Showboating Sherpa Summits Everest 22 Times, Makes Me Feel Like Garbage
It’s Sunday afternoon & I’m writing this outside a cafe in town, wrinkled shirt displaying a serious case of the booze sweats as I creep out the local high school kids a table over, my shaky-lil-31-year-old hands rattling the ice in a bucket-sized cold brew. My bagel (toasted with extra, extra, extra butter, please, heh heh), glistens in the hot sun, shimmering along with the cheap beer eeking out of my pores. Hey there kiddos, look upon my ocean of poor life choices, and see that it is deep & turbulent.
I was a waste of space all weekend, wayyyyyy moreso than usual. The love of my life, my crush since the 2nd grade, was getting married – and despite all the letters I’d sent with self portraits, doodles of our last name, and assorted hair clippings/vials of bodily fluids/hair clippings stirred into vials of body fluids, it was not me at the altar.
Lady, I feel you.
So Friday I kept my mind occupied by dropping a goodly amount of funds on a karaoke room in Philly, where, over the course of 3 hours, I could not figure out how to change the language from Mandarin to English. So I spent more on rum drinks & green tea shots until nothing mattered anymore. (Sad to report I did not wake up fluent in Mandarin.)
Yesterday I avoided news of the nuptials by sleeping in until noon & then binge-watching Evil Genius in my PJs. I did not get dressed or brush my teeth until around 5:30PM, and that was only because I was getting ready to meet a friend at the bars again.
When my Lyft arrived, I had trouble finding my keys beneath the boxes of delivery bacon pizza, curly cheese fries & empty White Claw cans. Back in the city, the evening kicked off with hot turkey on a roll, smothered in gravy, & a plastic bag of loose Millers.
And now, adding insult to injury as I sit here, a hungover non-princess missing several small patches of hair, I stumble across the story of Kami Rita, a 48-year-old Sherpa climbing guide who just took the world record for climbing Mount Everest 22 times, and sources say he has no signs of stopping. This fuckin’ guy. The gall. With his goals & persistence & skills, achieving something incredible despite extreme challenges in life. Just rubbing it in everyone’s face.
On my way to this cafe I had to surmount a slight incline & almost turned around to get my car instead. When I finally made it, no one was here to greet me besides a goth barista, & bystanders actually looked a little disgusted at my appearance. He scales the world’s tallest mountain a couple times and everyone loses their minds.
According to Sky News,
Mr. Rita was 24 when he first climbed Mt Everest in 1994 and he has climbed the 8,850m (29,035ft) mountain almost every year since then. His father was one of the first professional guides after Nepal opened to foreign mountaineers in 1950. Most of Mr Rita’s male relatives have reached the top at least once and his brother has done it 17 times. In an earlier interview with the Kathmandu Post, Mr Rita said: “My father was not educated, and I didn’t attend school due to our weak financial position. So I became a climbing guide.” The chances of survival on the world’s tallest mountain are always 50/50.”
He’s aiming for 25 ascents before he retires, and his odds of survival are roughly 50%. That sounds tough until you realize my odds of snagging Prince Harry are now 0%. He might face lack of oxygen, hypothermia or frostbite, but I’ll never get to roller blade around inside a castle with a ribbon dancer, or laugh at the poors from inside a gilded carriage while I sip an icy Olde English out of a platinum koozie. Guess Rita is kind of inspiring through… Maybe I shouldn’t give up on my dreams, just like he continues to keep going with his…
If you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, one of those noodles is gonna stick.
::Buys large amount of postage, more vials::