Well hey there, blog friends! Long time no see. I took a bit of a breather for the holidays, started making some plans, and started implementing some plans. And now I’m back. With something a little different.
I’ve been wanting to dabble in video for a while now. I’ve got this weirdly popular video on YouTube about finding sand dollars on the beach in March Island, but other than that I’ve just uploaded silly stuff, like the time I met Steve the Sloth and gave him three pets instead of two or when we went to the New Orleans bug museum and saw two turtles gettin’ it on.
The point is that I want to dabble in something a little more specific. A little more me, even. So I figured I’d pull an idea my bestie Cletus came up with back in our college days. He called it 60 Seconds of Chrissy. And I shall too.
60 Seconds of Chrissy will be a little snippet of my adventures clipped to a mere 60 seconds. Brevity is not my strong suit, so this will be a learning experience for everyone. But I’ll also come back here to the blog and give you a little more story behind the video if there is one.
For the first video, I’ve gone ahead and put together a little montage of that one time we went to a high ropes course with ziplining, right here in the western suburbs of Chicago called GoApe. They have a number of courses around the country, so there may even be one in your backyard too.
I was excited and nervous, and we spent a glorious 4+ hours sweating our brains out and adventuring high in the trees. Most of the adventure was pretty run of the mill, and I surprised myself by walking some of the course without holding on to the ropes. In many cases, you had the option of taking the “hard” path or the “easy” path, and 90% of the time, I took the easy path.
The one exception was the Tarzan swing near the end of the course, which you’ll see in the video below. What you won’t see in the video is the number of times I counted out 3-2-1 go…and didn’t go. Or the aftermath.
Well, here’s the video first. Then we can talk about the aftermath.
“Fuck me.”
Yep. That’s exactly how I felt. Because as it turns out, I had gone and fucked myself. With my lack of upper body strength (y’all I have leg strength like nobody’s business, but my arms and core need some serious help), I was unable to attach myself to that spiderweb of rope to climb up to the tower where Brian was standing. To add insult to injury, the harness I was wearing was uncomfortably digging into my body, so I was also in pain.
And that’s when the screaming began.
30 feet above the ground, hanging from some cables, and sitting in a harness, I had a panic attack. I felt like I was stranded and there was no way out. I needed help, but I didn’t know if help would ever come. I was helpless and afraid and screaming to get me out of there. What felt like an eternity later, a woman showed up to assist me. Apparently, I wasn’t the first to get myself stuck on the Tarzan swing. The woman hooked up a third harness dealie, and pulleyed it up to me. I connected to it, and she was able to help move me over to the tower and up just enough that I could crawl onto the platform.
I was ashamed, embarrassed, and feeling pretty low. Would I even finish the course?
And then I remembered that I’m resilient as fuck, and I finished the last two paths across the trees and the final zip line. And that zip line reminded me that I could jump again, even when the last jump failed me. And after watching that 60-second video? I feel like a bad ass mother who won’t take no crap off of nobody.
So, YouTube is doing this thing where small content creators aren’t going to be able to make money off their piddly little videos anymore unless they have over 1,000 followers of their channel. Would you do me a solid and subscribe?
