Aaron's Status

7:08 am

Climb log

I climbed a bit last night and it went pretty well. Why do I couch that statement with the “pretty?” That’s a great question. In terms of my lower back situation, it went perfectly. Nothing hurt while I was doing it, and nothing seems to be hurting this morning, but further detail on that as the day progresses.

I wanted to try some lead clipping practice on auto-belay and I did that on a couple of 5.8 climbs, which was fine. My take-away from that is that I need a ton more practice physically clipping, and our gym routes typically only have three clips, so it’s a lot of effort for not a lot of practice.

The good part of the practice was figuring out the best clipping stance and watching where the rope is hanging and stuff like that, which was useful to try once again. I had one back-clip that I immediately noticed and fixed.

I say “pretty well” because I also didn’t climb very strong. I did finally send a V3 boulder that had really challenged me before, even after seeing $wife do it effortlessly. I was encouraged when an extremely competent gym friend, who climbs like V7 or V8, said he thought it was hard for a 3. We all agreed that the second-to-last move (what is for sure the crux move) was just an insanely bad sloper for a V3.

During my climb I did remind myself a couple of times that I climb for fun, and I should do what feels fun. Sometimes working on something hard feels fun, sometimes practicing a new skill feels fun. Follow your bliss. That’s going to be my mantra here.

In any case, so far I feel mild soreness in my back, but the acute pinching has gone away, so I’m going to call it a win. This whole lower back situation has been a real roller coaster and I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon.

Christmas drama

Without going into unnecessary detail, my family has always found it challenging to, uh, how do I want to put this? “Go with the flow,” let’s say. There are a couple of main characters in this story who have certain closely held beliefs and often push them onto the others.

There have been two collisions this season. The first was regarding who would travel where and when to get together in celebration of Christmas, and the second was about gift-giving.

What I find irksome about these conflicts is that they both stem from a person having a specific idea of what they want other people to do. One person wants other people to travel to them, another person wants other people to give specific gifts, and like that.

In my atomic family, we have one boundary, and that is: we do not travel on Christmas. Ever since we had $kid, he gets to come downstairs from his bedroom on Christmas morning and see a tree full of presents, just like every kid dreams about. Giving him that experience of Christmas morning joy is the only thing that really matters to us.

When it comes to gift-giving, we are largely apathetic. At this point in time, I feel that “mandatory” gift giving is superficial at best; nothing stops you from giving something to someone you care about as a symbol of your consideration for them, not on Christmas, and not on any other day.

So the argument is not really “can I be allowed to give gifts,” because that is not something that anyone else should feel any capacity to control, but rather, “can I require you to give gifts to me.”

Anyway, we arrived at doing a “secret Santa” arrangement, which, again, fine, we can do whatever we agree on, and I’m not going to die on any hill to ban presents from Christmas or anything. But what’s really getting to me is all this posturing about “what Christmas is about.”

Christmas is, uh, as far as I know, Jesus Christ’s birthday. The idea that “Christmas is about giving gifts to people” is the most brainwashed thing I’ve ever heard. Maybe that’s what it’s about in your head, but that is not what Christmas spirit is, or what Christmas as a holiday ought to stand for, given its history.

I’m still grappling with the fact that I have close family members who have literally been programmed by American capitalism to believe that giving things to people is at the core of the meaning of Christmas. And look, you can say “what I love about our Christmas tradition is gift-giving,” but don’t say words like “spirit” or “meaning” in an attempt to invoke some historical or moral authority.

Fin.