Rock Climbing

I ordered a chair off of ebay yesterday. $499 for a leather club chair + ottoman. It's a pretty good price, I think. There's a chair at Target for $299--no ottoman. It's hard to tell from a picture. My mother said that I needed someplace comfortable to sit in my living room and for once, I agree with her. She said I needed a place for a man to sit down. Maybe.
I have a boyfriend, as I've mentioned. His name is Jay. We've been together 2 years. He's a climber (rocks, not social haha). He's kind of famous in that community. He's older--in his early fifties, and sometimes we'll be camping at a site somewhere and he'll be being dismissed by the younger people as just some old guy--then they watch him go up the face of a cliff like a spider or some sort of rock lizard and one of them will say, "Wait--are you....?" He loves it when that happens, although to give him credit, he does a really good job of pretending he doesn't. Then at night, people show up at our campsite 2 by 2, like pilgrims. And we never have to eat the food we bring.
I lived in a house full of climbers at Dartmouth. Dartmouth's a big climbing school--or it used to be. They lived to climb, and when they weren't climbing, they would do crossword puzzles. I didn't start climbing then, but I did start doing crossword puzzles. I just figured climbing would happen.
When Jay and I started dating, I begged him to take me climbing, but he wouldn't. "It would be like me showing up at your band and sitting in on the spoons." Which was sort of a crappy thing to say. Finally, though, after a year, he did take me climbing, and I was pretty good, which surprised him. So for Christmas that year he bought me a harness and climbing shoes. What I haven't told him is that everytime I finish a climb--make it to the top--I feel like having a nervous breakdown. I feel like I'm defusing a bomb, or working statistics problems--only with my whole body and a 3 story drop beneath me if I screw up. For some reason, I can't get it into my head there's a rope on me to keep me safe--I start going and something in my lizard brain kicks in and says, "okay--this is it. Climb or die." It's kind of like trauma nursing.
It baffles me that there are people now who consider themselves climbers who have never actually climbed on real rock. To me that's the whole point. Embracing the mother, literally.
Baggins, our ICU fellow, who I've told you about (Where's the Soul) started climbing recently, too. He dated a girl, a nursing student--terrible nurse--arrogant and unskilled, left patients in their own stool at the end of her shift---who was also a climber and she got him into it. There's a small climbing community in one of the larger cities around here, gym climbers, and no one was very kind to her (a lot of climbing chicks are, as a rule, kind of pissy. They're usually pretty well educated, and not very attractive, and they're awful to other women. The ones I've met seem to believe their hairy armpits confer some sort of moral superiority) Anyways, Jay told me, a few years ago she developed a massive crush on this English pilot in this group and pretty much just followed him around like a puppy dog. It became a running joke, this besotted coed, hanging on his every whim. One of the women in the group, an artist, made a life size cardboard cutout of her and took it along to parties where she wasn't present. Well, she may be a crappy nurse but she certainly didn't deserve that. That's typical of that crowd--they think they're clever, but they're just kind of mean and base.
And that's why you shouldn't climb in a gym. It will steal your soul.
That's my 1/2 hour. I have to go watch Nick in the homecomeing parade.