We always use the term ‘difficulty’ December 13, 2011

My system for reading the New Yorker has evolved into this:

It comes weekly to my sometimes-place in Austin where one of my lovely roommates piles them into a safe place. When I go through Austin, a once-every-4-months thing lately, I pick them up. It takes me as long, or longer, to read them than it did for them to pile up, and when I am back through ATX I pick up the new stack and put it on top of the remainder of  the previous stack. I always have a good 6 months worth on me.

So it’s not terribly surprising that last month I finally got to the issue from December 20 & 27, 2010, and read Nick Paumgarten’s profile of Shigery Miyamoto, the creative mind of Nintendo. A few things in the profile made me think about climbing. One issue it’s made me think about is how well/not well climbing, in my life, fits the definitions of “play.”

Paumgarten brings up this Dutch cultural historian named Johan Huisinga, and what he wrote in 1938 about the definining characteristics of play. He came up with five.

Play is voluntary – you can’t be forced to do it or it stops being play.

Play “takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences”

This isn’t always true I suppose, since you could hurt yourself a million ways, or get into highballing, or something. I think my natural cowardice and aversion to dangerous things keeps me and climbing on the play side here. If I sense any even slightly serious consequences, I usually back off.

Play is unproductive. “nothing comes of it – norhting of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized.

This is a real choicy thing for a lot of people I know, and myself. If you start thinking about selling photos or videos or winning money, things begin to leave the ‘play’ realm, just a little maybe.

Play “follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some articifial boundary of time and space.” 

So you start with this jug and this crimp, go right, and this is the top. Sometimes you top out sometimes not, this hold is off and no dabbing.

Play “is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation.”

I might or might not make it up this thing this time, might as well just campus that part.

So that was interesting.

There’s also sections of the profile where Miyamoto talks about the difficulty of video games, and how you have to balance impossibly hard things with repetative easy things to keep players engaged and allow them to improve. I related to this a LOT. Nothing like an easy start or chill section to keep me motivated trying something very hard.

“Miyamoto recognizes that there is pleasure in difficulty but also in ease, in mastery, in performing a familiar act with aplomb…His games strike this magical balance between the excitement that comes from faving new problems and the swagger from facing down old ones. The conseruent sesation of confidence is useful, in dealing with a game’s more challenging stages, but also a worthy aim in itself.”

Then the man himself is quoted

“All the time, players are forced to do their utmost. If they are challenged to hte limit, is it really fun for them?”
 In his games, “You are constatnly provising the players with a new challenge, but at the same time providing them with some stages or some occasions where they can simply, repeatedly, do something again and again. And that itself can be a joy.”

“We always use the term ‘difficulty’ when we talk about gameplay…If the game is too difficult, people may not want to play it again. With the appropriate level of difficulty, people may feel like challenging it again and again. As they repeat it, the amount of information they can acquire naturally increases….I always try to be conscious about that kind of gradual improvement.”

So do I, Miyamoto San.

He describes the crux of a game or a skill as a kind of “bridge”, between being a beginner and coming into mastery and deeper joy found through performing the activity.

“a kind of a bridge between indifference and pleasure. ‘If the bridge is too easy to pass by, it’s called ‘entertainment.’ If it’s rather difficult, it can be called ‘hobby.’

Here’s the article online.

September 30, 2011

Mom scrambling on seaside choss in Portugal. Love what she's wearing AND doing!

heads off July 2, 2011

I can’t remember what initially inspired me to go into the forest alone with a few apples, a sleeping bag, a bottle of water and instructions to my friends to come look for me if I didn’t return in 50 hours. I think it was something I heard on the SoundsTrue podcast. I do a lot of these “personal growth” “spiritual development”-y kind of things. They are my favorite, I love trying to find mental discipline, praying, doing established sequences of yogic stretches, giving myself positive affirmation, lists, journals, books, all that stuff. Not that it’s necessarily helping me be a better, happier person, but I enjoy it, and if I stopped doing it at this point, who knows what would come out, so lets just keep at it ya? Ya. But given how into that stuff I am, I decided to make this project more challenging by doing nothing for the full two days. No yoga, no siting cross legged, no prescription to pray or think about a particular aspect of my life that I want to change. Just, whatever comes. Also, minimal to no eating, sleeping, or moving.

So at 5am a few Mondays ago, I got out of my tent, stuck two liters of water and some produce into my sleeping bag, and walked down a trail, over a hill, into another meadow, and sat in a little circle of trees. I dropped a gps pin, emailed it to Heather, shut the phone off, and sat down. The next two days was so, so horrible.

For the first 32 hours or so, I thought about everyone I knew who might not like me, and what I had done wrong to make that so. I thought about, say, the half a dozen people who have come into my life who I related to the least, and do not care to invest in with time or talk, and fantasized about the terrible things they might think about me. Stupid things I had said or done in the past were a strong sub-topic of thought. I spent almost the entire first 20 hours reaming myself over my marriage, my divorce, romantic experiences gone awry since and before. Reliving humiliations and mistakes. I couldn’t stop! I thought, wow, Ann, you are supremely preoccupied by what negative things people you don’t like that much think of you.

Which is normal, right? Of course it’s natural to mull over failures, because they’re fascinating. What did I do? What could have changed things? Was it something small? Is it something I can fix next time? I think this is standard, and we all do this. Ok? We all do this.

But wow, I did not expect it to be so hard out there. I thought, I’ve gone on 15 hour drives, camped out alone, spent days on end alone or basically alone, this is going to be relaxing! Jeebus, how far the radio, a text, the making of cereal, a chat in the trailer,  go to occupy the mind and distract from this horror show. I thought I would love it, honestly. Meditate all day, think about my goals, forgive myself for stuff, forgive other people, feel newly stoked on all kinds of projects. Nope.

So I knew immediately I could not stop this terrorist thought train, and I was best to just watch. And be mad and sad and annoyed and embarrassed. And if I spent all 50 hours berating myself over things I did and thought as long as 6 years ago, well, that is just the pathetic truth of Ann Raber, dumb bitch.

At some point I became very hungry, and I ate like, a bell pepper. I looked around my tree circle and realized that I had lost track of which direction I came from. Doesn’t matter. Can’t even begin to wonder how to get back now. The tree circle was shadey all day, and I stared at the sun, willing it to move faster and put me out of my misery. I just kept letting the thinking happen. I cuddled up in my sleeping bag and waited to feel scared, alone in the meadow in the dark. I tried not to comfort myself by thinking about Andy and Ema relaxing in the trailer not 100 yards away, in some direction. I prayed kind of desperately, but all I came up with was “praying is so stupid. amen. whatever.” I fell in and out of sleep, maybe. No dreaming, it really didn’t feel any different to be awake or asleep.

Finally the morning came, Tuesday morning, and I was very thirsty. I drank a liter of water, just to see if I could do it all at once, and cried for a while about something nasty I’d said to someone once. At some point I rolled over and saw these little white desert flowers, and the way they were leaning and bobbing in the wind, they kinda looked like people having a conversation at a party, like how flowers do sometimes. So I stared at them and imagined their voices. Then their voices started talking smack about me, saying that I was a loser and a slut. So I reached out and snapped their heads off. I think at that point I started laughing.

By that afternoon, I had started to hallucinate a little bit, probably out of boredom and hunger more than anything. Everything had a weird dark band around it that expanded if I concentrated. So weird. I saw this very distinct whirlwind skip through the meadow for what seemed like 20 minutes, full of grass and dust. I got super hungry again and devoured an apple. I hid from a large black bird. Fasting is completely stupid, I decided. Then I gave up. I pulled out my chapstick, and I read the label. Bronner’s “All One”. All One what? Chapstick? What other functions does it serve? I was desperate to research something. I read every millimeter of the lable, but I think “All One” is just part of the Bronner’s brand name. I read it several more times just to be sure, just to be interacting with something. The chapstick.

So mid-day on Tuesday, after a good lunch of water, a good 33 or so hours in, I started thinking about climbing a little bit. Fantasizing about Hueco this year, remembering fun instances, funny people, stuff like that. Started to feel different. Laid there thinking about climbing until it was dark. I snuggled back into my sleeping bag, thinking about climbing. I was thinking about some problem, I don’t know what or where, maybe something at McKinney, and I was kind of, like, watching what a camera on my forehead would capture while I was climbing. I started staring at my hands matched on something, and — and this was the weird part — and I felt this huge wave of excitement just roll over my entire body, in my toes and my ribs, like I was up off the ground for a second, and my fingers were so tense. I thought, holy moses, I bet I have more of this. So I did that thing in that dream-movie Inception, and I dropped a pin for myself, this particular little image and sentence, thinking if I can call that up when I’m not 44 hours  without much sleep or food or human interaction, I bet I can use it.

I was recovered physically by Friday. Andy was showing me a new boulder problem, and I couldn’t do this weird dynamic match move, and I was ok with it. Because I was way tired, and it’s a hard line, tricky move, fine with it being kinda unrealistic for now. But just for fun I remembered the pin and tried it. Crushed. And those horrible feelings and memories and awefulnesses of the recent and father past, I am not lying, I can’t find them. I even tried to make myself think about the worst of it, the most current, the most upsetting, and it was like, nothing. Like a scab that’s all bloddy and gross and bloddy and gross and bloddy and gross everytime you mess with it then one day, it’s a fleck of dry skin. Flick!

step 1, step 2 by erik May 4, 2011

teeming April 29, 2011

So just when i was feeling like SUCH a b-teamer in local climbingland, POOF! Allen made a blog! It’s funny and awesome in the way I hope that SendAustin was funny and awesome. But his is very ‘boy.” I’m glad there’s a site like this around, but I’m more glad I’m not the one behind it.

We aren’t “pros”, we are better than the pros. We’re the mfkn BTEAM. We don’t do this because we want to, we do this because we can.

April 21, 2011

Either Fresh Air with Terry Gross has been particularly amazing all month, or I’m in one of my “easily taken by a performance” phases. Either is possible, but every episode has rocked me lately. Last Thursday Michelle Williams was the guest. She said this interesting thing about working as an actor that made me think, naturally, of myself and of climbing, even though I haven’t been climbing as long as she’s been acting, or as long as a lot of my friends have been climbing (or acting or working) still.

Work is something that I’ve always done. It’s been something very consistent in my life since I was in my early teens, and it’s carried me through so many situations where I think I might have gotten stuck, either because it would geographically transport me or it would give me a purpose or it would give me something to cling to, think about, enjoy, get better at.

She goes on to point out that she kept working through a very hard time and eventually realized she needed a year off.

Rideshare October 26, 2010

I’ve watched this video about 8 times today. I shared it on facebook too, but apparently I am obsessed so here it is again:

I always talk about how surfing media is so inspiring to me, for climbing and in a more general, life and lifestyle sense – way moreso than most of the climbing stuff I read or see. I’m not sure why, I don’t think it’s only because I’m a snob or the whole ‘any club that would have me as a member’ issue. I suspect that surfing media is on the whole just better. Surfing as a media industry has been around longer than climbing and there’s a wider audience for it and therefore more money in it, so it’s evolved to the point where the basic surfing movie parameters have been established and refined to their utmost awesomeness. Maybe. I mean that makes sense, yeah?

Climbing pr0n is, I imagine, a younger phenomenon with a smaller, much more niche audience. A non-surfer can enjoy a surfing movie, but climbing doesn’t often make a lot of sense on the screen to someone without a real experience to impose on what they’re seeing. Then again, that is definitely not the case with the very top of the line climbing movies, like the one’s I see at the Banff Mountain Film Festival road show. And I watch Dosage pretty regularly just to, ya know, maintain. But even small-time surfing videos have something…special going on.

The basic surfing video “story” goes something like this: “Me and my friends went someplace beautiful and we had a really good time. We like each other, and we like life. Surfing is neat” and there’s none of the stress and ambition that you, or at least that I, sense with the majority of climbing media. No one talks about how hard it is, or dwells on their self-doubt and disappointment. And there’s not much pride and elation over doing well, either. There isn’t even any ‘doing well’, just going, and falling or not falling or whatever. Another wave is comin up. It’s all just for kicks. Of course, with so much financial support and endorsement, surfing can afford to shirk the ambition and just hang out, making it look easy. And, being so much older, they’ve learned to hide the rabid snobbery and attitudes when the camera comes out. Maybe climbing stuff is just too close to home, and reminds me of my own stress and ambition about it, but surfing is not the love of my life so I can watch it in peace. Maybe the cultures of climbing and surfing are just drastically different. And maybe I should aim to embody aloha, but spend my time on the desert waves.

jennie riding the huenker 100 on north mountain last year, and me down in front. We did about 30 problems of it. She said "I'm kinda liking your no-star v0 thing." (picture by Charlotte Marie Wood)

The Leah Dawson video (the first one I put on up there that started this whole thing) features longboarding, which I love to fall doing, but what stands out to me is the way she talks about the place she is and how much is suits her dream wave fantasy. It reminds me of how I feel about Hueco. Like, man, climbing is glorious anywhere, and I love central Texas more than life and I’m so grateful to go climb in far away exotic places. But last year when I first went out there, Hueco felt like what I had been looking for since I started. I hope the feeling is still there this year, and that it’s stronger. I’m gonna spend one more weekend at the warm weather lake, and head west on Monday for a 6-week (<>?) trip.

Leah Dawson is featured in Liquid Salt right now too, an online surfing magazine of mostly interviews. I read this line a few times…

Man­ag­ing every­thing so that I can sus­tain myself finan­cially is chal­leng­ing, but I am con­fi­dent that it is only a mat­ter of time and ded­i­ca­tion before I com­bine all of my pas­sions into a lucra­tive lifestyle. I like to think of it as being in the busi­ness of mak­ing dreams a reality.

Here’s another surfing video (trailer) I like to watch repeatedly. Yeah I dunno. But it’s got G-love!