Sansa is putting on roughly a pound a day this week. Also, she likes to join me in the shower, for reasons known only to herself. She thinks her dad is more fun than I am, but she loves me more, and is very very bonded to me, which is all I wanted. We are one organism.
14 year old Ashima Shirashi might as well be a different species from the rest of us, that’s how good she is at rock climbing (if you are not familiar with sport climbing or bouldering ratings, just know that the below quote is basically saying “she is a Jedi”):
Another standard is the rating regimen. Sport and trad climbs are given a degree of difficulty, according to the Yosemite Decimal System: 1 is a walk on flat land, and 5 is a vertical climb, or close to it. So actual climbs are rated 5.0 through 5.15, with additional subcategories of “a” through “d.” The hardest routes at the moment are 5.15c—there are just two. (The system is open-ended, so it’s only a matter of time before someone pioneers a 5.16a.) In northeast Spain, last March, when Ashima was thirteen, she became the first woman, and the youngest person of either sex, ever to “send” (complete) a 5.15. It is a route called Open Your Mind Direct, which was recently upgraded from a 5.14d to a 5.15a, owing to a handhold’s having broken off. She spent just four days “projecting” the route—that is, studying and solving all the problems on it by trial and error. The men who had done it before had spent weeks, if not months. Obviously, the rating system is also subjective, but for Ashima this feat was an annunciation. If she could send a 5.15 during spring break from eighth grade, what more could she do?
Bouldering has a similar rating system, with a scale of V1 to V15. Ashima is the second woman to have sent more than one V14. (She beat her predecessor in a competition last year.) In a notable session this fall, an hour north of the city, in a wooded area that climbers call the Master Bedroom, Ashima ticked off a series of difficult problems: a V11 called Reckless, a V12 called Wetness to Fatness, and a V14 called Nuclear War, which, in the nine years since it was first climbed, had turned back all attempts until hers. She announced her performance on Instagram: “V11, V12 and V14 in a DAY! HOLY CRAP!!!!!” On Thanksgiving, she posted a photo from Texas on Instagram: “I shocked myself by getting the first female ascent of the legendary razor blade climb, Terre de Sienne (V14)!” (Also Federer-like is her way of blending frank amazement at her own capabilities with an air of humility and ease.)
Depending on which state you live in, your driver’s license may not be sufficient ID to fly domestic with in the near future (I doubt this will actually happen, but best to keep informed):
In September, we reported that the Department of Homeland Security would begin to enforce the Real ID Act for air travel in 2016, which would require secondary identification for licenses issued by four U.S. states. Now, the DHS has upped the number of licenses that don’t meet their standards, which means that if you’re carrying one from Alaska, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, Washington state, Puerto Rico, Guam, or the U.S. Virgin Islands, you might find yourself turned away if you’re not prepared.
We were just invited to become a Featured Publisher on This.cm, so please follow me if you have an account and share Toast stories! I’ll be linking my favourite Toast story of the day most days, and email me (nicole@ the-toast dot net) if you have a PARTICULAR Toast favourite of your own! Also, who should I follow?
Friend of The Toast Rebecca Scherm (she wrote “Charm School” for us) is embarking on a book tour, and would love to see Toasties, so check it out to see if she’s coming to a bookstore near you! Nikki loves Unbecoming, the book in question, and there was a little convo in the comments a few weeks ago about how it’s getting that NEW GONE GIRL marketing, but is actually fabulous and complex.
Transgender Headlines From the Future, Lightly Idealized (Meredith is the best):
Brooks Brothers Renames Itself As Brooks Siblings
Zero Trans People Were Murdered in 2016
Germaine Greer Drastically Shifts Stance, Says “Lopping Off Your Dick DoesMake You a Woman”
This is one of the VERY best Ham4Ham installments:
Dr. Zizmor is retiring, and I hope he finds joy for all the joy he brought me:
Zizmor began running the kitschy rainbow ads in the early 1980s.
“I got a lot of heat when I started,” he told Business Insider in 2009. “No one was on the subway. No one was even advertising.”
Rembert Browne on Tyler Perry (like everything Rembert does, this is so much better than you can imagine, and generous and warm and probing and spiky, and I love it, and we are blessed to be alive during The Age of Rembert):
During the curtain call, Tyler Perry walked out last, dressed as himself — jeans, a shirt, a black fitted cap. “You guys have always been so faithful to me,” he said to the crowd, which was still in the middle of a standing ovation. “Always right there by my side, always supporting me, even when it wasn’t that great.” He then broke into an old-lady voice that wasn’t quite the Madea old-lady voice, close to voice of the old lady two seats down. “Bless his heart, he’ll get better.” He thanked them for watching his four television shows currently on OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network), especially the breakout hit The Haves and the Have Nots, the network’s highest-rated show ever, which will return January 5. The season-three finale pulled in 3.71 million viewers, making it the third-highest scripted cable telecast of the summer, only behind episodes of Pretty Little Liars and Fear the Walking Dead. “Let’s face it, there’s no need for me to go out there [onstage] anymore,” Perry would tell me later. “The only reason is to be in front of them, and to tell them how much I appreciate them, make them laugh, see their faces — and it does a great thing for me and my heart, too. It just gets me reconnected.” There’s an argument to be made that these days, Perry is largely responsible for keeping the Oprah endeavor relevant, and with shows I’d only just learned existed. But that’s how Perry has always operated: success in plain sight.
Kate Authur’s MAJESTIC ROUND-UP of all the shows and movies we will be obsessed with in 2016 is balm to my soul, and there were even a lot of surprises, like Kerry Washington’s Anita Hill movie, which is going to be INFURIATING and GREAT:
God, this cast! Kerry Washington as Anita Hill, Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas, Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden, Treat Williams as Ted Kennedy, Dylan Baker as Orrin Hatch, Jennifer Hudson as Angela Wright (the other Thomas accuser) — and it goes on. Rick Famuyiwa, the director of 2015’s Sundance hit Dope, takes on the Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, which led to one of the most divisive, revealing, pivotal moments in American feminism (and institutional misogyny). Considering its ending, spoiler alert: Confirmation will be a horror movie.
Now, here is The Millions’ version for BOOKS (WHY CAN’T I READ QUEEN OF THE NIGHT YET?:
The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee: We’ve been awaiting Chee’s sophomore novel, and here it finally is! A sweeping historical story — “a night at the opera you’ll wish never-ending,” says Helen Oyeyemi — and the kind I personally love best, with a fictional protagonist moving among real historical figures. Lilliet Berne is a diva of 19th-century Paris opera on the cusp of world fame, but at what cost? Queen of the Night traffics in secrets, betrayal, intrigue, glitz, and grit. And if you can judge a book by its cover, this one’s a real killer. (Sonya)
Dayna Evans thinks she cured her cluster headaches with shrooms, and since cluster headaches are literally the worst and most painful things in the entire world, I am Team Go Ahead And Try Whatever, especially if you’re already using an oxygen tank (there are Beloved Friends of The Toast who are cluster sufferers, guys):
Lots of cluster-headache sufferers end up with PTSD from their illness, even if the headaches go into remission. Callison told me that he scored an 88 on the PTSD test, and that even though he’d been mostly pain-free for ten weeks, he stays active on CH forums as a way to focus his attention. Clusterheads fear that the headache will come back and ruin their lives all over again, no matter what method of self-medicating worked in the past.
Mushrooms worked for me. 5-MeO-DALT, a legal but not-FDA-approved synthetic tryptamine you can buy online, worked for Callison. But the worst sufferers — sometimes getting hits eight or nine times a day — are eager to take CH out from the fringes of medicine in order to find a less scandalous source of relief. “There are as many people with cluster headaches as muscular dystrophy,” Dr. Rosenberg told me, “and while muscular dystrophy is horrible, we put all this money into it, and as of yet, there have been no promising treatments.”
Whichever science sufferers turn to to keep hope alive, there is a sense of camaraderie among the margins. “You can’t let this thing control your life,” one clusterhead told me over the phone in September. “You have to live between the hits.”
Lauren McKeon on being first devastated by her husband leaving her, then totally fine:
The next day, my body was the Grand Canyon, vast and hollowed out. My mind obsessed over a dead narrative: wife, mother. Me, who was never quite sure I wanted to be a wife. Me, who hadn’t decided whether or not I wanted children. Me, undone. With him gone, who am I? With him gone, I’ll never have a baby. With him gone. As if I’d wanted one. As if he was my only chance to become whatever I was supposed to be.
Maybe I wasn’t the canyon. Maybe I was the hole in the sandbox from Robert Munsch’s Murmel, Murmel, Murmel, only impossibly deeper and assuredly empty. No babies here. No story. No life. Gone. Gone. Gone. Maybe I was both. Or maybe I was a thunderstorm—loudly inconsolable, pelting tears, taking up more space than I ever had before.
The day after that one, I bought new pillows.
