Your ex lover is dead

I found a song about the connection between saying goodbye to someone and experiencing the death of a loved one. I've become a big big fan of the cold turkey approach (my friend Aaron said that breakups should be like a carrot and not like a stick of celery). Some time has passed - but not enough time like, ever...or forever or whenever or even never would be enough.

My sister died almost 9 years ago. Not enough time could ever go by for me to feel ok with Traci dying. I don't think about it as much, of course, but there are definitely times when I'd love to talk to her. When a person is gone, then they may as well be dead. Mercifully, the sudden death of my sister rather than a slow death via anorexia made it easier to deal with. I didn't have a choice, didn't have time to decide or fuck up. I remember feeling so selfish in the immediate aftermath. Maybe going cold turkey is a way of symbolically killing off the relationship rather than letting it continue to slowly die.

Obviously it's very very different in many ways, but the process of dealing and putting it behind you is similar. Letting go, grieving, regrets, responsibility...all of it. Hoping for different things, wanting to be a better person a better friend a better family member. Feeling sorry for myself...I was also pissed at Traci for being anorexic. What a waste of life it seemed. How could she do that to herself?

"When there's nothing left to burn you have to set yourself on fire."

Exercise helps protect brain of multiple sclerosis patients, study suggests

Exercise helps protect brain of multiple sclerosis patients, study suggests

No words necessary.

A few things I've been inspired by lately

I have a little bit of a backlog of links that I think are interesting that I want to post about, so here is a short list:

(By the way I'm watching a super exciting hockey game! Canada and Switzerland are doing the post-OT shootout. Whoa! I've got a bunch of adrenaline and I've never even watched a hockey game before.  It reminds me of spending summers and playing hockey with all the Canadians with Brent's hockey sticks.

The first is the sequencing of the full genomes of several Khoisan Africans. This is interesting because the genetic diversity within populations of Africans is greater than the genetic difference between a European and an Asian person.  Classic founder effect, due to migrations of Africans into Europe, thus reducing the amount of genetic diversity in the descendent European populations. The African populations have existed at high numbers for many more generations than the European populations, allowing mutations (and thus overall genetic diversity) to accumulate.

The second thing that was compelling to me is an article about why religion is such a common behavior in humans across cultures and time.  The question is whether religiousness confers some sort of selective advantage to humans (in other words, through history, humans that were religious produced more offspring and were more successful than those who were not), or whether something else was selected upon and religion is a byproduct of this other thing.  The article wasn't terribly explicit about what this other thing could have been, but it has to do with social cohesion, group living, and cooperation, in addition to feelings of guilt and fear about defecting from the group.

Here is a choice quote from the original article:
"Religion is a set of ideas that survives in cultural transmission because it effectively parasitizes other evolved cognitive structures."

Here is the link to the original article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

I'll be astounded if any of the few people who actually take a gander at this blog read through this stuff!  And of course, terribly impressed.

Also, this is super sad:

http://seedmagazine.com/slideshow/appetite_destruction/

Utah in March!

My friend Joe and I are planning to meet up in Utah mid-March to do some climbing. We've put a bunch of destinations on the table: St. George, Joe's Valley, Indian Creek, Zion.  He wants to do Moonlight Buttress and Monkeyfinger.  Both are definitely way too hard for me, but he's psyched to lead most of it since it's "Golden Gate training."  Yessss.

For some reason the guy really likes to climb with me. He's definitely one of my favorite partners (except when he's tossing wobblers on the Free Blast, but hey, nobody is perfect...and it was SO amusing!).  So at any rate, I'm pretty psyched to climb with him. Plus he has a super cool dog.

I have to say that I'm a little more attracted to low-commitment climbing right now, such as sport climbing with fixed draws and bouldering, but Joe is one of the few people I'd agree to do Moonlight with, so I feel like I need to take advantage of the opportunity, even if I have to yard on gear the whole way.  It's just such a rad feature.

So I might not end up going to the red, unless I decide to take another week after Utah when Joe has to go back to Boulder.  I guess I could leave my car somewhere and fly to the red or something, but still it all depends on partners.

Besides the GI thing on the way home from Yosemite, it was a fun trip. Climbing with Katrina was a blast, and I got to see some folks I hadn't seen in a while. I finally met Spaz, and got to check out some of the park employee digs.  To top off the experience, I got to revisit the lovely dirt pile to sleep.  Ah Valley life.

BLERrgggghhhaa

sick sick sick.  I was climbing in Camp 4 this morning and had kind of a stomach ache...I started to drive home around 3 or so and had to stop SIX TIMES to be sick.  Got home at 830.  Epic.

Food poisoning?  uuuuggghhhhhh...

I think I'm hungry but I'm not sure, and I'm afraid to eat anything.  EErrgghhh

The cake monster, Yosemite, stuff.

I'm headed to the valley in an hour or so to meet up with my friend Katrina to boulder for the weekend.  Bouldering more in the gym and getting a bit stronger (or just remembering how to boulder) has made me more psyched to go outdoors.  Plus Gold Wall is probably wet and I don't want to drive to Bishop.

The original plan was to go to a gym or something on Saturday and then have a fuck-off bake-off at my house in honor of V-Day, but I decided that I'd rather go rock climbing.  Shocking.

So I made the recipe I'd had a crush on last night, rather than on Sunday: a pomegranate chocolate mousse cake, aka the Cake Monster (pictured above).  The recipe had no picture, and it turned out to be WAY bigger than I'd anticipated.  Four layers of chocolate cake with pomegranate syrup and pomegranate chocolate mousse filling, topped by pomegranate italian meringue buttercream (my first attempt at this frosting) and then doused in a pomegranate chocolate ganache.  It was damned good.  I went over to Bjorn and Lisa's last night for dinner/Olympic opening ceremony, and brought the monster. Fortunately a few other people were over there and I managed to have about half of the cake consumed.  I left it at Bjorn's house with care instructions and the hope that more of it will be gone by Monday when I return to pick up the monster.

Writing about things, for me, gets them out of my head.  If I am upset about something and I write about it, it goes away.  The demons get exorcised; it works.

Part of why I write about these difficult things is to get them out of my head, and another part is because maybe one of my friends is also feeling something similar. I think many of us don't talk about things that are hard for us. I know that for me, it makes me feel very very alone if I'm experiencing something painful. I've been told that I come off as "tough", which is not how I feel at all. Writing let's me explore the difficulties, the contradicting emotions, pain, joy, humor and sadness in a way that doesn't get explored through other avenues. I primarily write for myself, but I also write knowing that it will be read by a handful of people, and at the very least I want to be honest.