Light and Momentary

Nice guys at the gym

I have a pretty consistent Sunday afternoon routine: I go to the gym around 2:30, when it's usually fairly empty. I deadlift, I bench, I do a superset of upper-body accessories, and I'm done. But today I got to step 2 and all the flat benches were occupied.

I stood nearby and waited for a few minutes to see if anybody seemed to be wrapping up. One of the guys walked up to me while I was resting and asked politely if I was using the machine next to me -- he wanted to snag one of the weights. "Go right ahead," I told him. Politely, oh so politely, he said, "Do you need any help with anything?"

You guys, this man was jacked. Like, his name could be Yoked McSwolerson and it still would not convey the massiveness of his mighty muscles. Also he was, like, 6'5". "Oh, no," I told him, "just waiting for one of the benches to open up."

He asked me if I'd ever tried decline bench. I never had, because it looks a little scary. You have to put your knees over one thingummy and your shins under another thingummy and uncurl yourself backward without thwacking your head on the barbell. If you fail a rep on flat bench, you can roll the barbell down to your middle and escape that way. But if you fail a rep on decline bench I feel like you're kind of stuck, with a barbell that's well-positioned to roll right onto your neck. 

While he was resting between sets, he showed me which thingummies went where. After his next set I asked him a form question and he was friendly and helpful again. There was no skeeviness at any point.

I don't know how often I'll do decline bench, but it was fun to try something new. I was expecting it to be hard, because incline bench is significantly harder than flat bench, but it was not hard. I am mostly blogging about it because I want to remember the unexpected friendliness: I would not have expected Mr. McSwolerson to reach out and offer to help me out of the blue like that. "People at the gym are friendly," Joe assured me back when I first started lifting. I still think his gym experience as a muscular 20-year-old is different from mine. But what do you know-- sometimes people at the gym are friendly.

Back to it

This last week was my spring break, and for the first time in many years I left town for part of it. Back in the fall I was asked to serve as a program reviewer for another university: they offered to pay me to come out and evaluate the quality and sustainability of their grad program, which is located in an area where I have good friends. Sure, I said, I can do that.

I left on time change Sunday and drove to my friend Becky's house. We have an ongoing daily text conversation about everything under the sun, but we hadn't seen each other in person since the summer of 2021. I'd never met her youngest; I hadn't seen her husband in-- hm, probably 20 years. We went to a concert that night, I got to tour her office the next morning, and then I headed out after that.

The weather was worse than I expected, and I hate driving in bad weather. The sky dropped so much slush on the front of my little rental car that its cruise control cut out because the radar system couldn't function. But I kept plugging and made it to the other side of the state, where I had lunch with friend #2. After one more hour of icky driving, I got to the city where I'd be staying.

I had expected the university to put me up in a hotel that was clean but un-fancy, so I was pretty surprised by the reality: mammoth chandeliers, high ceilings, much swankier than my usual hotel choices. I had a little time to review my materials for the next day before I headed out to dinner with my friends who live in the city. We had the nicest dinner together -- we talked and laughed and talked some more.

The next morning I met my co-reviewer and we headed into two days of meetings. I wasn't expecting the job to be so interesting, and it was fun to be looking at the program as an outsider, with the freedom to recommend anything at all. They built in time for us to start drafting our report, which we appreciated. I had an uneventful trip back on Wednesday evening.

Spring break is always filled with grading, and I hadn't really done the math on how many hours of grading I would be trying to squish into Thursday and Friday. I wound up working a fair amount yesterday and I'm still not finished. It will be okay, though; the grading always gets done. Spring break is usually a lonely week for me -- usually I am on my own doing the least pleasant parts of my job while the kids are in school -- but this one was the opposite of lonely. 

WWJD, IJHS?

It was chilly today, chilly enough that I was wishing for gloves when I went for a run. It was chilly enough that I was not expecting to see Foundation Snake curled up by the daffodils. I think he was regretting his choice to sunbathe on this damp gray day (insofar as a creature with a brain the size of a lentil can be said to experience regret), because he was looking pretty torpid when I prodded him gently with a stick.

"Maybe I could pick him up with barbecue tongs and drop him down the storm sewer," I thought to myself. But when I opened the garage door, I remembered that the barbecue tongs were indoors, in the kitchen. And maybe this will sound weird to those of you who are less squeamish about snakes, but I didn't want to pick him up with something that would eventually be used on food I hoped to eat.

"Hm," I said to myself as I looked around the garage. 

My eyes fell on the rakes. "Will I have more nightmares about snakes if I try to move him or if I don't try to move him?" I asked myself. (I have been having nightmares about snakes in the house since the Unspeakable Event.) "Is it a bad idea to move him with an implement that is designed to bring him closer to me?" I asked myself. I decided that I would plunge in anyway.

Instead of using the rake like a rake, I adopted a sort of croquet-player stance, or at least the sort of stance croquet players might use if they were aiming their mallets at cold-blooded living creatures associated with evils including the Fall, countless deaths* by suffocation and poisoning, and unrelenting slitheriness.

*I know, okay; I KNOW garter snakes are not venomous and can't suffocate anything and still I cannot keep from shuddering at the thought of them. MUCH slithery. VERY slitheriness.

Wielding my rake like a croquet mallet, I sent Foundation Snake flying down the driveway. He landed with his pale belly upward, his body arranged in curves that I would call graceful if they weren't so darned...serpentine. If his little lentil brain does have any regret circuitry, it must have been lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Belly-up snake in the driveway did not seem like a big improvement over belly-down snake by the daffodils, so I tried another croquet maneuver. This time he landed in the street, unmoving, and I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

If I left him in the street, he would probably get run over. If I scooted him into the nearest yard, it would be a failure in charity. I do not like the lady who lives directly across from us but I do take "love thy neighbor" very seriously. I believe Jesus understands why I do not like her and also does not want me to yeet any snakes at her. So that option was out. 

There's a narrow vacant lot next to Grumpy Neighbor's house which seemed like a good second choice, but I am friendly with the neighbor on the other side. Probably she would not be thrilled with snake-yeeting that directed Foundation Snake closer to her foundation. I didn't want to try to put him in the storm sewer because (a) he would die there and (b) my aim was not great with my rake-turned-croquet-mallet. I can believe that snakes are good for the environment even as I wish very strongly for them not to be in my own personal environment.

I went back inside. "Marie," I said, "I have an ethical question."

While I was inside, Foundation Snake shook off his torpor, righted himself, and headed off to parts unknown. At least I hope they are unknown. Maybe the likeliest outcome is that he wriggled back up the driveway and into his favorite tiny hole in the mortar. Maybe I could spackle that little hole the next time I catch him outside. Maybe then he'll find new digs until it gets warm enough for the mason to come out and do something more permanent.

The title of this post stands for What Would Jesus Do, If Jesus Hated Snakes? Perhaps it seems to you that the obvious solution is for me to stop hating snakes. But it doesn't really seem to be a decision of my conscious mind. If the snakes on your property were causing you recurring nightmares, what would you do? 

Climbing then and now

In January 2020 I posted about finishing a painfully long route at the climbing gym, graded 5.10a; the next month I finished an equally long 5.10b. The month after that, the world shut down, and I haven't climbed consistently since then.

In the interim, the climbing gym personnel completely changed over: new manager, new route-setters. Somewhere in there they decided collectively that their old grades had been too soft, so a route that used to get a 5.8 rating would now be a 5.7 or perhaps a 5.6. A 5.6 rating is supposed to mean it's beginner-friendly, but it got a lot harder to find easy routes.

Also in the interim, I started lifting weights and added a fair amount of bulk to my frame. (Seriously, you guys: I tried on Marie's blazer after she said, "But my shoulders are much bigger than yours," and I couldn't move my arms AT ALL. I needed, like, a sausage-stuffing machine to pour myself into those sleeves. Her shoulders are not actually bigger than mine, even though she is 8 inches taller than I am.) The muscle is an advantage, but at the same time it's harder to move a heavier body up the wall. This is a tension Joe has often talked about: wanting to build muscle for lifting, wanting to stay light for climbing. 

The result of all this was that my sense of what I could and couldn't do at the climbing gym came unmoored. Was I struggling on a route labeled 5.7 because it corresponded to a 2019 5.9 route? Or because it was set by a new employee with no clue what it's like to be a middle-aged climber with a 66-inch wingspan? Or because [self-critical thoughts redacted here, though they remain very loud in my brain] and I should just give up?

In January 2023 I decided to buy an annual membership, and I've been climbing every week with Pete. I would put the humbling:pleasant ratio at about 65:35, because he keeps nudging me to do hard things. But I think I am beginning to see some progress.

We have been doing more bouldering than we used to, climbing shorter routes with no ropes. I do not love the idea of jumping down from holds 15 feet in the air, even though there are mats on the floor, so part of the issue for me is mental. Also, though, the boulder problems are hard. 

Before the pandemic I could often but not always climb V2 boulders (I don't know why they have two different systems for rating difficulty) and I was just starting to do V3s. But when I started climbing again this year, the V2s felt entirely out of reach.

Pete has been super-patient with me, giving me both encouragement and beta (climber-speak for step-by-step explanations of how to get from Point A to Point B). He can propel his body across the wall with a combination of control and grace that seems impossible for this 52-year-old body to imitate. "Put your left foot there," he told me today. "My LEFT foot?" I asked him skeptically. "Your left foot," he said again, with more patience than I deserve. And do you know, after a few false starts I sent my first post-COVID V2 route.

"Now try the green one," he urged me. The green one felt ridiculous two weeks ago. Imagine putting one foot on a surface that's at hip height, and then standing up on that foot with minimal upper-body support. Like, say you have a light switch you can hold with one hand, but mostly you have to push with your bent leg without losing your balance. Hard, right? Pete and I have this recurring conversation at the climbing gym: he says, "now stand up on your foot," and I say, "I can't," because my legs don't really work like that here in my sixth decade. (There's a similar maneuver in this video (0:57-1:01), but I have two solid handholds there.)

"Hm," he said, looking again at the route. "You could also put get both hands on the next hold and pull up instead of pushing up." This is not a move that 2020 Jamie could have managed, because she did not have the upper-body strength for it, but it worked well for 2023 Jamie. And it felt really satisfying to finish a second tough boulder problem in one session after weeks of frustration.

Hm, now that I have written all this out I am thinking it is unlikely to be as interesting to anyone else as it is to me. But I want to remember the sensation of pulling myself up to that fat green hold: effortful but doable. I spent a lot of the session thinking tailspinny thoughts. I told myself I was too tired, inadequately fueled. I was a little shaky when I tackled the green route for the last time, and the voice in my head said, "What if you FALL and HIT YOUR HEAD?" 

The voice in my head is not very likely to say "what if you finish the route and feel really pleased with yourself?" But that's what actually happened.