Author: keepascending

September 29: Shooting Stars

Located just about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and largely devoid of what Angelenos would describe as “sites of cultural significance,” Bakersfield is not the typical Friday night destination.

As we pulled into town at sunset, we passed windowless buildings, chainlink fences, and oil wells. The air was dry and filled with particulate matter. While it’s population makes it the 52nd largest city in America, in 2015, Bakersfield earned the distinction of being the 2nd most polluted city in the country. We parked along the side of the road to avoid paying and joined the throng of Bakersfieldians making their way toward the large ferris wheel silhouetted by orange sky. The sound of mariachi music and arcade games became increasingly loud, and the breeze began to smell of fried dough. After a 2.5 hour drive and a ten minute walk, we had arrived at The Kern County Fair.

How, you might be wondering, did three good-looking, intelligent millennials with a car end up in Bakersfield on a Friday night? While the rest of our peers were heading out to bars and movies and art museums (or staying home and pulling up The Office on their parents’ Netflix accounts), we were on our way to see Smash Mouth, the one-hit wonder whose song All Star had spawned countless Shrek-themed memes.

I’d had to select my companions for this adventure with great care. It’s not just anyone who will drop everything, duck out of work early, and spend hours commuting at rush hour to one of the least exciting cities in California in order to see a band they don’t care about. Jared and Katie were temperamentally well-suited for this idiotic mission–good-natured people who are routinely kind to those around them. Katie’s the kind of person who’s up for pretty much anything out of the ordinary and has a good time no matter what. Jared DJs in his spare time and engages with music as a craft. He’d been ready to turn down my invitation until he learned that the concert was free with the price of admission to the fair ($10). In particular, I worried he would regret the decision to come.

Unlike Jared and Katie, I am as close to an un-ironic lover of Smash Mouth as a millennial can be. In early September, when I heard the lead singer, Steve Harwell (a Guy Fieri look-alike), had suffered from some kind of heart episode and had had to cancel shows, I knew I needed to act fast or risk never seeing Smash Mouth perform live. While in the early 2000s, the zenith of the band’s popularity, they’d won a Kid’s Choice Award, featured prominently in the Shrek opening credits, and filled stadiums, in 2017, they were mostly performing at county and state fairs. The Kern County Fair was the only place they’d be performing in California during the month of September, so it was either make the pilgrimage to Bakersfield, or gamble on Steve’s heart lasting into October.

We had some time to kill before Smash Mouth was scheduled to perform at the Budweiser Pavilion, so we headed for the second most exciting entertainment option listed in the fair’s program, The Great American Duck Race.

Robert Duck (who claimed that this was his actual last name), served as MC. He introduced us to his ducks who have won The Great American Duck Race hosted annually in Deming, New Mexico twelve times. He selected volunteers from the audience to come up and hold the ducks. When the whistle blew, the lucky duck-holders would drop their ducks into channels with water (like lanes in a pool), and the ducks would swim to the other side. The person with the fastest duck would move on to the finals.

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No matter how many times I raised my hand, I was never chosen. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was competing with 6-year-olds for Robert’s attention. The first round of racing ducks had names like Michael Phelps, Simone Manuel, and Katie Le-ducky. The next heat was filled with ducks named after NASCAR drivers. The third heat was a Duck Dynasty round. I was very impressed by Robert’s ability to tell all the seemingly identical mallards apart (how could he distinguish Michael from Simone every time?), until he let each kid name their own duck in the finals and I realized they were randomly assigned jokes. In the finals, most of the competitors selected duck puns for names, except for the two littlest kids who named their ducks Lucy and Jake. After a short but intense race, Jake proved victorious, and his temporary owner was crowned with a duck mask. After the ceremony, Robert said he wished he could give everyone a chance to race the ducks, but there just wasn’t time. However, for only $5.00, we could buy the right to race a duck. This $5.00 purchase included a complementary duck whistle. A tempting offer, but Jared, Katie, and I had places to be.

After purchasing the most expensive, least satisfying burrito bowl of my life (for $9.50 it only included meat, rice, and beans. Everything beyond that was an “add-on,” including salsa), we got in line to enter the pavilion. Jared and Katie were shocked by how many people had come to see the has-been band. Nearly all of the pavilion’s 3,000 seats were full. There was even a VIP section cordoned off with rope. Who these VIPers were and what exactly they were hoping to get from this experience remains a mystery. The band was scheduled to go on at 8pm. When 8:30pm came and went, and there was still no sign of the performers, the audience began to chant “Smash Mouth.” Logan, the eight-year-old in front of us, informed Katie that Smash Mouth was a fake band that did not actually exist.

Just as I began to despair that Steve had actually suffered the fatal heart attack, the man himself walked on stage, red solo cup in hand. The band launched into their first song, “Can’t Get Enough of You, Baby,” and the crowd went nuts (several people were wearing Shrek masks). I’ve been to a number of concerts for bands I actually admit to liking, but this was the first concert where I knew the majority of songs on the setlist. I was embarrassed and proud at the same time. Up on stage, Steve didn’t seem to know how to interact with the audience. While he sang, he paced back and forth between the bassist and the guitarist. He’d encroach on their bubble of space, placing an arm on their shoulder and singing directly to them. At one point, he kicked the guitarist on the butt. I wondered if there were women out there who fantasized about being romantically involved with Steve.

Logan turned again to Katie and told her that the man on stage was not the real Steve Harwell. He pulled up images of Steve on his iPhone as evidence. It was hard to say from such a distance if the man on stage was really Steve. He’d lost weight since the band’s early years and was now bleached blond. He didn’t sound like the recordings, but then again, neither does Katy Perry.

As the performance wore on, the anticipation built. There was one song everyone there had come to hear, and it wasn’t Walkin’ on the Sun, Holiday in my Head, Pacific Coast Party, Road Man, or even their cover of I’m a Believer. The couple behind me started chanting “All Star” every time a song ended. What’s it like to be a band and know that the thing you’ve created far surpasses you in terms of significance?

All Star was the very last song of the night, and it was glorious. The people in the Shrek masks jumped up and down in time with the beat. The crowd lit up with cellphone screens as people recorded the moment for their Instagram accounts. 3,000 voices joined Steve’s for the chorus that has scored this milenium. The concert ended with Steve softly repeating, like a mantra or a prayer, the words “only shooting stars break the mold.”

“That was awesome,” Jared commented as we walked back to the car in the dark. Katie nodded in agreement. I felt inspired, rejuvenated, a part of something much larger than myself (like a generation or a social media platform or something). I looked up at the night sky, searching for a sign, maybe a shooting star. There were none to be found, of course. The air in the 2nd most polluted city in the USA does not lend itself to stargazing.

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September 25: Ants!

I’m half-awake and feel something tickling my face. I reach up to brush it off, and my index finger hits something small with many legs. My eyes are now open. The ant writhing between my thumb and forefinger comes into focus. I brush my face, checking for more ants. A sticky patch on my cheek tells me I’ve been drooling. Clustered around the watering hole of saliva on the edge of my pillow are five more ants. I jump out of bed and realize with horror that there’s something moving in my mouth. Reaching in, my fingers touch something small and alive. I pull out two very sodden ants who must have seen my mouth as an open invitation. How many more crawled in during the course of the night? Hundreds? I run to the bathroom and spend the next 10 minutes spitting real and imagined ants into the sink.

The worst part of an ant infestation is the paranoia. Once you find ants in your trashcan, your sink, your dishwasher, your bed, your mouth, you begin to imagine that they are everywhere. The feel of water evaporating from your skin is no longer a sensation you ignore. Instead, you search the area because even the slightest tickle on your skin could be an ant.

Ants begin to star in your dreams. Sometimes I wake up from dreaming there are ants in my bed to a reality where there are ants crawling on my legs under the covers. The distinction between the real and imagined begins to erode.

You learn things about ants you never wanted to know, dark secrets they left out of the sugar-coated Hollywood movie “A Bug’s Life,” like the fact that all ants can bite.

Over the course of the past 3 nights, I’ve slept in 3 different beds and 1 couch in an effort to escape them. After waking up with ants in my mouth, I moved out of my room. I spent the next night in my mother’s bed while she was out of town, but they found me there too. I woke to the now familiar sensation of an ant crawling across my face. It was early enough that I moved to the couch to continue sleeping. The third night, I slept in my sister’s bed. It was there that I finally found a sanctuary from the ants (though images of them still haunt me in my sleep).

During an ant infestation, you begin to ask yourself questions like “why now?”; “why me?”; and “what do they want?” It’s hard to imagine their motivation, but it starts to feel personal when, no matter how many times you spray them with vinegar and whatever other homeopathic extermination methods your mother researched on the internet, they keep coming back.

And maybe it is personal. After all, you don’t hesitate to end thousands of their lives in the name of a pristine sink.

 

For those who want visuals:

September 18: Boys and Girls

A troop of little boys in catholic school uniforms marched into the gym. I’m not someone who usually goes goo-goo for little kids or anything like that (if anything, I’m actually kind of afraid of them), but even I had to admit that these kids were pretty cute. They’d come straight from school to celebrate Patrick’s 9th birthday.

The party started off normally enough. I helped the first few kids into their harnesses and met my coworker, Colin the Lifeguard. I guessed Colin was somewhere in his 40s. He had the characteristic tan skin and bleach-blond hair of someone who’s spent a lot of time at the beach, and he wore a necklace with three fangs dangling from it (before Colin, these fangs had belonged to a sea lion).

Things went downhill when Colin asked everyone to listen up while he went over the safety rules for the gym. On cue, the adorable little boys began running, screaming, and attempting to strangle each other with balloons. Someone found the light switch and started flipping it on and off, creating a strobe effect. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a night club for catholic school-going demons. While Colin attempted to control the situation, the kids’ parents looked on with pleasant smiles, but did little to help restore order. It was at this moment that I realized why my mom had signed me up for activities in my youth. I’d always thought that she wanted me to get exercise, make some friends, and maybe learn how to dribble a ball around a field. Watching the chaos and the way it had become our responsibility to contain it, I realized the true purpose of activities like climbing, soccer, ballet, etc.: to give parents a reprieve from their children (with perhaps the distant secondary goal of getting their kids into an elite institution for higher learning). I had to admit that, were these my kids, I’d probably end up killing them if I didn’t have people like me to look after them a couple hours every day.

When the kids weren’t climbing with Colin or me, they were wrestling on the floor and climbing higher than they were allowed to without a rope. The worst offender in this category was Thor, Patrick’s older brother (I’m very interested in what changed for the parents between child 1 and child 2), who is on the non-competitive climbing team at the gym and thinks he’s god’s gift to the sport of climbing. He was unmoved by explanations that I would lose my job if he didn’t come down, and enjoyed striking provocative poses while on the wall.

At every opportunity, Patrick reminded us in his best outdoor voice that it was his birthday, which roughly translated to “I get to do whatever the f— I want.” One of the better behaved kids at the party, a kid with blond curly hair and glasses, informed me that he was a boy scout. As a boy scout, he took great interest in the knot I used to tie him in. He asked me to show him how it worked, after which, he insisted on tying himself in. This would have made my life easier had he actually been able to execute the knot. Untying was something he could manage on his own, a service he then insisted on providing to all his friends. Every time a kid came off the wall, the boy scout would rush over and start untying the kid’s knot, completely undeterred by his friend’s shoves.

Colin was, admirably, trying to teach the boys a string of commands to check safety systems before climbing. When this inevitably failed, he resorted to scare tactics, describing the importance of safety systems on a multipitch trad climb in Joshua Tree. The boys, entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of Joshua Tree, multipitch, and trad, remained unmoved. When they finally took a break for pizza and cake, Colin joked about putting cyanide in the pizza.

My second party that day, which I worked with a former parkour artist, was a birthday for 7-year-old girls. They were infinitely calmer and better at following directions than the boys. I vowed that, if I ended up having kids, they would all be girls.

After working a few birthdays, I’ve made some observations. One I call “the rule of birthdays,” which is that the birthday kid is almost always the best climber. Unlike most of their peers, they usually have some previous experience. The other kids fall into two categories: the ones that intuitively get it and the ones that don’t. Some kids, no matter how many times you remind them that the legs are stronger than the arms, and all they need to do is stand up to reach the next hold, just can’t internalize it. There’s actually a third fairly rare category, the kids who don’t want to climb at all. These kids usually spend most of the party glued to their parents’ sides. The party I was working had one girl in this category, Coco, a roundish blond with a mom in an all denim designer outfit and leopard print flats.

Periodically, Coco’s mom would bring her over to me, announcing that Coco was ready to climb. As soon as I approached her with the rope, Coco would begin to cry. At one point, we got as far as tying her in. Her mom led her over to the wall. Coco wanted to climb while holding her mom’s hand. Once the mother made it clear that she had no intention of going up the wall in her “fancy shoes,” Coco dissolved into tears again. Her mom knelt so their eyes were level and in a raised whisper said, “This is embarrassing. I don’t care if you climb or not, but we’re at someone else’s birthday party. You can’t just sit here crying.” Coco continued to cry. I stood there, reflecting on how I had no idea what the right answer was for this parenting dilemma. Do you let the kid walk away and give up, even though they’re fully capable of getting up the wall? Is that teaching them to throw in the towel too soon? Do you make them go up the wall while sobbing? That seems kind of cold. You want them to feel like you have their back.

 

As Coco’s mom continued to try to coax her daughter onto the wall, I looked at the two of them. They were a mismatched pair. While Coco was blond and a little chubby, her mom was a classic west Los Angeles mother–honey highlights in artificially straightened hair, skin bronzed to perfection, a huge diamond on a hand topped with black talons. Her face appeared hard rather than old. I glanced around the gym. All the party moms were thin, toned, and tan. Their little 7-year-old daughters were all different shapes and sizes, styled according to their imaginations rather than images they’d seen in TV and magazines. Looking at their moms, I saw what the future held for these girls. I wondered what each would have to do to her body to make it fit into the same mold as her mom’s.

Maybe I’d rather have boys. I’m not sure I could raise girls in west LA in good conscience.

September 12: Back to School

I couldn’t stop staring at the elaborately made up blond across the room. All the white women in the room, except for me, were elaborately made up blonds (most did not come by this blondness naturally, judging by their roots), so it wasn’t for these reasons that she stood out. The reason my eyes strayed to her whenever I thought no one else was looking was because of her arms and her lips. She had beautiful arms–toned, with large biceps and forearms. I watched enviously as they bulged whenever she reached up to play with her hair (she did this almost constantly). Her lips were also large, full beyond belief. In profile, it was hard to tell which jutted out farther, her lips or her nose. When she faced forward, I’d search her face for other signs of tampering, quickly averting my eyes whenever she felt my gaze on her.

It was day two of a semester-long class I’d signed up for at Santa Monica College (SMC). After swearing I was done with school forever, here I was, right back in it, taking a class called “Social Media Marketing.” I was inspired to do this by a job I’d interviewed for that was seeking someone with a background in social media campaigns. I didn’t get the job, lacking a background in both social media and environmental activism, but it’d gotten me to think about the world of media beyond film and television.

Someone at SMC, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that it made sense to hold this class in Malibu (45 minutes from SMC’s main campus) in order to attract a “different demographic.” When we went around the class on the first day and said where in LA we were living, the only people from Malibu were a trio of middle-aged women and a blond couple who looked to be about my age and used a shiny red convertible as their mode of transportation (the dude looked like Sean Penn’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High). If the demographic they were hoping to attract was white people with money, mission accomplished. SMC is still working on building its Malibu campus, so this class was held at Webster Elementary. Something I hadn’t considered before I showed up for the first day of class was how this would affect the size of the room’s furniture. My thighs were mashed against the underside of the desk. Every time I shifted position, one of the table legs would leave the ground, causing everything on the desk to slide.

Our professor had the physique of someone who goes to the gym a lot and focuses on the big muscle groups. He’s an Italian dude with a full head of silver-gray hair, and a smile that says “I was popular in high school.” On the first day of class, he wore jeans and a red collared shirt with the under armour logo. On the second day of class, he wore jeans and a navy blue collared shirt with the under armour logo. By the second day, I was beginning to sense a pattern.

On the first day, he gave us his professional life story over the course of an hour and a half. He went to business school in Vegas after moving there to spend time with his mother who, supposedly, wasn’t long for this world and needed to live in a dry climate (my mind immediately jumped to tuberculosis, but I think I was probably off base). After school, he started a business with his brother selling carts to casinos that allowed people to walk around making change for customers. These cart were rendered obsolete in 2000 by more advanced technology. At this point, his mom had lived many years past her alleged expiration date, so he moved back to Ventura, CA, where he’s originally from. He worked in marketing for a news paper until the iPhone came out, at which point he’d seen the future. He quit and started selling software. His biggest sale (which he’s mentioned at least once each class) was to Cisco. With that money (somewhere in the millions), he started a business selling ergonomically tailored chairs to large companies.

On the second day of class, we went through a powerpoint and learned a little bit more about our professor’s wife. Apparently, her idea of a night out is going to Pier 1 Imports followed by Starbucks. Our discussion then turned to Facebook. The professor pulled up the following chart:

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I was sitting at my little desk, trying to figure out what it would look like for a social media platform to know you as well as a spouse, when I heard the professor ask if anyone had any questions. He stopped pacing and stared directly at me. I guess I looked like I had a question.

Me: “Uh, what does that even look like? Like Facebook knows you as well as a spouse?”

This launched him into a scenario where the two of us were married and his mother, my mother-in-law, wanted to know what to get me for Christmas. In this scenario, I loved going to Olive Garden, so he suggested a gift card to that illustrious establishment. I was momentarily distracted by the thought that I needed to find a husband who knew me better. The big takeaway was that Facebook would also know this info about my spending habits. So I guess his mom, my mother-in-law, could have saved herself time and asked Facebook instead. The professor concluded with the idea that after 500 likes, Facebook knows you better than you know yourself, which is more or less equivalent to knowing what you’re going to do before you do it. I was starting to feel like we were living in a Christopher Nolan movie.

Our discussion of Facebook and its relationship to us ended when the professor asked me what my name was. I said, “Ceri.” This, of course, autocorrected in his brain to “Siri,” and a gray haired woman a few rows down started talking about the voice in her iPhone. At this point, I turned back to my fellow classmates for entertainment. Sean Penn was watching a video of someone surfing, dimming his screen every time the professor paced to our end of the room. On the first day, I’d pegged him as a surfer because of his long blond hair and tanned, stringy physique, so I felt somewhat vindicated. The elaborately made up blond on the other side of the room was running her fingers over her impossibly large lips. Maybe they were new.

September 8: Grounded

I’d been ignoring the nagging pain in my left shoulder since the end of the trip. I finally went to see a medical professional about it on Tuesday. After jerking my arm in various directions, Dr. Rosenzweig’s assessment was that I needed to stop climbing until my shoulder stopped hurting. While this might sound logical, in the moment, sitting on the examination table, I struggled to follow his line of reasoning.

Me: So, I should take a few days off, pop some Advil, and then I can climb?

Dr. Rosenzweig (struggling to figure out how to explain this since I clearly wasn’t getting it): Um, no. You should give your shoulder a chance to heal. Then rehab it through physical therapy. Once it’s strong, you can go back to climbing.

Me: So I can go back next week?

Dr. Rosenzweig: If it doesn’t feel better in a month, call the office, and we can schedule a cortisone shot. If that doesn’t work, surgery is the last option.

Me: So if I climb, but make sure I don’t do anything that makes it hurt, I’m good?

Dr. Rosenzweig (having had enough): We want to nip this in the bud.

I’m now on a diet of anti-inflammatory medication, regularly heating my shoulder to “stimulate healing,” and I start physical therapy on Monday. When I want to wallow in self-pity, I think about the irony of working at a climbing gym, having free gym membership for the first time in my life, and being unable to use it.

Now that I’m grounded, I’m having to seek other forms of exercise, exercise that doesn’t involve raising my left arm above my head. Imaginatively, I’ve come up with hiking, biking, and running. Biking has risen above the other options because it doubles as a legit form of transportation, dovetailing nicely with my desire to spend as little on gas as possible. And save the planet, of course.

I’d always thought of biking as a fairly unskilled form of exercise. It turns out this assumption was not entirely correct. I’m slowly learning how and when to shift gears on the janky bike my dad found on the side of the road (our family’s only bike. It has one of those baskets on the back for carrying things, a nice feature, but I can’t figure out how to lower the seat). I’m pretty sure that, as a biker on city streets, I’m supposed to obey the same rules as cars. I try to do this as much as is convenient for me. I’m also still unclear about what arm gestures I’m supposed to make to indicate right and left turns. I’m a little afraid to learn these arm gestures because if any involve raising my left arm above my head, that will eliminate biking as a form of exercise. So far, I haven’t hit or been hit by anything. I’m starting to think the Tour de France might be in my future.

My father’s bike and I are an unstoppable team, making our way all over the west side of Los Angeles (usually no more than a 5 mile radius from the house). Yesterday, we biked to the bank to close out a checking account where they’d started charging me a monthly fee. I had to wait to be seen by a bank official, for which I was thankful because it gave me time to stop sweating. Through my interaction at the bank, I learned that really all they want to do is keep you on as a customer. The woman I spoke to quickly came up with three different ways for me to keep an account with them without paying a monthly fee (one involved claiming I’d be in school for another four years, allowing me to open a new college checking account).

Post-bank, I decided to reward myself with an espresso drink at the Caffe Luxxe across the street (one of a long list of LA coffee places that have passively rejected me over the course of the past month). Sadly, there was nothing in it for the bike, but I think it understood. When I enter coffee shops, I try to hang back because it takes me time to go through the drink offerings and pretend like I’ll choose something new and exotic this time, before finally settling on an almond milk cappuccino. The place was pretty empty when I walked in, which meant that the baristas noticed me immediately. I stayed back, hoping they would take this as a cue that I wanted to mull over my decision, but I think they read it more as fear. One of them, a guy with glasses, who I would later learn was named Preston, called out to me, asking if I wanted anything. In an effort to appear well-socialized, I took several steps forward and told him I was considering my options. After anther minute of careful consideration, I ordered an almond milk cappuccino. Preston didn’t ring me up; he just started making the drink. After pulling out my credit card, I had nothing to do but wait. I felt awkward waiting for Preston to make my drink in silence, so I brought up the first thing that popped into my head.

Me: You guys sell liquid soap?

There was no reason to phrase this as a question since they were quite obviously selling soap, and it was quite obviously in liquid form. Either that, or it was an art installation designed to be reminiscent of a soap display case. Thankfully, it is the job of all baristas to engage with their customers, no matter how pitiful their attempts at small talk. My comment led to a discussion of all the non-coffee-related items for sale in the store and a recommendation that I try a sample of their hand cream.

I watched with envy as Preston confidently poured dollops milk into a thick, creamy shot of espresso. When he finished, he’d transformed the dollops of milk into the classic leaf-shaped latte art. I offered him my credit card, but he shook his head. “This one’s on me.” I did my best to keep from grinning and thanked him. I sat down on the far side of the cafe with my self-help book, feeling incredibly special. This day kept getting better and better. Free checking account, free cappuccino. I was on a roll, and it was all due to the awesomeness I was evidently exuding.

After reading for an hour or so, my concentration was interrupted when I heard Preston say, “It’s on me.” My back was to the counter, so I couldn’t see who he was gifting a free coffee drink to. Needless to say, that put me back in my place. Still, a free coffee is a free coffee, regardless of whether or not validation of your existence comes with it.

 

September 4: The Party

It was not a party for single, witty, intelligent male models roughly my age. Instead, when I arrived at the gym Saturday night, I learned that the party was for Tomás, an eight-year-old boy. This meant that the bulk of the party-goers were Tomás’ peers, seven and eight-year-old boys. My first task was to get the early arrivals suited up in harnesses. I was a little tentative about how best to harness the children. I tried to remember if, at seven or eight, I would have wanted a stranger to come over and manhandle me. Would I have found it demeaning? Would I have been capable of doing it on my own? Von, one of the people who works behind the desk, suggested I take them over to the stairs where they could sit. From this I gathered that the kids were not expected to put on their own harnesses. I would be the one sliding the harness over their feet and cinching it around their tiny waists. I selected my first victim, a cute little girl with long, blonde curls. Her style of dress reminded me of how I would have dressed at that age–cargo shorts and a boy’s t-shirt. I guided her over to the stairs. I felt a little awkward tightening straps in silence. Recognizing that I was the adult and would have to begin the conversation, I asked her what her name was. She said, “Milo.”

Thus I learned my first lesson of the evening: it is easy to mistake eight-year-old boys with long hair for girls. As I moved around, pulling kids aside to put on harnesses, I developed a script for my interactions. I would ask the kids or their parents if the kid was climbing at the party. I would then ask what the kid’s name was. While putting on the harness, I’d ask if the kid had climbed before, and regardless of the answer, I’d ask if they were excited. As I made my rounds, I was introduced to a wide range of eight-year-old temperaments. There were the ones who knew everything. They’d climbed before and were really good at it and could put on their own harnesses. There were the ones who were scared. One boy was so tearful, his mom had to sign an observer waiver so she could stay with her son during the party. The worst, though, were the ones who wouldn’t talk. I went up to this one boy and asked if he was climbing. His eyes got really big, and he took a step back. He wouldn’t answer me, which I found very distressing. I don’t think of myself as a frightening person (though one of my childhood nicknames was, in fact, Scary Ceri). I was the only female belayer for the party, which I (mistakenly) thought would give me automatic points with kids. I had to remind myself that this kid was eight, at most, and it likely wasn’t personal. If an adult were giving me the silent treatment, that would be an indication that he hated me or that there was something very wrong with him. This behavior in an eight-year-old, however, probably just meant that he was shy.

Once the kids were all suited up, they were released into the gym. One person supervised the auto-belay area (an auto-belay is like giant automatic dog leashes which takes in slack as a person moves up the wall, and then slowly lowers the person to the ground as soon as they let go) while the rest of us belayed kids on the slab walls. The kids would run up to us, and we would tie them in using a figure eight knot. I got a lot of questions about the safety systems in place.

Kid 1: “Why don’t you have those things (indicating the auto-belays) everywhere in the gym?”

Me: “Because then I wouldn’t have a job.”

Kid 2: “Which is stronger? This knot or (again indicating the auto-belay)?”

Me: “That’s a good question. I don’t know. They’re both really strong.”

Kid 3: “What happens if the knot comes untied?”

Me: “The knot doesn’t come untied.”

One lovely little girl who I’m pretty sure was the older sister of the party boy, Tomás, introduced herself in this manner:

Me: “What’s your name?”

Her: “Lucia. Don’t call me Lucia (pronouncing it with a ch sound) because I’m not Italian!

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to call her Lucia (ch) if she hadn’t brought it up. But, as a result of her comment, I spent the rest of the evening mentally correcting myself before saying her name. Another little boy wanted to know when the gym had been built. I told him I wasn’t sure, but the gym had been around when I was 9, which made it at least thirteen years old. That made me feel old. These kids weren’t even 9. They’d all been born in 2009 or 2010! The kids didn’t seem particularly interested in reaching the top of the wall. Most would climb about half way up and then ask to be lowered. The hardest part of the job, in my opinion, is trying to instruct an eight-year-old boy how to be lowered safely. Many were simply incapable of internalizing the idea that you needed to stop holding onto the wall with your hands.

Time passed pretty quickly, and before I knew it, we were already an hour into the party which meant it was time for food. My favorite kid at the party, a very inquisitive boy with dark curly hair and fingerless gloves, wanted to know what they were serving. I told him I thought it was pizza. “Why is it always pizza?” he wanted to know. I thought this was an excellent question. “I think because it’s easy to divide and cheap,” I told him before sending him off to wash his hands.

The 20 minutes during which they ate pizza were the scariest moments of the evening. I was left alone with my fellow staff members, which meant that I had to be on my best human behavior. I was introduced to Guy, a tall lanky dude with a man bun, who works as a masseuse and fitness instructor at the gym when not belaying children at birthday parties. He told me birthday parties are the best events to belay for because of the tips. From him I also learned that, contrary to popular belief, cake cutting is a specialty skill that involves extensive training and discipline.

During the second climbing session, I managed the auto-belay area, which translated to running between four belay stations, trying to clip in/unclip the kids before they attempted to do so on their own. I had one close call where I got to Milo just as he was about to let go of the tether, which would have stranded the auto-belay at the top of the wall. Once again, I marveled at the complete lack of interest the kids seemed to have in reaching the top of the wall. What were they getting out of the experience, other than a forearm pump? There’s probably an epiphany somewhere in that observation, waiting to be had, about my personal climbing philosophy, but so far I haven’t taken the time to figure out what it is.

While Guy doled out cake (in this case, cherry pie from a fancy west LA bakery), I watched this little girl with blond ringlets (I’m absolutely certain she was a girl) repeatedly fall on one section of a traverse. Her father was standing next to me, eating a slice of cherry pie, and started talking to me about his daughter. She’s five years old and just started doing gymnastics as part of a competitive team. Before that, she was self taught. I had trouble imagining what this would look like, but from the way he repeated it a second time, I could tell it was impressive. At first, I thought we were having the type of conversation that causes me anxiety, the type where the other person is expected to contribute to the exchange of words in some way, so I started trying to prepare an anecdote about my sister and her career as a gymnast. As I tried to come up with one that didn’t end in a trip to the hospital, the man informed me that his daughter has very good upper body strength. I observed the way she was pulling herself up the wall and nodded. The man went on to tell me that he has crazy good upper body strength. He’s always been some one who could crank out the pull ups and push ups, but he has weak legs. He doesn’t think his daughter has weak legs, but his son does. His son is a very advanced tennis player for his age but struggles to change direction quickly. This is how his father has diagnosed him with weak legs. It was right around the time when the father started demonstrating effective tennis technique that I realized no response was required or expected of me in this conversation. My role was as an audience member. I smiled and nodded and made noises that suggested interest until, mercifully, it was time to help Guy clean up.

As I drove home, I wondered if something about being a parent gave ordinary people the urge to share detailed accounts of their children’s exploits with strangers, or if this was the kind of trait that manifested itself in certain people regardless of whether or not they had any progeny.

September 1: Day Job

They talk about coffee in terms of waves (kind of like feminism). There’s first wave coffee, which is the approach you find in diners–they brew a pot of coffee with faint turpentine undertones and leave it on a heating pad until it evaporates. Then in the 60s you get places like Peet’s and Starbucks opening. These nationwide chains are the second wave of coffee. Third wave coffee consists of the small, artisanal shops that talk about roast flavor profiles using terms like “floral” and “peach cobbler.” I know this info thanks to “Barista,” a documentary I watched with my aunt about the national barista competition. Apparently, there are no limits to what can be made into a competitive sport.

After a google search titled “how to become a barista,” I concluded that if I was going to get a job in coffee without ever having held a job in the field, it would likely be at one of the second wave places. I got really excited when, last week, I received an email from a manager at Peet’s saying he’d like to interview me. We agreed on a time for the phone interview, 12pm last Friday. I trained for the interview. I rode my bike to the local Peet’s and sampled their offerings (on a total side note, putting condensed milk in coffee seems to be a new fad in the commercial world. I’ve been visiting coffee shops all over LA in recent weeks, and many, including Peet’s, are offering beverages with names like “Havana Cappuccino” or “Cuban Coffee” that contain a mixture of regular and sweetened condensed milk. It kinda seems like the antithesis of the almond/soy/coconut milk fad). The soy cappuccino I had at Peet’s was not too sweet. I was confident that, if asked, I’d be able to list Peet’s beverages I liked and what I liked about them. I rehearsed my answer about why I wanted to work at Peet’s, a combination of loving coffee and needing a job. Despite Urth Caffe’s rejection, I was hopeful that this would be my break. The Peet’s manager would realize that I was a levelheaded, diligent person with a sincere love of coffee, and would hire me on the spot.

Like most of my fantasies, it didn’t play out this way in real life.

12pm last Friday came and went, and the manager never called. I sent a follow up email, and we rescheduled for 12pm the following Monday. 12pm Monday came and went, and I received no call. At this point, I had to conclude it wasn’t an accident. What perplexes me is that the manager reached out to me presumably to fill a position that needed filling. Isn’t he interested in filling that position? Has he already filled it but has some social phobia that prevents him from telling me that this is the case? If not, what’s going on? I sent him an email asking if the position was still available and am waiting to hear back.

I’m not naive. Like any person who aspires to something lofty, difficult, and creative, I’ve come up with a backup plan in case my caffeine-laden dreams never come to fruition. In other words, I have a day job. Though Yale didn’t prepare me for the world of professional coffee, it turns out there’s one thing my time at that institution prepared me for exceedingly well–belaying children at birthday parties. I’ve applied to over 20 different barista jobs and one climbing gym, and it’s the climbing gym that called me back and offered me a job. The manager remembered me from eight years ago when I was last on the youth team at the gym. I was mildly flattered until my mom said it was likely the manager remembered me because I’d been dropped off the top of a climbing wall while at practice.

I showed up at the gym for training yesterday and was directed to Cameron, a bubbly dude who excelled at word play. I asked for some paper for note-taking purposes, and he handed me two sheets of yellow-orange paper, which he said were “bright like me.” I was caught by surprise and unable to come up with a suitably self-deprecating reply. My typical policy for new situations is don’t display personality until you’re confident this is a permanent thing (I don’t think my roommates in college realized how deeply weird I was until our sophomore year), so I wasn’t in a joke-making frame of mind.

The bulk of training involved going through a checklist of do’s and dont’s–do be kind and courteous to the people you are belaying, don’t let kids do anything that looks unsafe like running on concrete or whipping each other with ropes… I’m sure there’s no end to the imaginatively unsafe things kids can do for fun in a climbing gym. We briefly made sure I was comfortable with the safety procedures required of a belayer:

Cameron: “Can you tie a figure eight knot? You can tie a figure eight knot. What’s next on the checklist?”

Me: “Uhh…”

I was toured around the birthday cake distribution area, which also doubles as a yoga studio for all the yoga classes the gym offers, the supply closet, the dumpster out back, and the area behind the desk. Cameron then took me through the typical schedule for a party at the gym. Parties run two hours. The first hour consists of climbing. There’s then a break for food. It’s easiest if the pizza and cake are served at the same time for hand washing purposes, but if the parents insist, there can be a second break for cake. If the kids are tired, the second 30-45 minute climbing session can consists of games like simon says. The max ratio of kids to belayers is 5:1, so at any given party, there’re at least two belayers. One belayer is the “party lead” and is responsible for communicating with the “party parent” about all things party.

We had just gotten to the part of training where Cameron was describing what to do if an accident report needed to be filed–turn over responsibility to the people who work the desk (this was the answer for most complicated issues)–when we heard someone cry out. Cameron rushed over to a woman who appeared to have collapsed at the base of the wall. It turned out she’d fallen with too much slack in the system, so she’d hit the ground, rolling forward onto her foot. She was in enough pain that Aric, a coach for the youth team, ended up carrying her to her car. They looked like bride and groom as they crossed the gym’s air conditioned threshold and emerged into the parking lot beyond.

Training ended soon after, and I signed up for my first shift, an after hours birthday party on Saturday. I asked what age the birthday partiers would be but whoever had booked the event hadn’t noted it. Personally, I’m hoping for an event populated by attractive, single men roughly my age. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to hope for this. If it turns out the laws of professionalism preclude this hope, then I take it back.

August 23: Fat Lizards and Free Soloing

My next climbing partner was my aunt’s personal trainer’s longtime boyfriend, David. Heading into this experience, all I knew about him was that he’d been climbing for a long time and was super into it. I think he had even less info about me and was worried that he had someone who might prove a total liability on his hands, at least this is what I surmised from the slow, careful way he explained everything on the phone. He asked me if I was comfortable leading sport. I felt bad for him because he was probably doing this as a favor to Kirschen, my aunt’s trainer, being kind to her employer’s niece.

We met at the agreed upon time and location, and hiked to a secluded pink and gold sandstone spire overlooking Malibu Canyon and the ocean beyond. It turns out David is 57 and has been climbing since he was something like 10. He played a big role in the development of the LA outdoor climbing scene (the place we went climbing was a crag that he had found and almost singlehandedly bolted) and knows most of the famous climbers who’ve come out of Southern California over the past 4 decades (because I am a climbing history ignoramus, of the many names he listed, the only one I can recite for you here is Lynn Hill).

There was a wooden bench at the base of the crag which David himself had carried in and constructed. He toured me around (the crag had climbs ranging from 5.4 to 5.11), and asked me what I wanted to warm up on. I selected a 5.9 and offered to lead it, hoping to set the record straight about my climbing abilities. The 5.9 didn’t start from the ground, so David suggested we see if I was capable of completing a boulder problem that led up to the ledge where the 5.9 started. The problem involved one kind of reachy move that I completed with ease. I think this was the moment David began to trust me.

He suggested we continue to the top of the spire following a 5.4 route. We weren’t roped. I thought about what my mom would say, but then I remembered that I was 22 years old and allegedly capable of making my own decisions. I looked at the route. It looked like the kind of thing I would have scrambled up as a kid without a second thought. It was a ladder of ledges; there was no way I would pump out on it, and I knew I could complete every move, so I said yes. Perhaps, I was being foolish. I can’t really call it peer pressure because of the disparity in our age and experience, but I was definitely guided by a desire to prove myself. For those who are concerned, though I felt secure at every point on the route, it will not be the launching point for my career as a female Alex Honnold. I prefer climbing with the knowledge that if I fall, the worst injury I’m likely to sustain is a broken bone.

David was relieved to learn that I could belay (he must be a very kind/trusting person to take me out for the day without this knowledge). In between climbs, he told me stories about LA climbing history. At one point, he pulled out a bong and asked if I minded. I was amused more than anything. At the end of the day, David gave me some life advice. Unlike many of the people he grew up climbing with, he’d gone to college and gotten a day job (as a real estate agent). The people he knows who are his age and have been climbing bums their whole lives are miserable; they didn’t make plans for a future where their joints were stiff and their recovery time was slower and they couldn’t climb as hard as they had in their youth. He described 60-year-old men who’d lost most of their teeth and lived in vans parked on the side of the highway. I was ready to get on the career train then and there.

I stopped by the condo David and Kirschen are living in while they remodel their house. Kirschen’s also in her mid 50s and has the body of someone who’s been running seriously since she was 12. She was walking around their condo in small shorts and a bikini top. She greeted me warmly when I walked in and introduced me to their fat, paraplegic lizard, Miss Dinky Doinks, who they got instead of a dog. I held Miss Dinky Doinks using two hands and marveled at the way each breath rippled through her soft, enormous stomach. Dinky blinked at me and let her tongue hang out the side of her mouth. She is an utterly charming lizard.

Before I left, Kirschen insisted I take a plum and flavored Pellegrino with me for the drive, and David offered to introduce me to other climbers in the area. He mentioned a girl my age, which sounded promising. Below is me with Kirschen and Miss Dinky Doinks:

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August 21: In Which I Begin the Search for a New Climbing Partner

After almost two years of climbing with the same person, I’m having to find a new training partner, someone I get along with who has similar climbing goals and lives on this side of the country. I found a climbing partner once before, so I should be able to do it again, right? But it’s like every time you start a new school, you end up asking yourself, “how did I make friends last time?”

I began my search with what I thought was an easy target, my little sister, Remi. On the plus side, she lives near me (down the hall), we get along, and she has lots of free time. On the less positive side, she’s leaving in two weeks to go back to school and has only ever top roped. She claimed to prefer climbing outside to climbing inside, so I used this to leverage her into going with me. She beautifully summed up her reason for going as we walked out the door, “what else would I be doing today?” Her words reminded me of the woman in The Breakfast Club who attends detention out of boredom.

With our terrified mother’s blessing, we drove to Malibu Creek State Park. This was my first time climbing outside in LA. I got us lost a total of four times on our way to the crag known as “Stumbling Blocks,” so our approach ended up taking an hour and a half. The first time we got lost (when I parked at the wrong intersection in my effort to avoid paying the $12 fee for a day pass), we followed a trail through some bushes and arrived at a parking lot filled with people and suitcases. They were lining up in front of other people with clipboards. It looked like some kind of summer camp check-in except for the fact that none of these people were children, and they were all dressed in expensive, urban-looking clothing. The people with clipboards were wearing shirts that said “Camp Mars.” Other people in Camp Mars shirts were tooling around in golf carts, speaking into walkie talkies. I thought that it might be a film set for a movie where they figure out how to grow plants on Mars and use this technology to exactly replicate the biome of Southern California. Then rich people with floral-printed roller bags start going to the planet for vacation.

An internet search many hours later proved me wrong. Apparently, Camp Mars is an event hosted by the band 30 Seconds to Mars for their fans. Fans over the age of 18 can pay $1,000 for the “tree huggin’ package” aka the privilege of spending two nights and three days camping in a tent (it’s bring your own tent, FYI). For those less into roughing it (or who don’t own tents), $2,500 will get them two nights spent in a yurt with AC and shared bathrooms. Days at Camp Mars are filled with activities like yoga and rock climbing, and evenings are spent making s’mores and attending concerts. Los Angeles is a truly amazing place.

The final part of the Stumbling Blocks approach involves an easy traverse along the edge of a deep green pool. It’s really stunning to walk up the dry creek bed and arrive at this large body of water (large by LA standards. In Louisiana, I doubt it qualifies as a puddle). When Remi and I arrived, people were gathered on the banks, laughing and jumping in the water. I was sweaty and ready to join them, until I spotted a curtain of lime green algae floating off shore. I then reflected on the fact that we’d just walked up a dry creek bed to reach this mysterious pool of water, so it clearly wasn’t draining anywhere. If other people are anything like me, the water’s probably half urea by now (perhaps the reason behind its pleasing green color).

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When we arrived at the crag, I gave Remi a brief tutorial on lead belaying. Instead of taking in rope, you’re feeding it out, never take your brake hand off the rope, etc. I think she absorbed it all and displayed good belaying technique, but I could never be sure because I couldn’t watch her while I was climbing. As a result, I was never fully at ease. Remi doesn’t know how to lead climb, so I would put up a route, and she would follow on top rope. She’d clean the climb if the method for cleaning the anchor was simple. If it required rappelling, I’d go up a second time. I was pretty beat by the end of the day, but happy that I’d had the chance to go outside and climb. As we walked back to the car, Remi announced that she preferred climbing indoors because outside “takes too much time–you have to drive and hike to the wall, and then you have to set everything up!” This was the beginning and end of our short time as climbing partners.

 

August 18: No Reply

Sent my sister an email with the subject line “hi” and had her send me one back to make sure my email address was working. It had been days and, after applying for jobs with 7 coffee companies (if you break it down by individual stores, it was more like 10 or 11 job openings) and 1 climbing gym, I’d received nothing beyond a few automated “your application has been received” emails. I knew going into this that it probably wouldn’t be as easy as handing over my resume and getting hired on the spot. I knew that a Yale degree wouldn’t impress someone looking to hire a barista, that if anything, my degree would make it seem like I was less serious about learning the barista arts. I knew all of this intellectually, but I don’t think it prepared me for the utter radio silence that followed my applications.

After about a week of nothing which felt much, much longer to my unemployed brain, I opened my inbox Tuesday morning to find I’d received a single email calling me in for an interview with Urth Caffe, a local chain devoted to organic, responsibly sourced coffee, tea, food, etc. “Do you have any questions?” the woman on the phone, who I spoke with to set up the interview, asked. “Uh,” I said, “Is there a dress code?” She assured me that casual attire was fine.

Hair washed (yes, you read that correctly), sporting a pair of dark jeans and a respectable sweater (black because I thought it made me look slightly edgier, and because it’s never a bad idea to do a subtle homage to Steve Jobs), I made my way to Urth Caffe’s downtown headquarters. The address took me to streets lined with warehouses on the south side of downtown LA. I got to the door a few minutes before 9am, joining a small group that had gathered outside the door. Urth Caffe was doing what they termed an open house interview. You could show up anytime between 9 and 10:30 am. They said to except a 45 minute wait. I thought I could get around this by being one of the first people there. My early bird companions consisted of a boy who looked even younger than me (not helped by his skinny frame and the backpack he was wearing) and a man who looked to be in his early 30s and was wearing slacks and a button down. The boy, in his hand, held an Urth Caffe to go cup. “Suck-up,” I thought, bitterly wishing it had occurred to me to rep my love for the product.

At that moment, a large man in a large teal shirt joined our group. He addressed his remarks to the man in slacks, who had an air of authority, likely because he was wearing slacks. The man in teal wanted to know if he had parked in the correct location. The man in slacks didn’t know because, in spite of what his clothes seemed to indicate, he was not in charge. We were joined by a man with torn jeans and blue dreads of a slightly more purple blue than the man in teal’s shirt. We stood in silence until the doors for Urth Caffe were thrown open. Everyone jockeyed for position in line. I ended up near the back by the kid with the backpack. One by one, we entered the building, signed in, and were ushered to a holding area with folding chairs. It was 10am before the first person was called in for an interview, and nearly 10:30 by the time I went into the small, brightly lit room where three managers were waiting.

Two of them sat in silence during the interview, and I wasn’t entirely sure they were paying attention. The third, the man, began his line of questioning, “You went to Yale?”

“Yes.”

“What are your longterm plans?” Jeeze, it’s like this guy was peering into the depths of my soul and drawing inspiration from my insecurities.

“Uh, I don’t really know right now.”

He asked a couple more questions about my availability, and then it was over. It had been less than five minutes. On my way out, I asked when I’d know if I got the job. He said I’d receive an email by 5pm that day if they wanted to bring me back for the second round of interviews.

I did not hear from them by 5pm that day. The day after, I kind of hoped I’d get a “whoops, sorry we didn’t send this sooner, but we still want to interview you!” email. After about three days, I gave up on that fantasy.

In the days following my Urth Caffe rejection, I got an email from Peet’s saying they’d like to interview me, and an email from the climbing gym. I responded with my availability, but have yet to hear back. I’m glad La La Land didn’t win best picture, but I’m also glad it exists because the film’s given me a way to conceptualize my situation. For those who’ve seen the movie, you know the montage where Emma Stone’s going out to all those auditions, and people aren’t even looking at her? I feel like that, expect that I’m auditioning for the job Emma Stone already has when the movie begins; I’m trying to get the job she has to make ends meet while she tries to realize her dreams. What I’m trying to say is that La La Land glosses over how she got her barista job to begin with, but there’s probably another movie in that story. Maybe it’ll be the prequel.