To be a mountaineer...

When performing a quick google search for "Jon Krakauer" just to check the spelling on accounta a previous blog entry, I saw the first line about him on Wikipedia and it read, "Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer..." and I thought to myself: Wow. A mountaineer. it'd be so bad-ass to have that at the top of your resumé. I mean, you could have the lamest job in existance, but tag "mountaineer" to it and you'd be the bees' knees to just about anybody. Imagine if you were Mr. H. Smith, chartered accountant of Stanford, Massachusets. Dull as your unkept silver cutlery, right? But Mr. H. Smith, chartered accountant and fully qualified mountaineer... woo! Sign me up! But now I feel like I'm walking into and episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, so let's change directions ever so slightly.



After chartered accountant mountaineers, I wondered, what could be an even less respectable, more unexpected career pairing? I then thought: prostitute-mountaineer! That'd be a sight to see! The Swiss would surely dig it.



Desperately trying to find a way to tack this on to my own resumé in a relavent manner, I realized, "Hey. I've climbed mountains before. Loads. Fuck, I've even climbed an Alp!" Then I wondered, How did this Krakauer character get "mountaineer" tacked onto his name? Okay, he did climb Mt. Everest and wrote a book about it. It's called "Into Thin Air" and I read it* a number of years ago. It's hard work, that, even if you've got all your Sherpas and gear and oxygen. But wouldn't a ton of people like him (including myself) climb such ominous precipices as that if allotted the time and vast sums of money? How high does the peak have to be in order for you to achieve such a level of coolness? I'll continue to remain bemused about this injustice until I come to the bottom of it. The bottom being the end of this blog post.

*read: listened to it on tape

EDA: omg. this must be set on US time because I wrote the post about the Dom last night and this one this morning; not each on Sept 1. even though it doesn't say, I have written a post for Sept 2.