coworker of mine just slyly admitted to having been caught getting it on in the bushes on a hiking trail.

heh.

that's why my favorite hikes are in places of extreme desolation.

but still pretty strong.

350 went up, and 350 went down.

now, add five pounds and four reps to that, and i'll really have something!

is conclusive proof for the lack of a Creator.

My Erisian Wedding


version 5.5.23


(K) 2006, 2007, Rusty Penn

(Wedding Party meets at parking lot, departing at 1:45 in the PM. We walk until
2:33 in the PM and then stop, assuming positions as described below. At 2:35 in
the PM, the Ceremony commences.)

o |  PGG       |g
c |       G    |u
e |   P        |e
a |       B    |s
n |  MoH       |ts


PGG = Pretty Good Guy
MoH = Ms. of Honor
G   = Groom
B   = Bride
P   = Priest

(Bride produces Golden Apple. Bride tosses Golden Apple in the air, Groom catches it and presents it to Bride, making sure that everyone can see the KALLISTI. If nobody understands what KALLISTI means, TOUGH. Bride replaces Golden Apple wherever she had it stashed before.)

PRIEST : (Indicates Groom.) As 203 stands before you, just as you like her, wearing as little as possible, read from this card :
(PRIEST hands Card-o-Vows to Groom.)

I, Saint Toad
am honestly not joking, here on this magic beach
when i say that i promise
to love you, 203,
until late December, 2012, when the world will enflame itself in a nasty, 
  chariots-of-the-gods-style unappeasable-bug-eyed-alien-induced 
  armageddon
or till death do us part
whichever is longer
to treasure you and support you in all that you do
to make you beer and coffee for at least the first year
to grow with you and care for you
to pick you up when you're tired and even when you're not
to write you a minimum of 5 (five) love poems per annum for the first 
  5 (five) months
and to cherish the honor and pleasure
of being your faithful husband through good times and bad
patient and forgiving
as we wrinkle and gray together
on the same trail
forever.

PRIEST : And now the bride. (Indicates Bride.) As Saint Toad stands before you, just as you like him, all sweaty and salty, your vows, madam:
(PRIEST hands Card-o-Vows to Bride.)

I, 203
really truly mean it in front of all these people here
when i say that i promise
to love you, Saint Toad,
even in the upcoming
post-apocalyptic-nuclear-holocost-brain-eating-zombie-and-
  stock-market-crash world
where I'll probably have to eat meat because nuclear winter 
  will kill all the vegetables
to laugh at your toilet humor
to grow with you and care for you
to obey at least once or twice
to release your mother from her shackles of worrying for you
to stop breaking rule #1 of your car
and to cherish the honor and pleasure
of being your faithful wife through good times and bad
as we wrinkle and gray together
patient and forgiving
on the same trail
forever.

PRIEST : MoH, the Groom's ring, please.
(MoH presents HOT DOG BUN to PRIEST. PRIEST opens HOT DOG BUN and finds Groom's Ring.)
(PRIEST hands the Groom's Ring to Bride.)
Bride : (Slides ring on Groom's finger) With this ring, I cleave to you, eternally.

PRIEST : PGG, the Bride's ring, please.
(PPG presents HOT DOG BUN to PRIEST. PRIEST opens HOT DOG BUN and finds Bride's Ring.)
(PRIEST hands the Bride's Ring to Groom.)
Groom : (Slides ring on Bride's finger) With this ring, eternal cleavage.

PRIEST : And now, today, on this 23 day of May, 2007 AD, this Pungenday, Discord 70, 3173 YOLD, this Frobuary 19, YOMHC 0x15, by the power vested in my 401k, by the Power of Greyskull, and by the Power of Positive Thinking, I now pronounce you man and wife. Do your thingus.

(The Man operates the Wife's veil. The Wife operates the Man's veil-equivalent.)

(The Man and Wife do their thingus. Their thingus lasts five minutes. FIVE MINUTES DAMMIT.)

(Everyone lives happily ever after.)

... i plan to give the same to her.

my head really got screwed on straight these last couple of days. i like it that way.

most of what i know, i know subconsciously.

once in a while, it bubbles up to the surface, but when it's in its infancy, it's down deep and hidden.

when i asked 203 to marry me, not so long ago, i knew i knew some of the reasons i did it, and i knew i knew other reasons i did it, subconsciously. and i knew i didnt know at all some of the reasons i did it.

last night 203 put me before herself. it wasn't the first time, it surely won't be the last time. i could interpret her not waking me as part of her desire to maintain her tough-guy persona, and feel sad that she didn't want to lean on me, or i could think of it as her considering that i wanted sleep before a big day of deadlifts (and that's another thing: 203 understands my needs, even the ones she doesn't have and can't really relate to, and respects them. that, i think, is rare. and if it's not rare, why wasn't i told!?!) and, as i said above, putting me before herself. that's pretty cool.

whichever it was initially, it was definitely the latter by the end of it, and i slept like a rock (and had a fantastic dream!) to wake up to a PR deadlift.

and that PR got me thinking later in the day. over the past year that we've been together, i've jumped into two new hobbies (climbing, head-fi), and begun to really find my way to success in four others (beer, coffee, whisky, lifting (have i mentioned lately my PRs?)). my social life has improved, my decor has improved, my ice cream intake has improved, my car gets better gas mileage, and i spend less on shampoo.

in other words, since i met her, and especially since i asked her to marry me, my life has gotten measurably and immeasurably better. those lists up there were just off the top of my head, and i had to add to them multiple times as i thought it through a little more. less than two days from now i'll be married to 203. i've started a new countdown to commemorate this fact. but the reason i'll be marrying her is the reason i kept hiking with her, the reason i fell in love with her, and the reason i wanted her here with me:

she makes me better.

that's gotta be worth something. that's gotta be worth sticking around for.

R.

i dropped my work set down to 315 today, as was my plan, in order that i may progress another 10lbs in this deadlift cycle. i felt off a little on account of probably stress and on account of probably because i didn't have infected mushroom playing at all to help me out and also on account of probably on account of my future in-laws were watching disinterestedly. i felt hurried and sloppy but the weight was the lightest i've worked with in four weeks so it went up real easy like.

then i did my dips and thought about what i was going to try for my single.

would it be work set + 15 as i'd been doing? that would be 330, which would be a single of only 5lbs more than my 5RM. that didn't seem right. i had considered earlier that the single i do should be 40lbs greater than the 5 rep work sets, on account of my timetable has me doing 5x370 the workout before i do 1x400, so i should be able to pull 40lbs more than my 5rm (yes, i know 400-370 = 30. MARGIN OF ERROR.)

anyhow, that would have me doing 1x355, which is 15 more than my last recorded 1rm. that seemed wrong too.

so i simply put on 5 more than last week's 1rm/pr, and hey whaddya know, it went up easy for a cool 1x345.

so there we have it. one last PR single while i'm single. unexpected, too, like a midday visit from 203 ;)

cheese is not vegetarian

cheese is not vegetarian

cheese is not vegetarian

i got a hi-fi headphone system so i wouldn't have to spend $$$$$$$$$ on a hi-fi stereo.

now it's painful to listen to my stereo system, which cost, in its entirety, less than one of my pairs of headphones. in a word: it sucks. hard.

and it doesn't help when the mp3 i'm listening to is overcompressed -- and now i am tuned to hear crappy compression.

i've trained my ears with good music like i've trained my palate with good scotch. now i have a higher standard. music on the stereo now counts as "slumming". sigh.

how far i've come since i first heard those words.

still they echo in my ears, and in my soul, and as they reverberate throughout my room now, these words of sage advice are no less impactful now then when i first heard them.

how far i've come since then.

you have not betrayed your ideals, your ideals betrayed you.

when i think of how i've wanted to live, how i've steered my life, such as it is, such as i could, these past two decades, i am as content as i should ever be. my ideals do indeed betray me: i cannot hide behind something i think i want to be, because i can still see me.

i am so that i will be.

i am not sad when i think of the loss of what i might have been because i will not be that, i am sad because i have lost sight of what i mean to be.

relax, grin, let the changes in.

for several weeks now the mac has been driving me nuts, as, i think, happens to all mac owners after a while. i loves me my lovely mac, with its shiny pretty interface and its gorgeous bash shell underneath, but damnsit, once in a while...

i have some mp3s sitting on an openbsd machine, lots of them. some of them are very poorly sorted. they are/were exported via samba and the mac mounted the samba shares and i could play with my files via the finder. this was all well and good until one day i encountered a strange problem.

i was creating directories, named "1", "2", "3", and so on, and dragging mp3s into those dirs as is my way. after a small number of dirs had been created, say, 4, suddenly they all took on the name of one of the dirs -- they all became "4" in the finder window, and looking in any of them, i could see only the contents of "4". via hte bash shell, all was as it should have been, but via the finder, i had 4 copies of "4". i did various things on my windows laptop to verify that this was a finder problem.

so i figured that perhaps switching to nfs would alleviate the problem, after all, smb + mac? ms + apple? no thanks. so i went about setting up nfs (again), which should be no problem (right?) because i've done it before between the very same machines.

mounting the shares was easy. mount -t nfs eris:/opt/mp3 mp3.

oh no, not that easy.

sudo mount -t nfs -o resvport eris:/opt/mp3 mp3

that's more like it! stupid low-port-requiring-openbsd-nfs-server-that-can't-be-configured-to-accept-user-ports! okay, on to the writable share.

that's where the fun began. nothing bar nothing worked. not at all. i fiddled with options in /etc/exports (and dammit, there really *aren't* many options there!) and fiddled with options to mount_nfs (and there aren't many options *there* either!) and nothing worked. i created a user on the openbsd box with the same uid as my mac user, i tried writing as root, as my user, i changed permissions six ways from sunday, i did many things i can't even remember because by this point i'd had my third stout.

nfs configuration can only be comprehended under the influence. once i'd gotten that third stout in me, i wondered: what if I did something only a drunken idiot would do?

so i deleted a perfectly good line from /etc/exports, one that referred to a perfectly good existing directory on eris, and rebooted (too lazy to do the kill -HUP stuff).

the drunken idiot approach, as always, worked. removing a supposedly harmless, well-formed line from /etc/exports allowed me to write on the totally unrelated writable export. huh?

whatever.

at this point i was ready to attend to the mess of setting the nfs shares to automount on the mac. of course, this is where the *real* fun begins -- there's no real documenttion of this, just blog posts from 2 years and 3 OS versions ago. sigh.

and hence this blog post: if i ever must do it again, i have this for my cruddy reference, though i must punish myself with sloging through all this gunk to get to the point.

which is this:

netinfo
mounts
new dir
name = eris:/opt/mp3
type = nfs
dir = /Network/Servers/ (dont forget the trailing / or unexpected crap will happen!)
opts = resvport,net,tcp

that's it (hah! two seconds typing, twenty minutes trying).

tcp, i found out, is necessary because importing hte mp3s thus mounted thru itunes with nfs/udp causes itunes to barf when the udp packets don't show up. what?! udp packets not showing up over a wireless network? unheard of! how could that possibly happen? surely we have no recourse other than to give up!

in any case, nfs/tcp seems to be working, and maybe even a little faster than smb, probably because i had previously applied hte following to improve speed on smb:

echo "net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0" >> /etc/sysctl

really, switching between songs is snappy, browsing dirs seems faster than smb, and it's all unixy goodness. feel the love!

still, itunes is a slow beast and it took all night to import all my mp3s. i went to bed and woke up and went to see if i'd fixed the stupid folder renaming problem.

i had not.

ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!

i spent a drunken evening installing nfs instead of installing my own filesystem in 203s network. and nothing to show for it!

(she did refer to the indian restaurant we visited last week as "darfur" which i found hilarious, and aptly descriptive of their mediocre food)

so, back to work.

google, usenet, apple.com : no help at all finding this problem. it seemed i was the only one who had it.

i decided to think like a drunken idiot, again, this time without the aid of actual alcohol. what if i was a retard working at apple, what would it take for me to screw things up?

maybe this "finder turd" .DS_Store file had something to do with it? i deleted the .DS_Store files under hte dir i was browsing and browsed some more. no help. still the folders shimmied and danced.

what if i disabled .DS_Store on network drives altogether? i dont need them, they screw up soem of my scripts, and they bug me.

so, i ran:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

and rebooted.

wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles! that seems to have done it!!

why the stupid DS_Store files should screw finder up so badly is beyond me -- perhaps it had failed a permissions check and couldn't write one, and that hosed it permanently internally, i have no idea. but after a whole lot of messign about, after coming this close: | | to installing freebsd, partly in hopes it would fix the problem, partly in hopes that i'd get to install freebsd and thus have 3 different bsds online in my house, after skipping my morning pee to write this boring post, i solved the irritating problem and ended up with a slightly faster mp3 network.

now i'll go buy myself a squeezebox and throw all my work away.

i was going to be lazy and not blog what was on my mind, but then i got IM-ed a quote (from an odd source (yet, oddly, not so odd, since the source was included in one of the groups of folks to be mentioned below)) sourced to the inimitable (yet nonetheless poorly imitated in that cruddy time travel season cliffhanger of st:tng we watched the other night) mark twain:

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths.
No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they 
have been married a quarter of a century. --Mark Twain

i've been in a bit of a mood, lately, as i swiftly approach the first and only real commitment i've ever made in my entire life. it's a bit scary. all right, it's a lot scary. i can think of, and have thought of, a lot of reasons to go through with it. new reasons that i hadn't thought of back when i proposed. to whit: look, man, I’ve got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I… this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it’s not just, it might not be just such a simple… uh, you know?

just when i started to get a grip once more, i sat in on a meeting with a coworker whose marriage of six years (that magic number: someone on slashdot (yes, a world-class expert!) recently posted that six years is the duration of the hormonal cocktail that induces people to have LTRs) broke up quire recently, and, apparently, quite bitterly. "don't do it," he said with conviction when he heard that my marriage was six days away. "don't do it," he repeated, several times, to be sure i understood.

that got me thinking, as things tend to do. i'd imagine that he wasn't much younger/older than i when he began his marriage, and i'd assume that at the beginning, he and his wife were just as in love as 203 and i are now. now, we've moved out of the realm of things i've never thought of and square into teh middle of Heavy Thought Land. i've run the question of "how do you make a happy marriage" through the old sausage grinder, and the awful smelling mess that extruded out the other end indicated, "you pick a good place to start, and you do your best. the future's not ours to see."

way back when, i ran some mental calculations and came to the conclusion that marrying 203, i can't lose. if we live happily ever after, we both win. if it goes to crap and we split up, i've spent some years happy, and some years unhappy, and come through with some kind of greater understanding of something or another. if i stay stuck for decades in an unhappy marriage, then i'm one kind of a moron or another -- and truly, i've come to realize that though i have my faults, i'm not really that kind of a moron.

that covers the hindquarters of the extrusion, right up to the "do your best", and the "pick a good place to start" is all up to me. i think i've picked just such a place, which is to say, just the right person. though i could do differently, i could not, in my honest opinion, do better. whether my marriage lasts fifty years or fifty minutes, as i've said to 203, i don't want to not marry her. so i will. and since i go into my vows with the intention of holding them sacred closer to fifty years than to fifty minutes, i step over the threshold with the best of intentions and the fewest doubts that i, as me, can ever be expected to hold.

as i drove to work the other day, i thought to myself: you really can't beat being intelligent. i lucked out on that one, i guess, to the extent that i am intelligent. once i learned to harness it, everything that is good in my life followed.

as an ant follows a trail of slime to encounter a tasty dinner of salted slug, so this post follows a trail of my thoughts, and we are rapidly approaching the point, the thought that has emerged in my mind today to be provoked onto the blog by a quote of mark twain. i have a number of friends. the ones that i am closest to are, for the most part, married, and of the ones that are married, including the source of my twain quote, i can think of none that are married unhappily. i can think of none who are morons, none who are losers, none who are especially different from me in any important regard. and yet, among my acquaintances, the one who gave me the advice yesterday has never struck me as particularly like me. perhaps that is why he is counted among my acquaintances rather than among my friends.

while i do not know what happened in his relationship, and while i do not know how his marriage started, i must conclude, from what i know of him and me, that we selected our wives on different criteria, and i expect he glossed over the "longevity/loyalty" aspect not only in her makeup, but also in his own.

i know i don't have many of the answers, and that every time i find a Life's Answer it comes wrapped around two more Life's Questions, like a ransom note wrapped around a brick through my dining room window. i am expecting that my marriage will bring more unexpected surprises than not, and i'm expecting them to be mostly good. i can see for myself the things that i want from marriage in the marriages of those that i respect, and while i may have cut my bachelorhood a little too short, i will surely survive that mistake, and many others to come, by leaning on the unbreakable strength of the House whose foundation we will lay next week.

i speak of climbing, beer, and KILL ALL HUMANS! KILL ALL HUMANS!

had to shave last night. my plan for next week (holy crap, next week! yesterday on NPR we heard about a former president of the american psychological something or another who announced to his fiancee, two weeks before his marriage, that he was gay. when i heard that, i turned to 203 and said, "whelp, guess that won't happen to you, huh?" she didn't laugh quite as hard as i'd hoped.) was to have my beard be the same length as my top, to give the look of a lightly coated fuzzball with a smile. since my hair had been cut to a length of 1/3 LEGOs and since my beard was already at 1/4 LEGO, yesterday morning, after only a week of growth, this seemed eminently doable. the day before the wedding, i'd go over my entire head, comically, with a trimmer, evening everyting out to about 3/5 LEGO. but then, disaster!

an itch! and another! and irritation from the interaction between climbing helmet and whiskers! that would not do.

and so, yesterday afternoon, after one of yesterday's multiple showers, i abandoned my aspirations to hermetic balance (as above, so below) (i've been waiting to use that. i thought it up last week. it's so clever! har de har de har!) and sheared (in new zealand, we don't shear our sheep with nobody!) off everything but my magician's patch.

now, 203's parents are going to think i keep a beard year round, when in truth, i haven't had one in months and kept this one only to reduce blade costs.

okay, i didn't keep it for that, i kept it for the usual reason: the red in the beard offsets the gray on my head. also, it looks cool. it's so metal!

the running music, she calls to me!

january, my dear. january, and no sooner. then, once again, the road shall be mine.

i am now, officially, five pounds stronger than ever before.

i may actually be ten pounds stronger, but i dont feel like digging through the paperwork.

(i should, though, because i suspect i'm also five pounds heavier.)

has a nice ring to it.

those numbers seem familiar, somehow...

racked the hoagie style peated scotch ale on friday night, with a procedure that was not entirely uneventful. my broken siphon starter had been retrofitted with parts from my replacement (and also broken) siphon starter, and it refused to start a siphon. i'm not sure why -- the two were different models, but to my understanding of physics, that should not have made a difference. after we got things working (suboptimally: no "filter tip" on the starter, so we got a little more gunk than desired) i lost interest (replacement tip is in the mail) and didn't try to reproduce and analyze the problems.

i've got too many other problems to analyze.

i got a taste from the tube leftovers (perhaps not the best place to taste) and, unlike the extract version which i brewed nine brews ago, i could actually taste the peat. at 12 days of (vigorous) fermentation, we still have lots of harsh flavors, but not an excessive fruityness (which worried me on account of high initial temps). 203 tried some from the tubes, and she thought it was also good. unfortunately, it's got a lasting bitterlybad aftertaste. fortunately, that doesn't surprise me in the least and i'm certain it will go away with some aging in the secondary.

but now i've got the empty carboy blues. there's a 6.5er right there in my closet with nothing in it, and the only thing stopping me from brewing this upcoming weekend is the notion that i wont get the ingredients to arrive in time (oh, that and the fact that 203s parents arrive that weekend and 3 days later i'm getting married. but other than that...).

my next batch should be an imperial stout, which will take plenty long to age. it does not put me off one bit that summer is not hte best time to age a stout. i've got about 5 gallons left in the kegerator and 5 gallons in the secondary, which indicates that i'm piling up -- but that could all be gone after one party (tho the stuff in the secondary needs to age in bottles, too).

sigh.

Once upon a time, which is to say, 5 or 6 weeks ago, I had a problem. I was training deadlifts and I arrived at the target for the week, and failed to lift it. My target was five reps, I had lifted five reps of five pounds less not long ago, and I failed to get even one rep. This was bad, especially since the weight in question was only 320 and my goal for this year is to hit 400 -- a ways off.

so i devised a new routine, and i set to implement it, and after four weeks or so i'd worked my way back up, last week, to (a relatively easy) 315. and then, two days before i was to again attempt 320, i got the first cold of 2007 (i think) (maybe not) (but certainly, it was inconvenient).

now, deadlifts are an exercise of the mind as much as of muscle. that's true in both the hard scientific sense and the hocus-pocus sense. i'm training for poundage, not reps, and at some point, you're training the nervous system more than building muscle. in layman's terms, the only terms i really understand, you have X number of muscle fibers, but you must train yourself to fire them all at the same time. when training for max poundage, you're really training existing muscle and building muscle as an afterthought. so in the sense that the nervous system is doing most of the work in attempting a max deadlift, it's a mental exercise.

as far as the hocus pocus goes, the notion that i could lift 320 lbs off the ground is utterly ridiculous, so in order to actually go about doing it, i have to distract myself long enough to forget that 320lbs is really really heavy. how do i distract myself? that's right: focus. somehow, it all works out, except for when it doesn't.

part of the problem of when it doesn't is that i remember when it doesn't, and next time, when it really ought to, i remember that at least one time, it really was impossible to lift the bar off the floor, so it's entirely possible that the laws of physics will supercede the laws of deadlift magic once more, and right now, as i attempt a big lift, i'll fail.

it's never a sure thing, except for the evening before: then i feel like it's a sure thing and i ought to go for it. alas, oftentimes, in the morning when it counts, i feel differently.

so, all these little mental games and problems were with me all week, as i struggled with the cold, and the frustration that it would set me back on my already tight (but possibly possible) schedule to reach 400 by november, and the added frustration that i was poised to break an important psychological barrier when the cold struck. the new routine, the plan to get me to 400, requires me to lift before wednesday, and today is wednesday, regardless of whether my cold is gone or not (it's largely gone, but not entirely).

so, with all that, i managed. i managed 2 sets of 5x320, which was my goal. the extra off days must have counted as rest: the sets were eminently doable, if not easy (as easy as 320 can get). after a little chest work, i pulled 1x330.

my schedule dictates that next week i pull 5x325, and the week after, drop down to 5x315 (working up to 335 by late june). my 1rm calculator says that by the time i can do 6x340, i should also be able to do 1x400. my schedule has me pulling 5x370 in early november, and 1x400 on my birthday. these numbers suggest that i may actually make it, though clearly, i have work to do.

amusingly, my 5x315 "rest workout" will be done in front of my T-2days inlaws. won't that be exciting?

that means i'll have to wear pants to my gym. argh!

the most drastic (yet subtle) realization that has come with high quality listening equipment is that music (well, much of it (well, much of the good stuff)) is produced on -- get this: instruments. and not only that, but particular, identifiable instruments.

instruments that exist in space and cause vibrations in air.

seriously, it wasn't so blindingly obvious, but now, those thumps on the dick dale album are clearly drums (sets of different drums!) and that low, bassy thing on the ctb soundtrack is a bass cello. the chains sound like chains! the snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

a nice weekend. it started with me being sad about the passing of my time as a single person and it ended with me with a cold or severe allergy attack or debilitating sinus thingamotron. but in the middle of all that, whoa man! that was super.

a whole lot of star trek: tng was watched, which is kind of sad, but it's a whole different matter when not done alone. right? right??? well, maybe. friday night/saturday morning was an anniversary of sorts. one year ago may 4/5 was the night i delayed 203's trip to wyoming by a week, and changed the course of both our lives. suggestions were made -- and quickly dismissed like an obnoxiously correct pre-ensign wesley crusher by a pre-beard snotty cmmdr. riker -- that we commemorate the occasion by recreating the sleeping arrangements of 5/5/2006. instead, she told me she loved me, two days earlier than the one year anniversary of the first time she told me, which itself was two days after i knew.

so, we got all that out of the way and woke up bright and early saturday to wait until afternoon to go climbing with fellow blogger and relapsed climber soopahviv. we hiked on down to one of the selected climbs and began what is called, in technical climbing jargon, "waiting". that out of the way, finally, we got down to business.

i am constantly amazed at the goofy, jury-rigged voodoo that passes for anchors, especially the notion of a "backup". i'm still very much a newbie, so perhaps someday i'll see the light, but for now, with what i know of how stuff works up there on the ropes, there was some seriously goofy stuff going on with other people's anchors.

but that's fine, it's their neck, not mine. the climbs were great. tons of fun, lots of good pictures, and a great experience all around. no injuries, no poison oak (i think), no ticks (i think!) and we plan to go again.

on the way home, alas, my scratchy, dry throat turned into a full blown something or another, and now i'm seriously doubting that i'll be able to pull my scheduled 320 tomorrow. that's a real bummer, on account of tomorrow's 320 is the culmination of a month long plan to break through the 320 barrier. i need to get it to stay on track for 11/14.

sunday was chores and errands, with indian food and leftovers. lots of me moping with the mopes, and a little cleaning. the guest bedroom (heh) needs to be cleaned out by the time 203's folks arrive, which finally provides us the impetus to stop using the room as a dumping ground.

also, the beer is still chewing bubblegum and kicking ass, with no signs of slowing down on either front. i would have liked to rack it this weekend, but 1) it's busy and 2) i have no siphon starter and 3) no, dammit, i'm not going to use vodka, a hose, and some distilled water, so stop asking.

reflecting back on the past year, i am amazed at how much my relationship to 203 has changed. part of it is the distance (or now, the lack of it) and part of it is the willful merging of our disparate paths. all doubts and discomforts aside, all sadness and misgivings about a life too short, well... you know. whatever.

it's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x15!

this time around: comms troubles. the usual problem of answering the question "how short?" compounded by the usual language barrier. i tried to go to the fast mexican place but they were full and couldn't get me done in time (i needed it done asap to get to a climbing appointment!) so i ended up at the chinese place.

"look at him!" the lady exclaimed as i entered, for i had thrown on clothes and come in unshowered, with a long fro of hair to excite and amuse potential stylists.

"how short?" said the guy, "very short," said i, "how short?" said the guy, "#2", i said, with a sigh, having learned that this usually meant "#2 on the side and appropriate shortness on the top". "#2 all over?" he said, and before i had fully explored the consequences of the "okay" that i had already given, he'd dug in to my topscalp with his #2. usually they start on the sides and give me time to change my mind.

not this time. #2 buzz. shortest i've ever had it.

the good news:

headphones fit better.

that expensive shampoo i just bought will last and last and last.

i wont have to get a haircut for the wedding.

i can now calculate the YOMHC date of the wedding.

at this length, i suspect (because i can already see it) that my headhair will undergo the same auburnization as my chinhairs -- cool! i'm gonna be a redhead!

if i have skull cancer, it will be real easy to spot.

now, back to our regularly scheduled distractions.

have i mentioned lately how great my headphones sound?

not even the new ones! the old ones are great, too!

all right. that's great!

Overly Frank.

Middle Initials: TMI.

man, that dangold writers' block has been nasty these past few weeks. more than one post has gone three sentences into oblivion. let's see if i can manage better this time.

the secret to all good blogging is either high excitement or deep depression. that's nothing new; since the dawn of literacy, fancy writin' folks have been drawing on emotional extremes to bring home the bacon (or obtain whatever it is they're after by writing).

lately, where "lately" can be measured in terms of my relative blog silence, i've been pretty happy, with an ever-present "nagging something" somewhere in the upper registers. but both the happiness and the nagging something were too low-level (which is not a bad thing, necessarily) to induce good writing (okay, maybe it is a bad thing, then).

but eventually, i have to write. if i want to keep on thinking of myself as a writer, i must write. if i want to think of myself as a brewer, i must brew; as a climber, i must climb; as a lifter, i must lift, as a whiner, i must whine. even if the result is not the brilliant top 1% of posts that i want to write and you want to read, silence is self-perpetuating and -- much worse than potentially boring -- guaranteed boring.

i deleted (well, put in a delete order which will be processed later) an album from my music collection today. this is rare, because 1) i had not finished listening to it all the way through yet and b) i deleted it for the lyrics, not any technical or melodic shortcomings.

for me, music has been, for the last decade or so, a primary means of exploration. a method of manipulating mood, a tool for programming my own mind. and it works. m83 is now making me happy, and it made me happy even via substandard (hah) headphones back in the "bad old days" of 2 months ago.

aside from mood manipulation, music ties me to my own past. in my own brain, very little evokes the past so fully as a piece of music, a few notes or a bit of harmony, that i listened to at a particular time or place. the pet shop boys take me back to my high school reading spot, m83 takes me on to a plane, and beethoven puts me on the road to my wedding.

the wedding, hm? of course this post leads there, and i'll get to it. but first: the deleted CD.

this blog is largely a chronicle of my awakening into a new something-or-another. human being? spiffy person? drab, self-obsessed gen-X type blogger? i dunno. what i do know for sure is that there's a big difference between what i am now and what i was a month before the blog came into existence.

lately, my behavior (as recorded and unrecorded in the blog) has been largely characterized by self indulgence. most anything i want, i do. and the more i do it, the more i realize i can do it: the less all things seem out of reach.

with a little reflection, i realized a while back that i'm finally living my high school years. back when i was actually in high school, i was determined to ensure that those years were not the best years of my life, and i guess i followed that same plan all through college and most of my post-college. i may well be in those best years right now. "right now" certainly beats the pants off high school.

this, of course, is where the tension between what i want and what i'm doing comes into play. and this, of course, is where my finger hovers over the delete button (metaphorically, that is. it's more like a "close browser" button).

back in the day, i used to suspect i had an emotional on/off switch. i figured i could probably become an icy-hearted stonefaced SOB if i put my mind to it, with very, very minimal effort. i didn't really want to find out if i could, though, because i didn't much like the implications (which, of course, i had explored fully in thought experiments). i figured that if i could turn off remorse, compassion, pity, and this newfangled thingy i was provisionally calling "love" (while gathering more data), i would prove to myself only that these feelings (which i was rather getting to enjoy) are just as illusory as the engrossing sense of "being there" that i get every time i hear "DJ Culture" or "American Girl".

and so, as Fate would have it, i got to test out my theory. it turned out i was right: my emotions, my feelings, my desires, my plans and dreams and hopes and my very world view are just as silly, fleeting, and imaginary as every other thing that's ever come to pass, and eventually passed, in this wide world of ours.

this came as no surprise to me, but i spent little time reflecting upon it. i was too busy.

busy-ness is where it's at. that's what dr. pangloss found out. that's something i learned from questioning, so many short long months ago, what made me so different after all from the first girl i ever dated. that's what i found out. busy-ness. i'm busy now. oh boy, am i busy.

not too busy to stop and think, though. not too busy to listen to the lyrics.

Lily Allen sang into my ears today, the first I'd ever heard her, and she sang about things I've never done. Things that I want to have done -- though not necessarily things that I want to do. Experiences I never had, and never will have, but things that I wish I'd had nonetheless. (What I need is a past-injection, a memory syrup like the one Rufus Sewell gets in Dark City, an invented past that contains all the many things I regret I never knew I could have done.)

One night in May, a few hours short of exactly one year ago today, I split into two people. I killed off another "new me" and became a pair of "new me"s.

Much like Neo and Mister Anderson, one of these people has a future, and the other does not.

About five days from now, it will have been a year since I realized I was not, as I had thought, a hopeless loser with no prospects other than the application of symbol manipulations to transform technical minutia into limited wealth into shiny new toys. i realized that this was not the case, that, indeed, i was a desireable swimmer in the gene pool, in more ways than i thought, and to precisely the sort of fellow swimmer that i would hope to attract.

in fact, at the time, as now, it wasn't a "sort" that i was interested in: it was 203.

Today, shortly after I meaninglessly raised my right hand to secularly affirm the veracity of the correction that the clerk had made to 203's misspelling of my middle name, shortly after we walked out of the govt building with our marriage license, 203 asked me if I had cold feet. I answered that of course I did. How could I not?

I suppose this rambling post is a more fleshed out explanation of what I meant, since my immediate answer was clearly not comforting. That's okay though. Marriage isn't about comfort.

as i marked for deletion the album about picking up dudes in bars and breaking up and being a young urban dating person, i put my finger on what i'd been beating around the bush at, and what troubles me slightly as the date approaches. a year ago a couple hours from now, i became a person who could happily have entered "the dating scene", and who probably would just as happily have left it shortly thereafter, but who, in time, would have found someone with whom he did not experience an experience deficit. someone who could have gone out and partied hardy, in every conceivable way, to make up for all the lack thereof that my bitterly stodgy twenties left me with. a person who would have taken the radical transformation i had just begin into a whole new, sorely overdue and unexplored region.

at the same time, i became the other person, the person who took me into an equally unexplored reason, a person who saw (and sees) everything i want and need right in 203, and didn't and doesn't want to toss his current, amazing relationship aside to eventually find out that it was the best possible in all possible worlds.

fear is failure, it's been said. failure, properly observed, is learning.

so i found myself today, and especially this morning, marriage license in hand, especially this afternoon, listening to the details of things i'll never experience, faced with the finality implied by the seriousness with which i will take my wedding vows, able to see clearly the cloud of writer's block that hung over me, the sadness at closing of doors, the machinery of life grinding away and producing the one thing that i always feared, the thing that foolishly kept me out of mainstream life (and all the horrors it has to offer) for so long: the small deaths along the way to that final grave, the little commitments that hem a soul in and remind Him that a life is too short to do all things.

and perhaps it is from this fact that i can draw more empathy for my fellow humans: the sadness that we must all share knowing that things could have been different, and the anguish in wondering whether different would have been better.

that is one of me. the other of me, the me that went and signed the marriage license, belongs to a happier crowd of fellow humans, the optimistic, idealistic believers in happiness. the other me counts myself lucky for having skipped all the inefficiencies of dating, and dumping, and doubting, and other d-words involved in ending up by circuitous path exactly where i am now: with the person i intend to spend the rest of my life with, believing that i could not have done better, and happy that i did not do differently.

i know that with time, the thing i've always been short on, the thing i've always had an excess of, the Mister Anderson me will fade into a memory, and the Neo will resurface as the dominant force. I know this because I knew that with time I'd get over a number of hard things that I had to come to grips with, and time, it seems, has passed, because i was happy to recognize just the other day that i have, indeed, come to grips with them.

there are so many ways to view the world, so many ways to live a life, so many ways to end up on a magic wedding beach. she and i have taken vastly different paths, and the contrast of those paths sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but still, there's no place i'd rather be in 18 days and 23 hours than on my wedding beach with my love and a ==POPE== to make me one again, and one, again.

got the 701s today. so i fired up the closest thing i have to "classical" on the DAP : a shitty VBR rip of "conan the barbarian" i got from a coworker. "conan the barbarian" soundtrack was one of the first CDs I ever bought and i still have it, so i reckon i'll rerip it tonight.

behind the mask of poor quality of the mp3, and behind the veil of poor quality of the recording itself (a disastrous treatment of, imho, the greatest movie soundtrack ever made), i'm hearing things i've never before heard, and appreciating even more the genius of the score.

for example, all throughout track 4, "wheel of pain", one of my favorites, and a theme that can often be heard dancing through my head at the top of a deadlift (if, that is, you've got an inner-cranial mic injected through an orifice of mine, which, i assure you, you do not), someone is beating a chain against a metal plate. that's right: beating a chain against a metal plate. it's been there all along, in the millions of times i've listened to it, and i've never heard it. it's plain as daylight now.

that's what the 701s do, they say: shine daylight on all the triumphs and flaws of a recording. this one's got plenty of both.

(not to mention that the open design lets in keyboard noise (not to mention blasted fan noise))

for the record, i'm not yet enjoying the much ballyhooed "soundstage" of the 701s, but i suspect that has much to do with the music and the noisy environment.

and perhaps, alas, the DAC. i want to put off purchasing a fancy dac, but i think to myself, "self: you're going to buy the fancy one sooner or later anyhow, why waste time listening at lower quality in the interim?"

then i says to myself, "self, have you seen that credit card bill? with a wedding coming up? and plane tickets? forget it, self!"