32 Different flavors or so.

Check-in first:

Job search? Not traumatic today; boring, of course, but there's nothing wrong with that. Non-tenure track positions are beginning to appear. I sent my alma mater an application for a one-year visiting position (main drawback of non-tenure-track gigs being, one has to do the job market trauma AGAIN). Of course, the tenure-track acquisition game is underway hardcore now; acceptances and offers will be made and refused and so on, and the waterfall down the "qualified but not top three" towers will be coming soon. Maybe some tasty gig is in the mail as we speak.

School teaching? Today is new media seminar day, which is the course I'm really not sure about. I feel like each lesson plan is paper-thin and that it might well fall to pieces as I even drive over there. Insecurity central. But I did have an insightful conversation about contemporary art (teaching it, anyway) last night: much of it is about the NEW YORK SCENE, which in the long view really is just a blink in art history, but currently, it IS contemporary art, disciplinarily speaking. Sure, it's largely commodified rich-patron capitalist fluff and created spectacular fame and shallowness and everything bad about postmodernism, BUT that's what contemporary art IS, chief.

Yoga teaching? Still busy--five in my Mysore-style room, an offer to sub a led Primary in the middle of February, and I'll be doing another led Primary a week from today. To have Ashtanga in this city, it's worth it.

Yoga practice? It's been slow of late: Rocket on Friday, Saturday off, and inadvertently I took Sunday off too (either practice or set up new media class; insecurity ruled).

Saturday pulled me down to Bloomington for a meeting with the current dissertation writers, and each day I'm down there, if possible, I bring my climbing gear over to the gym and set some routes in there. That's getting very rare indeed, but I still love it and they still like having me do it, and so it's on.

Most climbing holds are bolted to the wall by cranking down the bolts with big Allen wrenches, but some are screwed down by means of portable drills which one can hang from climbing harnesses. These holds are called "screw-ons," and the problem with having a route made of them is that, when you take it down, you've gotta haul up there with drill in hand and hang in the harness for half an hour while you un-screw maybe as many as 80 of those little things. Saturday I was the official "un-screw-on" guy and spent my first hour in the gym, hanging out and unscrewing two routes worth of those.

I can tell when I've not been climbing/setting in a while, because one frequency comes out of my hands and head: it's strong, balance-intensive, and highly technical. Often the rating is high 5.10 to mid-5.11 (that's tough). I put up four routes, and only one was under 5.10; the other three were all upper 10, big powerful, technical, balance monsters.

Let me put ratings this way: if you climb a vertical ladder, that's maybe 5.3 to 5.4. The "5" in "5.whatever" means vertical, requiring rope (and so yes, a ladder isn't a "five" precisely because it's a ladder, but this is an example, right?). If you have two vertical ladders, maybe 3 feet apart, and you have to climb up one a few feet and then MOVE over to the other one, or better, to have one foot on EACH ladder, you're suddenly in 5.8 or 5.9 or 5.10 territory, depending on how sparse the hand-holds are. Add some high steps (skipping rungs), along with some tricky handholds (for example, being able only to fingertip the rung rather than wrap your hand around it) and some other tricks, and you can maybe imagine 5.11 territory. That's not the best example, but it works.

so: some climbing, which rules; really increases the confidence, demonstrates the inner power, the warrior soul. And then some new media seminar, which really cranks hard on the lack-of-confidence, the anxious soul. Alongside this runs the job market, which is best not thought about (what can one do? Nothing; worry, maybe). There's a lot of insecurity, and there is, above all, MASSIVE loneliness, even in a class full of students, even in a gym full of climbers, even in a job market full of seekers.

I feel an entity I call the "spring lion" (about which more later), and that is a good thing, a sign of springtime (my high holy season), but I also feel deep loneliness and anxiety (which is at least more distant from me than January's internalized horrorshow). It will improve after the seminar is over; five hours. Intro to Intermediate tonight; hurrah!