Things i learned while backpacking 14 miles over steep terrain with a 40 lb pack

1. i should probably work out more
2. when faced with the decision of pooping in a hole you have to dig and not pooping for a few days of strenuous activity it is very unwise to choose not to poop
3. Bears are wily, clever, motherfucking super beasts. And scary. Cuddly. but also scary.
4. Mosquitoes do in fact bite brown people of equatorial origin who suspect themselves of having a heretofor unidentified hemoglobinopathy based on absolutely no laboratory or clinical evidence whatsoever.
5. I hate motherfucking mosquitos.
6. i would like to devote my entire scientific career to single handed crushing every mosquito on this planet
7. i would be a great humanitarian hero if i did.
8. I probably won't.
9. Sigh.
10. Hyponatremia is no joke. gatorade can bring back life.
11. deer. kind of creepy.
12. Backpacking. WTF. really? you strap 40 lb to your back and then walk over steep terrain and leave behind centuries even millenia of sacrifice and progress like buildings with walls and indoor plumbing?
13. There is profundity in the pursuit of one's own limitations and how odd it is that in the clarity of daylight and serenity we file our lives in impeccably rational filing systems (work, fun, love) arranged by elegant narrative orderings, but in those dark moments, we find the mind has in fact cross wired everything by a far murkier robust system of visceral domains: despair (the gasping desperate blind rage towards the mountain top, the ghostly 3 am of another gloomy call night pummeled by hunger for sleep), triumph ( the 360 degree view of the California Sierra mountains, the bright light and echo of civilization when stepping outside of a hospital to a noon time healthy bustling San Francisco) and transcendence (the floating away when letting drop 40 lb of either camping equipment or neurosis)
14.Nature totally kicked my ass.