It's up to your knees out there

I've just returned from rock climbing with some people from work and there's still chalk in the crevices of my hands and my forearms are achy and I can feel my heart beat in my shoulders. It was really nice to do something purely physical but that doesn't require any internal vision or personal peace. Cause I have none of that. What I do have is the ability to belay up to speed (that's when, in top roping, you're the person on the ground locking the line to your harness as the person you're attached to climbs so if they slip they don't fall), and to ascend a 5.8 level without even a smidgeon of grace. I climbed like I wrestle, I'm all scrappy and without form and I certainly don't look good doing it (my sweats were all bunched in my harness like a giant diaper and the waistband had snuck up into my armpits) but I got up there.

It's raining like crazy here, has been all day, even sleeting some, and I'm going to brave the traffic tonight to go to a dinner that Michele (Assistant Director of the BCC) is holding at her house for the teaching fellows. It'll be nice to have a meal that comes out of the oven rather than the microwave, or one that's not an mistake dish at the restaurant that everyone has had their forks in. So I'll battle traffic as soon as I'm dressed and out of the shower. Or out of the shower and dressed, whatever works.

Also, I got my first Symmetry assignment back this morning and I got a B. It's not whopping, it's not fantastic, and I know it's only the first bit of homework but it's passing and that pleases me...it's a bit of hope suggesting that, at some point, I'll get a diploma and I won't live in Medford any more.

I'm really grateful to have had plenty to do today, and to have somewhere to be tonight. I feel like shit and I'm being plagued by the wrong music at every turn. All Tom Petty, all James Taylor, all Rascal Flats, India Arie, Ben Folds, even Barenaked Ladies aren't safe. Songs that have no affiliation to me but sound remotely mournful or longing or self-indulgent, no, I'm just gonna make the blanket statement that anything that begins with the chord progression I - vi - V is entirely unsafe and likely to throw me into my wallow. By the way Wallow is a noun now. I've had to make a playlist consisting of only Paul Simon and Bonnie Raitt and even then not all of their stuff is okay, so I've had to supplement with stuff that makes me laugh out loud, like Eric Cartman singing "Come Sail Away" and the audio recording of each of the Harry Potter books! Anything to get out of my head, anything to pull my head out of ...well ...my head. I was talking with Terri yesterday, Mum's sponsor (and, I hesitate to say it, mine?) and she was talking about living from the neck down, letting the head go off on it's own balloon ride - which is fine - as long as the body doesn't decide to react to it, or worse, go take the actual balloon ride (that's my crappy metaphor not hers). Let the head go, don't pay it any mind, just do something physical like a shower or yoga or teeth brushing. To me, the thought of living in my body is really not comfortable either, but lately it's preferable to the circus that's trying to calm down in my head.

I'm going to go take the shower and un-numb a little and then get dressed to go to dinner with the other teaching fellows.

Oh, and add Alison Krauss to the above list of unsafe artists. "Stay" especially.

What I wouldn't give to be 9 again.