So, for those who care, here is a rough breakdown of my recent appendicular situation: (times are approximate)
Wednesday, January 27th — I wake up in the morning with an odd pain in my side. I think at first that it’s a pulled muscle, but it doesn’t act that way. I decide to wait and see what’s up.
I was watching News Radio just now, which for those of you who might not remember was a sitcom in the mid-to-late 90s. It’s not a great show, but it has a mostly great cast and some good moments. Also I got it for cheap.
The episodes I watched tonight originally aired in April of 1996. Given that time frame, there were two lines in those two episodes that I found interesting to consider from our current perspective. The first was (roughly), “You can’t take something off of the internet; it’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
This is a very well-put and not-obvious truth. We, now, know this fact very well, but at that time I don’t think it was very widely understood. To see so prescient an idea spoken about with such eloquence, and on a mid-ranked sitcom, no less!
The second comment was not as prescient, but it still makes us think about how far we’ve come in our thinking about computers. Someone is given advice: “You don’t want to delete your file until you’re sure you have a hard copy.” When was the last time you deleted a file from your computer because you had it on hard copy? We delete files we don’t need any more, but the ones we do need, we keep them on the computer.
Back then, the computer was a tool for creating pieces of paper with writing on them. These pieces of paper were the artifact that contained the idea or the message. Today, the artifact is the file on the computer, and we only print to paper if we need to. We might use the paper to read on and mark up, or to bring with us if we need the information where a computer isn’t handy, or to hand out. In fact, we use the paper as a tool just like we used to use the computer as a tool.
Of course this isn’t true with all computer files. We still use software to create posters or magazines or books, and in that case we still think of the finished product as the thing and the file as the tool, but you don’t know how long that will last. It wasn’t long ago that physical photographs were the medium of transfer, but with today’s memory sticks and portable digital screens, that’s pretty much over already.
Both of the lines that I so liked were spoken by the character Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan, longtime UFC fight commentator and host of the hit show, Fear Factor. So, you never know where it’s gonna come from.
P.S.: While trying to remind myself what the internet was like in 1996, I came across this page, which is wonderful and worth a read:
https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm
It’s been a while since I did a book project update. I blame work, mostly. Or myself. Either way, it’s been so long that this post is actually the last one for 2009. On the 14th, I finished reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s “The Shadow of the Wind”, which was my 120th book of the year. I also was able to do some math and make it work out that my page average this year was precisely 310 pages per book. Last year I really struggled at the end of the year to hit my more modest goal — this year I’m done 2 weeks early. Next year I’m going to still go for 10 books a month, but I’m going to bump my page average up to 330 per book. We’ll see how it goes. For those who care, here’s my final stats:
The following is entirely fictional, just something I wrote and decided to not be a complete coward about it.
—
When we lost her, I lost a piece of myself. Her passing left a gap in my soul. I know, I know, that’s hackneyed, it’s a cliche, it’s what everybody says. I’m smart and articulate, I should be able to come up with something better, something more true or at the very least more original. Right?
The problem is, there is no more true statement. Sure, I could describe the sadness, how it sucks you in and engulfs you. I could describe the physical symptoms: the loss of appetite, the headaches and exhaustion. These are just symptoms of depression, though, and could be caused if your favorite car were totaled or if your home team bungled the big game at the last minute. Of course those things are sad on a much lesser level, but the basic components are the same, it’s just a question of how much and how often and for how long. There’s another difference, an entirely other thing that happens to you when you lose a person, and that’s what I and others are talking about when we say we’ve lost a piece, and that’s what I want to try to explain.
There was a time, when we each still had her and one other, that I was happy most of the time. Not everything was perfect, but whenever I found myself in a trough in the road, I’d just think of her and everything would seem better. It wasn’t any specific memory; once it was a bath she’d had the night before, how she wouldn’t go in until it was just the right temperature and that she farted and forgot to be scared long enough to belt out one sharp laugh before breaking into tears. Sometimes it was as simple as watching her sleep or pushing her in a swing, but whatever memory it would happen to be, it helped. It didn’t make the work easier or the pain lesser, but it touched the deepest part of my instincts and gave me strength.
It became second nature to me, like a dozing dolphin coming up for air, automatically and rhythmically. Throughout the day, I’d find myself reflexively going back to her in my thoughts. I’d be reading over double net lease documentation and she’d just pop into my mind, blowing bubbles or propped in the corner of the couch, sound asleep. After that, things just seemed… better. It didn’t just happen when things were bad; sometimes I’d be feeling great and I’d think of her and then I’d feel even better. It wasn’t a band-aid or a pep pill, it was a simply a cherry on top: a breath of wind at my back on a long walk home.
Now, of course, that’s all gone. No, not gone. It might be ok if it was gone; I’d lived without that for decades and was quite successful. The problem is that it’s all still there, but flipped over, poisoned. Instead of just being able to leave it behind me, I think about her more now than I ever did before. It’s a chain reaction: I could be anywhere, say, driving home and like always before she’ll pop into my mind. But now, instead of a cool breeze, it’s a dark wind. It stops my heart, catches my breath, makes my hands shake and my eyes well up. I’m nauseated and chilled and it takes everything I have to pull it back together enough not to wreck. Once I get it going again, get my mind clear, it’s only a matter of time until my focus wanders again and my natural reaction to the lingering ill-feelings from the previous incident is to call her back again. The only solution is constant internal vigilance.
So that’s my missing piece. It isn’t a figurative thing, no kind of Platonic ideal or metaphor but an actual, tangible void, as real as a missing limb and just as debilitating. There’s no better way to describe it. You don’t search for simile when describing a missing hand, and I can’t do it now either.
I had to leave the firm, of course. The practice of law isn’t as stressful and life-destroying as people make it out to be, but it is hard work and it demands faculties of which I find myself in short supply these days. We divorced soon afterward as well. Neither of us blamed the other but it turns out that the one person least able to help someone with a missing piece is the only other person in the world who is missing that same piece. We still love each other but we just can’t be together any more. It’s the insult to injury, this massive loss precipitating the death of an otherwise healthy relationship.
So here I am, a thousand miles from the only other place I’ve ever lived, a bachelor legal secretary living in a studio apartment overrun with roaches from the deli downstairs. People ask me, sometimes, in moments when they feel very close to me, how I keep going. That’s easy: nobody knew her but the two of us. We are the only people in the entire world who spent more than a total of 10 days with her. Her memory lives on only with myself and with her mother. I carry a precious cargo, so I don’t have an option. I don’t have to thrive, I don’t have to be happy, I don’t have to do anything except carry that gift with me for as long as I can.
It’s been like 2 months since I wrote anything in here. I have actually been doing some writing, but I’ve been throwing out more than I’ve been keeping. Also the new house and all that stuff is still taking up a fair amount of my time. Do you like excuses?
Despite it all, I’ve still been keeping up on my reading. I’m one book short of my goal for the end of the month, but I’m above my page goal, so I’m happy about that. I’ll write more later, promise.
The stats:
4 of the first 11 books I’ve read this year were written by Isaac Asimov. This isn’t a statistical fluke; I’m doing my best to read all of his books over the next few years. Let me tell you why.
I’d never really been a fan of Asimov. As a teenager, I was really into classic SF, reading as much Heinlein, Clark, Ellison, Bradbury and their ilk as I could get my hands on. I read Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage books at some point, disliked them greatly, and wrote him off from then on. Three years or so ago I decided that I should give him another shot, so I picked up all of his Foundation novels. I enjoyed them somewhat, but not enough to really get back into his work, so I decided that Asimov just wasn’t for me and that I probably wouldn’t be reading anything else of his.
I had, however, while shopping for the Foundation novels, found an anatomy book of his called “The Human Body”. I was really surprised to see that a science-fiction author had written a non-fiction book, so I picked it up, but was in no hurry to get to it and it sat on my shelf for some years. Last August, I finally read it and I was blown away at how good it was. It was incredibly clear, very detailed and very easy to understand. Since it was written in the 70s, the actual science was somewhat out of date, but that really doesn’t matter very much when you’re dealing with popular science like this.
It turns out that Asimov was never a science fiction author who wrote some non-fiction. He was really a popular science author who wrote some science fiction. He was not just any popular science author; he was an unbelievably prolific popular science author, with something like 350 books to his credit (the exact number depends on how you count them.) After learning all of this, I’ve decided to try to read his complete works. After having read about a dozen of his books now, I’m totally committed to completing the project; the man is a master explainer and I even enjoy having him explain things to me that I already know.
To that end, I picked up his book Opus 100, his 100th book which contains excerpts from and discussion of the 99 books he’d written previously, and I’m using the book list on its rear cover as a shopping list. I’m finding that this approach has kind of front-loaded the difficulty in terms of finding and affording the actual books, as I’m starting with all of his oldest and rarest work, but I will have to get all this stuff eventually. I should be done with the first 100 books in a year or two and then I’ll have to pick up Opus 200 and start the process over again. Should be a fun couple of years for reading.
And, of course, the reason that I didn’t like his science fiction writing was that it simply isn’t very good. In fact, most of his fiction work is really just the same as his popular science work but with thin plots wrapped around it. This is not the kind of approach that generally produces great literature. Luckily for me, he didn’t really write much fiction.
Ok, first post on my new blog. Super exciting. Or whatever. I’ve imported all of my old posts from livejournal, so any post older than this one is from there. Any comments on those posts from “do_not_lick” are me.
So, on to the book stats. Yup, I’m going to do the N Book Challenge again; I liked keeping track of what I read and seeing how much it actually amounted to. I also really enjoy looking back on my old lists and remembering when I read what. Kind of a book nerd nostalgia. This year I’m going to again aim for 120 books, or 10 books per month. I’m going to try for an average page count of 310 per book instead of 300. I think if I gradually increase my targets, I’ll eventually be reading twice as much as when I started this.
I’ll do another post later talking about the books themselves. I just want to get this numbers part out of the way first.
Well, there goes 2008. I did manage to meet my reading goal for the year; 120 books with an average page count of 300 per book. Actually 300.04, but who’s counting? I almost didn’t make it; I do most of my reading on the bus to and from work, and with the terrible weather and the holidays, I haven’t been on a bus in weeks. It was close going up to today, but this morning I inexplicably woke up at 4:30 and sat down to read. I finished Straight over lunch this afternoon, bringing me right to the finish line. Here’s my final stats for 2008:
I haven’t done a book status post for a while, and since I’m snowed in this morning, I figured I might as well. I was also holding off making this post until I finished Michael Moorcock’s The Vengeance of Rome, the last in a 4-book series called “Between the Wars”. I’ve been waiting to read these books for something like 15 years; I bought the first two books, Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage from the remainder table of the Border’s in Framingham, MA when I was in high school. I waited something like 3 more years until I was able to find a copy of the third book, Jerusalem Commands, which I thought at the time was the past book. It turns out, of course, that there was a fourth book, and Moorcock didn’t finish it until last year.
I could write pages and pages about these books. They’re like nothing I’ve ever read before and I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with a concise description for them. They follow the life of a man born on January 1st, 1900. His name is always unclear; we meet him as Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, but he changes his name on a regular basis as it most benefits him. The books follow his life from the age of 18 (at the end of WWI) to the age of 36 (at the beginning of WWII). He travels all over the western world, starting in the Ukraine, moving all over Europe and then on to the USA, then to northern Africa and then back to Europe. He works as a movie star, invents a laser beam to fight the reds in the siege of Odessa, ends up as a sex slave to a mad hermaphrodite in the Sahara, works to build Mussolini an air force and even dresses up like a woman to be Hitler’s dominatrix.
Part of the joy of these books is Pyat’s complete self-involvement and inability to see the reality of any person other than himself. He lies almost constantly through the books; he invents not only new names, but entirely new personas for himself as they’re needed. He pretends to be a count, to be a Colonel in various armies and to be a member of almost every major political faction in the world. While doing this, however, he is unable to recognize when anyone else is ever lying, taking everything said to him at face value. Even though the books are written in his voice and we see his world through his own warped vision, it is entirely clear to the reader when people are tricking him and he never, ever catches on.
Anyways, I’ll stop there. Here’s my stats:
While driving around yesterday, looking at houses, we came across a neighborhood where, in at least two different places, multiple streets came together all at once. Five or six at a time, they didn’t meet in simple geometrical patterns, but instead would all flow into great oceans of cracked asphalt, like dendrites entering the body of a neuron. There were no lane markings, no signs, no islands. I left me flabbergasted in a way that I don’t commonly experience.
As a gamer and a computer programmer, I generally find that I’m good at puzzle solving and at imposing order on disorderly situations. But this wasn’t a puzzle to me; it was a complete breakdown of my expectations for how roads fundamentally work. It was like as if the road suddenly went straight up the side of a building; I had no idea what to do. I knew which road I wanted to leave on, but I simply couldn’t figure out how to get there; did I drive straight across? Did I go around the edge? Was there some serpentine path that would be best? I felt like if I did the wrong thing, some SUV would come barreling in from another street and t-bone me into next Tuesday.
I think the essential thing here is that driving is dangerous, and to protect ourselves, we regiment it as much as possible. There are very few places that I drive where lanes aren’t clearly demarcated, turning orders aren’t well-defined and all you have to worry about it not rear-ending the guy in front of you and taking your turns at the right time. Once all of that was taken away from me, even though I was the only moving car in sight, I was paralyzed. I think it’s similar to the confusion people feel when moving from a right-side-of-the-road country to a left-side-of-the-road country, or vice versa.
I understand there are people who drive around in fields and other unmarked area all the time and they don’t have any problems, but that’s not me. Those folks are probably the ones who are always burning through a light just after it turns red anyways. I hate those guys.
In other news of yesterday, I accidentally bought two christian rock CDs in uncorrelated events.