Well, I'm recovered enough from my sickness that I don't think flying out to Buffalo will be any problem tomorrow. I have to get up at like 4:30 in the morning to make my flight, though, which is very uncool. But I'll manage. In honor of my going to a wedding this weekend, I was going to post Atlantic Starr's "Always", which I think it is mandatory to play at every wedding that ever takes place. But I've been obsessively listening to Nat King Cole's "It's Only a Paper Moon" for the last two days while I've been home sick, so I'll post that instead.

Posted at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (557) | TrackBacks (0)

Argh, I am sick today. It's some kind of cold/flu thing and I get it once every year or couple years. Luckily, it goes away in 48 hours, but they are some pretty miserable 48 hours. Anyway, my sickness darn well better go away in 48 hours because on Thursday I'm flying out to Buffalo, New York for my brother Joe's wedding. Joe and his long-time girlfriend Leanne are getting married on Saturday. Their wedding is not actually in Buffalo, it's at Heron Hill Winery, about 120 miles drive from Buffalo. Unfortunately, there aren't any airports close to the winery, so I've got some driving to do after I fly in on Thursday. I'm pretty excited about it all. Not just because my brother is getting married, but also because Joe and Leanne are amazing and fun people, and it seems like their wedding is totally going to be a reflection of their personalities. Leanne's brother and I are getting canes and top hats with our tuxes to, you know, add that extra touch of elegance. Joe and Leanne's dog Beamish is in the wedding party (she's a bridesmaid). And of course, the wedding is taking place at a winery, which is unique. I got my hair cut last Saturday, and when I told the barber about how I was going to a wedding at a winery he said it sounded like it had the makings of a crazy party. Heh, well it's not like it's in a brewery, but yeah I guess it could get pretty crazy. I don't actually drink that much any more; my wild college days are way in the past. But I might have a glass of wine or two. Or maybe three or four... My friend Jason has an uncle who gets drunk at every wedding and does this dance called "The Seahorse". It's where you hop around the dance floor with your hand pointed our from your face, and you kinda look like a seahorse. Of course, if I do that on Saturday, I'll be wearing a top hat and carrying a cane, so I'll be a very elegant seahorse.

Posted at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

I finished reading Don DeLillo's White Noise last weekend. I didn't like it very much; it was essentially the study of a bunch of whiny narcissistic people preoccupied with their own mortality. Even though postmodern literature shares many of the same viewpoints as Existentialism, particularly the belief that external reality is subjective and mutable, postmodern literature doesn't usually share Existentialism's preoccupation with death. The Modernists, most notably William Faulkner, dealt often with death. In Faulkner's most renowned novel, The Sound and the Fury, one of the main characters, Quentin Compson, commits suicide. Another one of his famous novels, As I Lay Dying, is about a family's journey to bury their dead wife/mother in her hometown. One of the chapters is narrated by the dead woman. Postmodernists, however, tend to treat everything in life as fairly absurd, and death is no exception. So, if it is discussed as all, it is usually just as another nutty happenstance in the insanity of the world. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which isn't exactly a postmodern novel, but is close to being one, has this somewhat absurd discussion about the possibility of dying in a combat mission:

Clevinger agreed with ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen that it was Yossarian's job to get killed over Bologna and was livid with condemnation when Yossarian confessed that it was he who had moved the bomb line and caused the mission to be canceled.

"Why the hell not?" Yossarian snarled, arguing all the more vehemently because he suspected he was wrong. "Am I supposed to get my ass shot off because the colonel wants to be a general?"

"What about the men on the mainland?" Clevinger demanded with just as much emotion. "Are they supposed to get their asses shot off just because you don't want to go? Those men are entitled to air support!"

"But not necessarily by me. Look, they don't care who knocks out those ammunition dumps. The only reason we're going is because that bastard Cathcart volunteered us."

"Oh I know all that," Clevinger assured him, his gaunt face pale and his agitated eyes swimming in sincerity. "But the fact remains that the ammunition dumps are still standing. You know very well that I don't approve of Colonel Cathcart any more than you do. But it's not for us to determine what targets must be destroyed or who's to destroy them or -"

"Or who gets killed doing it? And why?"

"Yes, even that. We have no right to question -"

"You're insane!"

"- no right to question -"

"Do you really mean that it's not my business how or why I get killed and that it is Colonel Cathcart's? Do you really mean that?"

"Yes, I do," Clevinger insisted, seeming unsure. "There are men entrusted with winning the war who are in a much better position than we are to decide what targets have to be bombed."

"We are talking about two different things," Yossarian answered with exaggerated weariness. "You are talking about the relationship of the Air Corps to the infantry. You are talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive."

"Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?"

"To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

Clevinger sat for a moment as though he'd been slapped. "Congratulations!" he exclaimed bitterly... "I can't think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy."

"The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live."

Anyway, I think that while there is a time and place for the discussion of death, even a serious discussion of death, in postmodern literature, I don't want to hear overprivileged middle-aged white guy characters with too much time on their hands who bear an amazing resemblance to the author ramble on and on about how scary impending death is. The one thing I did like about White Noise was the evacuation scene in the middle of the novel when a toxic cloud of gas descended on the city. It felt very close to reality. It's now exactly a year since Houstonians fled the city to escape Hurricane Rita. I was living there at the time, and even though I decided to stay in my apartment instead of evacuating, the Houston news covered the evacuation 24 hours a day, so I felt like I was right in the middle of it. The evacuation scene in White Noise made me feel like I was right back there.... So, after finishing White Noise, I've decided to tackle Lord of the Rings next. When the Lord of the Rings movies were out, I felt like I was the only person in the world who had never read the books. Everyone I talked to about the movies and all of the reviews I read always started out by saying how they remembered as children reading their fathers' dog-eared copies of Rings. I read Sherlock Holmes books when I was a kid. Maybe I was just a weird kid. Truthfully, I didn't like the movies at all. All of the heroes were so insufferable - Frodo, Sam, Earofcorn, Orlando Bloom, etc. etc. - they were so goody goody and everything they did was so DRAMATIC. Like, if Frodo got a hangnail, he'd be like should I take the path of good to get rid of this hangnail, or will I be tempted by the ring down the path of evil to get rid of this hangnail? Also, if you pay close enough attention, you will find that Rings is heavily indebted to a type of Romanticism that is very anti-science and anti-progress (one of my favorite articles ever discusses the philosophy of Lord of the Rings from this viewpoint). When I say "Romanticism", I'm talking about Romantic philosophy, not candlelight dinners and heaving bosoms, although the philosphy and the candlelight and the bosoms are not completely unrelated. Here's a quote from the article that describes what I'm talking about:

Obsession with either past or future can almost define a civilization. Worldwide, most cultures believed in some lost golden age when people knew more, mused loftier thoughts and were closer to the gods -- but then fell from grace. Under this dour but recurrent worldview, men and women of a later, coarser era can only look back with envy, hearkening to remnants of ancient wisdom.

Recognize this motif? It drenches every page of "Lord of the Rings." It is the old classic, the eternal verity -- the worst of all human clichés.

Only a few societies ever dared to contradict this dogma of nostalgia. Our own scientific West, with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any "golden age" to the future, something we might work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve with craft, sweat and good will -- assuming that we manage to prepare them. Implicit is the postulate that our offspring can and should be better than us, a glimmering hope that is nurtured (a bit) by two generations of steadily rising IQ scores.

So, why in the heck would I want to read Lord of the Rings if this is what I think of it? Well, books are different than movies and philosophies. Even if you don't like the theme of the book, you can enjoy the world and the characters and the whole atmosphere of it. And from what I hear, Tolkien does an amazing job of enmeshing the reader in the world of Middle Earth. Plus, I've got a long plane trip coming up next week (to my brother's wedding in upstate New York, more on that in a future post) so I need a good, thick book to hypnotize me and take me to another world for the hours and hours that I will be on a plane and waiting in terminals. Hopefully, Rings will take away the misery of air travel for me.

Posted at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When my friend Matt, who is now in Minnesota, joined me on climbing 14ers this summer, one of his main goals was to climb the Pikes Peak Barr Trail to the summit in under 4 hours. That's kind of the gold standard of speed hiking. You would have to jog the trail to make it up any faster. Last summer, Matt hiked it in 4 hours 15 minutes, so he was really close to making his goal. Unfortunately, his plans got messed up this summer because he got sick at the end of June, right before we were supposed to hike up Mount Harvard. It took him a week to get over it, and by the time he did, he was completely out of training. He moved to Minnesota at the end of July and never got a chance to make another try at Pikes Peak. Iyad and I made it to Barr Camp, 6.8 miles and 3600 feet up the trail, in two hours. However, Iyad said that, even though Barr Camp is roughly half the distance and half the altitude up the trail, in endurance terms, you're only about a quarter of the way there when you reach Barr Camp. It took us another 3.5 hours to reach the summit. When he hiked regularly, Iyad made it to the summit regularly in about 4.5 hours, and once he did it in under 4 hours, but, just like me, this time he tired out a whole bunch in the last three miles. Now that the weather is getting colder, and because I don't know anything about mountain-hiking in the snow, I think Pikes Peak will be the last 14er I climb this year. So the final tally of 14ers I climbed this summer is five: 1. Mount Antero; 2. Uncompahgre Peak; 3. Mount Harvard; 4. Longs Peak; and 5. Pikes Peak. That's pretty good, especially since I wasn't planning on doing any serious mountain climbing this summer because I was so out of shape from getting zero exercise for about a year while I wrote my thesis and then looked for a job. But somehow I got into good enough shape to do it. Hopefully by next summer I'll be a lean, mean mountain-climbing machine. Or maybe I'll just be a lazy slob all winter and sit around doing nothing. We'll see; there's a cute girl who works the front desk at Bally's Fitness, so right now I have motivation to keep up with the exercising.

Posted at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

I made it to the top of Pikes Peak on Sunday. As I said in previous posts, the trail that Iyad and I took, Barr Trail, is 12.6 miles long and gains 7500 feet of elevation. That's 5 miles longer than any trail I've ever climbed and 2500 feet more elevation than I've ever climbed. I managed alright, except for the last three miles which were pretty tough. Luckily, the weather was chilly, so I didn't get overheated, and I even managed to keep up with Iyad for the entire hike. I usually don't feel much like eating when I get to the summit of a 14er, but this time I was starving. Conveniently, they have a restaurant on the top of Pikes Peak, so I ate myself silly. I got pizza and donuts and hot chocolate. When I went to Houston in May for my graduation, a guy in a barber shop told me that the donuts at the top of Pikes Peak are great, and boy he was right. He said it was because of the altitude. In Sunday's post, I said I was worried about the reservations I made for our ride down on the Cog Rail. Well, they did hold our reservation for the train, so Iyad and I didn't have to walk 13 miles back down. It was iffy though; they had my reservation listed for the wrong train, so we would have had to have waited an extra two hours at the summit. Whenever I made the reservation, the guy on the phone kept calling me "maam", which I don't think has anything to do with him giving me the wrong reservation, but that happens a lot more than I would like. I guess I have a girly phone voice. Anyway, hiking Pikes Peak was a fun time, although my legs are still recovering. As we were leaving the summit, the train conductor told us that the temperature at the summit was 24 degrees. It felt like it. Boy, I am not looking forward to winter.

Posted at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (479) | TrackBacks (0)

Tomorrow, Iyad and I are going to be hiking up Pikes Peak along the 12.6 mile Barr Trail. The weather forecast looks good, although it's supposed to be down in the 30s at the top of the mountain. We're planning on catching the Cog Railway for a ride down, but I'm not sure if I might have screwed up the reservations. The thing is, the reservations are for a round trip, and since we won't be riding the train on the way up, I think they might cancel our reservations. I probably should've paid for our tickets up front. I think because of the cold weather that there'll probably be space for us on the train, but if worse comes to worse we can always hitch a ride down with someone who drove up the mountain. I already told Iyad that he hikes too fast for me. He said that he needs to go at his own pace and that he'll slow down a lot at higher altitudes. So we decided that he'll leave me behind at the beginning of the hike, and that I'll probably catch up near the summit. I feel bad for the guy, because he's been really friendly towards me, and I've been in a sour mood around him since the last time we went hiking two weeks ago. He loves to talk and talk, and I've been really busy at work, and every time he comes up to me at work I know I'm about to lose a half-hour. Sometimes I tell him outright that I'm busy, and the other times I try my best to keep on doing whatever I'm doing while partly listening to him, but neither method works very well. Regardless, I'll try my best to be a decent sociable human being tomorrow. It will help that I won't be going at a crazy pace and hacking up a lung and sweating to death like the last time we hiked.

Posted at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (518) | TrackBacks (0)

You may have noticed that it's been a while since I went on a hiking trip or a billiards outing with Allison. There's a very good reason for that. She recently got a new boyfriend who quickly became a new fiancé, and she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where he lives. I had a really great time hanging out with her for the few weeks that we knew each other, so this whole thing kinda sucks for me. And that's the most important thing, isn't it? Yeah, I guess that's not the most important thing. Allison seems to be amazingly happy, and I'm happy for her. And there are several hundred thousand other people in the city for me to hang out with, so hopefully I will not remain all by my lonesome for much longer.

Update:If you don't feel like clicking on the multiple links above, Allison has now posted the full account of her and Mike's whirlwind romance here. It's a very sweet story.

Posted at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (957) | TrackBacks (0)

Slate online magazine had a piece last Thursday in which they asked a number of cultural luminaries the question, "What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?". For some reason, Slate never asked me; I guess their message to me got lost in the tubes. Anyway, I don't read poetry, ever, to be honest, and I've never tried to make sense of 9/11. I'm not sure I even know what that means, to make sense of that day. But there is a particular poem that I go back to, well, maybe once a month, maybe once every couple months, because it hits me hard every time I read it. I think it makes sense to post it today, for reasons that will be obvious when you read it.



And Death Shall Have No Dominion
by: Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Posted at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to the Samuel Alito talk on Thursday night, and it was boring. He gave a 25-minute talk about how the Supreme Court justices run the Supreme Court, and then he took questions for about 25 minutes. The most exciting part of his speech was an "amusing" anecdote about how it's his job, as the junior Justice of the Court, to answer knocks at the door during their closed-door meetings, but at their first meeting, Stephen Breyer, who had been junior Justice for 11 years prior to Alito's confirmation, got up to answer the door because he was so used to doing it. Let me pause there to let you recover from your fit of laughter. Anyway, the question-and-answer session was a little more exciting because the cadets asked some really good questions. They asked for Alito's opinions on a number of cases, including Kelo v. City of New London and Lawrence v. Texas. He was also asked about the limits of executive power during wartime, which was argued in the last few years in the cases of Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and will certainly be argued again, at least as long as George Bush is in office. Unfortunately, Supreme Court justices aren't supposed to comment on cases that might appear before the court, so Alito either refused to answer the questions, or mostly just said something along the lines of "That's a good question. Some people view the case one way, while other people view the case another way." Except it took him about ten minutes to say that. He was also asked about whether he thinks the Constitution is living or dead. His answer was a punt, but because he's widely considered to be of the same mind as Justice Scalia on most judicial matters, and Scalia is probably the foremost proponent in the country of the dead Constitution, then I'm pretty sure Alito is in the dead Constitution camp as well. The one question he actually did answer was when a cadet asked him what the most controversial cases will be for the Supreme Court in the upcoming term. Alito said that they've only chosen about one-tenth of their cases for the next term, but so far the most controversial ones will be a case challenging the Constitutionality of the Senate's ban on partial-birth abortions and a case relating to affirmative action in public elementary schools. So, expect to see headlines about those cases sometime this winter. If I would have asked him a question, I would have asked him his opinion on allowing Supreme Court proceedings to be televised. It's not one of the huge questions of the day, but he could answer it without violating any of the Supreme Court's rules, and I would have been curious about his answer. But I wasn't curious enough to actually get up and go to the microphone. Finally, although Samuel Alito did not say "Go Steelers!!!" at any point during his talk or question-and-answer session, I have to believe that one of the reasons for the dullness of his speech was that his mind was occupied by the Steelers game being played at the same time he was speaking. That's certainly where my mind was. Thankfully, I got home in time to watch the second half, when the Steelers came back from a 14-17 deficit to win the game 28-17. Is it too early to start singing the Pittsburgh's goin' to the Super Bowl song? No way, not for me.

Posted at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1290) | TrackBacks (0)

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is in Colorado right now, and he's stopping by the Air Force Academy tomorrow evening to give a 30-minute speech to the cadets in law classes. Others at the Academy were given the opportunity to reserve a seat for the speech by responding to an email, and I reserved a spot for myself. I was really excited when I got my invitation to the speech, but, unfortunately, at the time and for several days afterward I thought I was going to see a speech by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It was only when I drove home on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend, as I sat in traffic letting thoughts pass idly through my head, that I suddenly came to the realization that Samuel Alito is not Antonin Scalia. All of the press stories surrounding Justice Alito's confirmation hearings emphasized the fact that he is considered to be something of a Scalia clone, and he even got the nickname "Scalito". I guess my brain took that in and just came to assume that Alito and Scalia were one and the same. Anyway, I was really excited to see Scalia speak since he has a reputation for making controversial remarks. But, regardless, I will be seeing an honest-to-goodness Supreme Court Justice speaking tomorrow, even if it's not Scalia, so that should be something special.

Posted at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (605) | TrackBacks (0)

I finally finished Joyce Carol Oates's "We Were the Mulvaneys". It took me a good month, maybe more, to get through the 450-page novel, but it was completely worth it. The book chronicles the dissolution of a family. Knowing Oates's penchant for darkness in her novels, this story could have went to a very very depressing place. Instead it takes a surprising left turn, and finds little glimmers of hope, but not in a saccharine manner. The characters just keep perservering. One of the most powerful self-help pieces I've ever read is this blog post, and one of my favorite points in that post is this:

Muddle through
I've never seen a self-help book with this advice, but really it's some of the best advice I can give somebody going through a difficult stretch. Sometimes the absolute best you can do isn't that pretty, or elegant, or graceful, or frankly all that inspiring. When you're in one of those stretches, stop worrying about it. Nobody else could do that much better in your position either.

That's what the characters in "We Were the Mulvaneys" do, they muddle through. They muddle through for a little while, and then muddle through for a little while longer, and things slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, get better, until by the end of the book, things are pretty great. The book I'm reading now is Don DeLillo's "White Noise". It's the first book by Don DeLillo that I've read, but he's a fairly famous author, and this book has been called one of his best (#82 on this list of the 20th century's greatest novels). It's also a postmodern novel, which got me excited. One of my favorite authors is Thomas Pynchon, whose "Gravity's Rainbow" is the definitive work of postmodern literature. The best way to describe postmodern literature, at least the way I think of it, is that it subverts all of the traditional conventions of literature. Linear plot, or any plot at all, is thrown out. Fact and fiction are blurred. The main characters, even the narrator, can fade in significance as the novel progresses, even completely disappearing from the story. In "Gravity's Rainbow", as the story itself completely disintegrates at the end, the main character, Tyrone Slothrop, vanishes in the chaos of post-WWII Europe. In another postmodern novel, David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest", the story ends where it begins, with Hal Incandenza babbling incoherently. I don't know if my description makes these books sound like they'd be miserable to read. I guess if you've read a lot of books, it's interesting to see stories go a little nuts every once in a while, which is the main reason I'm attracted to postmodern literature. But so far, "White Noise" hasn't been such a great read. It's too clever by half; it's like DeLillo's winking at you with every turn of the page. The main character, Jack Gladney, is chairman of the Hitler studies department at a small Midwestern college. Other courses at the college focus on Elvis Presley and cereal-box texts. Gladney has multiple ex-wives, all of whom work as secret agents in U.S. Intelligence. None of it is very funny or very compelling. It reminds me a little of Kurt Vonnegut, who, in his books, always seems to be telling a joke that I'm not getting. I've just gotten to the part in "White Noise" where a toxic cloud descends on Gladney's home, and from the the reviews I read, it seems like the book gets more interesting from this point on. So, we'll see. At the very least, it's a quick read. I'm already 120 pages in after two days.

Posted at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1011) | TrackBacks (0)

I hope you all are enjoying the long weekend! I've spent my weekend catching up on some long overdue laying around and watching TV time. I've also started reading a new book, which I'll probably be talking about some time this week. But today, I managed to get off the couch long enough to go hiking on Barr Trail, which is the primary hiking trail up Pikes Peak. I've talked now and again about Pikes Peak, but I don't know if I've ever explicitly mentioned that of all the 14er mountains in Colorado, it is by far the one closest to Colorado Springs. While I can't quite go out on my balcony and see Pikes Peak, I can walk across the street from my balcony and see Pikes Peak. It pretty much dominates the skyline to the west of the Springs. So you may wonder, of all the 14ers I've climbed this summer, why I never climbed the one right on my doorstep. Well, if you click on the link to Barrs Trail, you'll see that it is a 12.6 mile hike from the bottom of the trail to the summit of Pikes. So, you either have to arrange to have a ride down from the summit (there is a road that goes all the way to the top), or you have to do a 25-mile round-trip hike. So, because of those difficulties, I've put off hiking Pikes Peak. And today, I didn't hike the full trail to the top. Iyad, a friend of mine from the lab, and I had decided to hike halfway up the trail, to Barr Camp, and back down. Iyad, who is about ten years older than me, used to hike 14ers all the time, and has hiked about 30 or 35 of them total, but he hasn't done it in a while, and he wanted to see what kind of shape he was in for mountain hiking. Well, judging from today, he's in great shape. From all of his complaints about never hiking anymore, I was hoping for a nice easy Sunday hike (actually, we planned to hike yesterday, but when yesterday turned out to be rainy and cold, we decided to postpone until today), but Iyad sped up the mountain and I was huffing and puffing and sweating to death trying to keep up. At one point, we stopped so I could take my sweatshirt off, and Iyad said he could see steam coming off me from all of my sweat. Which was annoying, since it was pretty clear I was struggling, but he didn't slow the pace any. The Barr Camp building in the photo is actually a rudimentary bed and breakfast, and also a convenience store for hikers going by. We stopped for a half-hour there and I had tea and garlic bread. The tea cost a $1 and the garlic bread was free because it was extra from lunch. Iyad wants to do the full 12.6-mile hike to the summit two weekends from now, but when/if we do that hike, I'm going to tell him that I have to go at a slower pace, so he needs to slow down himself or leave me behind. The ironic thing is that I'm not a slow hiker, I passed up 20-30 people on my hike up Longs Peak, and nobody passed me up. I guess it's just that the guys I go hiking with need to go at a ridiculously fast breakneck pace for whatever reason. I don't know; I hike for fun, not to prove how fast I can go. But it seems like for a certain type of hiker, they need to prove how awesome they are by not just completing a hike, but completing it quicker than everyone else. On the way home, Iyad brought up, apropos nothing, that the Air Force Academy was a terrible place to meet women. Which is very true. In fact, I would say that if meeting women is a high priority, military bases are not the place for you. But he gave me something of a lecture about how I need to go around town, outside the Academy, to meet women. Which, once again, is something I didn't really need to be told, but anyway. I don't know if he picked up on some "desperate to get a girlfriend" vibe off of me or what. I think that because I am naturally impassive, people tend to read more into my words and gestures than is really there. I've had prior experiences with people assuming things about my personality or my thoughts and feelings that were just way off. In this case, though, I think that it was mostly that Iyad himself is a single guy looking for a girlfriend and just assumed that I was in the same boat as him. Which, yeah, I am single, but finding a girlfriend is pretty low on my list of priorities. I have noticed, especially since I've turned 30, that people who know I'm single just assume that I'm looking for a girlfriend. A couple months after I started working at the Academy, someone in the lab (not Iyad) asked if I "found a girlfriend yet". I told him I was doing my best not to. I'm sure it's even worse for single women my age, who must deal with all kinds of inappropriate questions and remarks about ticking biological clocks and becoming an old maid and how they have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than getting married after 40. My personal view, which I think is vastly underrepresented, is that being single is not a problem that needs to be solved. In other words, my being single does not mean I'm lacking a romantic relationship any more than eating a salad means lacking the enjoyment of steak. Like steak and salad, singlehood and couplehood should be treated as equally respectable choices, though that's rarely the case. I came across this amazing article on the subject, written by a woman named Sherry Obenauer and entitled "Single and Satisfied". I wish I could quote the whole thing. It's a short article so I urge you to click the link and read it. But let me just quote a paragraph from the beginning and a paragraph from the end:

What's wrong with being single? A whole lot if you go by what you see around you. Whether you visit a bookstore or a library, watch television, go to the movies, listen to friends and family, adopt the values of society, or read the newspaper, messages about couplehood prevail. Little is spoken about being single, except as a condition to avoid like the plague.

(B)eing single affords each of us the opportunity to discover who we are, what we do and don't like, how we deal with things, what we want out of life, what our expectations are, what our potentials and limitations are, what energizes and empowers us, and what discourages and disappoints us. The goal of being alone should not be to prepare us for couplehood. Rather, the goal of being single should be to learn to fulfill ourselves, to meet our needs, and to develop as a human being regardless of whether or not we choose to enter into a relationship. By learning to love and care for ourselves, we diminish the risk of starving for someone else to fill the void within our souls; a void that only we can truly fill. The purpose of entering into a relationship should be to share oneself with another person as opposed to trying to get from someone what is lacking in ourselves. Expecting someone else to fill in the gaps usually results in grave disappointments , a sense of failure, and endless resentment.

So, next time you see me, don't ask me if I've found a girlfriend yet, and don't give me advice on what I need to do to meet women. I really and truly am not interested. I'm not adverse to dating, and I wouldn't mind someday meeting someone and maybe even getting married. But I'm also perfectly happy with being single and on my own, and if that's the way things stay for the rest of my life, that would be just wonderful from my point of view.

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