This Week’s Adventures

Sand Rock, AL. Rock Climbing. Some sport climbing. Some trad climbing. The hardest trad climbing that I’ve done. Trad climbing is when you put your own metal pieces in the rock, which are the things that catch you if you fall. If you place incorrectly or can’t attach your rope quickly enough there can be some, uhh… Negative consequences. Part of the thrill?

It’s part of the adventure for sure though. Higher stakes mean a smaller margin of error. Not quite sure why I’m attracted to it but I am. Recommend.

I watched my roommate take multiple 10+ foot falls on a 5.9+ trad climb. They called the part of the rock a roof crack. It’s a technicality of climbing, and this dude was on the same route for an hour and a half. It was honestly mad impressive.

He just kept falling and then getting closer and closer to hitting the move he needed to. I belayed this dude for the entire time and was pumped the whole time. It felt like we were in it together, and I was doing everything I could to get this guy past the roof (I couldn’t do anything, but it was fun to watch). There was a war going on between us and the rock and he was not gonna lose.

On a separate note, we’re still early on in our trad climbing days (putting our own camelots and nuts in the rocks) so I wanted to build a bit of trust in the equipment. We set up an anchor at the top of the climb as backup and proceeded to whip on trad gear. It was sick.

This 22-minute video is an interesting breakdown of how the cams work and just how strong they are.

This is a pic of the cams.

This is a minute-long video of us whipping on said cams. It was awesome. It felt like you were flying.

A Fire Song If You Like Rap

Put You On Game by Russ

Something Surprising from Psych Expert Tessa West

So you know how we think we know what other people are feeling or thinking? News flash, we don’t.

Woah: Apparently humans in general are truly awful at knowing what another person is thinking, but we’re all tremendously confident in our abilities to do just that. (So we pretty much just lie to ourselves)

Woah: Studies even show that people in long-term marriages are even worse at knowing how the other person is feeling because both parties assume they know each other so well that they stop asking what the other is feeling.

Woah: Apparently even using empathy has limited success in understanding the other person. Even if we try to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, we can’t fully understand their context. This is particularly true for people that have very different lifestyles from us because we impart our own biases (and even stereotypes). Ie foreigners, different socioeconomic classes, or perhaps people from totally different regions.

This is the link to the podcast. Tbh the podcast format was kind of garbage, but it had good content.

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