Love Mountain
October 31, 2025
Mountain climbing is very perilous, which is why it makes for excellent AI generated content on YouTube. The story is the story and there are probably one hundred Wikipedia pages about specific disasters on a given day at a given peak, like how "Into Thin Air" is just a sliver of what really went down on Everest that day. There's no need to read "Into Thin Air" because there's a movie, and there's no need to watch the movie because there's a 20 minute YouTube video called "The most infamous day in Everest history" or something of that sort, which uses the same cadence and music as the one about the 2008 K2 disaster, or the 2014 Annapurna avalanches, etc. My dad, who I'll refer to as Papá because that's what I call him, climbed mountains in his twenties. He knocked out some of the North American classics—Waddington, Rainier, Washington in the winter, made it pretty far up Denali before getting injured and turning around. I don't hate him for this. He had the drive to do these things, and he did them. I'd like to climb like that, one day. It's not as if time is slipping away from me. I have other goals, perhaps.
It does not shock me that the world of climbing, whether it be of the rock or mountaineering or trekking variety (many times these endeavors call for a little bit of all of these), has a similar approach to achievement as Rolling Stone or Pitchfork. There are awards regarding the best climbs of the year, for groups and individuals, measuring the risk of the climb, the purity of the climb, the originality of the climb. The sporting press revelled in this year's mega-feat from Kílian Jornet, who ran up all of the 14,000 foot peaks in the Lower 48, and biked from state to state doing it. He set a benchmark for others to try and break, and come the end of the year he'll probably receive some award or be on the top of a list of greatest sportsmen of the year. I have the kind of idiot brain where this kind of thinking makes perfect sense to me. I leave a show, a movie, and not twenty minutes after I will be comparing it to something else I've seen, creating an infinite list (sometimes tangible, sometimes internal) of everything I have ever consumed and everything that surrounds me. This is the best babka. This is the best subway line. This is the best designer. My life is worse than her life, and so forth.
Once I get my degree and my vagina, I plan on leaving New York for a year or so. I haven't verbalized these plans to anyone, and they're contingent on getting a better paying library job than I'll get in the city (unlikely), so there's a chance it doesn't work out. I would be very happy to live in New York forever, but I have a very naughty need to do things that make me feel closer to death. This is an unbearably bourgois attitude, and I'm sure that when I start sharing this page around I'll be embarrassed about what I'm admitting to, but I'll call a spade a spade: the idiot Englishmen who set off to die in the Himalaya in the 20th century were right. I'll take every precaution to not die, and I have no plans on dying before the age of 80 something, unless I come down with some horrible neurodegenerative disorder and one of you have to George and Lenny me, but I want to feel my life in my hands, knees, and feet.
This is also a particularly masculine ideal, one that I've found to be so off putting in men.
On Desk
October 29, 2025
It's apparently bad form to be writing this directly into the code, but when I see any of the usual places where I write my essays, cries for help, grocery lists, I find that the tips of my fingers go blue. I hear keys coming down the stairs. There are so many books I have to read, for work, for school, to become more human, supposedly, but I also have other preoccupations. I received a note from a surgeon today telling me that December 9, 2026 could be the day, but like no pressure if not. I would like to stand on a stage and perform a lecture to all concerned parties, the unconcerned and the petrified, about what I want, what I'd like to do with my job, the places I'd like to travel to and why the world wouldn't end if I were to get a vagina.
That's so uncouth of me. I swear I have other things I think about. The rising price of coffee. Where to paddle out next time I'm at the Rockaways. What to tell Jason next session, to let him in on. Five years of therapy has probably left him with a significant backlog of notes on me, which he could reform and publish into a novel like "The State I Am In," supposing that all of the lurid details I've fed him can support the weak premise of my life story. Recently I looked Neve in the eye, and told her that up until that point my life has been very good. I still feel this way.
Previous attempts at blogging have been unsuccessful due to social media addiction, poor attention span, a general embarrassment in the premise of making myself the center of my writing. Ava mentioned that she was impressed at how well Karl Ove Knausgaard writes women in the "Morning Star" series. *ed note: I will turn titles into italics when I look up how to do that. I certainly learned this in INFO 654, but my notes are not with me* My simultaneous narcissism and disgust with myself flowed through me in that instant, when I thought about writing from the perspective of a woman. I cannot write as a woman, I cannot write as a man, I am a fundamentally self-centered person and a middling writer at best. In elementary school, I was always the main character of my stories, and I held all of the same traits as I did in that moment in time. In many ways, I hold all of those same traits today.
I swear to G-d, to J*sus in fact, and may both of them tag team me on my way to hell if you think this will become a purely confessional output. Again, so uncouth of me to be apologizing like this.
There have been more film crews near where I work recently. I love to see them, with all the people standing up straight, and one person so immaculately sheveled that the camera couldn't pick a bad angle if it tried. In turn, I stand up a little straighter, and pretend to walk by hurredly, neck exposed, like I have somewhere to be. I have nowhere to be, I am on my way to get my deal on tamales, but in those moments I am walking on the same street as a star, and in my mind I am superior. I work around here. I'm a librarian. I have a pretty face, maybe prettier than yours, but I get paid to help people, and what do you do? You film a perfume commercial, wearing clothing that fits you perfectly with professionally done makeup. You still have to stand on the same street as me, and if you're lucky the b-roll will catch me walking by, and everyone watching the Super Bowl advertisements will be talking about the beautiful girl in the L.L. Bean jacket with a coffee and a waxed paper box that probably has two tamales in it. I tell myself this to keep me sane.
For now,
Cleo