Banff Mountain Film Festival

Friday evening two weeks ago (that's how long it's taken me to finish this post...), I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival, hosted by REI at the Los Altos High School Eagle Theater, with Trang. It was three hours worth of outdoor-activity films, as well as an intermission and raffle, for the purpose of fundraising for the Snowlands Network. The films shown were:

1. Entropy - 11 minutes of snowkiting footage. Snowkiting is snowboarding while being pulled by a kite across relatively flat snow plains. The snowkiters did lots of jumps and spins in the air. Looked pretty neat, but there probably aren't too many places you can find the right conditions for doing this! This particular film was shot in Norway.
2. Badgered - A cute animated short about a hibernating badger whose slumber is disturbed by a pair of raucous crows. In the end, the crows were silenced when all their feathers were stripped by means of a weapon of mass destruction going off. I think there was supposed to be some sort of environmental message, but it eluded me.
   
3. King Lines - This was the feature film for the night, and follows Chris Sharma on his various climbing adventures around the world. It mostly focused on his deep water solo project "Es Pontas" in Mallorca, Spain. Climbing is spelled "Chris Sharma", and though I recently saw this film, I loved seeing Chris Sharma in all of his glory on a big screen. My hands were sweating the entire time!
4. The Western Lands - Hoy - Mainly the reading of a poem accompanied by stylistic footage. It was about an old man attempting a climb on his birthday. I admit I may have started dozing off during this one...
   
5. It's Fantastic - Kayakers don't seem to have much else to do besides attempt to descend waterfalls without flipping over.
   
6. Speedriding - Para-gliding with skis?
   
7. Cross Country with The Snakes - Random band members go cross-country skiing.
   
8. Inner Balance - Uni-cyclers doing tricks.

Okay, so I lost interest commentating on the last four movies. All in all, I was pretty entertained, though I was somewhat dismayed to realize that not a single movie featured women. I think King Lines showed some clips of girls climbing (a grand total of maybe 20 seconds of footage?), but that's about it. I'm not sure what to make of that. I suppose women are probably majorly underrepresented in "extreme" outdoor sports, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

I was also severely disappointed that two Lindas won raffle items, neither of them me.

The Mind and Heart Disconnect

Why does it often seem that our minds are often in contention with our hearts? I know that I definitely don't need the Crunch ice cream bar on the trip home from Bishop, but my heart (or is it stomach?) calls out for it. The heart often wins.

What I'm specifically referring to is the end to my most recent relationship (number way-too-many). There are so many ways in which breaking up was absolutely the right thing to do, and I have enumerated lists with extensive supporting arguments to convince myself of this, yet I still feel hurt and sad at times. My preferred method of coping with this seems to be to blot out any reminder of the relationship. It seems that my heart relies on my mind to know what it should have feelings about, so at least there's some control. But it's impossible to not be reminded of it, and sometimes the mind gets out of control and relives the past. Thereby this blog post.

So what's with the disconnect between mind and heart? I think part of it is feeling sad over the loss of someone I was previously close to. I guess if you give a piece of your heart to someone, knowing that you shouldn't have after the fact doesn't restore that fragment back to you. For me, I think it also hurts because I know the ex is totally over it, and doesn't give a damn whether or not I'm sad or happy, enraged or indifferent. That causes hopelessness, and that's a feeling that's hard to get over.

Mostly, I'm sad about yet another failed relationship. I don't really like introducing guys to my family, only to tell them a few months later that it's over. Wouldn't it be nice if I was able to manage a relationship that lasts longer than a year? And so on.

This all goes along nicely with my quarter-life crisis though, doesn't it (more on that later)? I think my header promised to keep the emotional drama at bay, but there you go.

"... the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and ... thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."

Love in the Time of Cholera