Climbers and Non-Climbers

When I was in high school, I had two kinds of friends: the ones that climbed and the ones that didn't.  Both groups had pros and cons.  With my non-climbing friends, I could go to parties, get drunk, and battle (or be) Rogues and Paladins in the role-playing ecstasy that is Dungeons and Dragons.  With my climbing friends, I could take thirty-foot whippers on the gym's fixed-anchor GriGris.  But my non-climbing friends didn't understand things like slopers and beta and dynos; and my climbing friends couldn't quite grasp my arguments that bright purple stretchy pants and tank tops that fall wistfully off the shoulder aren't necessary attire.  So the question for me was, were my climbing and non-climbing friends forever destined to be separated like so much oil and water, much like those non-existent showers on my greasy skin?

Not willing to live in two separate worlds, I tried for integration.  Once, I had a climbing buddy, Eric, pick me up at a party with my non-climbing friends to go on a climbing trip.  I figured he could party a little bit with us, everybody would get to know each other, and the whole time I could sing, "This is what its like WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE!" and pretend to smash their heads together.  It didn't really work out like that.  My non-climbing friends mostly compared that night's beer count to that of previous weekends or took stock of their Dexterity, Wisdom and Charisma (D&D, folks-keep up).  Eric mainly kept to himself.  It probably didn't help, either, that on the subsequent drive, I was drunkenly asking Eric to pull over every ten minutes: "Kaihgopeenow?  Erikaihgopee?"

Getting my non-climbing friends into climbing was also a no-go.  If they tried it at all, it was usually just once, and mostly they just did front-flips onto the pads (on an only slightly related note, if you're at a university gym and some newbie frat boys show up, watch closely-one of them will take off his shirt and try a handstand on the mats).  I rationalized my failure to interest friends in climbing the way I did for most inexplicable events in my life: I was just too good a climber.  A local newspaper once ran a feature on me, entitled "X-man," that explored how I was, among other things, "aiming for future X Games."  Here is an actual Mr. Meister quotation from the article:  "Over the years, I have taken friends down to try and introduce them to [climbing].  I don't know why they don't like it.  Maybe I've been doing it so long that I have reached a level so far ahead of a beginner that they get frustrated watching me."  My girlfriend (now Mrs. Meister) called this statement a "self-fulfilling prophesy."  For some strange reason, after reading that article, no one wanted climb with me.

My point is this, kids.  You're probably going to have to keep your climbing and non-climbing friends separate.  You could resolve the social dissonance by giving up one or the other, but screw quitting climbing-only professional climbing guidance counselors can really manage jettisoning a normal, non-climbing social life, and that field is highly competitive right now.  You'll probably just have to deal with it.  I look at it this way: in this great D&D epic that is life, sometimes you have to be a Halfling, sometimes a Warforged.  But I find it helps to imagine yourself as the Dungeonmaster, that perennial referee-nay, Storyteller-holding disparate worlds together in delicate balance.

As we went to press, the Guidance Meister began to realize that his fantasy role-playing activities, though highly rewarding and character-building, may have been his only real social obstacle--that, and not bathing.