are welcome to come along if you like, but I’m sure as hell not going to plan an outing.

I need to send out invoices to my two copywriting clients today, too.  I’m going to try to get out of work early.  I was in the office until 11:30 last night and about 10 tonight.  Overall, I suppose the bright side is that this is all good practice for May and June, when I can expect to pull 16-hour days on the regular.  I’ll have 6 Taiwanese proxy solicitations to handle this summer.  And the regular busy season for the US starts in a couple of weeks.

When I’m driving home late at night like I do, my mind sometimes takes me to some pretty interesting places.  It generally starts somewhere along the lines of “if my life were entirely my own, what would I do with it?  Where would I go?  Where would I live?  What would I be like?”

Two years ago this coming busy season, and even a year ago at the same time, I would get pretty pissed as I drove home, thinking thoughts like “I don’t get paid enough” and as many permutations of that as any other Mensa member might be able to come up with.  I’m going to avoid thinking like that this coming busy season.

But I would like to own a small to medium-sized sailboat and spend some time island hopping in a warm blue archipelago sometime before I die.

For a little longer than the last two weeks, I’ve been feeling a bit off.  Less self-confident than normal.  Kind of an irrational insecurity – I don’t really know how to describe it.  Being nervous for no apparent reason.  Watered-down delusions of persecution:  that kind of thing.

I’d like to say I’ve turned the corner on it, but I think I might be in the middle of it – the final throes, as it were.  A few more shudders and it should be spent and I can get back to my normal mackdaddy-of-iz-all mentality.  Or whatever passes as normal for me.

I think I entered the corner-turning phase after talking to my friend Emily this past Friday.  I mentioned that I’d felt a bit off for a couple of weeks or so and she said “hey – like since the 12th?” and I was like “yeah, that sounds about right” and she said “Haiti happened on the 12th”.  And everything just kind of clicked into place for me:

It’s the vibes.  The concentrated, localized, intense trauma happening to the human species in Haiti is affecting my mood.  I’m not psychic by any real stretch, but I’m definitely sensitive.  Sure, I knew about the earthquakes when they happened, but Haiti is so far away from me and there’s really nothing I can do – in a physical sense – to help, so it’s not really been on my mind all that much.  Pretty much all of the information I have about the earthquakes I’ve gleaned from facebook and Twitter.

I don’t have a tv, don’t really listen to the radio (except the jazz station in the morning), and don’t really pay much attention to the news on the internet.  I’ve not read one single article about the earthquakes – the only thing I’ve seen have been status updates and whatnot, and even those I haven’t paid too much attention to.  I haven’t really spoken to anyone about it either, and couldn’t tell you one horror story I’ve heard about the whole thing.

That’s why the whole vibe thing clicked to precisely for me.  It makes too much sense.  There’s really no ACTIVE way I’d be able to assimilate the anguish that’s going on in Haiti – it’s somehow reached me, though.

From that conversation with Emily on, it was like a burden was lifted:  “if you can name it, you can tame it”, they say.  And I believe that.  Oh, I’m still feeling echoes of low self-esteem, indecisiveness, fragility and insecurity, but now I have an idea of where that’s coming from and why it’s not necessarily a fact.

Sure, to a certain extent I’m being reminded of my own inherent fragility and insecurity as a human being – in a very subtle fashion.  And as I’m writing this, I’m getting a diluted sense of deja-vu:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a
Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse,
as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor
of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans
death diminishes me,
because I am in-
volved in Mankinde; And therefore
never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; It
tolls for thee.

That’s definitely a reminder of my interconnectedness with mankind.  As solitary as I may be, I’m still a part of the main.  Any man’s death diminishes me.

So I’m able to work with this faint level of pain and ignore it (to a certain extent) because I know where it’s coming from.

I’m saying prayers and sending good vibes – “light” if you wish – to Haiti.  That’s all I can do.  I’m not going to send money because I don’t really believe that my money will help.  But I believe my vibes will help.  That’s all I can do.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if there are any prayer groups, meditation sessions, or satsangs going on for the people in Haiti.  That would be much more powerful than just me sitting alone in my apartment sending energy that way.

I was talking to my old man this evening and he analogized the part of what I was telling him to which he was actually listening to my grandfather’s bit of wisdom that it’s important to take a car out and red-line the engine every once in a while to blow out the carburetor.  You know, work out all the junk and accumulation that comes with just driving around the neighborhood.  While I think my old man probably wasn’t picking up what I was putting down, his analogy still holds.  I fully believe that it’s important to blow the engine out on a regular basis – both with my car and with myself – but it has to be done properly.  What I’ve been trying to do (back to the analogy) is red-line my engine while I’m still driving around the neighborhood.  And that’s not the best way to do it.  In fact, that’s probably the best way to throw a rod or get the engine to seize or some such other bad thing that happens to a car when you’re up- and down-shifting too much and too quickly.

Blowing the engine out means doing it on the highway – the blowout has to be sustained, or the cleaning isn’t thorough.  Revving the engine and chirping the tires around the neighborhood isn’t the answer.  Sure, drive around the neighborhood a bit to get the engine warmed up – there’s no point in blowing out a cold engine: that leads to bad stuff too.  Once it’s warm, though, it’s got to get on the highway and spend some time at speed.

I’ve been doing all the wrong things.  I can see the highway ahead of me (read:  work and life getting very busy), but I’m not there yet.  And my engine’s still cold.  I need to spend some time driving around the neighborhood – which means getting back to basics:  setting up a solid routine so that my up- and down-shifts are smooth and regular.  Once that gets comfortable, I can start to pick up some speed and push the tach a bit here and there.  Once everything’s running pretty smoothly, I’ll be able to get out there and blow out my engine – a sustained and controlled burn which can only then be truly cleansing.

That means I need to back off a bit from trying to pack too many things into my life right now.  I need to concentrate on laying down the big blocks of my schedule first.  I need to be comfortable and regular with them before I can start adding more (smaller) pieces to it.  That means regularizing my work schedule as best I can, nourishing my body on a regular basis and not killing myself every Saturday when I hike (read:  slow the pace down, Ted, it’s not a race to the summit), taking care of my evening commitments and making sure I leave myself time at the end of the day to decompress (read and meditate).

Once I’m comfortable in this schedule (which really shouldn’t take more than a couple of days), I can start to add copywriting and other things back into my evenings (slowly).  As time passes, by the time I realize I’m blowing my engine out, it’ll be one helluva fun ride.

Saturday I climbed Wittenberg and Cornell mountains.  I met and conversed with five different people.  Two guys in their late 40s or early 50s who were out to do some winter camping for the weekend – they’ve hiked all over the place and had some interesting gear-related stories to tell.  One dude from Long Island with brand new, fancy gear who had claimed the lookout at the top of Wittenberg for his campsite (and who had entirely too much advice to share for my taste).  Another dude named Andy who was out with his dog Nick.  Saturday night was going to be Andy’s first winter camping experience.  His crampons were brand new and he didn’t have showshoes, but he seemed like an avid and able camper, so I assume things went well for him.  I hope Nick stayed warm.  The fifth guy (Jack) was a retired 3500 Club member and I walked the last mile and a half or so to the parking lot with him.  An admitted peakbagger himself, I enjoyed trading bushwacking stories with him.  Jack told me about an unrecognized club within the 3500 Club – those who had completed “the grid”.  That’s hiking each of the 35 peaks in every month of the year.  I’m not sure he should have told me about that.  It’s not an immediate goal of mine right now, but surely something to consider.  With the exception of the dude from Long Island, I think I’d enjoy hiking with any of the guys I met on Saturday.

Saturday night I met my friends Tara and Anna in Allendale to see Tara’s high school friend play her guitar and sing at a coffee bar.  She was quite good.  I can definitely see her playing in a more mature environment.  After that, Tara, Anna and I went out dancing at a place called Ultrabar (I think) in Teaneck.  It was filled with most of the different kinds of people that give New Jersey a bad name.  Probably exactly like what one would see on that show “Jersey Shore”, though I’ve never seen it myself.  But the beats were decent and I, for one, got a good sweat going.  It was definitely a good time.

Climbing mountains and staying out late with no nap or any kind of rest in between on a Saturday means I’m generally made of mush the following Sunday.  This Sunday wasn’t any different.  Especially because I knew I didn’t have to go to work on Monday, I was kind of aimless all day.  While I’m normally pretty focused in my errands-running (laundry, cleaning and the like), today I couldn’t quite make up my mind what to do next.  I got it all done, even with some time to spare for copywriting, but not with the usual sense of purpose I normally do.

I’ve decided – sometime in the last half-hour or so – that I’m not going to go hiking on Monday.  I still have a buttload of copywriting to do if I want to finish the website I started two weeks ago, and I’ve got another assignment from a prospective client who wants to “try me out” on a press release.  So I’ve got to get that done on Monday as well.

As much as I’d like to get ahead in my hiking goal, I think I just have too much work to do.  And my legs still feel a bit mushy.  I think I’d probably set myself back for the week if I went hiking on Monday.  I’m a bit nervous, though, because I don’t do well at waking up at a decent hour when I don’t have someplace to be in the morning.  I’m worried that I’ll sleep until 1 on Monday and then be under the gun time-wise to get my copywriting done.  I guess we’ll just have to see, won’t we?  Wish me luck.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King.

We dream your dream.

I’m off on Monday for MLK Day, so I’ll be able to get a bit ahead of schedule, I hope.

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Anyway, here are the rules of engagement:

List 10 things that make you happy. Do at least one of them today. Tag 5 bloggers that brighten your day.

For those bloggers who get the award, you then link back to my blog and create your makes you happy list.

So needless to say I’m pretty honored that TNR named me in her post; it’s nice to be among such fine company.  I won’t mention that I’m so far the only dude I’ve seen in this love-train.  Ok, so it looks like I did just mention that.  Whatever.  Somebody’s got to represent the Y chromosome.  “Represent, reprezent-zent”, as they say in A Tribe Called Quest.

I made my list on the way to work today.  And thanks to my AyePhone, I was able to store it in my notes, instead of wrestling with pen and paper while driving.  Here’s what I came up with – and these are in no particular order:

1. Sunny Days
2. Hiking
3. Tools
4. Katie
5. Yoga
6. Meditation
7. Strong Coffee
8. Cigarettes
9. A Sense of Accomplishment
   
10. A Solid Beat
11. Friendship/Unconditional Love
12. Living Alone
    
13. Driving
14. Boobs
    
15. Paying Bills
16. Writing
17. Reading
18. Feng shui

Yes, I can count, and I know that’s not ten things.  But whatever:  I was brainstorming.

As I was going through this exercise, my thoughts turned to the nature of happiness.  What makes me happy?  Does money make me happy?  The things that money can buy me?  I don’t think so.  I think that material things in general kind of need to be excluded from the list.  For me, that is.  Because I’m a philosopher and a wordsmith and pretty anal about definitions.  And, in that spirit, for the purposes of this post, I will define something that “makes me happy” as “makes me feel good”.

So what’s happiness?  Happiness for me comes in two flavors:  overall and the short burst/realization kind.  Most of the things on the list above are basically of the latter kind – having them, being around them, or just knowing or becoming aware that they’re near is enough to create a feeling of happiness.  The overall happiness thing is a bit more slippery and tough to nail down.  Which is why I don’t think I’m going to get into it right now.  I’m not sure that – overall – I’m happy right now.  Nor am I sure that I’m not.  Maybe I’ll explore this subject another time.

This isn’t meant to be quite as heavy as I’m making it, but wtf, I’ve been having trouble uploading pictures, so I can’t post brightly-colored pics of flowers, red lipstick and nipples.

Anyway, here’s a crack at distilling the above into ten specific items, and thereby coming into conformity with the whole point of the fun:

1.  Sunny days are awesome.  They make waking up easy and I dig wearing my new shades.  Whatever it is about the sunlight hitting my retina, I’m a fan.  I don’t care if it’s cold or hot or sticky or what-have-you: if it’s sunny out, chances are I’m happy.

2.  Hiking was an easy one – but when I spent some time thinking about it, hiking doesn’t really make me “happy”.  I don’t go hiking for the sheer joy of it.  I like the sense of accomplishment I get from peakbagging.  Oh, the exercise is certainly good for me and leads to a wonderful combination of physical exhaustion and balance among my brain chemicals (and waves), but these are – again – of the short-term variety of happiness.  They are also, however, in my opinion, components of the “overall” type of happiness.  And since we’re talking about visceral things here, I’m going to go right ahead and lump boobs into this one, because they bring me a very visceral kind of happiness as well.  Or maybe I should just say the female form in general.  Mmmm.

3.  Tools make me happy.  Having the right ones for the job, etc.  My AyePhone, netbook, cordless drill, leatherman, hiking gear, and so on.  All these things give me a sense of being prepared, and they’re a joy to apply to the proper situation.

4.  Driving makes me happy.  Specifically, driving my stick-shift Mini Cooper between 60 and 90 miles per hour in moderate traffic.  Driving your car doesn’t make me happy.  I suppose this has something to do with a sense of being in control, but I don’t much feel like shrinking my own head on this one right now.  Oh, and strong coffee and cigarettes are a wonderful addition to driving.

5.  A solid beat makes me happy.  It never fails.  Preferably one seen and felt in a live environment.  Recordings are great, but actually watching an artist lay down a solid beat – whether on the drums, cello, bass or whatever – gives me a sense of participation.  In such an environment, I find it hard not to dance.

6.  I know I already mentioned a sense of accomplishment above, but I think it deserves its own number.  In fact, that number should probably be 1.  Pretty much everything that makes me happy (or “feel good”) in some way or another involves the production of a sense of accomplishment within me.  It’s definitely the #1 reason why I’m always so busy, and probably the main motivation behind just about everything I do.

7.  Yoga and meditation can go together because they’re inherently related.  Quieting my mind on a regular basis is another aspect of the elusive “overall” flavor of happiness.  And definitely something that I need more of right now.  Feng shui is also connected to this, because #7 here is as much about energy flow as anything else.

8.  My sister Katie makes me happy.  I know I’m better in small doses, which means that my doses of Katie end up being reciprocal, but that’s ok.  Reciprocal’s not the right word, but I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

9.  Friendship and unconditional love make me happy.  Again, I think these are also components of the “overall” flavor that I’m missing in my life right now.  I don’t have very many friends – which is entirely a personal choice at this stage in my life, and I’m ok with that.  As much as I’d like to substitute a pretty girl’s head on my chest for Laila Jo’s furry-engine-purring when I (finally) go to bed at night, living alone is also something that makes me happy.  Not having to clean up after someone else and the resultant (relative) ease of maintaining my home’s feng shui are interrelated aspects of this.  While I haven’t actively severed ties with most of my recent friends, I haven’t done much in the way of maintaining the bridges between us.  Too many people have given me the impression that I’m really only good for whatever I can do for them, and that doesn’t make me happy.  I prefer the friendships that are based upon unconditional love – the ones where you’re buddies and that’s pretty much it, you know?  No strings, no quid pro quo.

10.  Reading and writing make me happy.  Both are kind of an escapist thing for me, but whatever.  I like reading fictions and writing facts.  Writing is cathartic for me, and reading is good for my imagination, which makes me more productive.  So does chess, but this post is long enough.

So that’s it.  Ten things.  Today, I spent some time reading, writing (in the comfortable feng shui of my apartment), and driving (fast, in moderate traffic, while drinking strong coffee and smoking cigarettes, listening to music with a solid beat).  I thought about calling Katie, but figured that was precluded under the “small doses” rule, given our interaction on facebook today.  I’m not even going to get into my usage of tools.

I’ll now do my best to tag five bloggers that make me happy:

Lauren Flax of the blog of the same title

Didi at Vodka Fuelled Diatribes

Sabrina at The Sabs.com

Samiantha at Being Samiantha

Jon Barker (aka “Barker Fett”) at JonMTM: A Private Lyricist

I can’t believe I was able to come up with five bloggers that quicly and easily.  What up, tribe.

Big time copywriting day for me tomorrow (by which I mean today, dear reader).  I pulled a website from the queue last Tuesday and haven’t had a chance to do more than the preliminary research for it.  Luckily, I’ve managed not to get too many additional knots in my shoulders over this.

The weekend was pretty darned excellent.  I hiked Peekamoose and Table mountains, which were numbers 16 and 17 of my 35 winter peaks for the Catskill 3500 Club patch (I have until March 22d to finish the rest).  I’m pretty much on schedule:  I figure I can get the last 18 mountains climbed in about 10 trips, and I have exactly that many weekends left in which to hike before the deadline.  I’m digging the fact that I’m progressing well towards a goal I set back in October.

What I’d really like to do is hike two trips this weekend, to give me some breathing room and so I’m not frantically trying to make up the time if something happens whereby I miss a weekend.  Maybe I’ll do Windham on Saturday and Kaaterskill on Sunday.  Or Wittenberg and Cornell on Saturday and Windham on Sunday.  We’ll see.

YouTube’s in read-only mode right now, so I can’t get the link to my video from this past Saturday to post here.  Rats.  Maybe tomorrow.

After hiking on Saturday, I went out to dinner with my immediate family for my brother John’s birthday.  Definitely a fun experience.  After that, I swung down to Jersey City to meet up with my buddy John Barker, who’s been visiting NYC from Britain for the past bunch of days.  We’d never met IRL before, so that was cool.  I’m looking forward to getting back together with him when he visits again in March.

We met at The Iron Monkey and had the pleasure of witnessing Ugly Purple Sweater and Pearl and the Beard perform.  I probably won’t buy/download any of their albums; I’d rather see them live.  Pearl and the Beard were particularly entertaining – their energy was incredible.  I don’t really have the words to describe it right now, but they’re from Brooklyn, so if you’re around there, check ‘em out.  I’m certainly going to go see them again.

Oh, and they were all really nice people, too.  Can’t beat that.

So that’s basically it.  In my neverending quest to get to work on time, I’m going to head off to my pre-heated bed now.  I’ve been meditating quite a bit on loneliness of late.  I think I’ve reached the conclusion that something in my nature really wants me to mate – not so much in the hump-hump-hump sense (though that’s certainly part of it), but very much in the base-touching sense.  Which is to say, in the sense that a home is different than a house.  That’s the best I can describe it right now.

Either that, or I’m slowly going insane and am evolving toward complete sociopathy and antipathy toward my fellow humans.  I think I’d rather not do that, but it kind of feels a bit inevitable right now – like gravity.

So yeah, maybe more on that later.  And maybe not.  I also need to work through another Inventory & Priorities List in the near future.  Maybe this week – but not until I’ve spent some hours copywriting.

Ta, all.  Sleep well; I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.

And I’m enjoying it.

It’s 12:28 and I’m struggling to write this because I want to get back to my book.  This doesn’t bode well, dear reader.  I’ve things to accomplish and I’m not sure that I won’t get sucked in to this novel until I’ve finished it.  I’ve been late to work every day this week – which is not so unusual – even though I’ve been making it to bed by around this time.  Which implies, of course, that I really should be getting to bed around midnight or earlier.

Right now, my mind is whirling on in attempt to justify another half an hour, another chapter, another 20 pages before bed.  My eyes are scratchy and that’s what I’m thinking about, even as I’m typing this.

No, this won’t do at all.  My pale green “fresh bamboo”-scented candle burns on my desk and the aroma is soothing in its pleasantness.  The two shaded incandescent lights at opposite ends of my apartment – one next to my chair and one over my bed – are lit and, combined with the ambered pine floors beneath the rugs and the angles of my ceiling impart a feeling that cannot be described as other than cozy.  Gemütlich, even.

No, I’ve no desire to leave this place for work tomorrow at all.

Pity.

***

The word “procrastination” is a combination of two Latin words:  pro = “for”, cras = “tomorrow”.  For tomorrow.

***

Seriously, I feel like I’m back in college.  I was really hoping to hit the ground running this week, but something’s kind of holding me back.  I don’t know what it is.  I’m trying to be proactive at work, but am meeting only resistance, which probably means that it’s not yet time for me to be spearheading anything in particular.  By which I do not mean it’s not that time in my life, but rather that it’s not that time of year yet.

An example might help here, wouldn’t it, dear reader?  Maybe I’ll give you one in a minute.  Let me ramble for a bit, please.

Things are not starting to pile up for me – yet.  But they will.  Soon.  Up yours Hemingway:  you and your terseness making me all curt with my writing and sh*t.

Which reminds me to pass along my friend and fraternity brother Pete Zeigler’s joke (just in case we’re not facebook-friends and/or you didn’t see his comment to yesterday’s post on fb):

Q:  Why did Hemingway’s chicken cross the road?

A:  To die.  Alone.  In the rain.

***

I’m not sure if you’re picking up on the whole digression-as-procrastination irony within this post yet, dear reader, but it’s there.  Here?

Anyway, in the past few days I’ve had a handful of things come up that relate to future projects.  Now is the time to start preparing for them, but the busy time is not here yet.  So I’m kind of procrastinating the preparation because there’s no fire under my ass.  Which is also why – I think – the Universe is telling me it’s not yet time to downshift and get into the fast lane.

I’m not exactly sure what the Universe is telling me right now.  Maybe it’s giving me a heads-up to enjoy a little bit of semi-busy time before the wicked-busy time hits me.  I know it’s going to come all at once.

Examples:

1. I’ve been working on a project on hedge fund activism at work for the past couple of years and the “go live” date has recently been re-set for mid-January.That’s like next week.  Thing is, the part for which I’m responsible is pretty much done and has been for quite some time now.  Other people have parts to play, but they’ve not executed yet.  I’m not really “in charge”, so I can’t light a fire under their asses, even though that’s what needs to be done.  And I just don’t feel like trying to be a cheerleader or Paul Revere for anyone – I’ve done it before and it’s just no use and only frustrating for me.

   So I have to wait.

2. I have another project at work with a drop-dead date of February 9th.

   But I won’t receive the data I need to start the project until sometime after January 11th, so there’s not much I can do to prepare.  Any preparation I put together now will only be semi-effective, because (a) the preparations will be stale in a week, and (b) I don’t want to be a Chicken Little or a Boy Who Cried Wolf, because when the fire’s finally lit under my ass, nobody’s going to pat me down when I stop-drop-and-roll.

3. The company for which I currently write website copy on the side is about to get very busy.

4. A buddy of mine just contacted me to let me know that he’s going to have some copywriting work coming up for two different companies.  But not for a little bit – start date is still TBD.
   

I talked to my boss today about getting some help for the upcoming projects at work and he responded with some pretty standard push-back.  That’s a real pain in the ass and basically just dampens my initiative.  The best way for me to be prepared for the upcoming projects is to get people trained and firing on all cylinders so that when the rubber meets the road, we’ll be ready.  I even suggested a side-project that I can use to train my extra help, which would be beneficial to other aspects of the business and keep my help busy without having them twiddling their thumbs.  More push-back.

So it looks like my work projects are going to get done the way they’ve always gotten done:  long hours for me, under the gun, with a constant feeling of playing catch-up.

That’s fine; that’s what it feels like the Universe is telling me.

I haven’t talked too much yet about the fact that Chinese New Year is coming up and that this year will be the year of the Tiger – which relates to personal achievement (as opposed to this soon-to-be-ending year of the Ox, which is/was a year of dogged plodding and hard work).  Maybe I’m supposed to grab the bull by the balls and give my boss what-for:  tell him that my work ethic demands excellence and that I’ll settle for nothing less than the extra help I need NOW, so that I can get them up and running.  Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

My, this post is rife with cliches, isn’t it dear reader?

I suppose the icing on the cake for me today was reading Lauren Flax’s post “MIA” this afternoon.  She pretty much hits the nail on the head with how I’m feeling right now, which isn’t altogether an unfamiliar feeling:

“…my life lacks intensity, focus, and purpose.

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way, and that is good. But, I have been coasting longer than necessary, and I think it is time to assess where I am, and either hit the brakes or hit the gas.

I am not looking for a new career, or to write a novel, or really anything quantifiable. It is more that I don’t have much drive about how life is going to be so that all of that other stuff can show up as the result. This is where I usually start complaining about the fact that no one gets me, and I need to find a community of like-minded people and blah blah blah. The world is still lonely sometimes, but I am getting better about seeking out people who do good things for my heart and mind. I have come a long way in the past year. Still, sometimes it would be nice if it were a little easier, if some one would just figure it out for me. Just in case anyone has figured it out for me, I’ll ask: What am I missing? What is the next chapter?”

I’ve heard it said “…but it’s hell in the hallway” in response to the old saying “when one door closes, another door opens”.  And that’s pretty much where I’m at right now:  in the hallway.  Like I said, it’s not an entirely unfamiliar feeling.  I just don’t particularly like it.

I don’t know what to do with myself.  When a project starts and the proverbial fire is lit, I’m a f*ckin animal.  I get things done like nobody’s business – and they get done well.  But it’s those moments of weightlessness between the hard burning of upward flight and the acceleration of the dive that comes from giving in to (and becoming one with) gravity where I lose my direction and feel lost.  I simply don’t know how to enjoy the view while I’m up there.

What I should be doing right now is what I did a few months ago:  look at the earth below me and take aim at some point so that when gravity takes hold, all I have to do is steer a little bit here and there.  In other words, put together another priorities list.

Yes, that’s what I need to do.  My former Inventory & Priorities list [See: Inventory & List of Priorities (1), (2), (2a), (3,4)] is pretty much now defunct.  All the short-term goals of that list have been achieved, and all I have to do is keep going in the general direction I’ve already set to achieve the long-term goal of getting my winter patch for the Catskill 3500 Club (viz. climb mountains every weekend).

Yup, that’s why I’m directionless and procrastinating right now.  (Thanks for following along this broken stream of logic with me, dear reader.)  I need to put together another Inventory & List of Priorities for 2010.

The busy season at work starts in March and goes through mid-July, and as I mentioned above, it’s going to start around January 11th for me this year.  So I need to figure out what I’m going to aim at.  When a hawk dives on its prey, it isn’t falling, it’s flying downward:  the velocity of a hawk’s dive is much greater than the simple product of its mass and the acceleration of gravity (9.81 m/s²).

I need to get a bead on my prey and shape my wings the way a hawk does during this time of weightlessness.

The only other novel of Hemingway’s that I’ve read was The Sun Also Rises, which I found to be absolute rubbish, even though my friend Nicole Franco thinks it’s the best novel ever written.  Maybe I’ll pick up The Old Man and the Sea or something else.  Any suggestions, dear reader?

Hemingway had some great imagery in For Whom the Bell Tolls, even though I’m not such a fan of his choppy writing style.  I think my favorite part of the book was the John Donne quote on the covering page of Chapter 1, shown thus:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a
Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse,
as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor
of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans
death diminishes me,
because I am in-
volved in Mankinde; And therefore
never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; It
tolls for thee.

This comes from Donne’s Meditations XVII, and I’m of a mind to memorize this portion.   I haven’t been able to find the Olde English version that Hemingway used, but here’s the full piece in modern English:

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

The snow was coming down pretty steadily – there was already an inch or more on the road when I got there.  The plows were out, but the roads were pretty nasty overall.  Besides the extra three miles I would have had to add to the hike, I was more worried about the Mini getting plowed in or enough snow falling that I wouldn’t be able to get out.  I didn’t bring a shovel and haven’t ordered chains for the car yet.

So today’s hike was a bust.  No ego-boosting 9 mountains this vacation for me, but whatever.  Seven is fine, and at least now I know what Mink Hollow Road looks like.  Plateau and Sugarloaf won’t be as easy as I thought – I might even have to hike them separately.

I’m currently at 15/35, with 12 weekends to go.

The hike today should be short (about 6 miles) but relatively strenuous.  I’ve got to bushwack about a mile from Mink Hollow Road – which hopefully won’t be snowed under – to get to the trail (Devil’s Path).  Then it’s make a right to head about a mile west to the peak of Plateau, back down, and continue east for another mile to the summit of Sugarloaf (then back down and back to the car).  Each peak will be about a 1400′ vertical from the col.

This will be somewhat of an ego-fueled hike for me:  I’d really like to end this vacation having bagged 9 peaks in 5 trips over the course of a week and a day.

I have other options:  I took a hard look at Cornell and Wittenberg or Peekamoose and Table, but the verticals on both of those hikes would be over 2000′ and the hikes themselves are around 7 or 8 miles apiece.  Being that I’m staring the whole Monday-morning-back-to-work thing in the eye, I think I’ll opt for the lesser of three evils.  I’ll be tired no matter what, but whatever.

It’s supposed to snow all day today and the temperature will be around 12 degrees.  Not necessarily ideal conditions, but at least I’ll be on a marked trail for most of the hike.  You can call me a pussy for hoping that other hikers have left a nice packed showshoe trail for me, but if you’re going to do that, then you should probably put your quadriceps where your mouth is and spend a day climbing mountains in the snow with me.  =)

Here’s the map:

View Larger Map

After this, I’ll have 20 peaks (in approximately 14 trips) over the next 12 weekends.  I hope I have the energy to bag a couple more peaks this coming weekend.

View Larger Map

I was up kind of late – the alarm on my blackberry woke me up at 7; my regular alarm had been going off since 5:30.  I got to the trailhead around 10AM.  I was putting my boots on as Rick Day (3500 Club member #17-something-something – I’m #1819) was heading off to climb the same mountains, so I had fresh tracks to follow.  That made a HUGE difference in today’s bushwack.  I climbed North Dome first and then Sherrill.  Rick signed in at the Sherrill canister at 1PM; I got there at 1:40.  He was moving pretty well to get that far ahead of me.  Of course, I stopped to talk to a couple walking their german shepherd.  And I was more tired from the other four mountains I’ve climbed this week than I thought, so I was going pretty slowly.

I followed Rick’s tracks back down Sherrill, figuring he’d turn north back to Spruceton Road, but he ended up linking back with his tracks and going back up North Dome.  I didn’t want to do that, so I struck out north from the col between the two mountains to go directly to the road.  I crossed the river at Shoemaker Road and walked about a mile and a half up Spruceton Road back to the trailhead.  The bushwack to the road was steep and tough, but I found a path (of sorts) for the last 1/2 mile or so, which made things much easier.  The last time I did this hike, I came out on Spruceton Road about 1/4 mile closer to the trailhead.

I ended up getting back to the car about 10 minutes before Rick did; he had in fact gone back over North Dome again.

I only took a couple of videos on the way – like I said, I was pretty tired.  They’re two segments of the last hundred yards or so up to the canister at North Dome.  There’s really no feeling like finding the canister at the top of one of these mountains, but the scenery should be pretty nice in the vids:

There are some steep dropoffs on the way down Sherrill to the road.  I was at the military surplus store today and looked at some good lightweight rope, but didn’t buy it.  I probably should have, but whatever.

As with yesterday’s post, I’ll post some pics and videos of the hike when I’m done.

These two will be numbers 13 and 14 of 35.  I still have 12 weekends left to climb the other 21 peaks (in approximately 15 trips).  I’m getting there.  Here’s the map of the two peaks:

View Larger Map

I wouldn’t recommend thinking about a guy with no sense of direction going hiking in the wilderness alone in the winter – especially not on mountains without trails.  That’s pretty much tantamount to thinking about Cthulhu and the Old Ones:  not good for the psyche.

You can also check out some of the pics on my facebook album, if you like.  I’d say go view the trip over at EveryTrail, but for some reason my last couple of hikes haven’t uploaded.

Overall, it was a great day. The weather report said that it would be overcast and probably snowing, but the sky was actually pretty clear. It was about 27 degrees outside when I got back to the car, so it was probably a few degrees cooler at the summits.

The whole trip was just under 7 miles.  The two peaks of Twin Mountain only count as one mountain.  Twin and Indian head are numbers 11 and 12; I have 23 left to go before March 22d.

At the end of the day, I think it’s basically ego-driven.  I enjoy hiking, but I like the sense of accomplishment I get from checking peaks off a list in pursuit of an overall goal.  I was shooting for my Catskill 3500 Club patch, and now I’m shooting for the winter patch.  When I’m done with this goal, I’ll move on to the 46 high peaks in the Adirondacks, for the Adirondack 46ers patch.

It’s the patches I’m after, not joining the clubs.  Not the physical piece of fabric and thread, but the symbol that I’ve accomplished the goal.  And, to a certain extent, the harder the goal, the better; the more valuable the patch to me.

I don’t hike or climb mountains for the simple joy of it, as many people do.  I don’t really want to climb a mountain unless I can check it off my list when I’m done.  I don’t really like climbing the same mountain twice.  Oh, I don’t mind climbing a mountain again if I’m taking someone out to see what it’s like, but I prefer to have a reason for climbing the mountain.

In the past few months I’ve skipped hiking quite a few weekends simply because I didn’t have any mountains to climb that were part of an overall goal.  I’ll be out there for the next 12 weekends (and a few more days this week) simply because of my winter peaks goal.  I recently climbed Kaaterskill High Peak and Indian Head and Twin because I wanted to get my skinny ass in shape for this week, but also to be sure that I knew the best way to climb them when they counted (which is now).  Those hikes were more scouting runs than anything else.

***

I recently received the latest issue of The Canister, the Catskill 3500 Club’s newsletter.  Between now and March 22d, member-led hikes are scheduled for just about all of the winter peaks I have left to climb.

I think I might sign up for one or two, but I’ll probably continue to hike alone this winter.  Again on the ego-driven thing, I won’t get the same sense of accomplishment if I follow someone to the top of the mountain.  I’d rather figure out how to get there myself.

That said, there are a couple of mountains (Friday and Balsam Cap, and maybe one or two more) that are particularly difficult; it may be worth my while to learn the best way up the mountain by following someone else.  And for a couple of the other tougher bushwacks, I may just contact the hike leader to find out from where they plan to set out, so that I can follow their tracks the week after.  For whatever reason, that seems to be a loophole that’s acceptable to my ego.

***

So whatever my motivation, at least I’m getting out there and climbing mountains.  As I’ve said before, it’s really good for me – physically, mentally and spiritually.  Sometimes I feel like I need it in order to stay sane.  There are plenty of mountains left within driving distance for me to climb.  I won’t run out of goals for at least the next couple of years.

27 mountains

17 trips

13 weekends

Today I’ll be hiking Thomas Cole and Black Dome mountains:

View Larger Map

I’d put in a plug here for Didi’s blog, but you can’t see it if you’re not authorized.  I’m authorized, which is pretty sweet.  That means I get to see the bits of Didi’s soul that she mashes up and spreads on the computer screen.  It’s actually quite lovely.  She’s actually got two posts waiting for me that I haven’t yet read – I’ll do that tomorrow at lunch.  Now is me-time.

If I spent a bit of time, I’m sure I’d be able to figure out how to post “authorized reader only”…er…posts so that I’m not necessarily spreading all my junk on the computer screen that I’d rather keep between me and Didi (and probably Katie and Scott).  Not that any of it’s all that juicy.  Just whiney.

So I’ve been dipping my toe back in the internet dating pool a bit.  I downloaded the OkCupid app for my AyePhone and have – at least thusfar – managed to not check it in an obsessive/compulsive fashion.  I’ve been sending out short emails to some of the chicks I find attractive, and have achieved a modicum of success which I won’t hesitate to call heretofore unheard-of.

Now, my guess is that my numbers haven’t changed, but rather that my perception thereof has.  Where I once sent out well-crafted emails sealed with love and anticipation, I now mostly just don’t care.  Get back to me or not; my expectations are low.  So I’m not really counting how many emails I’ve sent against how many I’ve received.  It’s kind of a pleasant feeling:  send and forget.

This is mostly, by the way, due to the advice of some of the wonderful women I’ve met on facebook and Twitter.  Thank you, ladies, for taking the time to give me suggestions regarding my internet pickup line format and style.

That said, the emails I’m getting back aren’t of the “YES!!  I want to date YOU!!  NOW!!” category.  One such went something like this:

… also, and I hate to do this, I noticed a dealbreaker for me.  Maybe two.  Firstly, I don’t want to date a smoker and second, I don’t know how far away Ridgewood is from me.  I want to date someone that is conveniently located in my daily world.  I’ve only been to NJ once in my life.

That was actually part of her second email to me.  Things looked pretty promising until then.  She’s in Brooklyn – about half an hour from me.  I refrained from saying anything along the lines of “good luck your search; look me up if you get over your prejudices”.

Her first email stated that she liked my profile.  Huh.

This whole “conveniently located in my daily world” thing is a good example of the eBay-attitude toward internet dating that I’ve sadly seen too much.  God forbid people actually meet in person to see whether they’re compatible.

So yeah, that’s the end of my whining for this evening.

Or not.

That all said, as much as the whole eBay-attitude is in and of itself a dealbreaker for me, at the end of the day it still looks and feels like rejection.

What kind of sucks is that I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about feeling rejected.  The above example isn’t really much of a big deal for me, but it tends to become one when I keep it in and spend too much time ruminating on it.  It’s like having a bit of nastiness in one’s mouth – better to spit it out and rinse with a palate-cleanser than to keep chewing.  I tried to find someone to talk with about it (to get it out in the air and rinse myself clean), but have not yet had an opportunity.  So this is the first time I’m speaking of it.  Again, I kind of prefer to do this kind of cleansing in a relatively private manner.  Whatever.  Welcome to the car-wash of my soul for today, dear reader.

The other bit of rejection (which only really compounded and exacerbated the first) I’ve been feeling in the past couple of days is easy enough to pinpoint.  The chick I’m tutoring in philosophy is the one for whom I’ve held a candle for the past year or so.  A few months back, she sent me the “just interested in friendship” email and I pretty much severed all ties – cut my losses – in an effort to avoid further pain.

This is the point at which I’d generally reserve the following for Didi’s eyes only – I’ll probably just skim through it anyway – so I’m kind of hoping that this stuff is buried under enough words in this post that only my die-hard readers are paying attention.

Well, a couple of months later, she asks for help with her philosophy papers and I really couldn’t say no.  Not really for who she is, but because she’s someone asking me for help.  And I dig philosophy.  So our first few meetings and conversations go pretty well – she’s not blowing me off at the last minute like she usually does.  She’s paying attention and trying to learn.  And we’re not flirting, which is key.  I’m keeping things all business, and I must also admit to being a bit reserved – not standoffish, but just very careful not to go down the road of flirting, as easy as that can be.  The rest of this will all be a single paragraph, I think: to further discourage lazy eyes and to fool myself into thinking I’m insulating my feelings from whatever.  Anyway, we met the other night and she talked a bit too much about her new boyfriend (a friend of mine) for my comfort level – and not particularly flattering things about him, either.  That and a few too many texts while we were working kind of made me feel like the whole thing was becoming a waste of my time.  I’m available to teach philosophy and help writing papers, not to socialize and gossip.  As I went to bed last night, it occurred to me that this is very similar to how she acted almost a year ago, when she would complain about her last boyfriend.  I’m not sure really where I’m going with all this, nor do I want to go down the road of straight-up bitching.  This, btw, is because when I write things here I feel like I’m having a conversation with you, dear reader (albeit currently one-sided).  My point of the foregoing is that when I went to bed last night, the old feelings of rejection from the “just be friends” email resurfaced.  I thought I was past that.  I was pretty proud of myself for being able to separate my former feelings for her and keep our interaction on a strictly professional level.  I am/was also beating myself up a bit about not being more straightforward and saying that I didn’t want to get into any talk about her boyfriend(s).  And now I’m wondering if I’ll be able to continue tutoring her.  I just don’t like the way I felt the other night, and it passed right on into today when I got out of work – like a mugger waiting for me in the car.  So anyway, that’s pretty much it.  If I’m going to continue feeling rejected, I’m out.  I’m not dealing with it.  In both senses.  I know that “not dealing with it” isn’t necessarily all that healthy in an emotional sense, but, to a certain extent, I will deal with it insofar as I’ll discuss it with the few confidants I have left in my life.  In the other sense, and probably the one that’s stronger with me (as the Force is strong with me), I mean that I’m not dealing with it insofar as I simply won’t allow this crap in my life.  I don’t need it.  I don’t need to spend time with people who are only interested in using me – whether at a conscious or unconscious level.  Fuck off, psychic vampires.

Tomorrow (today) is my last day at work for the year.  And I think it should be a relatively short day, too.  There’s not a whole lot going on at the office right now.  I sent out my “Happy Holidays” e-cards to my Outlook contacts (well, most of them), and received a ton of “out of office” replies.  Note to self:  maybe it would be a good idea to do one of those for me for next week.  Before I leave, though, I have to put together a proposal for one of our Taiwanese clients (actually, maybe two) and have my sit-down review with my boss.

I’m pretty sure I know how the review’s going to go, and I’m relatively pessimistic about it.  My boss will tell me that I’m one of the hardest workers in the office and that I really crank out the work-product, but he’d really like to see me at my desk at 8:30 every day.  Then he’ll give me a cost-of-living increase in salary and rationalize for a bit about why my bonus isn’t bigger.

My plan for the last several months has been to be uber-prepared for this conversation and kind of go on the offensive and ask for a bigger raise.  I’ve talked to several people who have spent time in the corporate environment, asking them for advice on how I should go about having the “gimme a raise” discussion.  I’ve got a good idea of how much more money I’m looking to make (and how much I should ask for), and some good notes about how to do this.  But as I approach the actual event, I’m not so sure that this is the best time to do so.  Call it fear or rationalization or whatever, but my plan right now isn’t to get all psyched up for a salary-grappling match with my boss.  I’m on vacation next week and I don’t want to spend the whole time thinking about what I could have said that might have made a difference.  As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s anything I can say during my review that will increase my salary beyond what my boss already has in mind.

So I’m going to stay relaxed and see what happens.  There’s a slim chance (I’m talking hundredths of a percent here) that my boss will blow me away with how much money he wants to pay me in 2010, but I doubt it.  I’m really not making as much money as I’d like to be making, nor am I making as much as I think I’m worth.  But I like my job and I’m making enough money to pay the bills.  With the copywriting gig on the side, I’m living in relative comfort (at least, as much as a $100k student loan yoke can allow one to be comfortable).  But wtf, I’m 33 years old and have been working hard since I was like 8.  I like working hard; even if I found an “easy” job for about the same amount of money, I’d want to work hard.  And I like the people with whom I work.  I like my work environment and my prospects for the future at this firm if I continue to work hard.

If my raise/bonus are what I expect (or less), then I’ll ask my boss for an appointment after the first of the year to discuss my salary.  I don’t think there’s any need to be pushy during the review session.  We can set a date and both be prepared for a negotiation at another time.  I know that review time is kind of a stressful one for my boss, and that some of my co-workers can be pushy about this stuff.  Again, I’m going to continue to stay relaxed and enjoy the ride.

Fuck it, I’m hiking all next week anyway.  That’s what I’m looking forward to right now.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll talk about my views on the upcoming Chinese New Year – reflections on the year of the Ox and projections/anticipations for the year of the Tiger.  For now, though, I’m heading off to bed.

Peace out, dear reader.  I know it’s still early, but please accept my warmest wishes for you and your family during this holiday season and for a healthy and prosperous 2010.

So let’s go with this for today:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Are you already there or are you working toward that goal?

If not, why not?

Back to the grind.  Whatever.  I’m off on Monday, bitches.

Tonight was the company holiday party.  I arrived late and left early, looking wicked sharp in my suit in true cooler-than-thou fashion.  There’s a pretty decent gap in maturity levels at my company.  The people on my level did pretty much the same thing I did, while those a few steps down on the professionalism scale took full advantage of the free booze and too-loud deejay.  Many will not make it to work tomorrow, and plenty of stories will be told.  I’ll tell ya though, dear reader, it was nice to see some booty shakin on the dance floor.

I returned home to find myself with a whole lot less ambition than I left the party with.  Sat around for a bit and finally unpacked my books from the boxes they’ve been in for the past two years and put them on my new Ikea bookshelves.  I am not my effin khakis.  Laid out the spare rug for insulation’s sake – the cat got something new to play with.

At least I think I found something to read.  For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.  I really don’t like Hemingway.  But maybe this time he’ll be different.  And if that’s not the definition of insanity, I don’t know what is.

So yeah, after being in this apartment for two and a half years, I’ve started to nest in the past few days.  I kind of can’t wait to move.  Could Brooklyn be the land of milk and honey and I’m still trying to plow this baked clay of suburbia?  Who knows.  I’m pretty sure I’m buying a motorcycle this spring.  After the tax man makes me his bitch, of course.

It’s been glorious.

It feels a lot like this song.

I should take vacations all the time.  I’ve been hiking, Christmas shopping, got my car inspected (and re-inspected), bought some bookshelves at Ikea (for me), and did a handful of other me-related things.  Including waking up whenever the hell I pleased.  Glorious, I tell you.  Glorious.

But, like all good things, it’s come to an end.  Sort of.  I’m back to work Thursday and Friday, and there’s plenty of stuff for me to do when I get back (like I said, I’ve been checking my emails), but I think I’m off on Monday as well.  Then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday back to work, and I’m off for the rest of the year.

As I’ve mentioned (several times, I’m sure), I’m really looking forward to getting a good jump on my Catskills winter peaks goal during that last week of the year.  It’s going to be wicked cold, but I’ve totally got the gear and the mettle.

I’ve totally been living in the moment for the last few days.  Completely relaxed and content.  It’s fucking awesome.

The Quixotic Jedi is one year old, by the way.  Sometime in December – I don’t remember when.  Maybe the 6th.  Happy Birthday, buddy.

To briefly switch gears (from lemon to Rhode Island):

I had an interesting experience this afternoon.  While I was playing chess at the local SBUX with my friend Anthony, I received a phone call from my philosophy student.  She said that she took a nap and woke up thinking about Decartes (we’re studying his first two Meditations on First Philosophy) and wanted to run something by me.

I mentioned these moments of realization way-back-when in the post The Coolest Guy I Know.  I won’t try to describe them fully here – I think I did a good enough job in that post.

So here’s the cool part – the part where I am today exactly who I want to be:

1. I’m tutoring someone in philosophy,
2. who called me to ask a question,
3. while I was playing chess with a buddy.

Go ahead and call me a dork all you like; I’m pretty happy with where I’m at right now.  Oh, I may not be that college professor in a sweatervest, tweed jacket and bow tie (though I do own all these things), but I’m closer now than I’ve ever been.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to start applying to undergraduate institutions for a teaching position; I still have to make my fortune in the real world before I can retire to academia.  I’m just saying that the moment of realization that I had this afternoon was wicked fly.