How's THIS for Communication?

As I sit here, I can hear screams of either outrage or delight—I can’t tell which (fortunes of being in a girls’ apartment). I am lying on a couch propped up with a pillow with my laptop warmly charging on my lap. Really warmly. Truth be told, it’s a good feeling having my laptop right on top of my quads; I can feel them slowly unwinding themselves after a long day of cleaning and climbing, and melon ball. It really makes me want to just want to close this laptop and go to sleep for about 3 hours. But procrastination is the thief of impromptu naps, so I will continue to let my legs unwind as I try to think of things to write about.

This morning, I got up early to find my roommates cleaning the kitchen. The kitchen has been getting gradually worse and worse over the last few weeks and because of the “Collective Action Problem” (it’s a political science thing. I used to be one of those, you know.)we have allowed ourselves to gradually devolve into lower and lower standards of cleanliness. About two days ago, my new roommate Bruce confronted the rest of us who have been living there for about a year now, and suggested that a) we should do something about the cleanliness of the apartment and b) maybe we should create a chore chart that we could share around. Now, you must realize that my apartment has had a Sixth Man for the past year or so. The sixth guy of our apartment has always been the outsider. He’s always been somewhat different from the rest of us. He’s always been the one to point out cleanliness problems. He’s always the one to move at the end of a semester. First it was Kevin, who, ironically enough organized the apartment contracts and invited us all to be a part of the original group. I didn’t know what the term “passive aggressive” meant until I met Kevin. He was a business entrepreneurial major and had taken some sort of Management Communications class in which he had read leadership books and healthy communication books and books about connecting with people, but when he talked to you, you always felt vaguely like a test case that he was running for a class. At one point, when the cleanliness of our apartment began its inevitable Collective Action Problem-driven nosedive, without consulting any of the rest of us, he put up a chore chart and assigned everyone a spot on the rotating schedule. The rest of the guys (me included) universally, unanimously, and silently rebelled and the apartment seemed to grow marginally worse for a while. I guess the chore chart wasn’t really a bad idea, per se, but when I saw it hanging unheralded, unannounced, and un-discussed on the fridge, I wondered how all those management techniques he learned in his classes hadn’t sunk in. Or maybe they sank in too deeply and he had begun laboring under the false premise that he was the one to fix the problem of our apartment’s cleanliness. Oddly enough, it was only after Kevin took down his failed chore chart that our standard of living began to pick up. Kevin moved out after winter semester and is still rather unmissed.
So now Bruce (our current and potential Sixth Man) was suggesting a chore chart, completely oblivious to the previous history that the rest of us had been a part of. We all exchanged silent looks and there seemed to be a small discussion amongst the five of us as to what the outcome of this particular commentary on cleanliness was going to be. During this discussion of significant looks, I made the point that the apartment was kind of a mess, to which Lenny responded that “on principle, we can’t cave to this guy!” All of this, was bandied about for a couple of seconds and then Cory said that we were planning on cleaning early tomorrow morning and from then on out, perhaps we might just make sure that we each clean our own things. By the time I got up at nine, most of the exciting stuff had been done, supervised by Bruce. Oddly enough, apparently he wasn’t responsible for any of the messes and therefore didn’t feel the need to contribute. All in all, I’d say it turned out much better than the previous encounter we had with our other Sixth Man—clean apartment, no cleaning chore chart, and relatively little animosity in the apartment. Sort of.

Okay, my laptop is really hot now. I’m going to put it on a pillow and hope it doesn’t burn through to my legs before I’m done with this essay. I shifted my body weight just now, and I’m realizing that everything hurts from the activities of today. My forearms are completely dead from rock climbing this morning and as a consequence, I’m having a hard time putting spacing and capitalizations in properly. Like that last word, for example: I spelled it “propoerly” and the computer corrected itself without my help. Heck, If I hadn’t have looked up, I might have missed that particular unsung hero of modern technology. Do you remember how you used to have to use spell check back in the day? Like, back in the 1890’s? Me too. Back then, I was working on a Mac Power PC (I’ve always been confused by that particular combination of titles) and I used to have this theory that the computer had it in for me. See, when I’d type out my papers for Mrs. Miller-Tart in 4th grade, no matter how many times I checked my work, there would always be an error. Always. It got to the point where I wasn’t even mad about it anymore; it just Was. If spell check had stayed around in that form, I think that I would have been much more in touch with my Qi and the Tao. But no, I remember when Word started underlining things and suddenly, it wasn’t enough for spelling errors to just Be. They had to be corrected and brought in line with the rest of the paper. No stand outs anymore. No more little but of humanity in the paper that showed Mrs. Miller-Tart that a human being had written this paper. Maybe I want my teachers to know that I had climbed strenuously before typing the paper. Maybe the As it is, I can now have 43% functionality in my hands and forearms, and the computer automatically capitalizes every sentence I don’t start propeorly. And in the case of words like the one at the end of that last sentence, if I stubbornly insist on misspelling things, it will underline everything that It doesn’t approve of in red or green. It’s like Christmas whenever I type with post-climbing hands. Climbing was good today, though. Oh boy, it was good. A bunch of us went up to Rock Canyon and roped Tinkertoys. The rule of the land is that whoever sets up the permanent bolts on a climb gets to name the climb. Hence, we climbed on a set called Tinkertoys. I climbed a 5-9 (about middling difficulty for someone with the right equipment) and absolutely sucked at it. I ended up using the rope way more than I should have, fell a bunch, got stuck on a couple of parts just because my sequence was wrong. Rookie crap, basically. I distracted myself for a while by helping some of the beginners we had brought along, but I was still irritated by the fact that I hadn’t really “climbed” the climb. Cory told me that he wanted me to do it again. This time, he would belay for me and he wanted me to think “smooth.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever done rock climbing before, but it is not a muscle-y sport. Most of the work is done with your legs and if you try to do pull ups all day, you’ll get burned out really fast. Most climbers are lanky little guys or lanky big guys who rely more on balance than anything else. So Cory told me “smooth” and that’s how I tried to be. I still burned out my arms (a sure sign of not enough leg usage), but the climbing was technically about 8 times better than I had done it before. It didn’t even matter that I totally screwed up the other 5-9 we did—I had conquered the first one and that was satisfying to me. They’re an interesting bunch, climbers: there aren’t a lot of socially acceptable sports where one is faced with death and nothing is thought of it. When you belay for someone, you literally hold their life in your hands. I think that that’s the reason that climbers are such a cool group of people to be with. Granted, I haven’t met a lot of them, but from what I’ve seen, they live in the moment and work with what they’ve got. Maybe my spell check’s lack of Qi and Tao will be balanced by my climbing.

So that’s that. My laptop is about to melt this pillow and I feel that I’m close enough to my goal to call it a day. Mayhap I will talk about Melon Ball another day.