My 2011 started off with just a touch of emotional trauma. Historically, I have preferred to deal with mild emotional trauma by wallowing in the bathtub with a bottle of something strong for a few days. But I have also learned enough about my own personal biochemistry over the years to know that the best trick for getting over a problem is to immediately get outside and wear myself out. Another good trick: obsessively making lists, and then crossing things off of those lists.
At about 3 AM on a lonely, depressing, January night, I obsessively fixated on the idea of climbing all seven of the summits in this list, and so I laced up my shoes the next morning and drove out of town in the direction of Tiger Mountain with a Clif bar in my pocket, feeling the best I’d felt in awhile. I had a plan! I had a measurable goal! I had a list of seven things to cross off! Disappointingly, Tiger Mountain looked like this at the top:
And then I climbed Mount Si, which looks like this at the top, depending on which side of the mountain you are on when you make stupid faces:
Emotional trauma is now resolved and things are really quite happy, and anyway, I think the other five mountains will have to wait until summer when they’ve thawed a little bit. But I found this thing, and the list of stuff to do got a lot longer. Now I have a terrifying 101 things to do rather than a pitiful seven, and these mountains are but a list-within-a-list. Nowhere in my list did I decide I would start a tumblr blog, but there are plenty of things on my list approximately that stupid, and so here we are.
