Grand Canyon

Me on the precipice. Guess it was better that my camera broke instead of me :).
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RUTHLESS CANYON

So I’m at the Grand Canyon enjoying the view. I asked this guy to take my picture. He was all fancy photographer like, “Oh yeah that’s a good one. Turn that way. Yeah that’s it. This is a good shot….” Then he dropped my 5+ year old camera! It was an accident; I let him run off embarrassed.

I took a very educational tour and learnt about the different plant life that survives at various elevations at the canyon. While on tour I met some folks who were on a travelling bus tour. I was invited to camp with them, so I bore the cold for 2 days at 7000 feet above sea level just to socialize with a bus load of random world travellers.

Sunset at the Grand Canyon
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There I met Ruth. We talked about a little about her home in Israel. Since I don’t know many Jewish people, I’m always interested to hear their perspective. She was some kind of adult educational teacher who claims to be psychic. So I figured that spending the day with this person is bound to be interesting.

Unfortunately, Ruth spent protracted minutes at a time reading every single sign and informational plaque. Sometimes I reread the signs twice or trice before she would finish. But the most annoying thing about Ruth was that I barely got to say a few uh huhs; She does not shut up. She talked and talked and talked in a slow and meticulous manner about everything from her adventures to the most minuscule details about her life. At times she struggled to find an English word, so I would help her out. Here I found my purpose in the “conversation”. I would trying to sum up 10 minutes of babble into one word. For example, “I am able to feel things, I know things, I met this person and I told them… and they were surprised…”.

Me hiking down the trail. Blurry pic from my broken lens.
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“You’re clairvoyant”.

Or, “That girl, was said… I can’t believe that person did… I learnt to be careful because of…”.

“That’s cynical”

Actually, her stories led me sum her up as a little nihilistic and misanthropic. Basically, the sort of person I do not need in my life. But I knew I was in real trouble when she admonished me for not offering to buy her lunch after she spent the whole day with me, but I was willing to get ice and wine for the group of strangers to whom I hardly conversed. In my defence, I was just showing gratitude to the group for inviting me camping, and I didn’t realise that Ruth and I were on a date! Besides, how anti-feminist is it to expect a man to pay for a strange woman’s company?

Tour guide explaining that mistletoes are really parasites :p
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Anyway, by the end of the day she was praising me for the great conversations we had, about all the things about me that she liked, and that she wanted me to visit her in LA. All I was thinking was that I need a civil way of saying NO WAY! After hours of conversation about my capricious travel plans, some nonsense about my mercurial stage in life, and flagrant absence from compliments or amorous gestures still proved abstruse, I settled for the much loathe silent treatment.

I am afraid that against my better judgement however, I will email her some pictures as promised. Guess some traits are immutable.