Breaking the back of winter

Many of the ancient peoples living Up North, where I grew up, felt an understandable paranoia about winter. Not only did it get colder than a witch's tit; the sun also seemed to disappear for months on end. By the time winter solstice had reduced daylight to a two-hour phenomenon they must've been pretty riled up about the world coming to an abrupt end. To appease the gods they sacrificed cattle, horses, humans or even the king (who was, after all, responsible for keeping shit running properly). And wouldn't you know it, soon enough the days started getting longer and the snow began to melt. Although an occasional storm might come in and set things back a bit, winter's back had been broken.

Both physically and metaphorically the same thing happened here in the last week. As I'm typing this I can hear the steady drip-drip of water melting off the roof and the sudden crash of an icicle falling down. And for the first time in what feels like a good long while I can actually sit back and relax on a Saturday afternoon. It's been a long and shitty semester thus far, but things are finally starting to look up.

Somehow it all started on January 11. Up until that point winter had been going surprisingly well - relatively warm, little snow, lots of climbing, excellent Christmas and New Year's. A couple weeks' worth of grappling with the slippery rock down in Fort Collins had substantially improved both footwork and balance, and pulling down hard on plastic was putting some muscle on me. Unfortunately my tendons did not respond in a similar fashion. Ever since I re-dislocated my left shoulder a few years ago I tend to climb with that arm slightly bent: it stops too much pressure hitting the joint. Instead most of the force goes into the muscles in that arm, and a lot of those attach around the elbow. And wouldn't you know it, in mid-January it all become a bit too much. A wicked case of elbow tendonitis/tendonosis (hard to tell which one) pretty much put me out of climbing and weight lifting for two months. The endorphine withdrawal did not make me a particularly happy man...

The next sucker punch hit me right in the back of the skull about a month later. After coming back from Sweden - a wedding, family and friends made the visit quite enjoyable - Amanda unexpectedly broke up with me. I guess in retrospect I kinda saw it coming for a while, but at the time it was quite the shock to the system. The less said about the weeks after that the better. To put it mildly my life didn't improve any.

Around the same time I started preparing for my preliminary exams. As I've mentioned before job security in grad school is somewhat sketchier in the US than in, say, Sweden. If it's my department in particular or the system here in general I'm not sure about, but the upshot is that there's a test of your abilities at the end of both the first and second year. If you fail, you're out. I dodged the first punch in May last year, but this time around it was more like a long series of body blows: you just had to stand there and try to take it. Life outside of work slowly faded away and eventually I was thinking of nothing else. The added stress of having my job (and hence my stay in the US) depend on my performance pretty much turned me into an asocial wreck. On the day of my oral examination I was about ready to puke out of sheer nervousness. But with a little help from my friends I pulled through and came out the other side with my sanity intact and my spot in grad school secure. A great learning experience, no doubt, but I'm not quite sure I needed that kind of pressure in my life.

But hey, it's all in the past now. My elbow finally healed enough that I can climb on it, next week promises to be warm and sunny, me and Amanda are cool, and I'm back to being productive at work. I felt ten feet tall walking down the hallways of the department yesterday. Winter really is ending, in all sorts of ways, and I'm looking forward to what tomorrow has to bring.