No Link Today. Maybe Next Time.
Felt like a truck hit me after second shot of Pfizer last week
Secret 300 word review of the well-regarded Skull
I’m not going to talk about Skull today. I was trying to remember why I dislike Skull so much but it was so long ago, to be honest. So instead here is my review of hiking.
I am so completely emotionally and physically flat on hiking. This is for 3 reasons.
-
The physical portion of hiking is just not interesting. To be fair, I did not do a lot of looking around because the hike was not trivial, so there was not a lot of looking at my scenery. Looking at views, sure, but even that really didn’t click with me. I did a lot of hiking and sight-seeing when I was younger, and what amounts to relatively difficult walking didn’t engage me. I love bouldering but hiking reminds me of trying not to run wrong in Death Stranding so that you don’t stumble and get your packages off balance and drop all your packages. Maybe I’m hiking wrong because I’m not a hiker. Apparently people who grow up hiking are just different compared to people who don’t hike.
-
I was told it was nice to think and have conversation while hiking. I was not able to think and not slip at the same time. I was able to have conversation for about 30 minutes but unfortunately my climbing partner wasn’t one for conversation and had left me far behind instead. Nice guy. Oh yeah, I’m not much a bird-watcher either. I lied about there not being a link btw.
-
Climbing a mountain with a mask fucking sucks. There was no expectation for me to climb with a mask, but I also have no expectation for people to be polite to me if I had my mask off. I’m not trying to brag, but I look extremely Asian. It’s probably because my genes are 100% Korean. People have a hard time looking in my direction. It feels like when I first went to school and realized I was literally the only Asian in school, and treated like I was. When I was under extreme duress, my kindergarten teacher thought I was speaking Korean instead of English and called my family to leave work and come to school. I was just crying because I was 5 years old and I was hot and didn’t know how to take off my sweater. When I finally felt like I was alone and isolated and was able to take off my mask outside of hydrating, I took 5 minutes and just breathed. Breathed air. For 5 minutes. No one around for 5 minutes. No smelling my breath and filtered air through 5 layers or my dead skin and my sweat on my KN95 mask.
This experience made me feel a need for one thing really. I want to be alone when I come back here. I want to be alone when I think out here. I want to be alone so that if I fuck up, it’s just me and I have to figure out what to do alone, because that’s part of hiking. I don’t want to be around people when I’m doing something like this. I don’t want my phone in my pocket in case someone wants to check in on me, or where I am every hour. I don’t want people on my mind when I’m hiking, because I don’t need to think about people for now while I’m hiking. I don’t need people to be here to affect me while I hike by saying that hikers are born different or that I’m Asian or ask me if I’m ok because I’m breathing hard and just want to fucking think for 5 minutes while pretending I’m alone or pretending I’m anywhere remotely…remote.
I just don’t want to feel like I have to keep a fucking mask on.