So much of our culture thrives on curation—the editing and selection of the constant stream of newness fighting for our attention. Within that stream, we congratulate and elevate those that find a way to edit down that stream to a personal vision, a curated view from the perspective of someone with good taste. Steve Jobs is just a single example of such an editor.
This video is an excellent call to action for everyone to embrace a more "edited" life and to be more thoughtful of its direction in regard to the things around you vying for your attention.
My wife Christy is a talented artist and film lover who has been working on a film blog for the last year. There is now a long history of insightful commentary on movies you've likely never heard of but are worth watching. Check it out.
More and more, the average life is spent in front of computers, televisions, and smart phones. People travel everywhere by car and it seems we are slowly approaching the condition of humans in WALL-E:
This may seem a bit over the top, but the human condition is devolving in its capacity to be a wild animal, to provide for itself, to survive on its own. You're reading this blog and so perhaps, Dear Reader, you are already acutely aware of the simple pleasure of walking to see things not ordinarily visited and of being self-reliant, but most are not. Backpacking is just one way ordinary people can reconnect with nature and our natural selves.
To those that haven't yet been on a backpacking trip of at least two nights, please let me fill you in.
Walking without a destination through forests and on the top of ridges and mountains, carrying your only options of survival on your back is exhilarating. You can exhaust yourself so completely that you get better sleep on rocks than you do in your bed, and wake up with the sun, completely filthy, and never feel more alive. You'll run across wild animals, overflowing with the anxiety and fear you're supposed to have toward these creatures, only to find them timid, happy, and majestic. You'll arrive at destinations few have seen, and bask in the absolute silence of miles of untouched world.
Backpacking is, essentially, now a sport; however, it used to be how people traveled and lived and explored. It is our roots. Walking and sleeping are such simple, base activities, but there's so much beauty in the world left unseen by your eyes that it'd be a shame not to go visit.
February of last year, Oregon was hit with a freak warm front that brought over a week of 50º weather and sunshine to the area. I took that opportunity to round up a backpacking trip of me and my friends, branding it "MANPING" to make light of the fact we were casually backpacking in winter, none of us with real four-season camping experience. The trip was a great success, staying at low elevations in the Mount Hood National Forest to avoid snow, we had a really enjoyable night in the wilderness, replete with a roaring fire and whiskey.
MANPING 2011
Naturally, I wanted to try to recreate such a fun trip this year. I set up a Facebook event and invited friends to come out for the second annual MANPING trip. I was particularly excited because I'd just upgraded a few bits of gear, notably a new ultralight backpack, tarp, and insulation layer. This year however, the weather didn't work out in our favor.
As the date got closer, the forecasted weather deteriorated from sunny skies and 45º to a 70% chance of rain and a high of 40º. Friends dropped like flies in the face of the unfriendly weather conditions. The count was down to just two of us—my friend Kevin and I. We tried to make the most of it now that it was just a duo; knowing we both had Friday off, we extended our trip to two nights, planning a loop in the Columbia River Gorge.
Day One
It was a beautiful day in Portland; but, it was steadily raining by the time we got to the trailhead 40 minutes away. We had roughly 5.5 miles of ground to cover and 3700' of vertical, and it never stopped raining. We stopped twice, and then only briefly, to grab water or a snack, before continuing on through the rain to Dublin Lake, our first night's camp.
When we finally arrived, the lake was encircled in snow and frozen over. Two campsites were mostly bare, though the top layer of soil was frozen, leaving water to stand on top of the duff. Kevin and I were both soaked through; no amount of Gore-tex was capable of keeping someone dry for that amount of sustained weather. A large rock was required to smash through the inch-thick ice on the lake to obtain water. We found the best spot we could, pitched the tarp, and huddled underneath. It was 5 o'clock and still very much light out.
I, naturally being an idiot, didn't bring an extra shirt, just my down jacket as extra clothing. After putting it on over my soaked Patagonia R1 fleece, the whole jacket collapsed, rendering it worthless. So too did parts of my down sleeping bag, the moisture introduced from my soaking wet underwear and fleece creating high amounts of humidity in the bag. For a couple hours while cooking and eating dinner, I was rather nervous about the night, having only deflated down insulation under an open-air tarp for the night, surrounded by snow and camped on frozen earth, rather chilled already.
After those couple hours—and multiple times venting the inside of my sleeping bag to let out the steam room microclimate I was creating inside my bivy—the down started to dry out, I started warming up, and I could relax into the evening and joke around with Kevin about how we actually elected to be stuck in the cold rain under a tarp in February. We also decided to head back to the car the next day, as it'd be foolhardy to continue on so wet. Needless to say, it was a cold night as much moisture lingered in my insulation, robbing me of precious loft while the rain continued to fall hard against the tarp above us.
Day Two
We woke in the morning around 7, and by the time coffee was prepared and hard-boiled eggs consumed, the rain finally stopped. No longer oppressed by the sky, we sprang from our shelter to don our wet clothes, pack our bags, and head back to the Wahclella Falls trailhead. I couldn't find the willpower to put my pants back on, still dripping with rainwater, so I hiked out in my long johns and gaiters. Without the rain, it was a beautiful hike through dripping, foggy woods.
Conclusion
This year's MANPING was definitely more manly than last. It was also a good gear shakedown, to better understand what I'm capable of handling in likely the worst conditions I'll find myself in. I can't say I'm ever going to willingly go backpacking again through sustained rain in the winter (especially with so little rain gear and no spare clothes), but I'm now much more confident that I can still safely get by with minimal amounts of gear.
It just may not be comfortable.
For the gear whores among us, my base weight was roughly 12lbs and total pack weight of roughly 15
The Three Sisters Wilderness is one of the most beautiful and varied in Oregon. In July, I did a three-day loop around the North and Middle Sister, traveling cross-country over the pass between the Middle and South Sister. We covered the 40 miles in the three days, a casual pace that allowed us to swim in lakes, relax often, and enjoy some of the more unique aspects of the trail such as the Obsidian Limited Entry Area.
One of my favorite toys is a little camera mount called a StickPic. At less than a half ounce, it allows you to attach your camera to a trekking pole and take a photo of yourself from a much further distance. I used it to film myself throughout the three days, the results of which you can see below. Enjoy!
What a plague of retardation. Starbucks is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world; they’re on every street corner, sometimes twice. Despite their immense popularity and growth and influence, they insist on using Italian names for sizes of every drink they sell, including milkshakes and tea, assuming that the average person will feel camaraderie with the brand or some such positive feeling or association. If not, then why continue the practice? Don’t want to rock the boat?
The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.
Dear Starbucks employees,
It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.
I'm coming to realize Facebook isn't the best forum for sharing much of the information it provides facilities for. Facebook's poor at sharing quality photos (quality truly is operative), bad for long-form writing[1], worse than Twitter or Tumblr for short or otherwise nonessential authoring, worse than LinkedIn for business networking, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is truly a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none (perhaps except abusing user's trust in them through dubious privacy issues).
What people really need is a single directory through which others can discover their friends content around the web—a "homepage" for the non-technical, if you will. A single page with granular security that provides access to people's content around the web. Friendster mostly did that, but was purchased and shut down by Facebook.
Hm.
[1] I tried posting this on Facebook, but hit an arbitrary status-length limit, further illustrating my point.
Ever wanted to embed a very narrow Google map in one of your websites, only to find that the copyright notice bleeds out onto surrounding content?
There is a correct way to solve this problem without breaking the terms and conditions you agreed to when you got your API key. Don't hide the copyright notice or decrease the size as that breaks the terms; instead, include this in your stylesheet:
#map div span { white-space: normal ! important; }
The noise is the first thing, the shrill cries, screams, and mechanical creaking, the uncouth discussions, the loud talking, the small children, the greediness of toddlers still unaware of their own self-centered viewpoint, the assault of the attendees' subtle tastes. Everything at a fair screams for your attention; each ride or stand is an island of assault on your senses, promising an extreme experience or ridiculously insensible prize. I know many, many folks that have an empty spot in their living room just waiting to be filled with a six-foot tall stuffed gorilla bear.
I went to the Portland Rose Festival'sWaterfront Village Saturday. I went with my ladyfriend who is, unbeknownst to me until this day, a carnival ride junky. With requisite machismo running high, I agreed to go big, to ride the big rides, the scary, the janky. How bad could it be?
As it turns out, pretty bad.
After the third ride, I was sweating ice water, pot-sticker skinned, the skin of a man about to have a heart attack. It was impending-doom sweat. Something wasn't right with me and I was fighting back vomit. I was determined to sit out the last ride which appeared to be the worst of all, a contraption that spins you in a circle while you spin in a larger one, g-forces gluing you to your chair, destroying your insides for a small charge. "Funtastic", indeed.
"This will wreck me," I remember saying, still panting.
The ladyfriend went, bravely, into the line by herself to await her turn. She gets to the front of the line, and is stopped. Surely, she is too short to ride this as it looks like Satan himself created this machine. She's turned away, thank God, walks over, and says:
"I have to ride it with a partner—no singles! Please?"
