Between CS and the recent slew of frisbee-related email, I'd had more than enough of sitting at my desk by the time the sun started to set. I was getting pretty jumpy and about to go forage in the kitchen when, lo and behold, the phone rang!

Let me first explain that Molly and I never get phone calls. There've been less than two dozen in the entire two-and-a-half months since the quarter started; half of those aren't even for us. In addition to the greater-than-average proportion of pure wrong numbers, there are also a bunch of conversations that get several sentences deep before the mixup is untangled. See, our current social manager, whose name "Mali" is pretty much phonetically identical to that of my roommate, lived in this room last year. Molly once picked up the phone to a guy who asked "Don't you remember me?" as if he had once played some very significant role in her life, and was completely crestfallen when she gave no sign of recognition at all. Poor kid.

In this context, then, even the fact that it was a phone call for me was thrilling. Better yet, it was Wilson, who wanted to know whether I wanted to go to the climbing wall with her. Yeah. I felt loved.

We spent the hour just bouldering, messing around, and talking about what was going on in our respective lives—good stuff, since I hadn't seen her in over a week. I'd haphazardly traversed one side of the court once and was feeling up to something new, so I took a look at the short wall to my left. It had pretty good holds, but on a reverse incline of about 70 degrees... gave it a stab, got a few moves up but lost my footing, swung a bit, and then regained contact with the wall but couldn't get any further and dropped back to the ground.

As I stood up, a voice behind me said, "I bet you could do it—the way you were hanging on there," and the guy proceeded to show me some technique that I'd forgotten since I first heard it in OEP: lateral motion, hanging off the skeleton, hips close to the wall, etc. Really truly nice of him to do that, but for some reason my concentration wasn't there at all, and I gave up, perhaps precipitously, after four or five tries. I turned to talk to Wilson for a bit, and when I turned around, he was no longer there. I'd wanted to apologize for being such a disappointing student when he'd seriously tried to coach me, but I suppose I can compensate by going back and finishing that route. Next time.