Exercise

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WINTER forward, Fall back just doesn’t make sense.

Well, here we all are again—though I, at least, am not on the Mississippi.  I’m actually on the Tri Rail train, northbound between Hollywood, Florida and Deerfield Beach, Florida*.  But I suspect that most of you are not on the Tri Rail when reading it, though some small possibility of such an occurrence does exist.

There may well even be people reading this while on the Mississippi.  Of course, the Mississippi River is much bigger than the Tri Rail train system, and I think there is quite a lot of shipping of various kinds that goes on along its course, but I don’t know that there are very many people involved relative to the amount of traffic.  Of those people, a very small percentage are likely to be reading blogs (or other matter) relative to the people on the Tri Rail who might do so at any given time.

I’m sure there are legitimate ways to assess those numbers, but I don’t have enough information to do it.  I also don’t have enough interest to try to obtain the requisite information, even if it is available out there in the internet/web.

It’s a bit amusing to me that yesterday when I wrote my post, I was completely unaware that we had done the whole “spring forward” thing last weekend.  Part of the reason it didn’t occur to me is:  It’s not Spring yet, dammit!  What the hell is that, having the “spring forward” part of daylight savings time when it’s not even Spring?  Forget the fact that daylight savings time is a dubious practice to begin with; if you’re going to take the thing with the long-standing mnemonic “spring forward, fall back” and adjust the timing so it no longer applies…well, I can only say that such stupidity must have required an act of Congress**.

Anyway, it was funny, because I got on a train twenty minutes earlier than my usual one, and I noted, as I arrived, that the sun wasn’t even starting to come up above the horizon.  I thought to myself that it was remarkable how much difference twenty minutes had made.  But, of course, it was an hour and twenty minutes, it turns out, so that difference is less surprising.

Then, at the office, I noted that the microwave clock was off by an hour.  At first I assumed someone had just stopped cooking something and left time on it, but seven minutes and twenty-one seconds seemed like a long time to have left.  Still, people do stupider things.  I’m one of them, obviously***.

So, of course, as I reset the microwave clock, noting that no one had just left time on it, it flitted through my mind that maybe it was a daylight savings time thing, but again—it isn’t Spring yet, so I didn’t think that could be the case!

I was wrong, obviously.  It didn’t matter much to me either way, since even with the hour shifted forward, I was up earlier than my alarm by quite a bit, and I finally gave up and left, since I was up anyway, and that was why I got the earlier train.  Today, I just got up earlier anyway, again.

I’ve been walking to and from the train on both ends now.  Just since Friday, that means I’ve walked about thirty miles—twelve on Friday, twelve yesterday, and six so far today (rounded off, and with some loose change left out from the weekend).  I seem to have reached the point where I’m not troubled by new blisters, which is good, and I’ve adjusted my process the avoid such things in the future, for the most part.  I do have some achiness here and there, but it’s not that bad.  Sweat is my biggest issue, to be honest.  But I bring a change of shirt, and I have Lysol and deodorant aplenty, so as long as I rehydrate, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

I am a bit frustrated that I haven’t again experienced the “endorphin rush” thing I had on Friday.  Maybe that was just me being all pleased with myself for having walked so far already that morning, and wasn’t really exercise-induced endorphins.  Over the weekend, and particularly yesterday, I’ve actually been even more depressed than usual for me.

I guess you could tell that much from my post yesterday morning, and I can only say that my mood went downhill from there throughout the day.  My mental energy today feels slightly higher, but then again, I have overdosed on caffeine already this morning, purely because I didn’t want to be quite so glum when I got to writing this post.  It was deliberate.

I’m really not prone to be kind to myself, am I?  In fact, I tend to be unkind to myself a lot of the time.  It’s not without reason that I did a cover of the song Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails/Trent Reznor.  I find that its lyrics more or less literally express my feelings and facts about me…except that, from my point of view, needles are for pansies.

Anyway, that’s getting too revelatory, and so I’ll draw to a close now—just for today, I mean, not permanently.  That may be coming soon, but it’s not here yet.  In the meantime, you can look forward to reading whatever I write tomorrow and the next day and for however long I keep going.  I really hope it won’t be very long.

You can place bets if you like.  I won’t do any match-fixing, or whatever the term is.  As Doris Day sang, whatever will be will be—as it must be, for once a thing happens, there is no way it can ever have been otherwise than it was.

*Actually, it runs between Miami Airport and Mangonia Park, which is in northern Palm Beach County, but I don’t go to either of those destinations.  Indeed, in all the time I’ve ridden the Tri Rail, I’ve never once gone to either of those two stations, though I’ve been to and/or through most of the stations in between.  This is perfectly understandable and predictable, given that they are the two termini of the line, and so one never passes through them en route to anywhere else.

**It is not without justification that Dave Barry once used “act of Congress” as a euphemism for “taking a sh*t”.

***Both in the sense that I do such “stupid” things and that I probably am one of the stupider things that people have done, though I shouldn’t disrespect my parents for bringing me into existence.  They had no way to know how I was going to turn out.

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It’s inspiring stuff for an otherwise mundane journey.

I’m starting this blog post a bit later than I usually do—roughly an hour later—because, as I planned yesterday, I have walked from the house to the train station, which is about 4.8 miles, it turns out.  It took me almost exactly an hour and a half, which I guess is a decent pace, though I used to walk more quickly.

I suppose with enough training I shall improve.

Now I’m at the train station (not the one to which I take the bus, but the one from which I always used to set off), waiting for the very train I would have caught had I taken the bus to the train this morning.  So I won’t be arriving at the office any later than usual, but I may be tardy in my posting of this blog entry.

While I walked, I listened to The Fellowship of the Ring on Audible.  It’s a brilliant book to which to listen while walking any distance, because the characters are walking, themselves.  When I started, they were in the Prancing Pony, first meeting Strider (my namesake)*, and by the time I’d gotten to the train station, Frodo had just been stabbed on Weathertop and they were getting ready to repack the pony and head off the following morning.

It’s inspiring stuff for an otherwise mundane journey.

I’m not wearing my Timberland boots today.  I fear that part of the issue with them is that they don’t fit my feet quite snugly enough, and so I slide around a bit in them, and of course, that can lead to blistering.  I’m not sure why the fit is overlarge, though.  I’ve looked at the various reviews and whatnot of those boots, and people generally say that they are true to size, or else a bit small.

Whereas, for instance, the Under Armor shoes I had are actually a bit snug at my usual size, and a pair a half size up seem a more comfortable a fit around my toes.  New Balance walking shoes, such as the ones I’m wearing today, and more or less just right.

I’m leery of trying a pair of Timberlands a half size smaller, not least because they are not cheap.  Though, of course, Amazon does have a try-it-on thing you can do, but if you don’t want to keep a pair you have to send it back, and that’s annoying.  I can’t deal with crap like that anymore; it involves interacting with humans I don’t know and changing my schedule and my routines and all that other stuff, and it’s just not worth the effort.

Maybe I’ll figure something out.  Possibly just the walking itself will strengthen my feet, or alternatively will make them swell enough that they fit the boots snugly.  I will admit, after wearing the boots yesterday, they already feel much more comfortable than they did before, but I did not walk more than about three and a half miles yesterday, total.

I’d like to find something out that is more or less ideal, but there may be no such thing in the real world.  Reality is extremely complex, with all sorts of high order equations interacting with other high order equations all over the place.  It may well be that the possibility of finding something ideally suited in all aspects for any given purpose is functionally impossible.

This is one reason I dislike it when people use the word “perfect”, because in most cases it’s a notion that isn’t even well defined, let alone achievable.  Unless one sets clear and specific and precise criteria, judging anything or anyone to be perfect is just rhetoric, it’s not reason.  Powerful rhetoric can be enjoyable, like watching a boxing match or a martial arts movie, but it absolutely should not be allowed to sway one in important matters that bear on facts of reality or choices of morality.

Should we really let our politics, let alone our judgments of the facts of reality, be shaped by the words of someone who is—effectively—the best name-caller on the playground?  The difference between juvenile remarks—“Neener-neener,” “Your mama,” and “I’m rubber, you’re glue” for instance—and the words in most political discourse and debate is one of degree, not of type.

Imagine if Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem*** had consisted of him saying, “It’s true ‘cause I said it’s true, now what are you gonna do about it?  My grandma knows number theory better than you do.”  Or perhaps he could have invoked the seemingly more mature arguments:  “Of course, my political opponent would be skeptical of my proof, even though it’s obvious to anyone of intelligence that it’s correct.  The members of that party don’t want you to have the freedom brought by knowing that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2.  That’s because it threatens their power structure, and their special interest groups and wealthy lobbyists.  My proof may, like Fermat’s, be too big to fit in the margins of a letter, but believe me, my opponent’s brains, together with his genitals, are more than small enough to fit in such a space.”

Would that be a convincing mathematical argument?  Would it have anything at all to do with the truth of any proposition whatsoever?

Why do people both use and fall for such manipulations?  I know, I know, they’re just a bunch of tailless, nearly-hairless monkeys; why would you expect them to be more reasonable than baboons?  But it’s so frustrating mainly because nearly all of them appear to have the capacity to be rational, contrary to popular belief.

The very use of language itself requires syntax, grammar, logic, all applied at quite a sophisticated and often abstract level.  Almost all humans are capable of language starting at a young age.  They have the wherewithal to be truly reasonable and sharp-minded, almost all of them, with but a bit of effort.  This makes it all the more irritating when they don’t do so.

One doesn’t get angry at a starfish for having no curiosity about astronomy (despite what we call it), or a worm for not grasping quantum mechanics****.  And what does a sea squirt need with philosophy, especially once it’s achieved tenure?  But humans nearly all have the capacity for exceptional achievements.

Though I suppose “exceptional” wouldn’t be the right word if everyone did it.

How did I get on this subject?  I don’t remember.  Anyway, that’s more than enough of a post for today, and as I write this last sentence, having arrived finally at the office (and having now walked just shy of six miles already), I still need to do my editing.  So I’ll call it good.  I don’t think I’m going to be working tomorrow.  It would be good, after my first day of longer walking, to have a day of relative rest.  Then, next week, I shall do my walking, about 12 miles, every day.  That’s not too bad for a start, but not as much as my eventual hope.

We’ll see what happens.

*That’s Aragorn, of course, but for those of you who have only seen the movies, you may not know that his name as king of Gondor, in the fullness of time, was Elessar Telcontar.  Elessar means “elfstone” and refers to the green gem given to Aragorn by Galadriel, whereas Telcontar means, more or less, “strider”**.

**If ever I were to assume a supervillain name of some kind, I might replace my current last name with “Melkor”, because it would lead to possibly the most egotistical concatenation of name meanings ever.  My first name, Robert, apparently means “bright fame” or “bright glory”.  My middle name, Eugene, of course means “true born” or “well born”, as in “eugenics”.  And my counterfactual last name, Melkor, would mean “He who arises in might”.  That’s a heckuva collection of names.  And, of course, I’m a doctor by training and by degree, so that just makes it all even mightier.  “I’m Robert Eugene Melkor, MD.  You can call me Dr. Melkor.  Bwa ha ha ha haaaa!”

***Which, to be fair, should be called Wiles’s Theorem.

****Though they are good at tunneling.  Ha ha.

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A turn or two I’ll walk, to still my blogging mind

Hello and good morning to everyone reading this, even if you’re reading it in the afternoon, or the evening, or at night, or if you’re fundamentally not a morning person and so you never see mornings as “good” no matter what anyone says.  Don’t feel bad about that, if it is the case for you.  Even Gandalf expressed his skepticism about the greeting “Good morning,” as we see almost at the very beginning of The Hobbit.

Most greetings are bizarre things, or at least many of them are.  I particularly dislike greetings that involve questions, because I have lost my former hard-earned skill, such as it was, at treating them as the vacuous, ritualistic bird-calls that they are.

If, on a Monday morning, someone asks, “How was your weekend?” I can’t simply reply with a ritual, “It was great,” and then ask about theirs, whether I care about their weekend or not.  I actually have to stop and think about the question*.  Often, I’m sorry to say, I can only shrug and quote Bart Simpson, saying, “Meh.”  This is me trying to avoid being too negative.  But, of course, humans—or at least Americans—don’t want to hear that sort of thing.  I don’t quite know why.

Similarly, some people will ask the rather grammatically suspect question, “How are you doing?” usually with some dropped consonants or strange contractions.  My first instinct, which I almost always resist, is to respond with, “How am I doing what?”  Instead, I tend just to go for the puzzled look followed by a shrug and, again, “Meh.”

The foreshortened version of the earlier question is “How are you?”  It is if anything more bizarre.  It sounds like the beginning of a deep, philosophical discussion, related perhaps to the old “Why is there something rather than nothing?”  How am I?  Does that mean “How is it that I exist?” which seems to be what it means if you take it at face value?

It’s an interesting thing—to me, at least—to think about the same question but changing “How” to various other words such as who, what, where, and when.  The first three make straightforward sense, the last one is an intriguing question calling to my mind the notion that, in GR, there is no time that passes, merely an extra dimension to reality.

They are all better questions and make more sense than the “how” one.  Then, of course, we could take our cue from the improvised, hilarious line given by Drax in Avengers: Infinity War, and ask, “Why are you?”

Okay, let’s move on to other matters besides my steadily atrophying skill at dealing with small talk in anything but a literal (and annoyed) way.

Today is the final valid day for my current bus pass.  These passes are really quite good if you ride the bus more than a few times a week in Broward County.  Unlike the Tri Rail, which charges full price for each calendar month—even if you buy the pass in the last week of that month—the bus passes start ticking (so to speak) only when you first use them, and they expire a minute before midnight thirty-one days later.  That’s it.  Straightforward.  So if you buy a bus pass and “sit on it” for months, you still have 31 days of use once you first use it.

I like it.  It’s a good system.

That being said, I think that after this evening, when I use this pass for the last available time, I’m not going get a new one.  Instead, if I can summon the courage, I’m simply going to walk to and from the train station every day.  That’s slightly under five miles in each direction.  If I can pull that off, counting the walk from and to the station up at work, I’ll be walking eleven or twelve miles a day.

I really ought to be able to do that.  Endurance is not an issue.  I just have problems with still-healing blisters.  But I can’t coddle myself with respect to those.  My blisters are all that’s holding me back, and they are annoying, but I have to push through to the other side of that barrier, because I have a task before me that I want to accomplish.

It won’t be a particularly useful task for anyone but me, and there will no doubt be those who will think it’s not good for me either, but that isn’t really my concern.  I want to try.  As I always say, I don’t want to inconvenience people I care about, so I’m thinking of something that hopefully will minimize “me-related” problems for them, though adjustments will likely need to be made at some level.

At least the number of people close to me personally and physically is small—it’s zero if you’re looking at the combination of the two attributes.  Also, at least my idea shouldn’t be messy or locally problematic.  That’s one advantage, at least.  Or is it two?

I feel that I have to do something though.  I don’t think I can endure much longer with nothing meaningful in my life in any serious way.  My foundations (metaphorically speaking) are crumbling; you can see the cracks widening if you know where to look, and when they give—I keep trying not to let it give as long as I can—the failure will probably be abrupt and messy and will cause trouble for the neighbors, so to speak.  I’d really like to minimize that if I can.  I cause other people enough unpleasantness just by existing; I’d rather not make it worse.

Of course, I’d rather do good for other people, especially the ones I care about.  I’d rather try to relieve suffering and cause joy, or at least to entertain.  I like to make people smile if I can, but I’m not good at it, and I don’t smile very well myself anymore.

I used to practice smiling in the mirror all the time, to try to get it right, but I’ve kind of stopped bothering with that anymore.  My smiles are usually façades and charades, at least in recent years.

Anyway, my bus will be here soon.  I’ll try to keep you all posted, and I’ll probably write something tomorrow again, whether you like it or not.  Have a good day, if you can, but you don’t have to have a good morning if you don’t feel like it, no matter what I said at the beginning of the post.

TTFN

Gandalf_the_Grey

*Lately I’ve considered simply replying, “It was about sixty hours long”, but I always forget to do that when the time comes.

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No live creature can continue to exist at all if there is no reality

Well, it’s Friday morning, and for those of you with a typical* American work week, I’ll say a “TGIF” on your behalf, though as I said yesterday, I work tomorrow.

That’s an interesting combination of tenses, isn’t it?  I’ll say, I said, I work, tomorrow…most of the whole latter half of that sentence is a mishmash of inconsistent, time-related words, and yet, as far as I can tell, it makes sense.  Please let me know if I’m wrong about that.

I’m still very tired from the fiascos with the trains Wednesday, and from sleeping on the floor in the office Wednesday night.  Nevertheless, on the way back to the house yesterday, I got an early enough train that I decided to walk back from the train station, despite being tired.  So, between Wednesday morning and Thursday evening I walked a total of about nine miles, and the athletic tape I put on the blister on my right foot seems to have done a good job at protecting it.

I did then pick at the blister a bit as I was lying down last night, and I might have irritated it some, since it’s slightly sore now.  That might just be from the longish walk back from the train last night.  Or, of course, it could be both.  There could even be unrecognized influences causing soreness.  Occam’s Razor pushes against that last bit—I’m unaware of any possible other causes so far, and I have potential known causes that can explain what I find and feel—but it doesn’t give any direction to the choice between the other two things or their combination.

Anyway!

I work tomorrow, as I said before, so I should write a blog post then.  I don’t know what I’m going to write about, but then again, I have no idea what I’m going to write about today, and yet I’ve already written some 360 words.

I think I’ve noted previously how this writing about nothing that nevertheless goes on and on seems almost related to the more ordinary thing called “small talk”, when people get together and discuss things that are of no consequence, really, and which are not planned in advance.  I gather that small talk serves some manner of social cohesion building, an interaction for the sake of interacting, done verbally in humans, since largely hairless house apes no longer need to pick Arthropoda from each other’s fur.

Small talk seems at some level essentially to consist of people saying to each other, “I’m a person you know and are socially bonded with, and you are a person I know and am socially bonded with.  We are part of the same community or tribe, at least at some level.”  I guess that’s useful, and even powerful, in an ultra-social species like humans.

Heck, even scientists and mathematicians get together at conferences**, or hang out together at lunch time.  Apart from this being a social bonding thing, it probably really helps to trigger and stimulate new ideas, as separate minds throw their thoughts into interactions with other minds, coming from varying points of view, triggering new thoughts and new insights that a single brain could not as easily produce.

Of course, reading (and listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and watching videos) can also bring on such new thoughts and ideas, sometimes in slightly deeper ways.  But there is no mutual, “real time” give and take, which can in the right circumstances lead to a seemingly near-miraculous bootstrapping of ideas.  Just imagine what the conversations were like when Gödel and Einstein hung out and went for walks together in Princeton!

Meanwhile, Robert Elessar, not sane, stood by himself against his blogs, holding darkness within.

Ha ha, that’s just me having a bit of fun with a slight paraphrase of part of the first paragraph (also part of the last paragraph) of The Haunting of Hill House.  (That’s also what’s happening in the blog title and in one of the footnotes.)

That has to be one of the best openings to a book this side of “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”***  And, of course, ““No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own…” from The War of the Worlds.  Or a more recent favorite: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” from a book the title of which escapes me****.  Oh, well…call me Ishmael, if you must.

I don’t think I really have much more to write today, though something else may occur to me.  This has very much been a blog about nothing, but then again, that’s probably a decent metaphor for the very universe itself.  A lot seems to go on, at various levels, but there doesn’t seem to be any central theme or topic or subject, unless you count the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Even if you don’t count that, though, it still applies.  That’s the way of “reality”—it doesn’t depend on your awareness, or on anyone’s awareness.  Indeed, all such awareness is but a tiny little portion of reality itself.  Reality is that which exists whether you believe in it or not.  If you have doubts about that, just consider what happens to people who die sudden, unexpected deaths, as from a surprise bomb attack or similar.  Not knowing that bombs exist or that an attack was coming would not protect against them.

Ask the dinosaurs.  Oh, wait, you can’t.  They’re all gone*******.

See what I mean?  Have a nice day.

asteroid hit

*Is it really typical anymore?  I wonder what percentage of American workers overall actually work Monday through Friday nowadays.

**And even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  See below (in the main body, not in the footnotes) for the source of that line.

***Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.  Surely the very title of that book, as well as its first sentence, would put it on the chopping block in the minds of the puritanical thought police of modern offense mongering.

****It doesn’t really escape me, of course.  It’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, obviously*****.

*****Seriously, I know it’s not.  I doubt there’s any book I’ve read more often than The Hobbit, if only because there have been quite a few times when I’ve started The Lord of the Rings and ended up stopping not long after the battle of Helm’s Deep, which is one of my favorite parts.  The early Frodo/Sam/Gollum stuff  in the latter part of The Two Towers is sometimes a lot to slog through.

*******Except for birds, of course, which really are descended from therapod dinosaurs and are, in a very real sense, extant dinosaurs.  I’m picking nits with my own words—figuratively, at least, since I do not engage in mutual grooming with any other primates if I can help it—but that’s fine with me.

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Some blistering insights into soles like hobbits’ (and holes like ants’)

It’s Monday again.  Yippee ki yawn.  Aren’t you all just so excited?

I don’t have much interesting to report or discuss today, because I haven’t really done anything interesting to report or discuss, nor thought anything interesting to report or discuss since my last blog post.

I have continued trying to sort out different shoes and related footwear.  I walked home from the train station on Friday, but it turned out that the new blister on my right foot had not resolved itself very well during the two weeks since it had happened, which is quite annoying.  The blister on the left foot was fine; I had very carefully, and under effectively sterile conditions, poked a pin-hole in it the day after my very long trek, to drain the fluid, and it basically has now become just a thickened area of foot sole, and it gave me no trouble over the course of my five mile walk on Friday evening.

On the right foot, for reasons I don’t recall clearly, I had elected not to drain the blister—I think it just didn’t seem to have as much fluid in it—and a little more than halfway through my trek on Friday, it started to give me more trouble, as if I had something sharp stuck in my shoe.  I didn’t have any such thing; I checked.

Anyway, I rested on Saturday, during which my right foot was sore still, and I decided to drain that blister as I had the other.  I then walked about six miles (total) yesterday, and though the blister is still irritating, it’s better than it was.

Here’s my off-the-cuff hypothesis for why the course of the left and right blisters was different:

By draining the fluid from the left blister, I allowed the two layers of affected skin to re-adhere to each other, and through that process to become firmer and tougher—at least tougher than they were when the fluid of the blister was present.  On the right foot, however, even as it was recovering, there was still fluid in the blister—it never got completely reabsorbed, and the skin layers thus never re-adhered.  So, once I walked a long enough distance, those two layers of skin were effectively separate and lubricated, and began to rub back and forth against one another.  Just as pertinently, at the edges of the former blister, shearing forces pulled the aforementioned layers of skin further apart, causing new damage.  So, it was actually therapeutic to drain the fluid—as long as I protected rigorously against the risk of infection—than to allow the other to retain its fluid in this case.

As I thought about this, I wondered why such a thing might be the case.  Why would our evolutionary heritage saddle us with a process, on the base of our feet of all things, that would be counterproductive to healing?  Then it hit me*.  Our ancestors throughout almost all of evolutionary time did not wear shoes or boots or any such thing, and they certainly didn’t walk for long distances on paved roads.  They would have formed calluses on the soles of their feet, starting at an early age—presumably as soon as they were able to walk—and repetitive shearing forces, such as are produced by the rubbing of the sole of a shoe, would not apply.  They would have had the soles of hobbits, if you will, and those are pure, tough soles indeed.

So, in some senses, our footwear is detrimental.  Of course, in other ways, it’s extremely useful, and does protect us from sharp and hard objects on the ground against which even thicker skin wouldn’t have defended adequately.  Broken glass is certainly something one wouldn’t want to encounter with bare feet.

Then again, I recall that once, quite a while back, a Kenyan athlete won the Olympic marathon in bare feet, so there aren’t severe disadvantages.  It’s got to be pretty hard to do on pavement, though, and the next time that athlete ran, and won—if memory serves—he did wear shoes.

And you wouldn’t want to go walking through a snowy landscape without something on your feet, at least for warmth.

Still, it makes one wonder how many of the things we wear on our feet are relatively unnecessary and even counter-productive.  If I had gone barefoot a lot over the years, would I not even require footwear much anymore, living as I do in south Florida, where there is almost never anything close to snowy weather?  It’s certainly likely that the risk of fungus would be lower!  It’s interesting to wonder whether even the problems I have with my right ankle, due to an old severe sprain, would be fewer if I had not worn various types of footwear.

It’s also interesting to think about how much of the footwear industry is just a self-sustaining fiction, like so many other industries.  Just to be clear, though, I would not claim that this is any kind of conspiracy or evil plot by malevolent capitalists at Nike and Adidas and Reebok and New Balance.  That’s just a stupid thought, and if you seriously entertain it, you should probably slap yourself.

I’m sure there are worse and better people (by whatever criteria one might specify) at nearly all levels in such companies, as there are in the ranks of social services, as there are working in governments, as there are in charitable organizations, as there are in hospitals.  No, the footwear industry, at all its various levels, is just a big, spontaneously self-organizing system, like everything else about civilization.  There is no master plan, and there is no master**, any more than there is a planner, architect, CEO or Personnel office in an ant hill or a termite mound or a bee hive or a school of fish or a flock of birds.  Things happen, and the things that tend to be self-sustaining tend to sustain themselves***, while the things that don’t tend to do so simply fade away with relatively little fuss.

This is part of, or at least related to, why I hate people calling elected officials our “leaders”.  They’re not leaders, nor should they be, and they certainly don’t “run” the country or state or city or whatever.  They’re employees, managers, servants.  And believe me, they are just as fundamentally clueless as everybody else about what’s happening in the world and what to do about it.  They just sometimes pretend otherwise, even to themselves.  But just because they fool themselves, doesn’t mean you have to let them fool you.

That’s about it for today.  It’s been a weird progression of thoughts, but that seems appropriate, given the eventual topic of discussion.

caveman walk

*It’s just like what happened when I was standing in a park and wondering why a frisbee appears to get larger and larger as it gets closer and closer.

**Except the Time Lord called The Master.

***Duh.

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TCIAPABBP*

And now, of course, it is Friday.  For me, this Friday is like that which is typical for those who work a traditional modern “work week”, in that I will be off work tomorrow, and so I will not be writing a blog post.  I’m sorry if that disappoints you, but if it does, you probably should reevaluate your priorities.

I tried out the new shoes I mentioned yesterday for a bit.  I didn’t walk very far in them—probably only about a mile or so—but I mean to test them a little more this weekend.  So far, I think I’ve made a good call.  Putting them on after the other shoes I’d been wearing that morning was a revelation; they felt almost as light as air.  It was very nice.

I have to restrain myself from trying to walk a long distance in them tomorrow, though.  I’m nervous about a recurrence of what happened two Saturdays ago when I accidentally got myself trapped into going farther than I intended because of ambition and “whatthefuckery”**.  That was when I was trying out a new pair of Timberland hiking boots, which are quite nice, but which gave me some minor blisters when I walked too far in them without getting used to them.

I also think that I would rather try to use light shoes for longer distance walking rather than such boots, even though the boots will almost certainly last longer.  It’s just more pleasant to walk in lighter shoes, and I have spandex® ankle braces to give me necessary ankle support…as the term suggests.

In case anyone was waiting, by the way, I still haven’t done any more audio stuff.  I actually recorded a reading of one of my blog posts from Iterations of Zero, but it was rife with footnotes and I hadn’t planned ahead how I was going to deal with those, so I stumbled around a bit.  I didn’t even bother editing it, because I would have had to do extensive cutting and pasting, which is more difficult with audio than with written material.  I’m not sure if I’ll be going back to that experiment.

Maybe audio is something better done de novo rather than with reading—except when it comes to stories, of course.  I like reading my stories into recordings, but I don’t think that many people have ever listened to any of those, and certainly no one has made any requests that I do more—for instance, no one has gotten to the last chapter I’ve read aloud of The Chasm and the Collision and asked me to continue.

No biggie.  If I undertake the quest that I’m considering, I will probably make videos about it and post them on YouTube and embed them here—I may even make passing comments here exclusively—but that is something that will have to wait.  It involves part of why I am trying out new shoes and boots and practicing walking and so on.

Because it will be a serious undertaking—in the sense of being no minor task by any means or by anyone’s likely estimation—I’m sad to think that I probably will not be using the Timberland boots for it.  I like them.  They’re good, there’s no doubt about that, but they work my feet in ways that are a bit too atypical, and also, I don’t really like having to deal with the hooking-lace thingies, whatever those are called.  I find it hard to trust them, as well as simply to get them to work right, though the Timberland ones are WAAAY better than ones I’ve had on other boots I’ve tried.  It’s not even a fair comparison.

Also—and this is rather silly and petty—I don’t like the fact that I can’t just kick them off when I get to the end of a day; I have to bend down and unlace them.  Now, I can bend down without any real trouble.  It’s much easier now than it was even a year ago, since I’ve been increasing my activity levels.  But at the end of a long day, it’s just a pain.

Hey, they’re my shoes, and they’re my feet, so I guess it’s okay for me to assess and decide such things regarding matters that have no significance to anyone but me.  I don’t like being too self-indulgent, but in this, since I mean to put my shoes (and my feet) through quite the wringer, I guess I can excuse myself.

And, once again, this has been a bizarrely boring blog post, and for that I can only apologize to those who stuck through it until the end, hoping for some surprising depth or esoterica.  I’ll try to get back into the mathematics and physics and philosophy and psychology stuff soon.  But, at the very least, one could probably consider every blog post I write to be related to the field of abnormal psychology, or even xenopsychology****.  Take comfort in that if you can.

And have a good weekend.

[P.S. Speaking of reading stories, if anyone out there works for Amazon—specifically for Audible—tell them that they need to improve their ordering system, and this need has existed for quite some time.  I tried to order an Audible book yesterday and it didn’t process, despite repeated attempts.  This morning, when I wanted to listen to it, it still wasn’t in my library…and I’ve retried ordering it multiple times today already.  I’ve been an Audible member for quite a long time now, and it’s irritating that this issue—which I’ve had several times before—continues.  I’m tempted just to find and download pirated audio of these fucking books, but I’d rather get royalties to the authors!  For those of you who might consider membership to Audible, or using its services, all I can say right now, based on this, is:  I don’t recommend it.  I’ll change that assessment when the problem is addressed.]

Listen-to-Your-Discontent1

*Thank Cat, it’s another peculiar and boring blog post.

**Specifically, the form that comes across as “What the fuck, let’s just see what happens,” rather than the more puzzled, startled, confused, and sometimes frightened form, as in “What the fuck is that?”***

***Apologies for the profanity if anyone is bothered by it, but I think there’s nothing magically scary or “problematic” about any words, and there are things that can be expressed through profanity that cannot be expressed as well in other ways.  I will use it when I feel the desire, at least here in my own blog.  I do try not to use it in places where other people have a reasonable expectation that there will be none.

****I just made that term up, as far as I know.

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This was the most unkindest blog of all

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday!  You know what that means, right?  It means it’s time for my traditional weekly blog post, the format of which antedates these ones I’m doing now on every workday.

In these Thursday blog posts, I generally include a picture of some kind, whereas that’s very much a matter of whim the rest of the week.  I also title the posts with some relatively (to me) “pertinent” Shakespearean quote that has been altered to include a form of the word “blog” in it.  The biggest problem with that is finding a quote that I haven’t used before, since all the best, most recognizable, most memorable quotes tend to get used early on.

That’s how the sausage is made, I guess, in case you wanted to know and hadn’t already figured it out for yourself.

I’m back at the bus stop this morning, by the way, which is cool.  Well, it’s not literally cool—it’s already about 73 degrees Fahrenheit at 5:20 in the morning, and a comparable number in relative humidity.  It makes walking to the bus and whatnot just a little bit unpleasant, if only because I sweat.

I mentioned yesterday (I think) that when I get up really early I consider walking to the train station, and that’s just shy of five miles.  The walk isn’t intimidating; it’s good for me, and I have more than enough endurance to deal with it even first thing in the morning.  But I don’t like getting to the office all sweaty first thing in the morning.  That’s one of the reasons I didn’t keep biking to work, way back when.  I always ended up smelling like mildew, at least to myself, though I learned to buy big cans of Lysol to deal with that, which worked pretty well.  Still, it’s a bit annoying.

That’s all relatively boring.  Sorry.

However, on a related note, I’m planning on trying something new today.  I use two main brands of walking shoe, chosen mainly because of their price to star-rating ratio, but with the absolute criterion that they must be black.  They are all the same official size, of course, but the newer brand—to me, I mean—has a tendency in the right foot to rub against my big toe, though it’s not as bad in the left foot.  So, I ordered an extra pair one half-size bigger in that type of shoe, to see A) if it makes a difference, and 2) if it’s comfortable and stable enough for me to wear in that size.  This is apparently a recognized phenomenon, this tendency for different shoe manufacturers and even different designs of shoe by the same manufacturer to have different sizes even within the same “size”.

That’s why I originally started wearing New Balance shoes, way back in the day when they were still trying hard to become competitive, and so were lower priced than the other big brands.  They were designed in such a way as to be slightly roomier, width-wise, which was more comfortable for me than other brands.

New Balance is the “older” brand I described above.  If the newer brand in half a size larger is good, though, I may focus on it a bit more now, because the design and model—if that’s the term—in question is slightly lighter and has a breathability that the Noobs don’t have.

Okay, that’s not just relatively boring, that’s thoroughly and completely boring.  Again, sorry.  I’m being most unkind.

Still, if I can find the right shoes and make the rest of the arrangements, I mean to try to do something that will be less boring, and perhaps even slightly interesting.  I’ve been working my way up to it for quite a while now, and I’m getting closer, step by step*.  If I do last long enough to try to carry it out, I imagine I’ll be announcing and detailing it here, so watch this space—so to speak—for further updates.

As for other things, well, I think I’m mainly over my little gastrointestinal bug.  I suspect that was related to some frozen, pre-cooked burgers I had that must have thawed during shipping at some point before being refrozen.  Thus, when I ate them they were slightly contaminated by some bacterial pathogen, which would explain both the quite painful enteritis and the low-grade fever.

It wasn’t anything too severe, thankfully.  But I’m not going to be eating any more of those for a while!

I didn’t do any calculus “homework” yesterday.  I did have a chance, since even though I had missed a day, I caught up and then did the payroll and everything else with surprising speed, because I’ve done it for a long time, and I prepare things relatively in advance, and I start working on it all early in the morning before anyone else gets there so there aren’t any distractions and it’s quiet; it’s especially nice not to have the loud background noise playing as it is during the workday.

The fact that they have to have “music” blaring all day because that’s just what is done in this business is maddening.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t respect it.  I think it’s pathetic.  But I don’t have veto power, and I certainly don’t have Vito power**.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and indeed, it’s probably more than enough—for today, for the week, for the year, for my life—and so I’ll close with the wish that you will all try to have a good day and then a good weekend and so on, and to be kind to your family and friends and to enjoy their company.  It’s a bleak old world and universe out there, and it does not owe you anything.  Get the good of it where you can get it, in the time you spend with those you love and who love you.

TTFN

unkindest cut

*This is a joke to myself related to the idea I’m not fully revealing, but you can also relate it to the discussion of shoes.

**Ha ha.  A reference to The Godfather.

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Pursuing it with eager, weary feet

It’s Monday morning again.

Hooray…

It’s the second Monday in February, though it feels like it ought to be the third, at least to me.  That’s because the first was on a Wednesday, so it feels like the work week is slightly askew compared to the length of the month.  And, of course, because this is February in a non-leap-year, that means that March will also start on a Wednesday, as I know I’ve mentioned on this blog before.

I’m writing this on my laptop, because this weekend I was forethoughtful enough to bring it with me when I left the office.  I had a potent reminder all day Friday from my severely sore and aching thumbs, and we didn’t push past usual closing time, since everyone gets their checks on Friday, and no one wants to delay things.

I had an adventure of sorts this weekend.  I had realized on Friday, after walking home from the train instead of taking the bus, that I had walked just shy of nine miles that day, and I felt pretty good, physically at least.  So I decided on Saturday to take a longish walk and at the same time try out some new hiking shoes/boots I had recently bought and had only worn twice to work.  They had seemed fine, but they were designed for hiking, so I figured I might as well do a bit of a hike.

I first walked two miles to a nearby 7-11, where I picked up some snacks for later and a bag of cat food for the cat I leave food for outside, and put the items in my backpack.  Then I decided to go out west along the road I’d come from in the east, just to see how long a walk it was to the turnpike crossing, and then—if that was a reasonable distance—on to the next major north-south walkable road and up to the crossroad that would eventually come back to where I live.

Well, the turnpike wasn’t all that far away, or so it seemed, though it had been a steady if shallow uphill walk of nearly two more miles.  Then I passed the Hard Rock Stadium, which I had never seen in person before.  Then I finally got to a north-south road, recommended by Google Maps.  It wasn’t the one I thought it was, but it was okay.

I was feeling pretty hot by then; it had been 80 degrees out when I started, and the skies were at least half clear.  I’d already had a small bottle of Lime Perrier—not nearly as good as the orange or the pineapple, and miles away from the peach!—and decided to stop in the next convenience store for water.  They had no fizzy water, so I got two one-liter bottles of Aquafina®, which was probably a bad idea.  They were heavy, and my backpack was already none too light, nor is it really a hiking backpack.  It’s more of a student-oriented backpack.

Anyway, heading back I tried to use Google Maps to pick the most direct walking route, but it led me around behind a casino and toward what it thought was an accessible road, but which had been blocked some time in the past, said blockage including big signs telling everyone that all copper had been removed from the facility.  Was it ever a public walkway?

So I had to reconfigure and reorient, trusting my own judgement a bit, though I’d been wrong about the distance to the road past the turnpike.  I backtracked to the proper road before too very long, but I did rest in the shade in the casino parking lot—which was huge and grassy—not caring if anyone thought I was weird, since people tend to think I’m weird, anyway.  I’d been drinking the water steadily, but I was starting to feel more and more fatigued.  I only realized it later, but I was also getting a bit of a sunburn.

Anyway, I had to stop and rest for about ten minutes at a time on a few more occasions, including one where I sat against a wall with my shirt off, no doubt looking like an overweight homeless person.  I thought I must be dehydrated, so I kept drinking water, and pouring some on my back and head.  I also walked up and over the turnpike this time, on an artificial hill much steeper than any natural one in south Florida.

Finally, I decided I’d come far enough that it was okay if I took a bus for the last leg of the trip; I had rested at bus stops a few times.  I waited for the Dade County bus, having put my shirt back on, and then rode only about a mile until the stop just before where I live.  I got back to the house and, not too long after, felt queasy (actually, I’d had hints of it before), so I grabbed a Tupperware container nearby—because I had laid down and didn’t want to get up—and then promptly threw up copious amounts of water, pretty much all the water I had drunk.  I had to switch Tupperware containers in the middle.  I guess in my worry about dehydrating, I had overcompensated, and my stomach was just irritated by the water, and almost none of it got absorbed.

That didn’t last long, though, because there’s only so much one can throw up when one has drunk two liters of water but hadn’t eaten yet that day.  I did get a cramp in my upper abs from the heaving, which was not fun at all.  I was pretty wiped out, and I recognized my sunburn at that point; most of my usual walking is early morning and later evening, so I haven’t walked in the sun for a while.

It turned out, based on my pedometer, that I had hiked almost exactly twelve miles (it had taken almost six hours, but that was with a lot of stopping).  So, that was quite a trek for a Saturday—longer than I had planned for it to be, but my shoulders were far more troubled than my legs, and indeed, they were the most common reason why I took breaks.

I did get a few new minor blisters, because of the combination of the long distance and the new boots, which were quite good in general, but which are, of course, going to rub in different places than my usual shoes.  It was a good starter hike, though, and I mean to keep working my way up, because I have a goal/plan in mind, and I don’t want to be hindered by silly things like blisters and sore shoulders, and other things I can condition myself for ahead of time.

Anyway, it’s probably been a boring blog post, and my sister has already heard the story, so she’ll probably be really bored by it, but it was a bit of an adventure, and was not without its own minor perils and pains.  I’m going to try to work in more walking during my typical days, though I may take the bus home from the train today, just to let the blisters rest.

Further bulletins as events warrant, or probably even as they don’t.

Picture1

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She told me to walk this way…

It’s Saturday.

I say that just in case you didn’t know.  I hope most of you are relaxing at home with your family and/or loved ones as you read this.  As I write it, I am of course sitting at the bus stop.

You may recall that yesterday my back was acting up especially badly.  It did so all day, pretty much without relent, despite copious use (probably to toxic levels) of OTC meds.

In the evening, after I had ridden the train back down south, I was waiting for the bus and watching the app that tracks arrival times at any given stop, with real time updates on delays or earliness.  The timing of the train’s arrival had been such that there was a bit of a wait (about twenty minutes or so) before the next bus.

But the bus didn’t show at the predicted time, and when I looked back at the app, it had just skipped ahead to the next bus time, half an hour later.  It seemed they had simply canceled that bus without notifying anyone.

I waited about five more minutes before getting fed up.  My patience was far from its peak in the first place, after a day of significantly elevated pain, and the lack of notification‒much more so than the apparent bus cancellation‒irked me mightily.  I figured, “You know what, I don’t feel like waiting for the next bus,”  So, I started walking.

Of course, as I’m sure you could have predicted, within another five minutes, the bus on which I had given up went rolling past me.  I guess it had just been ten minutes late, but its transponder, or telemetry, or whatever they call them, wasn’t connecting with the system that updates the app.  That’s irritating, but I suppose it sometimes happens when you put naked house apes (i.e. humans) in charge of technology.

It wasn’t too bad, though.  I decided I would just continue my walk for the 4.5 to 5 miles back to the house.  I took a route through the neighborhoods, some of which I had never passed before, though I knew the way.  It was just after sunset when I started; there was a fairly stiff breeze, and the temperature was in the sixties, so it was a pleasant walk.  It felt almost reminiscent of being out trick-or-treating back up north in my childhood.

Regrettably, of course, there were no Halloween decorations, and no kids in costumes‒I was mainly by myself on the sidewalks, listening to my shuffled “favorite songs” list on YouTube Music‒but I did see, through the large picture window of a third-ish floor “luxury” apartment building, that someone still had their Christmas tree up, and it was fully lit.

That was actually rather nice, although slightly odd and certainly unexpected.  I can understand why someone would want to keep a festive, brightly lit item around even after its traditional moment had passed, especially during the comparative holiday desert that follows New Year.  Sorry, Valentine’s Day does not count as a festive holiday!  And Saint Patrick’s Day, in America at least, is mainly a drinking holiday‒though corned beef and cabbage can be a quite wonderful dinner if one has it!

Returning to the original topic, though, I found that, as I walked, my back began to relax a bit, and before a few miles had passed, the pain had reduced to a much vaguer sensation, then finally it became insignificant relative to my normal tendency even to notice it.  My right Achilles tendon began complaining slightly* by the end of the walk, but it tends to do that anyway, almost since college, after I badly sprained my right ankle while playing catch.

Sorry, I know, this is all rather boring for a blog post, but I felt like having a mild celebration of the fact that I had soothed my back some by walking.  It hurts more again, now, starting as soon as I woke up, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and hopefully it won’t become so.  If it does, I guess I know what to do about it at least.  Just having that degree of available control makes things a little better, even if one doesn’t use it.

I keep thinking about better types of subjects about which to blog‒as you know‒including medical topics and physics and philosophy and psychology and whatnot.  I still owe you all a blog post or audio blog/podcast about sugar.  I haven’t forgotten.  I just have to decide to buckle down and do it.

But motivation, or executive function, or whatever they call it, is apparently often difficult for people with ASD, as I suspect I am, and also, of course, for people with dysthymia/depression, as I know I am.  That’s not an excuse, so to speak, though both are things I certainly didn’t choose.

Who would willingly choose to be depressed?  It’s truly a thing of horror, but it’s not even exciting or interesting or even disgusting horror.  It’s just a lack of any connection, a sense of learned helplessness that precedes any learning.  And, of course, it includes an inability to be optimistic or to feel certain of anything other than how horrible a person one is.

Maybe everyone, if they could see themselves without filter, without excuse, without delusion, would grow weary of themselves, would be disgusted, would end up hating themselves, and hating the world by reflection or projection.

I’ve read that the modern Catholic conception of Hell is not Fire and Brimstone, but merely a state without any connection to God, a complete removal from God’s presence, cut off from the source of life and light.  It’s rather like the Void in Tolkien’s universe, where Melkor wandered and first began having thoughts unlike those of his brethren, and to which he was consigned after the War of Wrath.  Anyway, that Catholic notion feels like a good metaphor for depression.  It’s not fire and brimstone; that’s all too dramatic, even melodramatic, and interesting in its own way.  Dysthymia and depression are much drearier and more dismal than that.  And yet there is pain.

Oh, well.  Maybe even in the Void, a good long walk can help temporarily ease some kinds of pain.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

*You wouldn’t think that something named for the mightiest warrior of the Iliad would be prone to whine, would you.  Then again, he was a bit of a snotty character, and he was invulnerable other than his heel in the original story, so he probably would have moaned a lot when in pain.

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A passion for timeliness and a late-appearing fruit of passion

Well, it’s Monday again, to the surprise of essentially no one.  That’s just what happens after the weekend, isn’t it?

I’m starting this post while still at the house, sitting on the “piano” bench in my room, because it’s too chilly to sit at the bus stop for too long and do the writing.  This is not merely a “chilly for south Florida”* chilly.  It’s about 45 degrees Fahrenheit out.  I don’t know how windy it is‒I haven’t been out yet‒but that’s not shorts-wearing weather even for snow birds.

Thankfully, fleece hoodies with the hoods up are more than adequate against such modestly cold temperatures, and walking is much warmer than riding a motorbike.  I have more extensive covering I could wear in a pinch‒a long, black duster I got originally to be part of a costume, but which is also quite handy for cold weather.

Anyway, there’s not much going on.  I had thought last evening about writing a topical blog post this morning, something relating to a book I’m rereading, called On Being Certain, but I’m not terribly into that right now.

I didn’t do anything useful at all this weekend, really, apart from getting some physical rest‒well, I walked 3 miles to 7-11 yesterday, but that was because I currently have no better means of travel, and I had some things I wanted.  It was worth the trip, I’d say, though 7-11 is pricey.

Still, the good thing about my current disrupted commute really is how much I’m walking.  Twice last week, I chose not to ride the buses back from the train station in the evening.  The first time was just because I wanted to do it, and was early enough for it to be workable; the second time because the bus that had been scheduled to come just hadn’t shown up, and the next one wasn’t for 30 minutes.

I made a good deal of progress before that next bus finally passed me:  more than half the distance I would have ridden it.  I felt quite smug, as though I were the one passing it, not the other way around.  On each  of those two days last week, I walked more than 8 miles total.  All the other days I walked more than 4.  So my walking really is getting boosted.

It occurs to me that I still haven’t done any of my “audio blogs” or podcasts or whatever one might want to call them.  Maybe I’m setting my bar too high.  I’d been planning to record them using Audacity and a decent mic, at least, but maybe I should just use my phone.  I’m using it for this, after all.  What do you all think?  Which should I do?

***

Okay, well, now I’m at the bus stop, but there’s still a good fifteen plus minutes to wait until the scheduled time for the first bus.  That’s just the way I do things.  I hate to be late to nearly anything, and at least since the time when I was in junior high, I always tended to get to school before nearly anyone else.  I just preferred the quiet solitude before the cacophonic arrival of all the other people into the area.

This has continued through pretty much the rest of my life (so far, anyway), and has, if anything, become more pronounced.  Indeed, my early awakening may well be distantly related to that sense that I can’t stand to be late (and being on time = being late to me).

If it’s related, it is pathologically so.  For instance, I first woke up last night at around 12:30.  I swiftly went back to sleep, at least, but still woke up more or less at least once an hour, and it became harder and harder to get back to sleep‒and it took longer each time‒such that by about 3:30, I mostly gave up.

But there was not too much point just to getting up and leaving early.  Oh, I suppose I could have walked all the way to my old, standard train station, and I would have arrived in time at least for the second train, if not the first.  But then, even given the weather, I probably would have started the day all sweaty.

Ending the day sweaty is okay‒you can shower and change clothes and all that‒but starting it that way can be a bit unpleasant.  And in Florida, at least, it leaves you at increased risk for skin fungus, or at least for mildew smells in your clothes, and there are very few smells that I find more repulsive than the smell of most fungi (though baking and brewing yeast are exceptions).

***

Okay, well, now I’m a bit anxious.  I looked on the “Myride” site and though it shows that there’s a scheduled bus arrival at 5:49 (in 2 minutes now) there’s no “estimated time” of arrival actually given until the next bus arrival time, which would be 15 minutes from now.  It’s really not cool for them to fail to have the first bus actually run, especially on an unusually cold morning.

Getting on the next bus will mean getting on an even later train, and so on.  Maybe I should have walked to the train station after all.  But if I left now for the train station, I’d be much later.  And there’s always extra work to do at the office after a weekend off.  But when one bus (or train for that matter) ends up canceled, the following bus (or train) is always that much more crowded than usual, and I hate that.  If it’s always crowded, at least I know what to expect, and I’m mentally prepared, if not exactly happy about it.  But if it’s a change from usual, it’s stress-inducing.

BCT used to run a pretty good bus service, but it seems they’ve been slipping lately, because this is now 2 different buses in the space of 4 days that are late or canceled.

***

Okay, well, the first bus wasn’t canceled, but it was five to six minutes late, and I can’t say that I’m okay with that.  It’s one thing for buses to be late when it’s rush hour‒such traffic is a chaotic system, and it can be effectively impossible to plan for every contingency when one has limited resources, as everyone does.

But at well before six in the morning, even in south Florida, there is barely any traffic at all, certainly not the kind of traffic that would slow a bus down.  People don’t tend to get in the way of buses, and police rarely pull them over, and the number of stops they make has a theoretical maximum, and they almost never have to stop at every stop.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  My boss at work sometimes sarcastically asks if I really think that the other people in the office are going to be able to do things to a level that I tend to do them, but my response is that yes, I do.  I’m not expecting people to grasp science and the like as well as I do, or to have the same enthusiasm for reading, but the things I ask for are things that should be graspable and doable by nearly any “normally” functioning human, since even I can do them, and I’m far from normally functioning, and barely human.  If they don’t succeed, it’s because they aren’t trying, or at least not very hard.

It’s like something I used to say to my kids when they would say they would try: “Good.  That means you’ll succeed, because this is something I know you can do if you actually try.”  Or words to that effect.

***

Anyway, that’s nearly it for today.  The bus arrived‒late‒but it looks like I’ll be able to get on the scheduled train, at least if it’s running on time.  Surely a simple 44 degree temperature isn’t enough to throw off all the public transit in south Florida?  Yes, it’s chilly for down here, but it’s not that cold.

Okay, well apparently the train is running about 3 minutes late.  That’s not horrible, but I still don’t think it should be considered okay.  Those responsible should feel embarrassed, though perhaps not ashamed.  People plan their days around the freely published schedules of the transit companies.  They make the schedules‒those schedules haven’t been forced upon them by a consortium of riders‒so they should stick to them.

The same goes for people at the office, come to think of it.  But apparently that’s just too much to ask of ordinary human beings.  If that’s really true, then ordinary people are not worth keeping around.

But I don’t think it’s true.  “Ordinary people” will for the most part live up to the standards to which they are required to live up, barring disease and disability.  And even people with chronic pain and dysthymia and depression and insomnia and apparent neurodevelopmental disorders can make it their business to get places on time and even early, and then to stay until all the work is done, even if everyone else has already left.  All that’s needed is just a little bit of passion**.

*Well, compared to whatever the temperature is currently in Michigan, or New York, or North Dakota, for instance, it would probably seem nice.  But you still wouldn’t want to sit at a bus stop for 45 minutes with just a hoody for your jacket in such weather.  And believe me you wouldn’t want to drive a motorcycle without layers and gloves and so on…though a good helmet will keep one’s head nice and toasty, at least.

**If that ending seems like a bit of a non sequitur, that’s because it was written in response to the fact that the person sitting in the seat in front of me on the train had a carton of passion fruit juice, and that made me think, “If there’s a passion fruit, why is there no ‘apathy fruit’?” which seems it would be much more an appropriate foodstuff for humans.  I put that last sentence in the main body of the blog solely for the purpose of writing this footnote.