More Congratulations Are In Order

Saturday evening, I attended an Event celebrating Team Bklyn (BklynTex1015 and TexBklyn1015) making their two thousandth find and one hundredth hide. This is especially impressive because the two of them have only been doing this for less than a year. It took me a year to reach a thousand. (I thought I was so high speed and low drag for that). After five years, I haven’t even broken a hundred hides. About twenty of us showed up to eat and have beers in their honor. As always, the topics of discussion meandered, from dart playing and Central Texas recruitment for Texas Challenge to invented languages and (in a private klatch away from the family friendliness) discussions of things beyond the statute of limitations. The hosts were even kind enough to place a new cache at the Event site for everyone to look for. I opted not to hunt for it myself because a) it was hot as all get-out and b) the Event was my cache for the day.

I’ve been to a lot of Events that celebrate milestones of one kind or another. Those are the kinds of things that bring us together as a community. Of course, Events don’t have to be celebrations of achievement. I’ve been to even more that were held just because someone decided to have a get-together because why not.

For some reason, I don’t tend to make a big deal out of the things I’ve done. From an Event perspective, that is. One might argue that this entire endeavor is me spreading my accomplishments, and one might not be entirely wrong about that. But it would never occur to me to hold an Event to celebrate something I did. There are a number of reasons for that (mostly stemming from my own neuroses), but the big one is that I rarely talk about what I do until long after the fact. While I am happy to laud those who do, for me personally reaching a certain number of caches or doing an amazing thing usually doesn’t strike me as something worthy of fanfare. I also find that I’m a little uncomfortable being the focus of such fanfare as well. I once went to another cacher’s Event celebrating his thirty thousandth cache and offhandedly mentioned to another attendee that it was the fifth anniversary of my streak. Soon after, my name was being spoken along with the host’s, which felt weird, like wearing white to someone else’s wedding. But celebrating milestones is an important part of the social ecosystem. If someone doesn’t hide, nobody can find; therefore if someone doesn’t celebrate, nobody will gather (which isn’t entirely true, but you get my point). So maybe the Bklyns have outstripped me again. They’ve already figured that their accomplishments are worthy of praise and an excellent reason to gather. Perhaps I should study their example a little more closely. Maybe I should write about my accomplishments less and celebrate them in a social way more.

Of course, that last sentence was partially metaphorical. We all know I’m not gonna stop writing…