(no subject)

Setting aside all the bother with Lysias, who, despite his (deserved) reputation as a man who can tell a compelling and straightforward narrative, starts out his first oration with three paragraphs of optatives expressing vague but effusive hypothetical compliments to the jurors of the case...

It's deeply satisfying to feel like I'm actually improving, in my climbing.

I mean, yes. I'm still on the V0 routes. I can't even start the ones with a steep incline, or the ones that go over corners. (The one on an incline that starts on two sides of a convex corner, then goes up over a ledge, is maddeningly difficult. If I try it five times, I might get to the second hold twice, and never to the third.) And routes that I've done before I'll still fall off of, or get stuck on halfway through...

But I'm getting better. I can try moves that used to terrify me with merely a small thought of, oh, yes, this might not work. Sometimes those moves do work. I can get my feet nearer to my hands that I used to, when I need a big step up somewhere. I'm getting better at hanging onto the wall with three fingers in one hold--if briefly--while I do a lunge for a new hold. Things that were once impossible or wildly improbably are now merely difficult and a bit chancy.

I'm getting better. Slowly. But definitely better. It feels...a lot like the moment when I went back over a fanfic series I was working on, and could tell that my later entries in the series had better pacing and better plots than the earlier ones. A long way to go: but with the knowledge that progress is being made.

(I'd like to feel the same way about Greek translation. But I'll take what I can get.)