dysthymia

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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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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.

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Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

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“It’s like…writing on the surface of a lake”

It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.

As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office.  This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post.  It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*.  I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points.  I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.

I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train.  It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride.  I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end.  But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better.  I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one.  It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff.  But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.

I don’t know what the best thing to do is.  This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you.  I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.

Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it.  Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids.  But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.

I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating.  Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else.  I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating.  I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?

Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on.  I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass.  I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.

Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  I guess that’s good.  It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book.  It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen.  That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.

Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on.  I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would.  Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.

Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it.  I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all.  I have no particular goal or purpose in mind.  I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently.  Also, I’m getting close to my stop.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day.  I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.

*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays.  There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on.  I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.

**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice.  That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them.  Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it.  It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all.  Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies.  Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.

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Top o’ the workweek to ye.

It’s Monday, and I’m writing this blog post at the train station after having walked here from the house.  I did a bit of working up to the trek over the weekend, walking about four miles wearing my boots on Saturday (and getting a modest sunburn in the process), then a shorter distance yesterday, wearing lighter shoes, all to try to counteract some possible deconditioning.  It seems to have worked at least to some extent, because I was able to walk the whole way this morning without stopping to rest.

Of course, it’s possible, in principle, that my preparations over the weekend were of no help whatsoever.  It’s even possible (in principle) that I would have found it easier to walk this morning if I had not prepared at all.  However, given what I know about the nature of adaptive physiology in humans (and humanoid creatures like me), I give both of those possibilities fairly low credence.

I downloaded the MS Word app onto my smartphone over the weekend, hoping that thereby I will make it easier to work on my fiction even if I don’t bring my laptop computer with me.  The app is linked to my OneDrive account, as is the program on my computer, so I can use the phone to write and update not just Extra Body but also, if I so choose, Outlaw’s Mind or even The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  I think no one is interested in having me work on either of those stories (possibly ever again), but please, correct me if I’m wrong.

I am considering changing my blogging pattern, especially if I can keep up my regimen of walking to (and also, at least part of the time, from) the train station.  I plan to cut back on the blogging to Tuesdays, Thursdays, and on the Saturdays on which I work, which will be every other Saturday.  That way, I’ll keep getting at least some new fiction writing done three days a week.  Thursday and Friday (also Wednesday, if I recall) of last week, I got no work done on my new short story once I’d written my extremely gloomy blog posts.

Much of this, like other plans, depends on me getting a minimally tolerable amount of sleep.  My sleep was still fragmented quite a lot this weekend, but I took two Benadryl tablets on Friday night and one and a half on Saturday night, so I slept relatively well, at least for me.  The Benadryl has unpleasant ill-effects on my ability to concentrate, so I took none last night.

Interestingly enough (to me, anyway) the time adjustment this weekend was somewhat useful.  When I started waking up on Sunday, quite early even after the Benadryl, I looked at the computer clock and thought that, well, at least I wasn’t waking up too early.  Of course then I looked at the microwave clock and realized that it was “spring forward”* time, and I was waking up really quite early for a Sunday, especially after 1.5 Benadryl.

Still, given the shifted time, that particular “early” isn’t quite as early relative to everyone else as it might have otherwise been.  I still started waking up well before my intended time to get up this morning, but not as much before it as it would have been before the “time change”.

I’m hoping that the walking and such will help me be prone to rest (or supine to rest depending on how I lie down, ha ha) a little better.  I think a lot of what prevents me from being able to do what I mean to do a lot of the time is my lack of sleep.  If I can manage to improve that, things may seem better.

I remember, when I was young and even more foolish than I am now, I used to wish I didn’t need to sleep, or at least not to sleep much, envying the people I’d heard of‒truthfully or not‒who didn’t need to sleep as much as others.  I didn’t quite recognize that I was already beginning to be that way, myself.  After a certain age, I was almost always the first person to get up in the morning at home, and even when my friends and I would stay up very late, I was almost always the first of us to awaken.

Sleep doesn’t actually feel enjoyable or even pleasant to me.  It’s not something to which I look forward; there’s no reward sensation associated with it, and if anything it is filled with stress and tension, partly my dread of how early I’ll awaken and how tired (but not sleepy) I’ll feel when I wake up.

I know there are people who really like and enjoy sleep.  I am not one of them.  I simply become tired, and that’s unpleasant, and so I go to bed and go to sleep, and eventually start to wake up, usually not feeling good, not feeling rested, but feeling perhaps a bit less tired than I had‒though not always.

The only time I ever enjoyed the prospect of going to sleep and felt good going to sleep was when I was on Paxil for depression.  Unfortunately, that came with a host of side effects that made it not a great answer for me and my depression.  But it was interesting to have the subjective experience of looking forward to sleep and really feeling good about the prospect.  Weird, isn’t it?

All right, that’s enough for now.  I’ll write another post tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have had a tolerable amount of rest and so won’t be too depressed.  Then, maybe, Wednesday I’ll just write fiction.  I guess we’ll see.

*It’s annoying that the new paradigm for “Daylight Savings Time” is set to have the jump back forward so early, because now the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” is technically inaccurate, because it’s not spring yet for more another week and a half.  If they’re going to squeeze the time change in so close together, why don’t they just get rid of it completely?  It doesn’t actually change time, after all.  Within any given inertial reference frame, time is conserved; gaining an hour now entails losing an hour later.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

It’s Friday, and presumably I’m not working tomorrow.  I don’t think I will work even if it turns out I am working, if you take my meaning.  I’m too tired.  My coworker was out sick yesterday, and so were some other people.  Unfortunately, I’m not sick, apart from the chronic, sick-in-the-head sort of sickness with which you all are no doubt familiar.

I’m writing this on my phone, though I brought my laptop computer with me yesterday.  I had thought to whip out a draft of a blog post on it then write a page of Extra Body before editing the blog post, but now I’m having to wait so long for an Uber that I decided just to take one into the office, anyway.

I hate how Uber always tries to get you to do the “share a ride” thing.  I wish they would stop suggesting it to me, or that there was some setting in the app that would let me tell them never to offer me a shared ride.  In the unlikely event that I want to share a ride, I’ll select that option from the start.  Stop “nudging” me.  It’s unpleasant enough for me to have to deal with the fact of the driver; I don’t want to share the back seat with some other stranger.

Actually, if I’m going to “share a ride” I’ll just take the flipping bus and pay pennies on the dollar, as the saying goes.  I really should just do that, anyway.  Uber and Lyft are bad habits, and not cheap ones.  In fact, I ought just to be walking to and from the train in the mornings, since riding the bike makes my back and hips absolutely scream with pain afterwards (which is very disheartening).

I took half a Benadryl again to try to help me sleep last night.  I don’t think it actually helped me rest, but I do feel groggy and incoherent this morning, so it’s had some effect, subjectively speaking.  I don’t know if you readers can tell, though.  It may well be that, from your point of view, I’m always more or less equally incoherent.

I feel that I’m becoming more and more decoherent with every day.  I wonder if my wave function is collapsing.  Can the Born Rule be applied to a human…or to whatever I am, for that matter?

I’m being silly, I know.

In a sense I suppose the Born Rule could apply to an individual if that individual makes a decision based on a quantum measurement.  There is, apparently, an app that allows you to do just that; it’s connected to a beam splitter in some lab somewhere, through which one photon at a time is being sent, and it tells you which direction a given photon ends up being measured.  Thus, you can make a truly random decision if you so desire‒as far as physics can currently tell, a fundamentally random decision.

A coin flip or a die roll is not fundamentally random, though for practical purposes it may as well be.  We don’t have access to enough information to predict a given outcome on a fair coin or die, but in principle it is possible.  Whereas with a photon going through a beam splitter, we have a completely, in-principle, unpredictable process.  The Nobel Prize was recently awarded to Aspect et al for their experiments that tested and confirmed the Bell inequalities, thus disproving anything but the most esoteric forms of “hidden variables” descriptions of quantum mechanics.

Sorry.  That was one of my weird tangents.  I’m a bit too mentally fatigued to restrain myself very well.

This sort of thing happens in real life, too.  Yesterday, I was talking about something to do with some song that came on the playlist to my boss, and I went off on some esoteric tangents about music and stuff, and I could finally just see his eyes start glazing over, so I pulled up short.  Then I caught myself looking up to see if I could find someone else in the office with whom to share some of my trivia and my thoughts about songs and various other things.

I caught myself in time, though, and retreated to my desk.  Then someone asked to change the music playlist to some pathetic new artist and related crap that wasn’t nearly as interesting.  I briefly put in my earphones and listened to some of the Feynman lectures on physics to block out the noise.  That didn’t work for long, though, because I kept having to do office stuff that required interaction with living humans.  And then, of course, I had to work through lunch, because three people got sales all at once, just as lunch arrived.

I hate my life.  I really do.  It’s not just work that I hate‒at least that involves some purpose, however unfulfilling.  I also hate my time “off”, my lack of friends, my apparent inability to be a friend, and my inability to be able to fucking sleep, along with many other things.

I’m so tired of it all.  I’m tired of writing this blog, but I feel stressed at the prospect of not writing it.  I don’t get tired of writing fiction so much as feel it’s an exercise in futility, and so I generally don’t get started anymore.

Then again, everything in the universe, ever, is just an exercise in futility.  As Charles Halloway said*, “Where do you come from?  The dust.  Where do you go to?  The grave.”  The same could be said of every planet and star and cluster and galaxy and every bit of the observable universe and everything else that may be beyond it‒metaphorically speaking, anyway.  Dust is something within the universe, as are graves, so it seems unlikely that the universe could come from dust.  But I think you get my point.

It’s that there is no point.

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I’m too tired to think of a good title for this post

I’m writing today’s blog post on my phone in the back of an Uber.  I could not sleep and figured I’d just head into the office, since it feels slightly more like home to me, at least when no one else is there, than does the house in which I sleep, .  I have my laptop (computer) with me, so I could write this post on it, but I think I would feel more awkward doing that.  It can be trying enough writing on it when riding the train, and the shifts and bumps and other minor accelerations in a regular car tend to be more irregular and pronounced than those in a railroad car.  There’s no track, for one thing, and also a car is much less massive, so it is more prone to lurch noticeably than a train is.

It’s a stupid waste of money to take an Uber, of course, but it’s not as though I’m saving up for the future.  I don’t expect any significant future, and to be honest, I don’t really want one, at least the way I feel most of the time lately.  Even the present is barely worth it, moment to moment.

I’ve recently learned that, in the UK at least, the average lifespan (the arithmetic mean, remember?) is only 55 years for people with autism spectrum disorder.  This average is no doubt weighted down by those who die quite young, but still, this is the UK, where there is a National Health Service.  Here in the US, where the average lifespan, at least for men, has actually recently begun to fall for the first time in any of our lifetimes, the average autistic lifespan is very likely to be lower than in the UK.  I’m 54 now.

I realize that there’s nothing magical about a statistical average when applied to an individual instance of a circumstance, but numbers mean a lot to me at least, and frankly, right now, the idea that there is a maximum predicted cutoff for my lifespan‒and that it is arriving soon‒is more of a relief and even a comfort than it is a horror.

Of course, I don’t carry an “official” diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, but as one who has, as part of his now-dead career, given who-knows-how-many thousands of “official diagnoses”, I know there’s nothing magical about them.  They are educated, best-available descriptions of what’s happening in particular instances in a medical situation.  They are useful for steering thought and decision making, but because they cannot address all details of an individual case, they can also shackle one’s thought processes and lead one astray.

One thing is clear:  I have some manner of atypical neurology.  I certainly have trouble with dysthymia and depression; I have little doubt about those diagnoses.  I have rotten chronic insomnia, which may be a symptom/sign of that probable neurodevelopmental disorder.  I also had a secundum atrial septal defect, and I have a slight cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, and these things both occur more frequently in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD (as opposed to the cardiac Atrial Septal Defect, see above).  They are far from diagnostic thereof, but their presence does shift my Bayesian estimates.  They can also be associated with other diagnoses as well, of course, but I don’t have nearly as many hallmarks of those disorders…at least as far as I’m aware.

Of course, each thing can also happen and stand on its own, being indicative of nothing but itself.  But I think we can all agree that there’s something atypical and dysfunctional happening in my brain, even if it doesn’t actually connect causally in any way to those other findings.

I did write a bit more than a page yesterday on Extra Body, which I guess is a worthwhile accomplishment.  I know it hasn’t been all that long, but I feel as if this only-one-page-a-day pattern is not giving me the benefit that I used to get from writing fiction.  Maybe it’s that I just get my juices going and then shut them down.  Maybe it’s that the story is taking so long to get on with itself.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just hoping for too much.  Hope is dangerous stuff.

I don’t know how to adjust my behavior, though.  I already tried to cut back on doing this daily blog, but found that not doing it made me very tense and stressed, since I’ve gotten into the habit of doing it.  It’s almost an OCD-like pattern.

I wouldn’t call it exactly anxiety that I feel if I think about not writing the blog (or doing any of a number of other things that I do by habit). It’s more of a kind of tension, a stress, and it can rapidly escalate into hostility.  Of course, all of these are associated with the sympathetic nervous system, the whole fight-or-flight mode, so maybe one could call my experiences anxiety.  Certainly, the physiological responses are related and quite similar.  But my mental state doesn’t feel fearful as much as angry, and even hateful.

Maybe that’s all just part of Yoda’s cliché little response to young Anakin admitting he was afraid in The Phantom Menace:  “Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering.”  I always wished Anakin would reply, “Yeah…the suffering of the people who made me afraid and angry.”  Oh, well, much of the Jedi philosophy in the prequels is kind of stupid, and it contributed to their downfall, but they’re fictional anyway.

Speaking of fiction, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my fiction writing.  I intend to keep writing at least a page a day, but writing it after I write my blog is stressful.  But not writing my blog is stressful.  And writing only one page a day of fiction is stressful.  And dealing with people being late to work and the noise and nonsense and the internally created rules that are not enforced when it’s inconvenient is stressful.  And commuting is stressful, and neither of the places between which I commute are places of comfort to me.

A large contributor to these problems is that, no matter where I go, there I am, and I am not comforting to me.

The Buddhists are supposed to have said that life is suffering‒or was that the Dread Pirate Roberts?  I suppose they might have agreed on that statement.  Still, you’d think that would be enough to counter Yoda’s little admonition, with the reply, “Everything leads to suffering.  What’s your pointy-eared point?”

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Below average night, average post

I had a horribly interrupted and just generally bad sleep last night.  One might imagine, after decades of insomnia, one would be relatively inured to the paucity of sleep one gets, and that the relative worsening of a single night would make little difference, but it doesn’t appear to be so.

Of course, it’s possible that something else is making me feel particularly horrible, and it has nothing to do with my exceptionally fractured night’s sleep.  It’s also even possible that the two facts are causally linked but in the other direction, and that whatever is making me feel bad is what made my sleep worse than usual, not the other way around.  It’s difficult to tell without more information.

It’s also possible—thought extremely unlikely—that everything I’ve experienced since early August of 1988 has been a dream, and soon I will awaken in the recovery room after my open heart surgery, thinking, “Damn it, I survived,” which is roughly what I thought when I first woke up from that surgery.  It was not a pleasant awakening; I was cortically blind for about a day (though I didn’t realize it at the time), I was (obviously) in quite a lot of pain, I had three chest tubes and a couple of central lines and an endotracheal tube inserted into me, and my hands were strapped to the bed rails.  I probably looked vaguely like something out of an H. R. Giger painting.

Anyway, the point is I feel really worn down this morning.  I almost wish that I hadn’t brought my laptop computer with me, because my backpack feels like it weighs twice as much as usual.  That’s an illusion, of course, but the experience is salient even if misleading.

I resaved this original file for yesterday’s blog post with a new name—not overwriting the original draft of yesterday’s post—in order to avoid having to start a new post with that (cr)Aptos font and change it to Calibri.  I wonder how many people like the new default font, how many people really don’t care, how many people, like me, dislike the new font, and how many people don’t mind it so much but don’t appreciate the whole “change for the sake of change” nonsense that motivates so much of the computer industry these days.

“All improvement is change, but not all change is an improvement,” as Eliezer Yudkowsky has said.  I could not agree more if I tried with both hands (which I am doing, at least while typing).  This is one of the reasons I hate political and related slogans in movements that simply talk about making “change”.  Change in general is easy enough to make.  If you ignite some thermite and napalm in the middle of a house, that will change the house.  For that matter, so will hitting the house with a tornado, or a large asteroid.

Does any environmental organization say, “Let’s work together to make real climate change”?  It would be slightly humorous, I suppose, but it would miss the point.

As an aside, the southbound train just pulled into the station across the way, and my computer automatically logged into its Wi-Fi and saved the draft of this post to my OneDrive, because apparently I’ve logged into that train’s Wi-Fi in the past and saved the link.  That’s pretty nifty, when you think about it.  Now it’s pulling out and soon I will lose that connection.

The ease of such things, and their automaticity, is quite remarkable and useful, though of course, it entails certain vulnerabilities as well.  Still, it’s fascinating just how well the nature of such codes as used in Wi-Fi signals allows them to transmit useful information with barely any connectivity.  This is the real difference between digital and analog signaling, and it’s one of the things that makes me want to study Information Theory more deeply.

I have an audio textbook (very basic) on information theory, but I don’t tend to listen to my audio books except during long walks, and I’ve fallen off that wagon a bit.  But still, Information Theory is really very cool.

If I were able to get good nights’ sleeps, if I were able to rest, I think I would be able to console myself with nothing more than learning about more of these really interesting subjects and having my own thoughts about them*.  As it is, though, I’m so tired and in pain and worn out that most days I just fantasize about going to sleep and never waking up.  It would be nice to have a better future than that, but there’s no good reason for me to expect it.

Meantime, I’ll keep writing this and, as I did yesterday, also write about a page a day of my new story until it’s done.  I hope each of you—and all of you collectively on average—feels better than I do today.  Come to think of it, if each of you feels better than I do, then your average, perforce, will be better than my level.  That’s trivial mathematics**.

*They’re not necessarily banal or unoriginal thoughts, either.  I predicted the tech stock bubble burst in the late nineties well in advance, I recognized an issue with LLMs and the like quite some time ago that was discussed in a Sabina Hossenfelder video yesterday, and I even had some ideas about the reversibility of time and the possibility of the big bang happening in both “directions” that I’ve discovered is similar to some real ideas from real physicists.  I’m not saying I had unique or remarkable or singular insights, but I don’t just passively take in stuff.  I build mental models—I don’t necessarily learn quickly, but I do learn deeply—and they can be useful, at least when I believe in myself.  In the nineties, I did not have the courage of my convictions, and I let a bank talk me into investing in a tech fund, despite my misgivings…and before very long, the fund had lost half its value.  Humility can be a false virtue sometimes.

** Incidentally, it’s possible in principle for 90% of people to be above average, but not for 90% of people to be above the median.  The median is defined, mathematically, as the midway point along an ordered list of ascending values in a group, so literally 50% of the members are at or above the median and 50% are at or below.  With the average—which usually refers to the arithmetic mean, in which one sums all the numbers of a group then divides the sum by the number of members of that group—one can have rare situations such as 90 of a hundred people getting a 51% on an exam and the remaining 10 getting 10%, which would give a mean score of 46, so that indeed, 90% of the test-takers would be above average.

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North is south and south is north and never the trains shall meet

It’s Monday morning again, against almost everyone’s better judgement.  I’m sitting at the train station, but I’m not entirely sure that I’m on the correct side to board my train.  They’re playing an automated announcement that the northbound train is boarding on the track 1 platform and the southbound train is boarding on the track 2 platform—which is switching the normal sides—but it’s not saying the specific train numbers that are switching, which it usually does.  I’m going to have to pay some attention to any changes in these announcements, but I’m currently waiting on the normally southbound side.

It’s very annoying to have to deal with these seemingly pointless incongruities and alterations so early on a Monday morning.  I don’t feel at all rested from the weekend; I feel physically very tired, as well as mentally and emotionally so.

It would be nice if the Tri-Rail people could just make it clear if there’s going to be an ongoing pattern of switching sides in the morning for a while.  It would be particularly nice if they could tell us what the reason for it is.  That way we might even be able to estimate how long it’s going to keep happening and so not have to keep switching from one side to the other, ourselves.

It’s also an interesting fact to note that on the way back in the evening, the southbound train on which I ride at that time has been arriving on its usual side, so the switching is not continuing on into the evening at least.

I don’t know why they’re doing this.  Possibly if I knew more about their train system’s workings and whatnot I might be able to come up with some reasonable hypotheses, but alas, I don’t know enough to make a good guess.  As it is, it feels like some peculiar, train-related psychological experiment.

I’m going to try to keep these blog posts relatively short if I can—really aiming to keep them down to the 800-ish word count, which is my usual starting goal, but which I usually pass by 200 to 400 words on any given day.  I want to try to preserve the extra time and energy I’ll need to do a little fiction writing every (work) day.  Maybe I should set a new goal of 700 words.

I did do some writing on Extra Body on Saturday—probably slightly less than a full page, since I wrote until I got to the next page as my target, and I was about a half page in, but the story is already just shy of 3600 words long.  As is usually the case, though it took significant mental effort to get going at first, by the time I was almost to where I ended up stopping I felt like I didn’t want to stop.

I’ve been resisting the urge to keep writing, though, because I’m trying to make the limited writing per day work for me to keep from getting carried away and writing too long a story.  Paradox City was meant to be a “short story” and was handwritten in its first draft, but it was nevertheless something like 40,000+ words long.  I don’t recall the exact length, but it’s not what would usually be called a short story; certainly it’s not the kind that might have been published in a magazine in the old days.  But it’s not really quite long enough to be considered a novella.

I don’t know why I’m worried about that notion, though.  I don’t know for sure that shorter stories are better or worse.  I just know that, if I want to keep writing this blog, I can’t write as much per day on fiction as I used to write, since the blog takes up most of the time I would otherwise dedicate to fiction.  And this blog is really my only regular manner of interacting with people in the outside world, apart from those at work.  But work is noisy and lots of the things there don’t make sense and just make me feel uncomfortable, especially during the day when the “music” is turned up so loud.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about any or all of this.  I don’t know why I should do anything at all, ever again.  Probably I shouldn’t.

Oh, by the way, the southbound train just arrived on its usual side, so a bunch of people had to switch.  And on the northbound side—to which I have switched back—I can see the green signal for northbound train traffic, so it seems that the plan is for the northbound train to arrive here.  Apparently that announcement was just an automatic announcement that was left running from before.

It would make me feel a bit better if I knew at least that someone in the Tri-Rail system was embarrassed and chagrined because they realized they had dropped the ball on this issue, and that they resolved to do better from now on.  However, I am by no means convinced that there is such a person.

Meanwhile, the tracker system online for the train doesn’t even show that my expected train exists, let alone which track it’s going to be using.  It’s all very frustrating.  Everything is frustrating, and there seems no reason to bother with any of it.  If I had some goal or joy in my life, I’m sure I could tolerate and even laugh about all these things; goodness knows I’ve done so in the past.  But when there’s no compensatory purpose or plan or hope for the future, all the little annoyances just wear me down.

My train is still not appearing on the tracker, but the next 2 ones are, and my train is already due to have arrived, but it’s not here.  I think I’m going to give up on all this soon.  It’s just the beginning of the week, and I’m already exhausted.

***

[P.S.  My train did arrive on its appropriate side, and only about five minutes late, but it still doesn’t show up on the tracker, even as I’m riding it.  How mysterious!  Maybe I should write a story about a train that doesn’t show up on a tracker because it’s not really a normal train, but some trans-dimensional or spirit train or something.  I don’t know.  I’m sure that’s been done.]

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With malice toward Aptos, with charity toward Calibri

Well, it’s Saturday, and I’m writing this post on my laptop computer—for the first time in quite a while, I think.  That’s where I’ve been writing Extra Body, and I figure I might as well write both things on the computer and bring it with me to the house and back to the office.

That’s what I did, which I guess is obvious.

I did in fact write some on Extra Body yesterday.  As is often the case, it felt a little clunky as I was getting started, but after a short while it flowed pretty easily, and I ended up writing about a page and a half; so the story is over 3,000 words long already.  I’m trying to keep from going off on tangents and getting into too much detail, and the less-ambitious target of only a page a day may be helping me do that.  We’ll see how well it turns out.

Sorry about that pause there, just now (perhaps you didn’t notice it, since it happened on my end, but didn’t necessarily happen on yours).  I was trying to look to see if I could remember how to change the default font in MS Word back to Calibri.

I don’t know whose nephew designed the “Aptos” font that Microsoft has made their new default font, but I hate it, and I wish ill luck, disease, and financial ruin upon the individual most responsible for its adoption as the new default*.  It has no advantages over Calibri that I can see, but it adds little, irritating curlicues and the like that are just unpleasant to my eye.

There’s also, as far as I can see, no reason to have changed it!  The switch to Calibri from, for instance, Times New Roman was probably justifiable because getting rid of serifs could make a raw document look slightly less cluttered while one is writing.  And, I guess, if one were printing a draft, it might use a little less ink.  Calibri isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as Times New Roman, but it’s clean and easy to read.

I don’t understand the point of this new, not-even-cosmetic change.

By all means, update the program regularly for improved functionality; no program is going to be perfect, and as people use it, they will discover little bugs and quirks, and these can be fixed, and new tools can be added.  But the little twiddles like this font change are much like the cosmetic changes to Google Chrome, which has rounded off all the virtual “buttons” on the screens, and the boxes, and all that related stuff.

Are there really people complaining that the buttons and the boxes and so on that adorn their computer screens are too boxy, that their corners look too sharp and angular?

If there are such people, can we please try to do our best to prevent them from reproducing?  It’s one thing to “baby-proof” a house by putting foam pads on the sharp corners of one’s furniture while a toddler is learning to walk.  But it would be weird to leave them on all through your offspring’s childhood, until they got old enough to head off to college or whatever.

That’s a bit what it feels as though Google is doing with their updates on the shapes of virtual buttons, only in this case it’s even stupider, because no one can bang his or her head on the corner of a button that’s merely a graphic design.

But at least the default font in Google Docs is still the same as it was before:  Arial.  It’s not exactly identical to Calibri, but it may as well be.  It’s a stripped-down, no-serifs, no-frills font where each of the letters is readily distinguishable from the others.

It’s easy enough, I suppose, to alter the font later on, as one is writing, and that can be useful.  If one is making a sign to hang in the office, for instance, it can be useful to vary fonts and font sizes and so on, to try to get the attention of the reader.  Also, when editing my works of fiction, I change the font on each run-through, so the work really, literally, looks different to me than it did while I was typing it.  I don’t know if this actually gives me a fresh outlook on it when I’m editing, but it feels as if it does.

And, of course, when my fiction ready to publish, it’s always going to be in Times New Roman or some other traditional, classic, serif-laden font, because why would you cheapen a work of fiction written for grown-ups with kindergarten-style type?  For working on drafts, the no-frills fonts are good.  But I hate changes that take place for no good reason.

Oh, well.  Whataya gonna do?  I’ve changed the font of this work in progress to Calibri, but that won’t have any Impact (get it?) on you readers, because the WordPress format I have uses one standard font for the main body of the post.

Life really is fundamentally and inherently unsatisfactory, isn’t it?  The Buddhists are right, at least about that.  You can see why the goal of Buddhism, upon recognizing this, would be to escape from the cycle of karma and rebirth.  Of course, reincarnation is a bizarre concept, especially since there’s not supposed to be any actual, subjective connection from one life to the next.  If one’s previous life’s memories and character are all erased and one starts anew, in what sense has that person been reincarnated?  It’s just a new person, almost as if there were no such thing as reincarnation.

Well, I’m not going to digress into that.  I hope you all have a pretty good Saturday and a pretty good remainder of the weekend thereafter.  Heck, I hope you have a great one.  Why not?  My hopes are even more useless to you than they are to me.  It’s like “sending” thoughts and prayers to victims of a tragedy; it does literally no good whatsoever for the people involved.  You’d be better off trying to do a rain dance for people suffering from a drought, because at least you would get some exercise.

That’s enough for this week.  If you’re unlucky enough—and if I’m even more unlucky—I’ll still be around and writing on Monday, and I’ll give you the latest updates on my new story-writing and on the twisted and crampy processes of my thoughts.  In the meantime, please do try to have a nice day, for your own sake, if you can.

*Note that, as I pointed out in my discussion on thoughts and prayers and the like, I’m aware that this will have no actual effect on the person in question.  If my malice had the power to cause harm just by its existence, there would be many, many, specific people who would be suffering this very day, and probably every day.  You may say, “Well, there really are many people suffering every day,” but believe me, you have no idea.  My natural, inherent ill-will is worthy of legend, and it’s just as well for the world and humanity that I direct as much or more of it at myself than at everyone else put together and that I inherently have very strong impulse control for such things.