Not all that funny

My apologies - if anyone is still reading - for the lack of engaging repartee lately. I've been lazy about posting because, well, now that I KNOW who's reading this thing, I sometimes feel the need to hide a bit, to not be out there in the open, exposed.

I was thinking about that this weekend, in a place I'm not allowed to mention under threat of Brad, when I was trying to convince myself that I should go running. I love running, just as I love writing. But in both pursuits, it's the start that's the hardest. The first twenty steps of a run; the first few sentences of a blog or journal entry. The opening of an email to an old friend.

It's hardest for me to crest those beginnings. So I stop running for a while - and writing - until I become so annoyed with myself that I just have to do something.

Climbing is the same way. Getting out of the car, approaching in the sun, just to get on a route that's too difficult for me - so much so that I come off the weekend looking like a bare-hands fighter. Sometimes it just doesn't feel right, but when asked what I'd rather be doing, I don't have an answer. Of course, I probably DO have the answer, I'm just not able to say it yet; I'm too scared that it's not the "right" thing.

Sundays used to be sad for me. We'd leave our ski house and drive down into the city. The weekend was over. My "ski friends" were heading home for the work and school week, too, and I wasn't going to see or hear from them again until the following Friday (long distance calls were kind of rare back then, and cell phones came in giant bags that sat in the back seats of our mothers' SUVs). I had to return to the school I didn't really like, to the peers who I thought didn't "get" me (who gets" anyone at age 14? And really, how complex could I possibly have been? I was a girl in the suburbs, not the next Steven Hawking). I remember sitting in the backseat, listening to my parents' music, watching the gloomy Pennsylvania dusk take over what was most likely a cloudy day, and giving up. I didn't stand a chance at having a good week at school, because right there, in that car, I decided not to have a good time. I decided that it was going to be hateful and annoying, and so it was.

And as I watched Brad put up a new route this weekend, in a PLACE-THAT-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED, I began to think that maybe I was doing the same thing with climbing. Not always, but definitely on those weekends when I'd rather be watching Fall overtake the mountains and baking brownies than hauling a huge haul bag up a crumbling talus field in PLACE-THAT-MUSTNOT-BE-NAMED.

I need to stop giving in to that fatalism.