JayB

Count yourself lucky if this is foremost amongst your worries in life, or if it's the trace quantities of BPA leeching out of plastic containers that does you in.

That's sweet Carl, but I don't think he'll need it with all of the job-offers that come flooding in amongst the letters of praise and encouragement that are sure to materialize in response to this column. I mean, the kid's right in the heart of the New York rust-belt, where no one has had to contend with hard times or make any adjustments in the face of adversity, so I'm confident that the sympathy that the readership feels with him on account of his plight will be both vast and profound.

I'm sure that he has a paypal account that you can contribute to if you feel so moved, Carl.

Ellensburg. Nothing's right next to town, but there's quite a bit of stuff 1-2 hours away, and the cost of living/job-prospects/etc are probably better than most resort towns.

"Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had no intention of living in a society that was as unfair as this one. To seek a haven devoid of the ruthless 9-to-5 ebb and flow of contemporary America, I moved to Alaska." I hear that Sean Penn has optioned the rights to his story.

nice catch! The irony is so perfect it makes me wonder if this "letter" is in fact a troll (better check snopes.com) http://www.buffalonews.com/opinion/myview/story/191803.html

C'mom, they're busy educating themselves while the folks you are talking about are wasting all of their time studying.

You aren't spending more on groceries? The Phinney-downtown-Capitol Hill and back circuit seemed to require at least a meal's worth of energy every day, and that was about the cost of the gas it would take to go to and fro, so for me it was a wash on a day to day basis. Did spare wear-and-tear on the vehicle, parking fees, etc.

Communications majors always struck me as the folks who were taking their education seriously, and seizing every opportunity to challenge themselves and develop all of the capacities that a college education was intended to foster.

I dunno man - depends on what you consider "Alpine," but there's an awful lot of long routes way up high in the mountains that feature rock/snow/ice. Kiener's ranked right up there with the North Ridge of Stuart for me, and involved quite a bit more time in Crampons. Heck, even the North Face of Pikes Peak had some pretty sweet alpine routes. The attitude that seems to flourish in Boulder might be a drag, but it seems like there, just as anywhere else - you can choose who you associate with and your experience will vary accordingly.

Getting an education and preparing for a career are only mutually exclusive goals for some.

It doesn't actually sound like his debts are the key limitation. If he had said, "I found a job that neither involves working in an office, nor that I consider beneath my dignity - but unfortunately it doesn't pay enough for me to live independently *and* pay off my student loans," then perhaps the loans would be the key variable. Seems to me like he's having a tough time grappling with the cosmic injustice inherent in the fact that he didn't have a dream job waiting for him upon graduation, rather than his student loan debt. Unfortunately for him, paying for food, clothing, shelter, insurance, etc often compel lesser beings to make concessions and compromises, and exemption from student loan debt wouldn't diminish the probability that he'd have to contend with any of these realities after graduating.

Preserve his dignity!! He has a history degree! Ergo he shouldn't have to submit to the constraints like....working in an office...that lesser beings like accountants and engineers submit to if he wants to make enough money to live independently and pay back his loans! "Student debt limits who we become Ken Ilgunas, who lives in Niagara Falls, fears college is becoming unaffordable for most Americans. I am 24, live with my parents, can’t find work and am floundering in a sea of debt five figures high. I think of myself as ambitious, independent and hardworking. Now I’m dependent, unemployed and sleeping under the same Super Mario ceiling fan that I did when I was 7. How did this happen? I did what every upstanding citizen is supposed to do. I went to college. I took out loans so I could enroll at Alfred University, a pricey private school. The next year, I transferred to the more finance-friendly University at Buffalo, where I could commute from home and push carts part-time at Home Depot. I related my forthcoming debt to puberty or a midlife crisis — each an unavoidable nuisance; tickets required upon admission to the next stage of adulthood. But as interest rates climbed and the cost of tuition, books and daily living mounted to galactic proportions, I realized this was more than some paltry inconvenience. Upon graduating, I was helplessly launched headfirst into the “real world,” equipped with a degree in history and $32,000 in student loans. Before ricocheting back home, I would learn two important lessons: 1) There are no well-paying — let alone paying — jobs for history majors. 2) The real world is really tough. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had no intention of living in a society that was as unfair as this one. To seek a haven devoid of the ruthless 9-to-5 ebb and flow of contemporary America, I moved to Alaska. As a liberal arts major, I dreamed of making a profound difference in people’s lives. Instead, for a year, I lived in Coldfoot, a town north of the Arctic Circle that resembles a Soviet Gulag camp. My job as a tour guide for visitors temporarily alleviated my money woes because it provided room and board, but when the season ended and I moved back home, I was again confronted with the grim realities of debt. Desperate, I browsed through insurance and bank job descriptions. I had hit an all-time low. Could I surrender my soul for health coverage and a steady income? Could I sacrifice my ideals by falling into line? Suddenly, living at home didn’t seem nearly as degrading as selling out. But sadly, other graduates don’t have any choice but to work for temp agencies and retail stores to eke by. That’s the tragedy of student debt: it doesn’t just limit what we do, but who we become. Forget volunteering. Forget traveling. Forget trying to improve your country, or yourself. You’ve got bills to pay, young man. Unfortunately, the recent passage of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act doesn’t portend that times are a-changin’. The act reduces interest rates on Stafford Loans and increases Pell Grant awards. Whoopty-do. There’s no question that this is a step forward. But we’re still talking pennies and nickels when we need to completely revolutionize the government’s role in financing post-secondary education. College is a wonderful experience and something every young citizen should pursue. But without help, a college education is becoming an unaffordable rite of passage and a privilege of the affluent. My loan payments can’t wait much longer, and soon I must leave home to find work that doesn’t compromise my integrity. Although I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I had declared as an accounting major and got a cushy job punching numbers somewhere, I’ll take my history major, my debt and my mom’s cooking any day of the week. "

I don't think anything can touch Boulder. One other town that I think gets dismissed for political reasons is Colorado Springs. If you live on the western side of the town, you're usually just a few minutes from Garden of the Gods and a bunch of other small granite Crags, a bunch of stealth crags on Rampart Range Road, about 40 minutes from 11-Mile Canyon, and about 10 minutes beyond that you are into Turkey Rocks and the granite infinity of the Platte. There was even a somewhat stealth two-pitch 3-4 ice line about 20 minutes outside of town, and a spot offering `~100 feet of 1-2 ice that I could play around on before work. The trailhead to Pikes Peak was also about 15 minutes away. Head about 1.5 hours South and you're at Shelf Road and warm south facing rock that you can climb just about all winter long. Also big enough for real-jobs, the downtown core has Colorado College, small bookshops, bars, restaurants, etc - just about all of it with a great view of the Front Range. And ridiculous amounts of Sunshine.

i have a climbing buddy of mine who eventually got divorced for this very reason. his wife was thin and trim long enough to get him sucked in then went off the diet pills (that he didn't know she was on) and ballooned. he stuck it out with her for years, but it was a source of friction - 'you should love me for who I am', and no effort to get in shape. eventually they split. I think the same rule applies to emotional stuff as well. Assume that you no longer have to put any effort into the way you treat the other half and you're essentially doing the same thing.

I think that "letting yourself go" after you close the deal is a sign that you take your other half for granted, which is something that borders on contempt IMO.

Rousseau being captured and eaten by cannibals would have been more ironic...

Interesting that you make no mention of Chris's discovery that his father had not been divorced from his first wife when he married Chris's mom, and also fathered a child with the first wife after Chris was born. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an 18-year-old capable of forgiving their father after learning that, but maybe the ones who aren't naive and self-righteous would just take that right in stride. The family I refer to includes Mother/Father/siblings. Krakauer discusses the impact that the guys choices had on his mother at some length in interviews that he's given about the book. I don't recall the book clearly enough to remember to what extent he mentioned this in the book.

yes, it does. nice PC try though. kids need both a male and female role-model, so with same-sex parents, that missing role model needs to be filled somehow - ideally speaking that is. male and female, or masculine and feminine? And why? Is it simply so that they have a frame of reference when interacting with the rest of us? Conceptions of what a good Masculine roll model, and a good feminine roll model are vary so much from culture to culture, I wonder how much value they really have, except within that rather narrow group. When people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born, following the local social and familial norms may have been more necessary, but any more (especially in the US) we have the ability to create our own families and subcultures around us and can tune the people we associate with to our desires/beliefs. So I don't think that the traditional male/female has as much value as it used to. I agree with the notion that same-sex couples can raise healthy, well-adjusted kids - but I also think that kids naturally seek persons of their own sex to model themselves after, and counsel from people who faced similar situations/obstacles/dilemmas, and if that's not present to a certain extent in the home, they'll seek it out elsewhere. It'd be especially interesting to see what the statistics have to say about the outcomes in those cases of girls reared in male-male households, and boys reared in female-female households. My limited, biased, subjective, and wholly unscientific opinion is that boys raised in female-female homes will be both overprotected and overindulged in a way that's not going to prepare them terribly well for any of the more male-dominated environments that they happen to encounter in their lives.

Just to make sure that I'm not misinterpreting this statement - you are claiming to have had sex with three of your brother's wives, your best friend's wife, and two of your wife's sisters?

Definitely shades of the Grizzly Man, but he, unlike McCandless, was dedicated to something outside of himself, which made him a more sympathetic - if equally tragic - figure IMO.

I read the book and thought that he was a profoundly naive, narcissistic kid who was obsessed with his own righteousness, and the manner in which he treated his family was completely inexcusable.

I love the auto-congratulatory flourishes that are appended to all of your posts. Do you often find yourself winking slyly at your right hand and saying "It was good for you, too - wasn't it?" People are not rational actors and...the optimal response to this is to allow a centralized authority control over what they are allowed to chose? "unless you assume that such a mechanism will be completely effective in preventing any additional rise in global temperatures, part of the response to global warming will consist in adapting to it." Even if your fantasy of a centralized authority given carte blanche, the odds are high that adapting to changes in global climate would constitute a substantial part of the human response to it. Sorry.

"People will more often blow their finite resources on shit they don't need; individually and nationally. How about my new Esplanade? 194 billion more for Iraq? No problem! That is why both individuals and this country as a whole face an increasingly worrisome financial future." Clearly what we need then, is for a body of technocrats with the means and the authority to review everyone's personal expenditures to insure that they aren't exercising their freedom to spend their income inappropriately. What's the maximum predicted delta in global temperatures that full-implementation of Kyoto would generate? What's the probability associated with the delta? Clamor for top-down globo-mandates enforced by some kind of Uber-bureau-mechanism with infinite budgets and enforcement powers all you want - it's not going to happen. The most likely outcome will consist of voluntary efforts on levels ranging from the individual to the national - that make a dent in trend increases in CO2 emissions, but do not curtail them in time to prevent any additional warming from occuring. No matter whether it's a cooperative mechanism or coercive mechanism that materializes to reduce C02 emissions, unless you assume that such a mechanism will be completely effective in preventing any additional rise in global temperatures, part of the response to global warming will consist in adapting to it. That means the Southeast will adjust water-consumption, infrastructure, etc to changes in precipitation as they happen - rather than imposing draconian water restrictions and constructing a new reservoir the size of Lake Ontario to see them through years where trend precipitation is several standard deviations below the moving average.

There will never be enough money to prepare for every conceivable contingency, so people will always elect to allocate finite resources in a manner that favors the most probable. There's a reason that the per-capita dollars allocated to snow-removal in Portland Maine are greater than those in Portland Oregon. Are you electing to fund your IRA/401(K), or retrofitting your home to withstand a magnitude 10.0 or higher quake?