On mentors, father figures, and the rain outside

My parents divorced when I was three and I only met my father when I was 18. I only met him then because I looked for him and insisted I meet him (at the insistence of my then boyfriend, who thought fathers were important). My father did not look for me, did not want to see me, and not have anything to do with me. His reason (ahem)? He wanted me to look for him, to make sure I wanted to see him and his presence was not forced upon me. Motherfucker.

I am not gonna tear you up with a sad story of a fatherless claudia growing up missing her father and thinking about him many many times. Truth is, I didn't miss him or anything, but I do think that his absence left me with a need for father figures or at least [older male] mentors. Or maybe not and all I am talking is bullshit, consequence of the very gloomy and wet weather outside.

What I want to say is that I do have a sort of life/mountaineering mentor and I do think of him at least once or twice a day, which is more than I think about my own father. While in the grampians, I thought even more about him. Actually, I thought about him everytime I entered the tent I had pitched.

Because you see, I had to pitch the tent at 1:00 am in the morning. Now this only can lead to a series of unfortunate events. Luckily, I didn't pitch the tent near a) the bathroom, nor b) the fire.

But out of the entire VERY flat campsite, I chose the only inclined spot. After slowly sliding the entire night: "on the mat", "off the mat", "back on the mat", "off the mat", "back on the mat", and being able to sleep on only one side (facing uphill) because sleeping on the other side (facing downhill) would land me straight on my nose, I decided the next day that anyway I'm gonna be here for a little time so there is NO POINT in moving the tent. However, everytime I entered the tent and saw that everything in it was slanted to the right, I would hear my mentor scold me: "You should have changed it. Why didn't you change it? I told you to change it. It was a better idea to change it." which is something that he does when one tends to fuck things up (turns out, I fuck things up easily and often).

Problem is, that little voice in my head was right. Turns out, sleeping for three nights in a slanted tent becomes worse and worse as your body gets tired and tired from climbing. Turns out, this may lead to back pain, especially since one is not young anymore.