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brilliant day climbing, feb 16 - feb n, 2002 (UNPUBLISHED)

[the following weekly steve was never sent, if i remember correctly. mainly becuase it was quite boring and was never finished. i've put it up here, however, just for completeness' sake. be forewarned, it wasn't sent for a reason...and that was that i mentioned maple... **shudder**. i also seemed to have forgotten about my 'new hat'...]

so did no one try and compute my age last time? the whole derivative thingie? i'm so disappointed in you all. i worked hard on that, consulting integral tables, finding interesting things about the number 24, factoring, refactoring..., finally deciding that it was coolest in the form x*2^x where x is 3...but whatever. not everyone had maple though, so i forgive you. but now is the perfect time to remember how to take derivatives of functions with respect to variables in the exponent. go log go...

this week: a beautiful day climbing, my new hat. probably not that interesting, more like a personal journal entry, but whatever. it'll waste a couple of your minutes...

****just another day****
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

saturday morning, 6:02. i woke up early again after another dream involving characters it hurts to remember. as usual, the sun reflecting off the windows of the apartment building across the railroad tracks shone brightly in my eyes and stirred me to movement. the sky was flawless. since the [tenkiyohou] guy said the highs would be up to 13 C, i decided to make a PBJ[1], pack my climbing shoes and head to lovely mitake (mee tah kay) for a day of bouldering[2] next to the rolling river. and that, my friends, brings me to japanese bread.

have i talked about japanese bread yet? first of all, you can only buy 4, 5, 6, or 8 (7 is right out!) slices of bread, though the loafs are all more or less the same size. therefore, if you want skinnies you go with 8, and if you want fatties you go with 4. however, whenever i go to the store to buy bread, the expiration date is always the next day (or at most three days away)! i can't eat eight skinnies or four fatties in a day! i need to find out when they stock things so i can have a loaf that lasts a week. needless to say, i have probably developed an immunity to penicillin. it's not so bad now, though, the winter makes the bread last longer. anyway, japanese bread (moldy or no) makes great PBJ's! the big fat slices and unusually large SAPS (Surface Area Per Slice) coefficient make for a rather filling meal. and it also makes me go through a tiny jar of kuranchi skippy in like a week...well, maybe two.

now where was i?

right! it was a flawless day and i was going to celebrate it by going bouldering in mitake. i packed my everything up and left the house around eight something. woohoo! i felt great. the sky was CornflowerBlue [3] and cloudless, the wind was cool and i was invincible. i had everything i needed: my PBJ, my chalk bag, my shoes, my chapstick, my toenail clippers, a copy of the return of the king, tons of energy and 200 yen. i was almost skipping, it was ... 200 yen? 200 yen?! where in the hell am i going to be able to go with 200 yen?! i stopped skipping and gave a dumb look to an old man who chuckled as he shuffled past. ARGH! i was suddenly a pirate. and that, my friends, brings me to japanese banks.

japanese banks are like any other bank in the world, except most of them are in debt because of ludicrous circular high-paying bearuocracy that i will never understand. sean can tell you tons if he's in the mood and you ask him. like every other bank in the world, japanese banks also keep ludicrous bank hours. but here, even your own bank will charge you those ludicrous "convenience" fees to use your own bank's atm outside of said ludicrous bank hours. ARGH!

but where was i?

ah yes, it was a flawless day and i was in the process of trying to celebrate it by going bouldering in mitake. after a brief intermission of about 50 minutes of aimless walking around town, noting that absolutely no stores were open, and munching on my 100 yen salmon onigiri[4] and my 90 yen jam and margarine roll [100+90=190*1.05=199.5 which rounds to precisely 200 yen!] picked up at the convenience store whose ATM conveniently did not work before 9am... i *finally* made it the ATM by the train station where i was *finally* told by the BEBCH [Bowing Electric Bank CHick] to "please take your card.", "please take your receipt.", "please take your cash.", and "please come back and use asahi ginko again!". stupid BEBCH...

ah, money in the pocket, i rushed up the stairs and bought a ticket just in time to catch the 9:12am train out of town. what a great day! the train wasn't crowded and i could see a snowcapped mt. fuji looming over the numerous power lines and square houses that packed the landscape. 3 train changes and a couple of "return of the king" chapters later [one hour and ten minutes], i was one of three people who stepped off the train at sawai station, a station so small that nobody even works there. the absence of anybody or anything to check and see if you've paid the full price for your ticket allows young cheap climber punks to pay only 120 yen for 650 yen train ride! woohoo! but i always think of it after i buy the ticket...

****i heart mitake****
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i love getting off at sawai station. but i love getting off anywhere...[rimshot]. i guess it's the complete inaccessability of the place that draws me to it. it's located on the side of a steep hill with only a 45 degree sloping road that carries the chance pedestrian and small car to and from its lonely gates. incidentally, this quiet, steep road is also privy to the very seldom, laughing and yelling white guy running out of control down the 45 degree sloping road as fast as he can, trying not to trip and die or run into the busy intersection at the end. ah...i love that road.

so mitake is about the closest you can get to nature and still technically be in tokyo. it's a node on the banks of tama-gawa () that slowly winds it's way through a rich wooded valley. like all rivers in japan, though, there are tons of dams and hydro-electric power generators, too much concrete and unnecessary bridges...[construction=jobs!]. but today not even the dumb plastic laminated signs warning me of slippery rocks and too much litter on the path could dim mitake's attractiveness. like i said, it was a brilliant day...not too many people, maybe 10 climbers quietly working on the boulders, a few old couples walking dogs, a photographer, a fisherman guy, the kayak kids in their little hard core kayaks pretending they're actually in rapids, ... oh and the construction guys painting another recently refurbished bridge.

i walked into a small restaurant on the hill and offered to pay 100 yen or so for them to fill up my water bottle. "oh you don't have to pay...the water's good here!". i stifled my skepticism because i wanted the water to taste good that day. even if it tasted like iron i probably wouldn't have known, but whatever. i thanked them and stepped out into the sun and took a huge drink. the water was icy cold and tasted of snow.

anyway, i spent the day bouldering around, alone, free and quiet. and when i was tired, i just climbed up on a big boulder in the middle and then as a grand finale, i went and tried ninja gaeshi[5]

********
climber specific info, probably boring to most of you who don't care...
********

i've always found all the different ratings in climbing to be annoying. i usually just like to find a climb that looks interesting and go, but the ratings help keep us within our limits and not die, i guess. and they give us something to aim for and something to brag about to fellow practitioners. anyway, as most of you know (most = climbers on the list = scott, friso, whidden, and probably dave) the ratings in the states are usually based on the yosemite system (5.5-5.14 and various alphabet additions) and bouldering is based on the v system (v0, v5, v8) which is completely foreign and strange to me. the rest of the world outside of asia and the US uses the french/european number system (5c, 8a, etc) which is also foreign and strange to me. japan, as usual, takes little bits and pieces from the rest of the world and incorporates it into its own system, making a hybrid mess of poo. anyway, for normal climbs they use either the yosemite or the european system, depending on where you are. the boulder ratings, however, are based on the old japanese rating system used in martial arts and stuff[5], (10kyuu-1kyuu, shodan[first dan], nidan [second dan]... with 10kyuu being the easiest and 1kyuu being the hardest, and then the rest being super hard) it hurts my head to think about it all, but i just thought i'd let you know...

*******
ok, i'm done.
*******

it is now 2005. three years after i wrote the above. i think I was going to mention some things about finally climbing ninja gaeshi (V5) and afterwords meeting some kids from tsukuba who promptly:

  1. asked me if i knew the tsukuba climbing gym (where my ex-girlfriend (who had just broke up with me the week before) worked)
  2. asked me if i knew my ex-girlfriend (who, as aforementioned, had broken up with me the previous week...), and
  3. told me that said ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend climbed ninja gaeshi in his socks.

oh really... his socks huh? other than that, it was a great day...

apparantly i also had a story about my new hat...my new hat?! man, i was scraping for ideas... :)

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