Lifestyle

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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below

Hello and good morning.  Welcome to another Thursday.  Please wipe your feet on your way in.

Just kidding.  It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.

I don’t have much to say today.  I don’t think I do, anyway.  Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know.  I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.

Let’s see…updates.  I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning.  We’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient.  I tend to be patient, at least about some things.  What’s a doctor without patience, right?

Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm.  I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.

It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried.  It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus.  I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.

If it had been like the first time they would have noticed!  That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted.  That was part of why they brought me downstairs:  a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.

Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness.  It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved.  I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm.  Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.

I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough.  I don’t think that’s the case with me, though.  I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.

Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment.  I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that.  “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.

I think I may try to do another audio post today.  The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one.  Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.

Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least.  They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats.  They just eat them both.  At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.

Cats are a little more persnickety.  There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite.  I would do that with eggplant.  It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.

Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment.  That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit).  That would be kind of lame.  I guess we’ll see.

I might as well do something though.  I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction.  I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org.  And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.

I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning.  My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier.  Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.

So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy.  I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.

Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.

TTFN

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Monday, Thursday, Doomsday, Workday, let’s call the whole thing off

It’s Monday, but for some unclear reason, I felt the strong urge to write that today was Thursday when I was titling this file to be saved.  It took a moment of concentration to correct that urge.

Probably it goes back to the long stretch of time when I did my blog posting only on Thursdays, because I worked on my fiction every other workday.  That paid off, in a sense, because I did write quite a lot of fiction in that time.  Though, to be clear, it did not pay off in any material sense; I’ve spent more by far on copies of my books to give away to coworkers and such than I am likely ever to make back.

It was an awful lot of work for things that, as far as I know, only two other people have actually read at all.  My music has done better, honestly, though not in the sense of bringing in any income.  But at least some people have listened to it, my originals as well as my covers.  I guess songs are quicker and easier to consume than novels or even short stories (especially my short stories).

So, yeah, even though it’s been years since I was following that Thursday blogging practice, the etchings of that habit are still not completely effaced from my brain.  This is the way of habits, as I think I mentioned not too long ago.

Speaking of music, by the way, I want to share a really cool bit of music that came up in my YouTube feed, and which I think deserves a listen (and a like and a share if you can) from all of you.  It’s very good, as is the artist’s other work.

YouTube is basically all I did this weekend.  I did not read nor write, nor did I play any music (either on a stream or from a recording or on guitar or keyboard or cello).  I haven’t done any of those things in several weeks, barring a few one-time exceptions.  I mean, I went for walks on Saturday and Sunday, though I was careful not to go too far, and I used sunscreen this time.  This was because I had a few errands to run; it was too hot and humid to walk for fun.

But, yeah, I watched videos and vegged out rather pathetically pretty much the entire weekend.  I mostly watched various reactors reacting to either Backrooms or Fantastic Four First Steps.  Meaning, I watched multiple different people and groups of people reacting to each movie, more or less at random.

It’s almost like watching a movie with someone, though not quite*.  Movies are a way of socializing for me; they are one of the few ways I can connect with people.  TV shows are similar.  I don’t really like to watch things by myself.  I do it sometimes, of course, and I even went to see a movie by myself once, when I went to the theater to see the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, because I just didn’t want to miss that.

I considered going to see the new Spider-Man movie this weekend, but it just felt…I don’t know, like something that would highlight my solitude even more than does watching oodles of different people reacting to movies that I’ve liked.

Mind you, I did watch a few more worthwhile videos.  The Science Asylum guy put out a couple of new videos about basic circuit theory topics, and I watched Tyler Folse reacting to a Veritasium video.  That tends to be fun.  He (Tyler, I mean) frequently speaks my own thoughts** when he’s watching such videos, which is refreshing.

Anyway, that’s as good as it gets, and I don’t know if it will ever get that good again.  But I am still going to work, though it is often difficult for me clearly to say why I do it, even to myself.  I’m just bringing in income to sustain an existence that is almost without anything to recommend it.

I don’t like it here in Florida, for one thing.  It’s naturally an amazing state, quite unique and with many, many interesting life forms.  Unfortunately, humans are not one of the interesting ones.  They are an infestation that has turned this state into a wellspring of the stupidity that is so rampant in the US.  It’s no coincidence that Taco Piggy took up residence here.

So, I’m working to sustain an existence I hate, in a location that is largely repellent‒but with a few very lovely oases in time, such as my youngest, who is enough to counterbalance many, many negative things, but who would almost certainly be well served by not having me in their life any more than necessary.  That’s certainly the general consensus at which most other people have arrived regarding my presence in their lives.

It gets harder and harder all the time for me to get up and get into the office every day.  It’s not because there’s anything particularly bad about the office; I mean, the noise can be really irritating, and if I don’t watch myself it can get the best of me, but the people are okay.  They’re actually quite nice.  I’m without a doubt the least pleasant person at the office.

That alone is enough to make life subtly and pathetically dreadful.

*I also watched a few more people reacting to the “special look” trailer for Avengers:  Doomsday, but I think I’ve seen most of them by now.  Doom is, as I’ve noted, my favorite villain and one of my favorite characters overall in fiction, so the special look is nice because it focuses more on him.  Here it is, in case you missed it.

**Not literally.  He’s not like Tyler Durden.  I just mean that he seems to have similar thoughts in response to the things he’s watching to the ones I have.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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You can’t CURE a headache by banging your head, but you CAN make it all go away…

I am writing this post on my lapcom for the first time in quite a while*, but I couldn’t honestly say why I’m doing it.  I just decided yesterday afternoon that I wanted to bring my lapcom with me when I left the office, and since I have it with me, it would be a minor shame not to use it to write today’s post.  As far as I can tell, there’s nothing more to it than that.  I certainly don’t care much anymore.

I continued to feel pretty rotten all day yesterday, and I became quite stressed out and frustrated, even snapping at a coworker with whom I normally get along very well—actually, it was somewhat more than “snapping”, and it was not justified—before repeatedly banging my head on my desk.

This, of course, did not help my residual migraine discomfort, which was partly responsible for my horrible mood.

It also hurt my neck.  I wasn’t surprised by this fact, though, since I’ve done this before, alas.  Indeed, I can tell you this tiny bit of potentially useful information:  banging one’s head on one’s desk is uncomfortable and somewhat injurious (I’ve been known to raise visible lumps on my forehead in addition to causing neck pain), while banging your head on a sheetrock wall is not as bad.  However, banging your head on a concrete wall is quite unpleasant.

And I really don’t recommend hitting your head on the top of a door (or “hatch”) in an aircraft carrier, but that was purely accidental, born of overenthusiasm**.  I’ll just add, for emphasis, that an aircraft carrier does not notice that you hit it; it does not give in any measurable way***, only your head and body do.

By the way, head-butting a human is comparatively laughable.  But mind their teeth; you can get cuts from them that are prone to bad infections because of the nasty bacteria that often live in the human mouth.

Anyway, all this nonsense is just to emphasize that I am not doing well.  I feel physically quite uncomfortable, from my head to my tail as it were, and down into my legs, too.  And my mood is worse than the rest of me****.

Some of this may be related to the weather.  The heat and humidity down here are utterly oppressive, and they make it all but impossible to exercise outdoors (such as by walking) unless one is committed to possibly dying or becoming quite ill in the process.  I am not entirely averse to dying in that process, and I contemplate trying to walk from the office to the house almost every day.  But I’m not committed to it yet, so it’ll have to wait.  It would be just too pathetic to start it and not carry through.

It’s also been very sunny lately, which just adds sunburn (which I have from Sunday) to the mix, but that doesn’t bother me as much; for unclear reasons, I don’t get as uncomfortable from sunburns as most people seem to get.  This is probably not a good thing, especially when you have an inherent fish-belly complexion like I have.  It might also have contributed to my migraine.

I’m coming to hate nearly everything about Florida.  Of course, it’s the state where my youngest was born (and where my kids still live), so it will always have that going for it, and that’s hard to overpower.  But even my kids unfortunately didn’t have the greatest scholastic experiences in Florida—which is no surprise, since Florida is known to have subpar educational system overall (though it has definite bright spots at the university level).  Just look at who our governors have been and are, let alone our legislators.  If Tallahassee were wiped off the map by an asteroid impact, the average IQ of the state would rise by 10 points, at least.

The trouble is, it’s entirely possible that I would hate things wherever I happened to be, because really, it’s myself I hate.  And yes, I know about the self being nonpermanent and really an illusion and not a consistent thing from moment to moment let alone from day to day or from one part of the brain to another.  That’s true but trivial, and it doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself, whatever you want to call my self.

And while the self does change from moment to moment, it still has way more in common with its past and future states than it has with, say, the state of a different person, or with a dog or cat, or with a slug or with a tree or with a fucking rock.  There is a four-dimensional continuity of structure and identity to what I call my self, as there is with all of you, unless I am greatly mistaken.

Okay, sorry for that little diatribe, if that’s the correct word (“diatribe” I mean, not “sorry”).  I’m just frustrated with and angry at more or less everything.  Which, of course, implies that I am the problem, since I am the common factor in all the things that frustrate me.

Unfortunately, I cannot swap me out for some other person, and I don’t think I would if I could.  I’ve often wanted to be like certain other people in certain aspects, but I’ve never actually wanted to be another person.  In fact, I think the very concept is vacuous; I could explain why that’s so, but it may well be obvious already.

Anyway, I’m sorry.  You should all probably just stop bothering with me, to be honest.  I am only going to bore you at best and more likely cause you pain of one kind or another.  It’s what I do.  I’m not a good person by nature, though I try to act as if I am when I have the energy to do so.  But my energy is lagging and seeming to get worse all the time.

Honestly, I wish I could just sleep until I feel truly rested, or forever, whichever comes first.  Of course, the universe is not set up in such a way as to make the first thing necessarily achievable, but at least I know I can achieve the second.  It just takes commitment—or time, I suppose.

All right, that’s enough of that.  I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, of course, this is the only time I have ever written this post, and it is the only time that I will write this post.  I apologize for the somewhat misleading language, but I suspect you know what meant.

**I’m not likely to experience that again.

***Yes, yes, physics shows that it does indeed movie a little.  I suppose I could do some math to try to figure out just how much, but it won’t be much more impressive than how far the Earth movies in the other direction when you jump straight up in the air.

****Those of you who saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs might recall that “the rest of me” in an anagram for Hester Mofet.

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Yet another pointless discursion

Well, as I warned you would probably happen, here I am, writing a blog post on Saturday (August 15th, 2026 AD/CE), because I am going to work today.  I feel barely awake, to be honest. Nevertheless, as I said, here I am, smartphone in hands, thumbing out the words to yet another pointless discursion, one which I have headlined “Yet another pointless discursion”.  Go ahead, see for yourself.

I’m really pretty foggy and groggy right now, so I don’t know how good or interesting this is going to be.  I mean, I guess I could say that every day, of course, but it feels more acute at this moment.  It’s a bit weird to have a strong, sharp feeling of not knowing something, and of not being able to know it.  It feels like some sort of epistemological contortionism.  Which is itself a rather strange notion.

Of course, I don’t know what to write about today, or rather, “I don’t know about what to write”.  I feel that fact quite acutely at this moment, as well.  Still, it’s a work day, and one on which I am indeed going to work, so I guess I should fulfill my duty as I perceive it.

It’s not as though it would make any significant impact if I didn’t write anything, though.  I know of only a handful of people who consistently read and “like” my work.  Even those who don’t specifically “like” it but do come to read it number only in the few dozen.

But the readership here is pretty much the only regular social interaction in which I engage nowadays, if you don’t count work-related stuff.  At work, though, I think that I am probably quite unpleasant, because I am quite uncomfortable a lot of the time, and so my personality is negatively affected.

I’m not snappish and irritable at baseline, not as far as I can remember.  But for many years now, I have been quite grumpy and ornery.  I still try not to be rude if I can avoid it.  But I think I fail in that endeavor far more than I used to do.

And really, while it’s good not to be rude, ceteris paribus, my energy for such things is often less than optimal.  That dearth* also seems to affect my sensitivity to sensory annoyances, especially general noise and lateness and such like.

My tinnitus doesn’t help, either.  Right now it’s blaring at what feels like maybe 90 or 100 decibels in my right ear.  My left ear has a much milder amount, often zero, but the very disparity leaves me constantly a bit off balance.  Anyway, it’s quite annoying, but it doesn’t distract from my other discomforts, it merely layers itself atop or amidst them, like some kind of sensorineural seven layer dip or something.

There’s such a thing as seven layer dip, isn’t there?  I thought there was.  I could swear I had it at some family get together in the distant past or something.

Anyway, I’m very tired and very uncomfortable, and I’m just bobbing around here like a discarded plastic bottle that once contained one of those “experimental” sodas that never caught on, floating in the brackish, contaminated wastewater canal that is what’s left of my life.  I’m so tired and I am so uncomfortable.

I really want to get out of all this, to rest or at least to escape or even just to cease.  I am doing no good, as far as I can tell, and if I am doing no good for anyone, even myself‒at least not enough to outweigh the natural harm brought about by my very existence‒then why am I doing anything?

I feel rotten‒not morally so, but literally, as if my body were decaying in a more than metaphorical sense, yet still I am conscious and able to experience the sensations of that decay.  It’s not a good thing (duh!).  I wouldn’t say it’s hellish in any usual sense; it’s not as if it were so much discomfort that all I can do is scream.  In some ways‒admittedly, very few‒that might be better, because at least if I were in howl-worthy agony, I would not feel the compulsion to bother to try to force myself to be productive in any way.

Which one is worse, a Prometheus-style agony, where one is immobile and tortured regularly in such a way that one can do naught else but shriek, or a Sisyphean type of situation, where one strains and struggles to carry out some pointless task constantly, but one is at least able to act in that task?

Oh, who cares?  It doesn’t matter, and the answer is probably not precisely the same for any two people ever in the world.  I hope you all have a good weekend.  I guess I’ll probably be back on Monday.  I don’t think I’ll do audio today.  I’m too tired. 

*Does anyone else here remember Dearth Nadir, the Muppet Show’s spoof of Darth Vader, clearly played by Gonzo because his nose was unmistakable?

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I’m too worn out to make up a decent headline

I’m going to try to make this a shortish blog post today, because honestly, I’m pretty worn out (see above).  I haven’t brought it up that much this week, but it’s been a very bad time for pain‒in the sense of being good for pain, bad for those experiencing the pain.  Well, it’s been bad for the one experiencing it here, anyway.

I’m not aware of anyone else actually experiencing my pain, though there are those around me this week who have sympathized, since my pain has been rather obvious.  I’ve spent an unusual amount of time (even for me) lying on the floor, or trying to thump on my legs and sides until they stop hurting as much, or trying to do various exercises, from lunges to squats to steps and so on to try to improve my back, sides, hips, etc., all during the workday.

These interventions have been less than perfectly effective, alas, though the exercise is probably good in and of itself, ceteris paribus.  My pain might have been worse if I had done differently, which seems plausible, but it might even have been better.  I doubt it, of course, but if I had not doubted it in that way, it would have been absurdly masochistic for me to try these various exercises to see if they helped.

My thumb bases have also been particularly sore, which was at least part of my motivation to try my little audio posts.  I have to say, the audio stuff appears to have increased my “readership” slightly, though the before and after numbers are both so small that it’s difficult to draw too many inferences.  Still, they haven’t diminished anything, so far.

I don’t know if I’ll do an audio post today or not.  I’m really wiped.  But in any case, I should work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, so if I don’t do one today, maybe I’ll do one then.

Mind you, psychology has shown that semi-random, intermittent rewards tend to garner greater capture (of an audience, of gamblers, of addicts, whatever) than any steady amounts of reward…again, ceteris paribus.  This does not appear to be one of the lamentably numerous findings in psychology that have failed to replicate over the years; it seems fairly robust.  Certainly it is working for the casinos and for the various lotteries.

I have restarted taking naproxen since yesterday morning, and at near-maximum dose, because the pain is just too much right now.  I’ve been so uncomfortable that I’ve been getting Ubers to and from the office (the whole way) all week; this is how I heard the song about which I complained (in audio) a couple of days ago.  But this is not a sustainable practice.  It’s costing me quite a lot of money, certainly relative to my income, such as it is.

So, I’m taking more NSAIDs and hopefully it will help and won’t box my kidneys (to use typical medical slang, in which “to box” some organ is basically to kill it, i.e., to put it in a box or a coffin or whatever).  And if it does box my kidneys, well, we’ll probably just call that good for this life.

How much longer do you think I want to live with chronic pain that I can’t even partially control without taking toxic amounts of one or more medications, especially while being almost completely alone, living in a one-room dwelling with only a camp bed and my piano stool for furniture*?

I haven’t even seen the new Spider-Man movie, nor have I felt like looking to see it.  I have watched the trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, as well as reactions to it, because Doom is my favorite, but even that is not encouraging or exciting or motivating enough for 4 months of waiting.

If I were to have to face four months feeling as bad as I do this week, I think I would just buy a huge amount of ice cream and Jack Daniels and Coke and Tylenol and laxatives and every other thing I could think of and try to dissolve myself away, as literally as possible.  Okay, well, that’s not very practical, I know; I would probably have to do something else.

Anyway, that’s already about as much as I feel like writing today.  Maybe I’ll do a little audio about how we have no right or reason to imagine that there will always be a satisfactory answer to every problem, like chronic pain.  The universe is allowed to suck, and it is allowed to produce misery that doesn’t have the slightest shred of any silver lining.

Nevertheless, I hope you have a good day.

*That’s where I’m “sitting” at the moment of this writing.  I used “scare quotes” because I’m really almost leaning more than sitting, pressing the middle of my back against the edge of the keyboard to try to decrease local pain.  It’s less sexy than you might imagine.

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I buprofen, you buprofen, we all buprofen…

I feel that there’s something important about today’s date* (it’s August 7th in 2026 CE, but the year is not what feels familiar, it is the day and the month).  It’s not coming to me yet, but I think it will.  If it doesn’t, I guess I can always look it up, but that would be a shame to have to resort to that.

Please don’t think I have anything against looking things up; that would be quite untrue!  I’m a huge fan of looking things up, especially in ways that can lead one to learn about unexpected things while seeking the answer to one’s initial questions.  This is one of my big problems with LLM-assisted searches; they don’t tend to lead you to unexpected and tangential knowledge, or even to see a nearby entry in an encyclopedia that’s on a different but interesting subject.

But if I already “know” something, and sense that I know it, I feel that it’s a shame not to exercise my powers of recall.  We shall try to do that today.  Or, well, I will try to do that.  Y’all can do what you please.

It’s a weird morning for me, and if I seem stranger than usual or more incoherent (or less) than usual, try not to be alarmed.  Something rather remarkable happened to me last night:  I slept nearly six hours without any (remembered) awakenings.  I may even have slept slightly longer.

This did not just happen, though.  There was a series of circumstances that‒I strongly suspect‒led to this outcome.

Yesterday morning, I felt so crummy right from the start of the day that I took a CBD/Delta-9 gummy** first thing in the morning.  It made me groggy to some degree but at least it suppressed some tension.

Then, of course, I took some Tylenol and some aspirin in reasonable amounts, and they did whatever they do for me, which isn’t terribly much, but there it is.  Anyway, I felt kind of crappy and sleepy and low-energy and just miserable, even for me.

I also wasn’t sure that the curtailment of NSAIDs had actually been making any difference in the symptoms (signs, really) that had led me to stop them.  Anyway, I have a bottle of Ibuprofen (actually, I have two) at the office, and I finally gave in to pain and general stiffness and soreness and mental fatigue and just took three of them.

Not long after, I found myself getting pleasant chills all over my body, as well as a general feeling of relative euphoria, and I realized that it was the Ibuprofen fighting my inflammation‒or whatever specifically was having the effect I was experiencing‒and making me feel physically alive and rather well for the first time in a while.

Unfortunately, ibuprofen doesn’t last as long as naproxen.  I took another dose (of 2 tablets this time) later in the day, and then two just before I went to bed last night.  I can only conclude (provisionally) that it was at least part of what led to my relatively sound sleep.

This is, of course, immense, but it is also ever so slightly worrisome.

You see, I stopped using ibuprofen a while back when it seemed to start being associated with occasional palpitations (consistent with premature atrial contractions).  This was not at all certain.  They might have been related to something else I was taking or perhaps some interaction (the palpitations were real, in that they were not merely sensations but were associated with slightly irregular heartbeats; I checked my pulse).

But there are many other medications available, so I decided to switch to naproxen for regular use.  I usually didn’t take the maximum dose, because in my clinical experience, naproxen tends to be a bit more toxic than ibuprofen (possibly related to the latter’s relatively shorter duration of action).

So, anyway, yeah, I think that’s a big part of why I slept last night better than I’ve slept in a good while, or at least longer.  I don’t expect that to continue, necessarily (though I am unlikely to complain if it does).  After all, my rest has probably been quite a bit worse than usual these last ten days or so, because of the eliminated anti-inflammatory medications, so there’s some degree of making up for extra exhaustion, which temporarily overpowers whatever processes lead to my insomnia in the first place.

We’ll see, I guess.  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.  If so, I’m sure I’ll let you all know.

In any case, I’m going to be paying attention to my liquid waste elimination systems, just to be sure I’m not experiencing major difficulties.  I’ll also keep a weather eye on my heart rhythm, but I need to try not to pay too much attention to it, since palpitations can be subjective.

Also, let’s be honest and clear, premature atrial contractions are generally benign, and are not associated with degeneration into worse rhythm disturbances.  I’m sure that I have some scar tissue in my heart‒I mean, I did have open heart surgery for crying out loud***‒and so I’m probably prone to some slight irritability in the conduction system from time to time.

I guess we’ll see what will happen.  I haven’t taken any ibuprofen yet today; despite the euphoria I felt yesterday, I don’t expect it to entail any addiction risk, because that “rush” was a rush of relief, not of intoxication.  But I need to be aware of the kidney and cardiac effects.  Of course, I also must keep protecting my stomach, but I’ve been doing that for a long time (and probably engendering some chronic issues related to the meds needed for it).

We’ll see how well I can engineer the workings of my body, I guess.  I’m pretty good at it, but the tools available are still blunt ones, and PPE for them is limited.  Hopefully, I will at least get a few night’s worth of relatively good sleep this weekend.

Speaking of which, I hope you all have a good day today and a good weekend, yourselves.  I expect I will next write a blog post Monday morning‒as always, exclusis improvisis.

*The more I think about it, the more I think that it might be the birthday of one of my best friends from when I grew up, named Andy Tabar.  If I were still allowed on Meta-related services, I could check, because I followed him on Facebook and Instagram, but alas that is no more.  If it is his birthday, and if any of my readers are in contact with him, please wish him Happy Birthday from me.  Thank you.

**Perfectly legal, OTC, hemp-derived.

***Actually, it was for an atrial septal defect, one that wasn’t discovered until I started working out for NROTC and running fairly long distances.

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The sun is the same in a relative way…but not as much as the CMB

Meet the new day; same as the old day.  Or at least, in everything but the trivial details, every new day is indistinguishable from the previous oodles of days.  It’s just a full rotation of the Earth around its axis, such that when it’s done, the same points on Earth are lined up with the same…

…well, okay, here there’s some variation depending on how you’re measuring the day.  There are solar days (our usual measure), which are reckoned when the same line of latitude points “directly” at the sun again.  But, of course, the Earth is moving relative to the sun, and at a noticeable rate:  it goes roughly one 365.25th of the way around the sun in one day, and so it takes slightly longer to get back to the original orientation toward the sun than it would otherwise.

Then there are sidereal days, in which we reset when the same point on Earth is aligned with the same relatively distant stars.  Such distance means the angular change to those stars caused by Earth’s motion is much smaller than the angular change to the sun.  So those day lengths are, I believe, more consistent, but they are actually slightly less than 24 hours long.

I suppose, at our current level of technology and understanding, the most consistent day measure would be Earth’s rotation relative to specific spots on the cosmic microwave background radiation, which would basically be as far away as anything we can measure.

The Milky way is moving slightly relative to the CMB though.  I think this is called proper motion*, but I may be misremembering that term.  Still, that rate of motion is tiny relative to the scales involved.  Although, come to think of it, since the Earth is moving within and along with the Milky Way, it’s possible that the Earth’s motion relative to the other, relatively distant stars within the galaxy may be smaller than its motion relative to the CMB.

I don’t know whether or not that is the case.  If anyone out there knows off the top of your head, I would be delighted if you would let me know.  But don’t bother Googling it, or asking some LLM about it; I can do that for myself if we’re going to resort to such tactics.

Speaking of relative motion and such, I did something relatively new yesterday afternoon with respect to reading.  Allow me to set the stage**.

I recently started dabbling (very inconsistently) in the online courses at MIT (and other universities) on their YouTube channel(s).  I started with Quantum Mechanics and then also started the General Relativity course, since I have some personal curiosities related to that subject that I’ve yet to see answered.

In the first lecture, the GR professor went over the main texts they would be using.  Well, I already have two of them, so I figured I would get the third.  I ordered it in paperback (the hardcover was ridiculously expensive, whereas the softcover was about the same price as any good-sized trade paperback).  After it arrived, it sat rather forlornly on my desk for some weeks.

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Now, as I’ve said, I’ve been having a hard time reading fiction or nonfiction lately.  But a softcover textbook is no heavier than my lapcom would be, unlike the two hardcover GR texts I own.  So I brought the text General Relativity, by Wald, with me when I left the office yesterday.

The cool thing is, I actually read from it while waiting for the train and then while on the train.  I completed the preface/introduction and chapter one!  It’s not a long chapter, of course, and it mostly reviewed concepts of special relativity and so on***, which I know relatively (har) well.

Still, I feel reasonably pleased to have done this, and I hope to continue the process.  Maybe once I get this book under my belt, I’ll feel more inclined to do similarly with Sean Carroll’s Spacetime and Geometry, which is hardcover but not too terribly heavy.  Gravitation, on the other hand, is a book comparable in scale to Harrison’s, the “bible” of internal medicine.  It’s not a book one tends to carry around (though it provides its own rather pointed example of the effects of gravitation).

Anyway, with any luck, maybe I’ll inaugurate a more useful commuter reading schedule.  And maybe I’ll achieve enough skill at GR that I might be able to explore my perennial question.  At least, I should be able to learn more stuff, and that’s always a good thing.

I hope you all have a good day.

*Actually, no, in astronomy “proper motion” has to do with angular movement with respect to more distant stars, or something along those lines.  I don’t think it’s a great term for that.  The motion of a galaxy relative to the CMB is apparently called the “peculiar motion”, which seems like a rather peculiar choice to me.

**I don’t know how you could stop me even if you so wished.

***It has one practice problem, which is a version of the classic barn door paradox aka the ladder paradox, but I didn’t work the problem.  I know the basic answer already; it involves the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, and the author asks us to draw a spacetime diagram demonstrating the basic issue.  I had no resources to do this on the train.

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Foundations tend to have a lot in common

Hey there, everybody.  I hereby wish you all a good Tuesday morning, by whatever criteria you might use to judge the goodness of a day of the week, which are not necessarily the ones I might use.  Different people can have quite different priorities.

Although, when you get down to it, such differences exist only in the periphery of our value judgments, and they can only become powerfully pertinent in a population the basic needs of which are by and large met.  For nearly all of us, nearly all of the fundamental requirements of a good day are going to be very similar, albeit generally unspoken (because they are so obvious, I guess).

For instance, most of us would like the day not to include any serious dangers to life and to health*.  Most people would prefer a day without serious illness, without significant pain, without acute fear.  Most of us would prefer a day on which we do not go (completely) hungry, except perhaps by deliberate choice.  Most of us would prefer to have access to adequate clean water, and to shelter from heat and cold and rain and so on.

I’m sure I could think of other things that lie at the base of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.  Up a level or so would be slightly more abstract desires that are nevertheless common to most humans.  These include being among peers that one likes, and who like one as well.  It includes, for many of us, the (unfulfilled?) desire to share one’s day with actual loved ones:  parents, siblings, children, partners, close friends, etc.

These are things that begin to be more unreliable in the modern world, despite the advances that make the basal needs less commonly thwarted.  Perhaps this is partly related to the fact that, in the ancestral world, one’s social group was very much essential to one’s basic needs.  Now that those basic needs are less frequently thwarted, it is possible for us to lose track of and allow to slip away those social connections upon which we evolved to depend.

Also, our societies no longer really have much built-in scaffolding around such needs.  This appears to be because there are few forces at work that reinforce that scaffolding, and so it slips into disrepair, to everyone’s cost.

To be clear, this is not the result of some conspiracy of evil-doing, selfish billionaires or government operatives or whatever other presumed enemy of the good one childishly imagines.  It is a result of stochastic, chaotic, complex forces in a civilization that is very far from any kind of stable equilibrium‒a civilization that has seen world-changing discoveries and innovations and ideas multiple times in nearly every decade, let alone over any person’s lifetime.

Civilization is a spontaneously self-assembled system, but its existing patterns keep getting disrupted in multiple places, in multiple ways, all the time, and so it must recrystallize in some new, local frost-pattern‒one that will, in turn, most likely be disrupted again, and soon.  There’s way too much going on everywhere for any mere human or group of humans to have actual control over even their own personal circumstances for very long or very well.

Any external locus of goodness is going to be unreliable, not just in practice but in principle.  This is a fact that Siddhartha Gautama recognized many centuries ago, as did Lao Tzu (or whatever the proper name is), and the various stoic philosophers of Greece and Rome.  I suspect there were similar insights among thinkers in the ancient western hemisphere as well, but I don’t think we have access to good records of their specific thoughts, alas.

It’s questionable, of course, whether any internal locus of goodness can be reliable in any way, either, since we are no more the authors of our brains/minds than we are of the external world.  I can tell you plainly, and with very little fear of contradiction, that I am not the author of my mood disorder(s), and I am not the author of my ASD any more than I am of the septum pellucidum “cyst” in my brain or the hole that was in my heart.  Neither is anyone else.

Okay, that’s enough mindless philosophy**.  I doubt that I’ve said anything particularly useful or even interesting.  For that I apologize; I’m not at my best, I fear.  I mean that not just in the trivial sense, that one is surely only at one’s overall “best” on very rare occasions throughout one’s so-called life.

I am still off NSAIDs, though at least my concerns that prompted that moratorium appear to be improving.  But I am quite stiff and sore, obviously.  My sleep has, if anything, been somewhat worse than usual.  I have not read any books, fiction or otherwise, in over a week.  I also haven’t done any exercises on Brilliant dot org in well over a week.

I played guitar a little on Sunday (and sang) but considering the noise in my room, with fan and air-conditioning going, and with my cheap little practice amp, it was a bit unsatisfying.  I played my Gibson SG (special edition, I think this one is called, with three pickups and so on).  It’s nice, but I think I like the Strats and the Les Paul style guitar a bit more (though the SG is beautifully lightweight).

I often think I’d like to have a telecaster, because some of the people whom I’ve heard playing them get some quite interesting sounds.  But that’s an idle sort of notion; it’s not really important.

Anyway, that’s it for me for today, at least‒though I admit, with some regret, that I will probably be back tomorrow, exclusis improvisis.  

I again wish you all the best of days, as measured from the base to the summit of Maslow’s pyramid.  If anyone deserves it, you do.

*Although people delude themselves about such dangers when it comes to, for instance, driving.

**“Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease!”

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It is a far, far better thing I did than anything I did that was far, far worse

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.

It’s Monday.  I am heading in to the office very early because I hardly slept last night and don’t feel that I could sleep.

As you probably guessed‒if you thought about it at all, which may be unlikely‒I did not work this weekend.  Instead, I finally got to hang out with my youngest, and we went to a big arcade kind of place whose name I forget, where we played a lot of crane grab style games.  Then we ate at Sbarro and wandered around the mall for a bit before seeking out a comic book store I had recently found out about.

So, all in all, it was one of the best days in more than thirteen years.

Unfortunately, it can be rather dispiriting to return to my illusory life after enjoying most of a day with my child.  Not that I’m complaining about spending that time; I most certainly am not!  But apparently this is one of those ASD* things that happens, when even very positive and uplifting interactions take a toll, especially if they involve a lot of noise and people and such.

Though I must say, in the comic book store, I felt almost instantly at home, and didn’t feel any of my usual awkwardness in asking if they had anything related to the role-playing game Gamma World.  These were my people, after all.  And it was a good comic store, not one that overly caters to “normies”.  Though I daresay all were surely welcome there.

Anyway, the usual friendless and familyless (that’s not really a word…might “afamilial” be better?  Apparently not, based on Google Docs’s reaction to it) days of my peudo-life from day to day don’t seem even as good as usual after such a day.  Also, I think I’m fighting a mild cold, which probably is something that happens fairly easily after playing games that many other people have played.

Though, come to think of it, I don’t remember that being a big deal back in the day when arcades were much more common.  At least I never remember tending to get sick after going to one.  But honestly, I did not go to them very often, so my sample size is very small.

I suspect I am often low-grade inoculated by very small doses of many pathogenic viruses because (among other stims) I bite my nails almost constantly.  I used to bite them more, and even picked at the skin around the base of my thumbnails until it peeled off a long way; my thumbs would sometimes bleed from the picking and get quite inflamed and irritated.  Occasionally, that still happens, but I am able to resist picking at the skin so much.  I have other things that I can do with my fidgeting fingers that are less painful.

Anyway, the nail biting may help prime my immune system against a lot of things.  I occasionally wonder whether it’s a trait or tendency that has been‒or can be‒selected for by evolution.  If it does happen to give one’s immune system a leg up, it would make sense for those with the tendency to have selective advantages.

This may also relate to the tendency of very small children to put a lot of things in their mouths.  I don’t mean to suggest that habit developed because it was good for exposing the immune system to very small doses of things.  I suspect it has more to do with the mouth being highly sensitive and having multiple modalities and more dexterity at an early age than the hands, and so it is a useful primary means of exploring much of the world for an infant.

Still, I think the immune priming is a useful side-effect.  Also, the modern tendency for people to be hyper-fastidious about not allowing their young children to touch things and taste things and expose themselves to tiny amounts of pathogens probably contributes to the surge in (hitherto almost unheard-of) allergies to rather ordinary things in the latter few decades.

I’m going to draw to a close now, because I’m having trouble focusing on my screen.  I don’t think it’s anything related to a sudden worsening of my vision, and I am wearing reading glasses.  It’s more as if my ciliary muscles are just tired, and they don’t want to do the work to make my lenses (the ones in my eyes) focus.

It is what it is.  Hopefully they will recover a bit of their endurance soon.  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day and week as you possibly can (which, as I’ve pointed out previously, you will, because whatever happens, once it has happened, is immutable, and was inevitable, and so you have the best‒and worst‒days you could have, every single day).

Dickens wasn’t just playing around with words in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, I guess.  No, he was writing floridly because he got paid by the word.  But that’s another story.

*I will indulge in a little sophomoric (and accidental) humor here:  because the S and the D are so close together, especially on the smartphone, I at first wrote “one of those ASS things”.