Author: Robert Elessar

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Squaring away a queasy stomach

It’s Tuesday morning, and I’m not writing any fiction today, because I don’t feel terribly well.  I took a lot of pain medicine yesterday, of more than one kind, and I think it upset my stomach.

Indeed, I woke up very early this morning feeling nauseated.  I wasn’t queasy enough to throw up, which is in some ways disappointing, since that always brings at least a bit of relief, but I was certainly unable to rest.  I decided, finally, just to get up and get an Uber in to the office, since I knew if I waited too long I might choose to stay “home” for the day, and that wouldn’t make me feel any better.

So I showered and then ordered an Uber; today the prices were reasonable, even for a ride all the way in to the office, which helped cement my decision.  It’s frivolous, of course, in that it’s an unnecessary expense, and I really need to avoid doing it too often.  But it ended up being interesting.

I decided, while en route, not to do any writing in the car, either on my phone or on my laptop computer, since I was worried about car-sickness.  Instead, I eventually started playing with the notion of the standard Uber tip buttons.  I thought, to myself, if I were to give a 25% tip (the maximum automatic one), that fact would increase the total amount paid, and so the net tip would be less than 25% of the new total.  So, if I added 25% of the extra, that would increase the total even more, but it would then still be less than 25% of the new total, so I would need to add more, and eventually it would converge on a final number.  As I did a quick bit of figuring, I realized that the final amount I was approaching was 33% more than the original amount.

I realized—this is not a terribly impressive mathematical insight, I know, but I was and am queasy and so it was an interesting distraction—that this process effectively entailed an infinite series, in the form of 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +… and so on.  The first little ad hoc trial I had done made me realize that, at least that series had taken n as 4, and iterated it, giving a final number that was 1 and 1/3.  That seemed interesting.

I wondered if this was a general pattern.  So, using a calculator this time, I took one then added a fifth, then added 1 over 5 squared, then one of 5 cubed and so on, and pretty clearly arrived at a final total that was one and a quarter.  A few other numbers made it clear that this was general, and it makes sense if you work it backwards.  25 (one quarter) added to 100 gives you 125, and 25 out of 125 is always going to be on fifth of the new total , or 20%.  33 and a third (or a third) added to 100 gives you 133 and a third, and 33 and a third out of 133 and a third will always be a quarter of the total.

And then, of course, there’s the old mathematics joke about an infinite number of mathematicians going into a bar, with the first one ordering a pint of beer, the second ordering a half pint, the third ordering half as much as the second, the fourth ordering half as much as the third and so on, until finally the bartender holds up a hand and says, “Gentlemen!  Know your limits!” before drawing two pints of beer and putting them out on the table.  This is because 1 + ½ + ¼ + … goes to 2 in the limit as iterations go to infinity.

So, the series 1 + 1/n + 1/n2 + 1/n3 +…converges to 1 + 1/(n-1), which is (n-1)/(n-1) + 1/(n-1), which is n-1+1/(n-1) or just n/(n-1).  I’ve tried to start working the algebra of the infinite series to produce this result (just for fun), but didn’t put much time into it, and it’s not really necessary, since I can see the result clearly by working backwards.

Of course, looking at my result, I know this is really basic stuff, and at some level I already “knew” it, at least formally.  But there’s nothing like working out a thing for yourself to make it sink in and make true sense to you.

This is a bit like something I did when I was in the Education Department at FSP West during my involuntary vacation with the Florida DOC.  I was helping inmates try to get their GEDs, which was rewarding work given the circumstances.  But at one point it occurred to me that I didn’t think I’d ever seen the Pythagorean Theorem proven*.  So, I set out to prove it for myself, just for a laugh.  It looked something like this:

pytho

I didn’t use any of the standard, purely geometrical proofs that one often sees, but instead applied a combination of geometry and algebra that I kind of fiddled together on the spot.  I don’t know if what I did was perfectly rigorous; probably not.  Nevertheless, after I’d worked things through and simplified my algebra and indeed came out with c2 = b2 + a2, I was more convinced than ever before that the Pythagorean Theorem was not merely a well-supported hypothesis, but was indeed a theorem, and that given Euclidean geometry and so on, it was absolutely true.

All this is frivolous, or trivial, or whatever the term you might want to apply.  It certainly has little bearing on my day to day life.  But it is reassuring to think that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible to have new insights into fundamental ideas and things, however basic they might be, even at an older age (in my forties and fifties in these cases).  The human brain does not stop “growing” or improving after one reaches one’s twenties or thirties or after one has left one’s teens (or at least, whatever kind of brain I have doesn’t stop).  Even old dogs can be taught new tricks; and how much more amenable to teaching are naked house apes!

I’ve often been frustrated when people complain that they learned things like the Pythagorean Theorem in high school (or whenever) and had never had to use them at any point in their lives.  That may well be true in a simple sense, though I think the usefulness of that theorem might surprise people (it appears often in the workings of advanced physics, for instance, including in the Lorentz transformations in Special Relativity, and also in calculating the probabilities of outcomes from the magnitudes of the wave equation when makings measurements of a quantum system).

But ultimately, I feel like asking such complainers, “Do you do push-ups in order to become better at doing push-ups?  Do you do bench presses and squats to become competitive squatters and pressers of benches?  Do you jog to become professional joggers?  Do you do yoga to become a champion yogi?  No, the vast majority of people who do such things do them to make themselves fitter overall, stronger, with better endurance and flexibility, to be better able to do the many things in the world for which it will be an advantage for them to improve their strength and their flexibility and their endurance, and to be healthier overall!”

So it is with exercise of the mind, except the mind is far more plastic, far more able to be improved and trained, than the structures and strengths of the muscles and bones and ligaments and cardiovascular system.  Learning some of the methods of geometry and algebra and calculus, learning basic physics, including Newtonian physics and thermodynamics, learning some Boolean logic, some probability and statistics, some basic biology and chemistry…all these things are both inherently useful, and also give you skills and tools and abilities that are adaptable to hitherto unguessed situations and problems in the world, and give you insight into how much commonality there is to the structure of reality.

Understanding a bit about Chaos and Complexity theory can help you recognize why the specifics of the weather are fundamentally unpredictable but nevertheless the climate can be amendable to explanation and broad prediction.  Understanding a bit about Bayesian reasoning can give you the comfort of knowing that, even if you have a positive mammogram, and that test has an 80% sensitivity, you probably have nothing like an 80% chance of having cancer.  Indeed, you could be an order of magnitude or so less likely than that, depending on base rates and false positive rates and the like.

And in a somewhat orthogonal area of inquiry, if you want to understand something about the human condition, it wouldn’t hurt to expose yourself to the works of Shakespeare, who wrote about that subject as well as or better than practically anyone else ever has, and who did it in remarkable and beautiful language, coining figures of speech we in the “Anglosphere” still use, regularly, in daily life, four hundred years after he created them.

Also, if you live your whole life without ever having read book one of Paradise Lost, I think you will have sadly missed out on a great experience.  It’s not really a very long read.  Milton made his Satan a relatable and charismatic, almost heroic, character, and seeing how he did this can help you understand the power and persuasion demagogues and ideologues can bring to bear in the world, and how dangerous and yet enticing they can be.  Also, Milton’s writing is just beautiful, sometimes better even than Shakespeare.

And in To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell prefigures the works of Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young by over 300 years.  And I’m pretty sure Pink Floyd referenced the work in Time.

Anyway, that’s what I did this morning to distract myself from an upset stomach, showing that these pursuits and skills can have wildly unpredictable uses.  So, until and unless you have actual organic illness that prevents your brain from learning, you can still grow, and can take more and more of the universe into your mind.  And, as Milton’s big bad himself said, “What is else not to be overcome?”

*It probably was at some point in my education, but I didn’t recall the proof, so it had clearly never really sunk in for me.  I didn’t doubt the theorem—all the greatest mathematical minds of antiquity and modernity were convinced of it, and it has always worked in practice.  But that’s not quite the same thing.

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The moon may be a harsh mistress, but her eyes are nothing like the sun

I was going to write this post on my laptop computer, since I had brought it with me back from the office on Friday, thinking to write fiction this morning.  However, I am waiting for fares to go down to normal levels for Uber or Lyft this morning, so while I wait, I figured I might as well write this post on my smartphone.  It’s inconvenient to write on the laptop computer while waiting at the house, because to do so I need to set up a TV tray table type thing.  That’s not hard, of course, but it’s still more effort than I mean to put forth for something that will hopefully only entail a few minutes’ delay.

I should just have gotten up when I was awake‒well, okay, not when I was first awake.  There would be no point in going to the office in the literal middle of the night.  But if I had gone to the Tri-Rail station early enough, I might have gotten on the 4:20 train.  Still, who knows?  Maybe Uber rates were twice as high as usual even then.  I don’t know why the ride services are so busy at this hour on a Monday morning.

Whatever it is, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with the eclipse that will be coming today.  That phenomenon is cutting a line from the southwest to the northeast across the country, including up by my sister’s house.  I won’t be seeing it, of course, since I’m down here in south Florida, and there won’t be another opportunity to watch one in my lifetime from anywhere readily accessible to me.

I could have gone; I was invited to visit by my sister.  The people at work thought I should go.  But when I started looking into booking either buses or trains or planes‒even though I did renew my state ID to make things easier‒I felt tension bordering on dread at the prospect of traveling in any of those ways.  So I didn’t go.  And here I am.

***

Ride rates have now dropped to normal, and I’m outside waiting for my Uber.  I was hoping to be able to ride my bike to the train station; I changed up my upper body workout a bit last week, and it felt different enough that I thought I might be able to use the bike without issue.  I rode it a decent distance on Saturday, with minimal trouble, though I felt a bit stiff overnight.  Then I rode it some more yesterday, and while riding I felt fine.  I even felt rather good, if slightly breathless.  But then, overnight, the stiffness and splinting and spasms started up again, so I fear that’s just not going to work.  I also have soreness in my right Achilles tendon and significant pain in my left knee, and my left side feels like it’s been infused with hot metal.

***

I’m at the train station now, still in pain (of course) and seated on the ground because I was too late because of the Uber delays to get a good seat where I prefer to sit.  It’s annoying, but I guess I would have been even later if I had ridden my bicycle.  Then again, at least I would have had the good feeling of having gotten some exercise.

Oh, well.  I don’t know whom I think I’m fooling.  I don’t expect to get back in good shape any time before I die.  Every time I try to exercise (so far) it screws me up with worsening of my chronic pain.  I wish I could just shut the pain off, but biology is not readily amenable to compromises in that area.  Pain, like fear, is too essential.  All things that suppress either of them‒even when the pain and/or fear have become thoroughly dysfunctional‒cause terrible side effects.

I can’t go on much longer like this.  It’s almost too bad that the solar eclipse is not some harbinger of disaster, but of course, it is not.  It’s merely a consequence of the geometry of three bodies whose mutual orbits lie nearly in the same plane.  If the moon’s orbital plane were identical to the Earth’s around the sun, there would be a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse with each orbit of the moon, and predicting such things would have been far less impressive to the native peoples of Hispaniola when Columbus used his knowledge thereof to dupe them into going along with his plans.

Some modern people seem barely less credulous, despite being avid users of the Internet and World Wide Web.  Why, the leading independent candidate for president is full of ideas so absurd that they would have been rejected as plot points in the later seasons of the X-files.  If you caught him at the right time, you could probably convince him that early vaccines had been used to mind-control him and that he had assassinated both his uncle and his father.

Sorry.  I’m grumpy.  My apologies.  I’m in a lot of pain‒more so than usual‒and of course my sleep has been horrible, though at least I napped some over the weekend.  I also replaced the shower-head in the bathroom, but that’s not very impressive, and I had the cable people out to replace the modem for the Wi-Fi, but though that was absurdly nerve-wracking, it’s hardly a big accomplishment.

I feel horrible and rotten and disgusting.  I wouldn’t give myself 5 stars even on an Uber or Lyft scale (in which, if someone doesn’t get 5 stars the app asks you what went wrong, but only gives you pre-programmed, simplistic options for explanation, eliminating the whole point of a 5 star rating system‒3 stars should be the average, but instead it’s something like 4.9).  I wouldn’t give myself an A even on the Yale grading scale (in which, it seems, the vast majority of students get As in the vast majority of their classes‒again, destroying the whole point of the grading system and eliminating any incentives to excel).

Maybe I should write a whole post about that issue, how (among other things) grade inflation makes the prestige of elite educational institutions evaporate, since in the real world, business is competitive, and a 4.0 from a school where everyone gets a 4.0 and there is no merit-based admission will gradually (but not necessarily slowly) come to be not worth the virtual paper on which it is written.

Again, I’m sorry.  I really don’t feel well at all, and I don’t feel good at all, either*.  I hope you all feel significantly better than I do, physically, emotionally, morally and otherwise.  I’m sure you all deserve it more than I do, though “deserves” is for the most part a vacuous term.

I hope you all have a very good day.  If you get a chance, and are in its path, observe the eclipse (but don’t do it directly, not with unprotected eyes).  It’s not an especially impressive cosmic phenomenon, but it’s still pretty cool.  It’s particularly cool that the human race understands the universe well enough that these phenomena, which confused our ancestors so mightily, are almost banal to us, and we can predict and plot them out centuries in advance.

It’s particularly uncool that despite how much is known and understood, there are people who live in the modern world and who constantly use devices that rely on quantum field theory and general relativity yet still think a solar eclipse might be some supernatural sign.

Heavy sigh.  What can you do?  The world is tragically comical and comically tragic.  It’s probably not worth the effort.  And I’m darn near sure that I am not.

*Yes, I mean two different things by those two words.

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Not A Blog Post…

…it’s just a quick update/bit of bragging.  I wrote about 1600 words this morning on Extra Body, and then I even played a bit of guitar for about half an hour (and sang with it).  I’m extremely rusty, particularly the singing, but it’s nice that some things come back seeming easier than they did the last time I played.  I guess I didn’t lose those learned skills, which is nice.  Writing is always relatively easy, though it’s not as if I’ve ever really stopped doing that.

No posts or updates this weekend unless things change.  I will write fiction on Monday, and if you want, I can leave little updates like this afterwards.

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This is not an altered Shakespearean quote, in case you couldn’t tell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the first time in quite a while, this is my weekly blog post, the way I used to do things.

I’ve not been very well lately, even by my standards.  By which I do not mean that I haven’t been writing.  Monday morning I wrote just under 1400 words on Extra Body, which I guess is a good thing.

Then, Tuesday I did not go into the office.

I’ve had a particularly bad time lately regarding my insomnia.  Since Friday night, I haven’t had a single night with as much as four hours of sleep, and many of the nights have seen significantly less.  On Tuesday morning, I just stayed home and took some Benadryl, which only made me doze off for about two hours.  Then, Tuesday night I got another few hours, and went to work Wednesday.  I felt a little loopy during the day yesterday, to be honest, and occasionally I even acted a bit silly.  I suppose everyone at the office thought I was feeling better.

But even my pain has been worse than usual, too, probably largely because of the sleep deprivation.  I don’t think that the causality works in the other direction, because it’s usually not pain that wakes me up; it’s the semi-panicked feeling that I must have overslept by hours and hours, even though it’s only been about five minutes or so since I dropped off.

In any case, I have some kind of feeling of anxiety or vulnerability while I’m asleep.  You’d think I was a Vietnam veteran or something, except I was born in 1969, so I would have been very young indeed to serve.  Whatever it is, I don’t feel safe, or at least secure, when I’m asleep.

Still, it’s not as though I’m safe when I’m awake.  The thing is, no one is safe, not entirely, and no one ever has been (as evidence, note that almost all people who have ever lived are currently dead).  And I frankly find life mostly painful and stressful and exhausting and lonely and dreary, so I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of such that I’d feel worried about having anything taken away from me.  It’s weird.

Anyway, I didn’t even bring the little laptop computer with me on Monday when I left the office, so I didn’t have it when I was on my way to the office (extremely early) on Wednesday morning.  Instead, I decided to use the Word app, which I’ve mentioned before, and I started to write the beginning of HELIOS.  I did not plan to go far, and I didn’t, writing just over five hundred words‒just beginning to introduce the setting, really.  Then I got to the office and wrote a bit over 800 words on Extra Body, bringing my total new words that day up to nearly the same as on Monday.

On Monday morning, I even strummed the guitar just a little bit.

Unfortunately, there has been no joy in writing fiction‒nor in playing guitar, come to think of it‒since I’ve restarted doing it.  I don’t blame the fiction, of course.  Nor do I blame the guitar.  The problem is my own faulty hardware and/or software, my operating system or particular programs or I don’t know what.  To quote C3PO, “He’s faulty!  Malfunctioning!”

I wish I could get some kind of system update that would fix some of the bugs.  Or at the very least, I wish I could reboot from time to time‒in other words, that I could just get a restful night’s sleep.  I feel that if I could get just a good night’s sleep, it might be almost like a little resurrection.  I still recall how good it felt on that day in the nineties when I had my last (or at least my most recent) good night of sleep, from which I awoke refreshed and rested the next day.  I don’t recall what I did that day, but I felt amazing.

I don’t know how I could accomplish that, though.  I’ve tried medications of various kinds, but they’ve tended just to make things worse.  I can force myself unconscious with Benadryl, for instance, but I awaken feeling groggy and confused and more out of it than when I went to sleep.  I’ve tried getting massages of various kinds, from real massage therapists and so on, but I guess I can’t really relax with a stranger.  And massage chairs, unfortunately, just don’t do it.

So it sucks, and I’m tired, and I’m in pain, and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a glimmer, not even a glint.  All I see is a vague sort of swamp-light haze, a sort of sickly phosphorescence.  There’s just enough light to be able to take in the dreariness of my surroundings.

Blackness would be better, honestly.  Black, silent, empty oblivion seems quite preferable to my life, in which the only joys I know are the guilty (and steadily diminishing) reward of food, and‒as Steve Martin said‒a dishwashing liquid.

I need just to opt out.  I need just to work up my nerve.  That’s the hard part.  Fighting against those ingrained drives to stay alive even though it’s not merely utterly pointless but almost entirely without joy (yet almost never without pain, both physical and psychological).

It’s been getting old for a long time.  I’m sure you’ll all agree.  From within, I feel about a thousand years old, or a million, or a billion‒but I’m not an organism built to live that long.  So, again, I’m faulty and malfunctioning, held together by gaffer tape and twine and mud and twigs and clothes-hanger wire and paper clips, with modeling clay stuck in some of the holes to keep the damp from getting in.

Anyway, that’s my status for now, which is nothing new, just more (and gradually worse) of the same.  I hope you’re all feeling much better than I am.  At the very least, you deserve it for being patient enough to read my blog.  That’s a definite trial by ordeal.

I will do my best to keep writing fiction tomorrow, and I plan to do next week what I planned to do this week, though hopefully with at least a little bit more sleep.  By which I mean, I want to try to write fiction every day but Thursday.

If you see a post go up on some other day, it means I lost my resolve for that plan, at least temporarily.

If you don’t see a blog post at all, not even next Thursday, then either I’ve gotten sick, or I’m dead.  The longer time passes with no posts, the more likely it is to be the latter.  We can always hope, right?  I don’t know, maybe you think it would be a negative thing for me to die.  I’ll even admit that I am afraid of dying, by which I mean the process.  I don’t so much want to die as I want, most days, to be dead.

Silence.  Oblivion.  These things so often seem so much better than the noise and stress and tension and pain of awareness.  If I could just become “comfortably numb” it would be a vast improvement.  But that’s not likely.

TTFN

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“I can see you’re out of aces”

Well, it’s Saturday morning and I’m on my way to the office in the back seat of an Uber, against my better judgment, for various reasons, into some of which I may (or may not) get during this post.

The day has not started auspiciously.  I got up and got ready to shower, selecting my clothes for matched colors* and all that, and then turned the shower on…and the shower head popped right off, and water shot all over the place.  I tried an impromptu fix, but there’s cracked plastic in the portion that grips the actual shower head in place, and I’m going to need to provide a stronger repair for that.  I have some things in mind, but in the meantime, I had to wash my hair in the sink and write an IOU to my body in the form of antiperspirant and aftershave.

Of course, I could either get in touch with the owner/landlord or my former housemate to get it fixed (or replaced), but that would entail having one of them come into my room at some point, and I’d rather avoid that if I can.  I think I’ll watch some videos about how to put in a new shower head and/or go to wikiHow for an eventual fuller fix.

That’s if I don’t just die before it becomes relevant, which doesn’t necessarily seem like the worst option.

I had abdominal pain yesterday during the day similar to what I had on Wednesday, which I think I wrote about here.  It may be because I’ve been trying to institute a form of daily exercise that I used to do, but which I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s putting strain on my mesentery or something.

I suppose it could be an abdominal aortic aneurysm that’s getting close to rupturing, but that seems unlikely‒I’ve had MRIs and such of the area in the past and there’s never been any sign of such a thing, and they don’t just happen overnight.  It’s kind of a shame in a way; if one of those ruptures and you’re not in very close proximity to an operating room, you’re in for a probable quick death.

That wouldn’t be too bad.

It’s also very unlikely to be appendicitis; although it is similar in character to the initial stages of that disease, if it were that, it would have progressed by now.  Appendicitis doesn’t come and go.  At least, I have never heard of a case in which it does 

It’s probably just a combination of something I have been eating and my attempt to do new exercise.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  It’s just one more of the numerous forms of pain, both literal and figurative, that one can experience in life.  I’ve also been getting some threatening esophageal spasm, something I know and recognize from doleful experience, and that is a very unpleasant sensation.

I guess I shouldn’t restart that exercise, after all.  I had tried it as an alternative to walking because of the irritation of my left knee, but I guess I’ll have to find some way simply to adapt and ease that knee’s trouble.  It would be nice to use my bike, but I’ve had trouble with that due to my back.  Still, maybe if I commit to it, I can make biking something to which my body will adapt.

Sorry, I know all this is probably incredibly boring.  It’s also probably just silly fantasizing, since I don’t think I’m ever going to get back into any kind of good shape.  I want to lose weight, because I find myself disgusting, but I keep falling back into bad dietary habits, or developing new bad dietary habits.

It might be easier if I could think of any good purpose for getting healthier other than just living longer in the profoundly unsatisfactory state in which I currently live**.  Pink Floyd may be right when they say that hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way, but though I revere much of their work, I am not, in fact, English, so I don’t want to do it.

If I have any English blood, it’s very dilute, so to speak (though I am an anglophile nevertheless).  Most of my ancestry is Irish, with some Scottish here and there, unless I am very mistaken.  I never did the “23 and Me” thing, but others in my family have, and though there were little surprises here and there, as far as I know I have few direct genetic connections to the Angles (or, presumably, the Saxons).  Mainly it’s the Celts.

That was another weird little tangent, or digression, or however else you might prefer to refer to such deferrals of main ideas.  I don’t really have much more to say today, anyway.  Don’t expect a blog post on Monday or on Tuesday or on Wednesday.  I may succumb and write a post on any or all of those days, but my intention remains to do fiction writing on those mornings.  I also intend to go back to taking the bus at least on the way back to the house, unless or until I can get used to walking without causing too much exacerbation of my left knee, or to biking without exacerbating my back.

Of course, we could all get lucky and I could have something fairly severe going on in my belly, and I might never write any blog posts or fiction again.  If not now, something like it will happen eventually.  “The losing card I’ll someday lay,” as the song says.  In the end‒as it was so beautifully put in the Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler‒we all break even.

In the meantime, for those of you who celebrate it, please have a Happy Easter tomorrow.  I hope you get a chance to enjoy some time with friends and/or family, and that you all feel at least a little bit personally resurrected.

*That’s a minor joke; I only wear one “color”, top to bottom, inside and out.  It makes everything less stressful.

**I don’t mean Florida, though that would make for a reasonably funny joke.  I mean “state” in one of its other standard uses:  the specific condition that someone or something is in at a given time.

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I hope you all have a good Friday (get it?)

It’s Friday, and for those of you for whom this is the last workday of the week, I hope you have a good weekend; I work tomorrow, so this is not a TGIF sort of Friday for me.  I am obviously writing a blog post today, and I plan to write one tomorrow, as well.  Aren’t you lucky?

However…

…my current plan after that is to bring my small laptop computer with me when I leave the office tomorrow and then, next week, write fiction in the morning every day except Thursday, on which day I will revert to my old, once-weekly blogging.  I don’t know how long this pattern will last; I’m not making promises, merely predictions.  Still, I want to try to finish Extra Body and publish it, and maybe even start writing HELIOS afterwards, though that’s a longer term prediction, and so, like the weather forecast, it becomes inherently less reliable.

I already reverted to the old form of blog title yesterday, that of using a Shakespearean quote, altered to insert some form of the word “blog”.  I hadn’t planned to do so, but since I discussed some matters about which I wished I could take vengeance, I naturally thought of Shylock’s little speech in The Merchant of Venice.  I had to have a title anyway, and it was Thursday, so, to quote Doc Brown**, “I figured…what the hell.”

(Had it been Saturday night, I might have thought it all right to say, “What have I got to lose?”)

I didn’t include a picture, as I often used to do for my Thursday posts (imagining that this would garner me more readers).  That’s because finding a usable picture, then modifying it to suit my needs, was always very effortful.  I could do it pretty quickly, and some of the results were even fairly creative and artistic (in my opinion), but they were not worth the effort.  And if they drew more attention, they drew the attention of people who were more interested in pictures than in words, which is not my intended audience, at least not for this blog.

Oh, my!  I just realized that this is “Good Friday”.  It seems odd to call “good” the day memorializing someone’s crucifixion, especially if it’s the crucifixion of a good person.  Still, “good” is a fairly protean concept in any case, and I understand the reasoning behind it, such as it is, for the day, but it still seems slightly perverse to me.

It first occurred to me to check if it was indeed that traditional Christian holiday because there seem to be slightly fewer people at the train station at this time than there usually are.  As far as I know, the train schedule is a standard weekday one, and on Sunday it will be, as always, on a Sunday schedule, so there’s no need to modify it for Easter.

I don’t think I’ve ever ridden the Tri-Rail on a Sunday, come to think of it.  But I have ridden it on many a “holiday”, when it was on a restricted schedule, because my office, like so many businesses in the modern world, is much less likely to take national holidays off than used to be the case for most organizations a few decades ago.

The businesses of the modern world are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (of sorts) in which were any of them to change and improve their practices (in the sense of being less aggressively competitive and allowing employees more days off), they would be outcompeted, would lose business, might go out of business, in which case their employees would also be harmed by losing jobs, which would affect the overall job market, dogs and cats would live together…mass hysteria!  In such situations, there is no way for individuals to change their practices without harm to themselves and even to the system, even if those practices are plainly not optimal.

It is for these reasons, among others, that governments are instituted among the peoples of the Earth (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), to try to act upon situations that will not correct themselves.  Unfortunately, governments too can fall into perverse equilibria of various kinds, and once they do, getting them out of it can require significant, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals.

Think of having to pull the power cord on your computer to restart it because it’s gotten bogged down or frozen, and Ctrl-Alt-Del isn’t doing anything at all.  If they haven’t been auto-saved, you might lose some files on which you were working, but at least the computer can be useful again.

That’s a strained metaphor, I know, and I apologize.  But sometimes one does have sympathy (albeit not full agreement) with Jefferson’s notion that, for people to remain free, and presumably for governments to do what they are supposed to do, there should be a literal revolution/rebellion every twenty years or so:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

That’s a bit extreme, perhaps, but maybe it would be interesting if, say, once every twenty years or so, everyone in government had to be replaced.  This is beyond the concept of term limits, and it would not be a staggered affair but would happen all at once.

I know, I know, there would be many detriments, including harms due to the fact that, ceteris paribus, people tend to get better at jobs the longer they work at them.  There would be real losses and setbacks associated with everyone being new to the government.

But then again, when people do politics as a career, they often learn bad habits, and the system can develop unplanned but subsequently entrenched and self-reinforcing negative patterns, equilibria that cry out for punctuation***.  These lead to losses of opportunity, economic losses, the loss of lives, and the occurrence of needless suffering‒but these costs are usually unnoticed because they are diffuse and scattered.  It’s related to the way we don’t recognize antacids as genuinely life-saving drugs, because we’re not aware of the many people who would have died‒who used to die, and often quite young‒from ulcers and perforations and gastric and esophageal cancers.

It’s also related to the fact that, environmentally and public health wise, nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels for the world and for people’s health.  The number of illnesses and premature deaths per capita caused by even the worst nuclear disasters, even if they were scaled up to account for the greater preponderance of fossil fuel based power, is probably little more than a rounding error compared to the respiratory illnesses and other causes of suffering and premature death due to airborne particulates and similar problems from fossil fuels.

Well, there I go again, swerving all over the shop from one tangent to another, like a space probe passing near a bunch of unrealistically closely packed planets and having its trajectory repeatedly altered as it does so.

Speaking of such things, I do wish I could find a way to keep the energy I tend to have on Monday mornings for physics and mathematics and make it last through the rest of the week.  But my mental energy and clarity seems to be swiftly diminished by the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity throughout the working days, so even by Tuesdays, I am usually significantly enervated.

Well, whataya gonna do?  This post has gotten too long already, anyway, and we’re getting close to my train stop.  I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday have a truly good Friday, and the rest of you as well.  Tomorrow, I’ll probably wish you a happy Easter.

*An interesting phrase combining a present tense verb with a future-oriented adverb in a way.

**That’s the one from Back to the Future, not the one who makes the really great canned sodas you can get in good delis and similar places.

***To bastardize a concept from Gould and Eldredge.

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If you prick us, do we not blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m fairly sure it’s Thursday.  I have on my Thursday trousers*, at least.

Yep, it’s Thursday; I checked my phone’s readout.  I was pretty sure anyway, but when my memory jibes with an external measure of which I have no current reason to be suspicious, that drives my credence even higher than it already was.  Most days I don’t need to double-check.  Most days, my internal experience of reality is persistent and consistent enough that I’m well aware of what day it is, usually even when I “first” wake up, to such a degree that if my smartphone’s readout gainsaid that, I would suspect that the phone was malfunctioning.

Today, though, I am mildly fuzzy-headed, relative to how I usually am.  I spent most of yesterday with some manner of persistent and non-peristaltic abdominal pain that left me very grumpy; it was good that I got started on payroll early and finished it early.

I didn’t leave the office early.  No, no.  I didn’t leave until nearly 7 pm, though it was different people who kept me late this time.

That’s part of the problem with things being so lax for my coworkers:  I have to be at the office first every morning (I do get there earlier than absolutely necessary, since I can’t sleep in the morning, anyway, and it’s better to travel before rush hour).  And I am also the last to leave at night, since I lock up the office.  Yet I live farther away than almost everyone else who works there, and I don’t drive.  So I am subject to the vagaries of each day’s least time-sensitive person, whoever it might be on any given day.  Often, the people who stay late do not arrive on time in the morning.  They are often also the people who work into and sometimes through lunch.

I ought to find a way to punish these people.  I ought to take extreme vengeance upon them, “in this life or the next”.  But I probably will do no such thing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m a bit fuzzier than usual because I didn’t even start eating any dinner or winding down until 9 o’clock or so last night.  And here I am at the train station slightly less than eight hours later.  So, plainly I did not have a full night’s sleep‒but that never happens, anyway.

On to other matters.

I still don’t know what to do about my fiction writing.  Writing this blog every day increases the daily readership by a significant margin, such that, in the few weeks in which I was doing 2 days a week, there were only about two thirds as many visits per day that I posted.  But, of course, it’s not as though I reach very many people even on my best days.

I am probably wasting my time doing this, both in potentially boosting the reach of my fiction, and in trying to improve my mental health by talking about it (there’s no sign of that making any difference, is there?).

I don’t know.  I suspect that if I suddenly just stopped writing this blog, there are only maybe two people in the world who would notice quickly, and they are both family members.  A few others might eventually vaguely realize that they were no longer getting posts from that weird guy who has insomnia and depression and goes on and on and on about it all the time.  Perhaps they’d wonder whether I just stopped blogging, or if I died, and if so, whether that was due to accident or illness or suicide

Actually, it’s reasonable in many‒perhaps most‒cases to call suicide a death due to illness.  It’s just a kind of illness that hasn’t been recognized as such throughout most of history, and still is not met with the attitude that would be useful from most people who interact with its sufferers.  Of course, it isn’t caused by any virus or bacteria (as far as we know) and so is not contagious in any straightforward sense (though memetic contagion cannot be ruled out in all cases).

Then again, people have only known about the contagious nature of things like smallpox and typhoid fever and the black death and the flu and various other infectious and parasitic diseases for a very short time.  But those are the comparative low-hanging fruit of illnesses, prevention and treatment-wise.  When a disease is caused by a definitive pathogen, an invader, there is a target that can be eliminated, if possible, to the unmitigated benefit of the one invaded.  It was a clear and definitive good for people when, for instance, smallpox was eradicated.

Problems related to malfunction or dysfunction or conflicting function of the organism itself, on the other hand, are much trickier.  The structure and function of a biological organism is akin to a vast and vastly complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where interventions in one region can have hard-to-predict effects elsewhere.  And, of course, once we’ve eliminated or at least significantly curtailed all the “easier” targets, then only harder ones remain.

Then people will complain about the slow pace of medical progress and the fact that some people must take lifelong medications to treat things like diabetes and high blood pressure, imagining that this fact is only and entirely due to, say, profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies.  Meanwhile, some of them will actually complain about and even resist the use of such things as vaccines, which have given them the luxury of being able to worry about things other than, say, how many of their children will die of measles encephalitis or will be crippled by polio.

It’s enough to make one want to paraphrase Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, and remind people that they rise and sleep under the blanket of the health and longevity provided by medical science and then question the manner in which it has been provided**.

I don’t know how I got onto that tangent.  Neither do I know why I got onto that tangent.  It’s all pointless, anyway.  I hope this hasn’t been too disjointed a blog post.  I also hope that you all have a good day, and a good rest of the week, and a good upcoming month, and a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives, and a good rest of eternity.

As for me, I’d be pleased just to get a good rest.  But I don’t expect that to happen any time before I die.

TTFN

*Yes, I have a pair that I wear specifically and only on Thursdays.

**But they don’t question it in any honest, serious, intellectual sense, such as would entail actually studying and deeply understanding even basic undergraduate level biology (to pick up a  weapon and stand a post, so to speak).  It’s remarkable how many problems seem so simple to those who don’t really, actually know Jack Shit about them.

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.

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Would YOU eat Zel’dovich pancakes for breakfast?

It’s Tuesday, and I’m writing another blog post rather than throwing some kind of curve ball and doing my fiction writing today, since I wrote a blog post yesterday, when I had scheduled myself to write some fiction.  I don’t know if that counts as a double curve ball or as a capitulation to a simple, over-the-plate, none-too-fast soft pitch.  It’s probably the latter, but I suppose there is no absolute right answer, and the judgment would depend upon one’s point of view.

I’ve realized that, contrary to what I wrote yesterday‒to what I honestly thought was the case‒I did not bring my small laptop computer with me when I left the office on Thursday.  I had unplugged it with the intention to pack it, but then I had left without it.  I can’t recall ever having done that before.  It goes to show just how crappy I felt on Thursday, I guess.

I really want to keep writing fiction.  It would be a shame to take this new story that I’ve well begun, with over 10,000 words written so far, and let it just fall by the wayside.  Then again, I’ve left The Dark Fairy and the Desperado hanging, and more egregiously, I’ve left Outlaw’s Mind hanging, so it’s not as though there is no precedent.  And, of course, in the past I’ve left stories incomplete many, many times.  But it seems particularly sad, now that I’ve published 5 novels and 2 collections of “short” stories, to fall back into that pattern.

But I need to find a way to be able to work fiction writing into my daily routines without messing up habits that have become somewhat compulsory for me.  I’ve tried to find ways to block out the noise in the office, so far without much success.  Yesterday I bought a rather inexpensive pair of noise-canceling headphones.  They didn’t do that good a job at the noise canceling; they reduced it a bit, but it was still there, though if I put in earplugs as well and then also played a YouTube video about field theories and similar stuff, if helped, but that is certainly not a combination of measures I could take while trying to write fiction.

I’m of two minds (at least) about the headphones.  I’m glad I didn’t spend very much on them, since they don’t turn out to be as effective as my more old-fashioned, gun-range and airport style ear defenders (when combined with ear plugs).  They can also play music or the sound from videos, but I didn’t get them for that.  I already have things that can do that.  But I wonder if more expensive ones would do any better.

It’s a shame that no high-powered movie executive has read any of my books or stories and approached me to option them for movies or shows or anything, but it’s obviously not surprising.  I’m terrible at self-promotion, more by temperament than merely due to lack of skill.  This blog is my closest approach to self-promotion, and I spend most of my time here spewing my random and often depressed and depressing thoughts in some wishful, pseudo-Freudian free association kind of exercise.

Of course, it’s about as useful to me as Freudian psychoanalysis* ever has been clinically demonstrated to be for anyone, which is to say, very little, if at all.  Nevertheless‒and also like psychoanalysis for many of its patients‒it has been habit forming, and I feel awkward and disjointed without it.

Also, as I noted yesterday, it’s the only means by which I keep contact with anyone other than my sister in the world outside of the office.  I’ve really become a shell of my former self, and the fact that there is physically more of me now than there has ever been before only makes that more biting, the irony enhancing the contrast with the past, when I used to relieve suffering and save lives and be beneficial to the world.

Ah, well.  From a cosmic perspective, all such benefits will probably be transitory, or effectively be nonexistent.

Which reminds me:  yesterday I was looking at the abstracts of some recent papers on “quantum cosmology” uploaded onto arXiv, the preprint server.  Obviously, most of these subjects were well beyond my expertise truly to be able to follow, but I get the concepts involved in most of them.  Also, exposure to the mathematical formalism when I don’t know how to manipulate it often makes it easier to understand later, as there is familiarity and applicability that helps add to the more complete picture I gradually build in my mind about such things.

This has happened to me more than once in the past.  I don’t learn by rote, I learn by building mental models and maps and structures that link areas of knowledge and understanding together.  So, I don’t learn quickly, but I learn deeply and durably.  I think this is a much better way to go.

Anyway, that’s tangential.  What was amusing is, I read about a paper involving some deSitter** models of inflation in a universe which (if I recall the abstract correctly) was matter-dominated in early moments and so had no uniform pressure (unlike radiation-dominated situations, which, if I’m remembering correctly, is pressure intensive and homogeneous, and is how our early universe probably was).  In such models, if I understood the point correctly, you could find more noteworthy inhomogeneities than seen in radiation-dominated phases, which makes sense, since the radiation pressure works against gravitational collapse.

So, the model discussed would be unlike our universe, in which the CMB demonstrates extreme homogeneity, down to a few parts in a hundred thousand, even from one edge of the cosmic horizon to the opposite edge, encompassing regions that could never possibly have been in any form of direct causal contact at least since the hypothetical time of inflation.  The light from each side has only just now reached us, and so is only halfway across to the other side, and may well never reach it if the universe expands quickly enough.  Yet the temperatures are the same to a few parts in a hundred thousand, which is probably more than can be said about the room you’re sitting in now.

One type of this theoretical homogeneity in the model in the abstract had apparently been previously described as a “Zel’dovich pancake”.  This is apparently nothing new (first described in the 1970s), but is a really amusing way to think of a cosmic structure, and I kind of want to look into it and see what it describes, to see if I can understand, at least superficially, the math behind it.

Wow, that was a whole ‘nother tangent of much greater departure than before.  I think I’ll call that good for now for this day’s blog.  I’m kind of all over the place, and if I’m not too careful, I might undergo decoherence and split into multiple versions of myself.  That seems all too possible, since I’ve never been naturally inclined to very impressive coherence in the first place.

I will probably be writing here tomorrow.

*Not to be confused with the more general term “psychotherapy”, which can be useful depending on the type of therapy and the person receiving it.  CBT is one of the most effective of these; it didn’t work all that well for me, but I’m annoying and perverse, so that’s no surprise.

**DeSitter spacetimes are just spacetimes with positive cosmological constants‒like our universe, with its apparent “dark energy”‒which will tend to drive accelerating expansion.  The whole “holographic universe” concept was motivated, or perhaps inspired, partly by the Bekenstein-Hawking recognition that the maximal entropy of any region of spacetime is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of that region.  Any greater entropy in the region would add to the mass of the black hole associated with that horizon, and so would make the horizon larger; thus that is the maximal entropy for that initial region.  QED (Quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics) if you will.  The holographic principle regarding a universe has only ever been worked out for anti-deSitter spaces, with negative cosmological constants, which we know is not the case for the universe in which we live because…well, because we’re alive, and those spacetimes tend to collapse rapidly.

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Surprise! It’s a Monday morning blog post

It’s Monday, March 25th‒only 9 more shopping months remain until Christmas‒and I’m writing a blog post today (on my smartphone) instead of working on my short story, even though I brought my laptop with me when I last left the office.  I left (slightly) early on Thursday, and did not go in on Friday, because I was feeling quite ill.  I don’t know exactly what the nature of the illness was/is, but it was probably a respiratory virus.  I’m mostly over it now.

I’m still at the house while beginning this, because I’m waiting for Uber/Lyft rates to come down to reasonable levels before I accept one.  It should not cost all that much to get a ride less than 5 miles away, especially when I tip generously*.  I also have a bus pass available, which is quite a bit cheaper, but that would take quite a bit longer, whether I use it to get to the train or all the way to the office.  So, I’m not going to do that today, probably, but I may do so in the near future (Also, there are no bathrooms on the buses, but there are ones on the trains; this, for me, can be a serious concern).

I decided to write a post today mainly because I feel that I’m releasing most of my connection, such as it is, to the larger world by writing fewer posts.  Certainly, my readership has declined by a significant percent per post already.  Of course, I doubt that more than a handful of people would notice that I was gone even if I stopped completely.  I don’t know if I’ll keep this up or not, but I don’t think I can keep going back and forth.  I have to have some kind of mental momentum/inertia** to keep doing one thing; bouncing from one to another doesn’t seem to work well for me.

Obviously I would like to keep writing my stories, but if I go back to that 4 to 5 days (or more) per week, I would lose practically all sense of connection with the outside world other than weekly calls with my sister.  I like those weekly calls, of course, but at least when I write my blog posts, I know that a dozen or two people are, in principle, aware of my existence, and at least some of them actually read my stuff.

I guess that’s the sort of immediate feedback with activation of dopaminergic centers of the brain (the nucleus accumbens and related structures) upon which social media and similar situations depend, and of which they take advantage.  But it is (almost) all that I have, really, so that’s that.  It’s not as though I have any friends.

My sister lives in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse (which doesn’t narrow her location down by much, so I don’t think I’m being indiscreet for saying so), and she invited me to come visit to see it.  I really was going to try; I renewed my state ID to make travel easier, and I looked into bus and train and airfare, and they all seemed not too unreasonably expensive (unless you want a private compartment on a train, which would be cool, but would be ridiculously costly).  Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do it.  The prospect of traveling in cramped quarters for even the length of a plane ride seems just too unpleasant to tolerate.

I’m sorry about it; it would be great to see my sister and neat to experience a solar eclipse.  But the neatness thereof would not outweigh the prospect of the trip.  It’s pretty pathetic, I know, but then I don’t think I’ve ever specifically claimed that I was not pathetic.  My frequent readers will probably agree that I have been wise not to so claim.

I’m not sure what to do about this writing situation.  I sometimes consider just writing my fiction and maybe trying to do voice recordings a little later in the day, then editing and posting those as YouTube videos and embedding those as posts here.  I had reasonably good positive feedback when I did that before, but I don’t know how long it would last.  Also, I don’t know if I would lose people who prefer to read rather than to listen to a “video”, what I call an audio blog.

It’s probably all pointless, anyway.  I don’t think many people will probably ever read my work, fiction or nonfiction, or listen to my talk or my songs.  Likewise, though I have technically done a small part to add to the scientific knowledge of humanity, specifically relating to gliotoxin***, I’m not likely ever to make any contributions to quantum field theory or particle physics or cosmology, because while I think I am capable of contributing to them, there’s too much catch-up necessary, and I am limited more in energy even than in time‒there’s too much to which I have to adapt myself from day to day, and that burns my willpower up like nobody’s business.

It’s not as though I can just stop working.  At the beginning of a week, I can find the energy to start reading texts and other things relating to the pertinent fields (not just quantum ones, ha ha), but by the end of any given Monday, I am already so mentally drained that, come Tuesday, I don’t usually crack a single text.

I am, regrettably, not independently wealthy, so I can’t just go off and study.  I am also not mentally suited to seeking out and applying to graduate programs in appropriate fields, nor would I know quite where to begin.  I’m also pretty old to start such a thing, though I consider that less of a concern.  Mainly it’s just an “executive function” issue, as they say.  Also, I don’t think I could in good conscience accept loans or grant money for education.  I don’t think I’m a good risk; I’m too likely to kill myself sometime before finishing any academic program.

It’s not impossible for an autodidact to achieve at least some things‒after all, everyone is really self-taught, since it’s not as though anyone can do the learning for someone else.  They can only point the way; everyone has to walk the path individually.

I’m very tired, though.  If I could sleep decently, it would be easier, I think, but maybe I’m wrong.  Like the fella once said, it would be a real kick in the head for me to develop good sleep and find that I didn’t feel any better, would it not?

It’s a test I’m unlikely to encounter.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I expect I’ll write another post tomorrow.  Have a good day.

*Of course, like restaurant owners in America, Uber et al rely on tips to make up a good portion of their drivers’ pay; that way they can keep a bigger chunk of the fees for themselves and pay less out of their own pockets.  I would say they should in good conscience do otherwise, but they’re in something like a Nash equilibrium (as are all the various American restaurateurs) in that if they change their practices, they will be outcompeted by others who do not, and no one will be helped overall.  It’s one of those situations in which true collective action or legislation would be required to correct the inadequacy.

**Remember, inertia doesn’t just refer to an object’s tendency to remain at rest, but also to its tendency to continue moving in a straight line (or at least along a geodesic) at a constant velocity.

***Don’t bother looking into it.  It’s esoteric and not terribly interesting for those not working in mycology.