Mammoth Lakes, California

Christmas Eve, 2024

I woke up at 5 AM this morning and drove through the storm all the way from Palo Alto, 350 miles on four hours of sleep, heavy rain at first and heavy snow later on. I made it to the mountain just in time for half a dozen laps down fresh powder.

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about finitude. Approaching 40 I find myself in the unbelievably privileged position of almost never doing things I don’t want to be doing. (That’s true even at work, despite my constant complaints.) The problem is that there’s always more I want to do. There are so many things I want to write; there are so many mountains I want to climb (not a metaphor); there are so many people I care about and so much depth I want each of those relationships to have. There’s only so much time. When I was younger I thought I’d be limited by money, but even as a high school teacher in San Francisco money doesn’t seem to be the problem. I always feel limited by energy, but even if I had boundless energy, I couldn’t convert it to time. There’s just not enough time.

I didn’t want to drive through the storm today, but that’s the only way the timing worked. I didn’t want to stay up so late, either, but the stuff I was doing until 1 AM was more fun and more important than going to sleep.

This year. 2024. 366 days. I did a lot of stuff.

I climbed and skiied Shasta again! I ran the Broken Arrow 46K again! I spent a week mountain biking and packrafting in Southern Utah! I went to Hawaii with the 10th graders! I got dragged into running a charity 5K with some friends and came in second in M26-40! I made more zines. (Do you want one?) I made redwood vodka and homemade sea salt and dried my own mint plants for tea. (I guess I do this every year now?) I foraged mussels from Half Moon Bay and fennel from the San Francisco Baylands and made locally-foraged mussel chowder. I gave a graduation speech at the senior dinner! I led seminars on the Apology and Mending Wall (ongoing effort to make my pedagogical skills coextensive with my intellectual interests). We did a faculty performance of the first act of Angels in America and I got so into character that I spent the rest of the day agitated (having just learned that my lover has AIDS). I wrote tons and tons of math notes and problems for the kids. I read poems to my classes. I did all my regular DIY car repairs and I learned new ones (replacing rear wheel bearings! installing a trailer hitch! persuading Subaru corporate to buy me a new engine gratis even though my car is out of warranty!). I caught bull trout for the first time. I caught brook trout on a climbing rest day in Yosemite, and they were gravid, and I made a few spoons of caviar that we ate around the campfire.

I made it one more year without my mental health totally falling apart. That’s an accomplishment. (But I’m still run-out on choss, way too far above my last piece.)

I had the best climbing season of my life!!! Every year I’ve been in California I’ve told myself “this is going to be the year that I finally climb really hard and go to Yosemite every weekend!,” and this fall it actually happened!!! I could gush on and on for pages. The moonlit climb! The freestanding spire! The insane chimney! Actually figuring out how to climb crack! How I ALMOST sent that 11a! (it was sport) (and on toprope) (okay “almost” is doing a lot of the work here). But it feels so good to finally break beyond the baby Yosemite trad climbs, and if I’m still in California next fall I can work towards some actually ambitious Valley goals.

I’ve been teaching linear algebra for the first time! This is mixed: whenever one teaches a class for the first time it’s improv (teaching is always improv, but a new class especially so); with this class, there have been added constraints that I’ve been frustrated by. But two weeks ago I got tipsy at the work holiday party and had a fantastic thirty-minute conversation with the (also tipsy) wife of a beloved colleague who’s this badass rocket scientist in her 50s who gave me all these fantastic ideas, and I left so energized. And then, as a result of that, the final week of the semester all I was doing was thinking about linear algebra all the time. That’s all I wanted, for me, for this class, this semester. Just getting to dive into that hyperfocus headspace. There’s an image that’s in my mind: the first flickers of light starting to show the outlines of the landscape. When the world is dark, it’s boring. (It’s unintelligible.) When the world is illuminated, it’s boring. (It’s legible—too legible.) But the time when the outlines are starting to become more and more clear—crepuscular is a word I love—“through a glass, darkly”—it’s that wonderful moment, and that wonderful feeling, intellectual, emotional, and it’s how I’m feeling about linear algebra right now. I’m so grateful for that.

I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’s collected letters. They just came out; I picked them up because I’ve loved Sacks since I was in middle school and have read most else of what he’s published. But I’ve found unexpected resonance in how many of his early career frustrations mirror mine. I’ve gotten up to the period where Sacks is the same age as me (gulp) and has just finished the work that, shortly after the time of these letters, is what first brings him to prominence. (Robin Williams plays Sacks in the movie that later gets made about this period.) Sacks is successful with his patients, but alienated from his colleagues (and medicine more generally). At best, the medical establishment ignores him; at worst, they ostracize him. The animosity is mutual: Sacks is frustrated at the dominance of quantification and systematization in medicine, of seeing patients as numbers on a chart and inputs to a treatment algorithm. Here’s a good example (I’ve been taking notes): in one letter to a friend, he rails against

the folly of this sort of ‘objective’ examination which replaces human judgment by stereotyped questionnaires … In some very fundamental sense, when all the gradings and rating and testings and measurements have been done, and all the test-sheets and schedules filled up, the very flesh of the subject has escaped, like a jellyfish through a tea-strainer.

That’s the 1960s, and medicine. Imagine the 2020s, and math education. Math is about numbers; therefore, math education is about numbers. Nothing is meaningful unless it can be measured. Robots instead of souls. My teacher friends worry about AI taking their jobs; no, it’s not the AI they need to worry about; it’s the bureaucrats. God in a spreadsheet. “Data-driven” right off a cliff.

Longtime housemate M. brought me back from Bulgaria a beautiful hand-painted Eastern Orthodox icon: St. George, slaying the dragon! The church lady she bought it from said that as an unmarried man the only icons it’s appropriate for me to have are either of Jesus or of St. George. It’s on my shelf next to my collection of past years’ ski passes. Ikons and an icon. (Is that disrespectful? Ack. Save me from my own irony.)

Two other great things I’ve read this year: David Brooks on his spiritual journey in the 2010s, and Emily Witt on the parties she went to and the drugs she took that same decade.

Back to today. 2024. Snow. The chain control guys waved me past and I edged up towards Echo Summit on all wheel drive. Staticky country coming in from Sacramento. Sagebrush and a magpie greeting me almost exactly the moment we crossed the pass and entered the intermontane west. Beautiful drive. I simultaneously feel desperate to get out of California and also that I have no need to go anywhere else.

Longtime outdoor partner R. is remote-working from Mammoth this month, so I’m crashing on her couch and skiing for a few days. Then I’m continuing on to Palm Springs for M. and S.’s weekend wedding bender bash. Half a dozen of their friends are giving blessings during the service on things they value as a couple; they’ve asked me for 100-150 words on “doing hard things.” Ultramarathons and sleep deprivation aside, I don’t think I’m very good at doing hard things. There are just too many hard things I avoid, professionally and emotionally.

Maybe next year we can all have an epsilon more courage. (Or an iota, if you prefer that.) Not slay the dragon, perhaps, but be a little less afraid of it.

Give me a call in the new year and let’s catch up. (607) 592-4759.

love to you all,

Andrew