Lifestyle

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Monday morning report, 4-29-2024

In case anyone was wondering, the office was closed on Saturday (April 27th, 2024 AD/CE), so I did not work and I did not do any writing this weekend, neither fiction nor nonfiction.  In fact, I did almost nothing productive at all this weekend, apart from a few moderate walks.  I also didn’t really do anything fun this weekend, honestly.  The closest I came to that was watching some YouTube videos of people reacting to movies that I’ve seen before.  It’s almost like watching a movie with a friend.  Not really, though.

Anyway, this morning I did some writing, and I guess I was making up for lost time, because I wrote 2,626 words on Extra Body.  Obviously, it’s coming along, and I hope to be done with it before too long.  At least, I’ll be done with the first draft.  It will need a lot of pruning, of course, because I do tend to get carried away when I’m writing fiction, especially when I’m using my laptop computer, which I did today.

Other than that, there’s not much to add.  I’m starting a new work week today, as are most people, and <sarcasm> that should be wonderful fun </sarcasm>.  It actually wouldn’t be all that bad if there was not so much noise and if people came and went on time and followed the rules and/or the rules were enforced.  Oh, well.  The world is unsatisfactory, and it always has been.  It probably always will be.  I don’t know why I bother with it.  I’m way past finding any significant value in existence.

I hope at least some of you are more enthusiastic about starting your work week than I am.  I don’t know whether to tell you to look forward to my story; it’ll be a while before it’s done, and of course, I don’t know whether it will be something anyone will like.  I guess there’s only one way we can discover that fact.

Have a good day, please.

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Blog post for 4-10-2024 Wednesday

I’m not writing any fiction again today, it seems.  I just don’t have any urge to do it.  The very prospect of it feels almost entirely pointless, though that could be at least partly due to the fact that I’ve felt so gormy these last few days.

I’m not as nauseated as I was yesterday (though I’m probably just as nauseous, ha ha ha), since I took two omeprazole tablets last night, and also I didn’t take any aspirin or naproxen yesterday.  I did take a few acetaminophen, though those don’t tend to work as well on their own as they do in combination with aspirin and so on.  Still, I hate the feeling of nausea*, and would rather have at least a little pain than be nauseated.  It would have been one thing if I were sick enough just to throw up and get it over with, but all I had was just general gastro-intestinal distress and discomfort throughout the day, which really sapped my energy.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about my fiction.  This week I just haven’t had any enthusiasm for it (nor for any other positive thing in life, really).  Maybe I should try to reignite my energy by sharing more of the links to my pre-existing fiction on Twitter and Facebook and the like.  Maybe if I got any feedback of any kind on any of those posts or shares it might stoke the fire of creativity a bit.

Of course, it’s hard to see why anyone other than the people who already read my stuff would respond to my posts, but who knows?  It’s difficult for me to predict what might motivate other people to do something, at least some of the time.

I feel slightly awkward sharing my links and stuff on the various anti-social media, particularly because I’m currently reading Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, about the detriments of social media and smartphones to younger people.  On the other hand, unless you’re asking an elf or a vampire, I probably would not be considered a younger person.  Also, I developed my neuro-psychiatric issues long before smartphones and even before the Worldwide Web—I come by them naturally, so to speak—so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about them twisting me in some negative way.  My personality, such as it is, is already formed.  Though, as I discussed yesterday, I do seem to be reasonably good at learning new things even though I’m an old geezer.

I guess maybe I will share my stuff on at least X** and Facebook, and maybe even LinkedIn, though I have less interest in the latter, since I don’t do the whole networking thing.  I might as well make those old posts in which I “advertised” my new stories and such work for me.  And I might as well make Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s endeavors serve some useful purpose, since it’s not as though they pay much in taxes or anything.

I don’t knew where I’m going with this today, otherwise.  At least I’m not going off on weird tangents about playing with infinite series that have obvious outcomes once you work them through.  I mean, yes, it’s rather fun to fiddle with such things in the moment, particularly when one has nothing better to do, and it’s even good when it comes back around and you realize it’s revealed something that should have been obvious with much less work***.  That’s okay.  There’s nothing too wrong with coming at something in a complicated way and finally realizing how simple the answer is.  As I mentioned yesterday, at the very least, it’s good mental exercise.

Still, I shouldn’t go off on too many tangents like that too often.  I don’t think people like those posts very much.  Though, for all I know, they might think they’re the greatest thing anyone’s ever done, they’re just too shy to say anything about it.  I simply don’t know.  It’s like firing a photon off in the direction of an intergalactic super-void:  I’m not ever going to get any feedback about what happened to that photon if it doesn’t interact with something relatively nearby very soon****, and even if it does, unless it reflects back, or unless some intelligence sends a signal in response, it’s still going to be lost.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I expect to write my usual Thursday post tomorrow, so if you look forward to such things, you can look forward to that.  If I don’t write it, it will be either because I’m not feeling well (more so than is typically the case) or I’m dead, or perhaps that some other, unpredicted alternative possibility has interfered.  I’d give well over 50% odds that I’ll write a post tomorrow.  But for today, this post is already too long and is almost entirely without substance (and I don’t mean that just because it’s written on a word processor and shared online).

I really do hope that you all have a good day.

*I know, how unusual, right?

**Does Mr. Musk realize that by calling his platform “X” and putting its symbol in the upper right corner of the various X-cretions, he makes it look as though one is supposed to click on that symbol to make a “tweet” go away?  I know that’s the way I feel, and I’ve even tried to do it once or twice when I was distracted.

***In this case, for instance, if you add some (single) fraction of an original number to that starting total, the amount that you added is now one integer step smaller fraction of the new total.  In other words, if you start with some number, then add a ninth, say, of the original number, you now have ten of those ninths in your new total, i.e., 1 and 1/9.  But that 1/9 is now 1/10 of your new  total, trivially.  So, if you want to tip, for instance, 20% of the new total (including the tip) then you need to tip 25% of the original amount before the tip.  In other words, to tip one fifth of the total including the tip, you tip one fourth of the original, pre-tip total, since then you will have five fourths.  Anyway, let me stop this now.

****Unless, I suppose, the universe if both closed—i.e., it loops around on itself like a torus or a sphere—and smaller than anyone has any reason to suspect.  It would have to be small because, based on the expansion rate of the universe as currently measured, any photon of reasonable wavelength would probably have red-shifted into undetectability long before the time I could receive it from the other direction if it circumnavigated a closed universe on anything like the minimum scale we think the universe is.  A photon of too tiny a wavelength, i.e., of high enough energy, would have too high a chance to spontaneously decompose into some particle-antiparticle pair somewhere along the way…I think.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I can see you’re out of aces”

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

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

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

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

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

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

That wouldn’t be too bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tuesday for the price of one day

Okay, well…it’s Tuesday morning, and this is the first of two planned blog posts for this week.  If there is any person out there in Hell’s creation who really used to look forward to starting his or her week with my Monday morning blog post, I apologize.  I regret causing you any disappointment.  On the other hand, causing disappointment is one of my greatest talents, so at least you’ve been exposed to that facet of my character.  I don’t know if one could properly call it a creative ability, but it is something for which I have a knack.

I did do some fiction writing yesterday, after walking to the train.  In fact, I mistook how much I had written, feeling that I hadn’t gotten even one page done, so I continued to the top of the following page only to realize it was the second page of the day.  I wrote over 1400 words; I’m at least making progress.

As I said, I walked to the train yesterday, and in addition, I walked back to the house in the evening.  Indeed, according to my pedometer, I walked about 14.7 miles yesterday in total.  I did not walk this morning because I have developed a modest blister on the bottom of my right big toe.  It’s quite annoying, because it’s not as though I just started walking again.  Last week I walked well over thirty miles in total, wearing the same effing make and model of shoes I wore yesterday.  Why should I have just yesterday developed a blister?  It seems absurd, but reality, for better or worse, is not amenable to appeals.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break after a day that included nearly three fifths of a marathon worth of walking, though apart from the blister and my left knee soreness‒the latter of which is almost chronic‒I don’t feel particularly worn down.  I did have trouble getting to sleep last night after having walked so much in the evening, which was somewhat annoying, since I had already gotten back to the house later than usual.  It would have been nice if at least I could have slept more deeply once I did fall asleep, but that was of course not going to happen.  So, I’m quite tired.

What else is new, right?

I don’t know what else to discuss today.  The equinox is coming this week, but I figure Thursday would be a better day to talk about that.  It’s not exactly exciting, to be honest.  Up north, the coming of Spring is a positive thing, but in Florida, mostly it just presages the bulk of the year during which the heat and humidity are stultifyingly intense.  Believe me, when you walk 6 miles in Florida most of the year, you look as if you’d just gone swimming, because your sweat does not evaporate.

There’s a bit of a cool and rather strong breeze blowing this morning, which is a surprise, and I did not wear a jacket or a heavy shirt.  That’s okay.  The train will be here within the next 5 minutes according to the schedule and the announcement.  By evening, unless prior weather reports have been completely superseded, it will be plenty warm.

Oh, I did stumble upon an interesting book yesterday while skimming through recommendations based on a decision-theory book I bought.  It was a computer science book, geared toward undergrads and grad students but not really requiring that one be in that situation.  Its purpose is to teach a broad primer on computer science from the bottom up by walking through the process of building a (fairly simple) computer, writing and setting up an operating system, and then making it able to play games such as Tetris.  The authors even provide links to resources so the reader can actually do that building, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise.  They start with logic gates and go to the end, so the overall system is called “Nand to Tetris”, though that isn’t the title of the book.

I think this is great, because modern computers have become so sophisticated and complex that most people who program probably learn to do it without getting educated in the underlying systems and how they work, how Boolean Logic works and is instantiated, up to machine code and the like.  But these are the things I have always wanted to understand better.  My CS 100 class in college just taught us how to program in Pascal.  That was fine, as far as it went, but that kind of programming is just following more ordinary kinds of logic and instruction-giving.

If I had taken extensive coursework in computer science and electrical engineering, I’m sure I would have gotten into such things.  But that wasn’t my major, and I didn’t have time to take a boatload of electives.  If I could have taken courses in all the possible areas in which I might have been interested, I would probably still be in college, and my educational costs would probably have reached a level comparable to the price of an aircraft carrier, or at least of one of the military planes that uses them.

Anyway, I got the Kindle edition of the book.  Being a book by and about computers, it is well formatted to work with the e-book reader format, which is itself a good sign.  Also, the reviews in general are glowing, and the comments they make seem to demonstrate that this is exactly the sort of book I’d like to bring my basic understanding to a better level, from my point of view.  Who knows, maybe I’ll end up doing the project?

If I’m going to be a supervillain, I’m going to need to be able to build my own doomsday devices and robot servants, after all!

Of course, I have a whole slew of books I want to read in addition to this, and I haven’t gone any farther on Quantum Field Theory.  The audio files in which I read aloud just take up so much memory when I use them, and Google starts trying to entice me to buy more storage because (gasp!) I’ve now reached 80% of present capacity.  That’s only taken, what, seven or eight years?  Better send Google more money or before I know it I’ll be at 85%.

Anyway, I don’t think the audio has made me read any better or improved my understanding.  It nudged me a little, but not enough.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I mean to do some walking tomorrow, and some fiction writing, and I keep dreaming that I might write something more topical here in the afternoon and post it, but with the noise and nonsense at work, that often becomes all but impossible.

I guess we’ll find out what happens together.

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I’m not yet back to doing Shakespearean blog post titles

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so this is the second day of my planned new habit of writing posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday.  I don’t know how that pattern might affect my readership.  Maybe it will lead to fewer people reading my stuff because it will be coming out less often.  Maybe it will lead to an increase in readership because it will be a comparatively scarce resource, and that fact will both make people want to see it when it’s available and will make it less of a burden for people to commit to following it.  Possibly, it will have no appreciable affect whatsoever, and any changes that happen will be related to other variables entirely.

It seems most likely that it will be some messy combination of those three broad categories.

I did some writing on Extra Body yesterday, which was the plan, even though I had slept very poorly and had to catch up on some things at work, for which I hadn’t been able to summon the energy on Tuesday.  After my relatively upbeat morning post on Tuesday, I’m afraid my energy and my mood really crashed, and it’s very unclear to me why it happened, other than the rather broad and general global tendency on my part that makes me prone to such things.

While that is indeed a good description of aspects of my nature, it isn’t a very satisfying explanation for why things happen in specific ways on specific days, and it doesn’t allow me to make any choices about what actions to take based upon it.  As Eliezer Yudkowsky might put it, it doesn’t let me squeeze the future into any particular path, so it’s not useful.

Anyway, it was a very rough day, and several times just sitting in the office, I grappled with the urge to start crying, and several times I thought‒out loud in my head, as it were‒the words, “Somebody, please, help me.”  Of course, no one could hear my thoughts, so no one did offer any help.  It was a general, global request, or plea, anyway, not one specific to that day or time.

Getting back to writing fiction, though:  I wrote well over 1500 words, which was a little over two pages in the format I have now on Word, which I think is perhaps different than it used to be.  I don’t recall 750 words per page being usual, but maybe it was.

I had forgotten, I must admit, how much more relaxed it can be to write one’s pages for the day and not be expected to publish them that same day, in contrast to what I do when writing this blog.  I simply wrote a couple of pages of the story, and I could have written more, and then I was done with that writing for the day.  Sure, I’ll need to come back to it and edit it later‒I’ll do that a lot.  But on any given day, the process has a sense of relatively pain-free closure.

I even puttered around on the guitar for a few minutes after that, as a sort of nostalgic indulgence.  I used to do that most every day after I finished my three to four pages of draft writing.

With the blog, writing and then editing and then posting and sharing and all takes up much more time, and it seems to be more enervating.  No offense intended.  Maybe it’s a bit like drawing a daily comic strip, but drawing and releasing it on the day, every day.  That could be done, in the modern world, but I don’t think many comic strip creators would like it, and I think it would probably burn them out before long.

Still, at least people seem to read my blog.  If we compiled every individual instance of a single person reading any one of my fiction works‒meaning if someone has read three of my works, that counts as 3 instances‒you might have fewer instances than the number of people who at least look at my blog on any given day.  Certainly the number of people who have bought my books isn’t even within an order of magnitude of the people who subscribe to my blog.

Either way, I guess it doesn’t make much difference in the long run.  All these moments (and words) will be lost in time like tears in the rain, as Roy Baty said.

I did walk to the train this morning, though I did not do so yesterday, fearing the time loss it would entail.  That lack of exercise didn’t help or hinder my mood as far as I can tell, but it was probably good for my recovery, because today was easier.  I mean to keep doing this, as I’ve said, and eventually to add the walk back to the house as well.  It’s good for my health, it makes me “stronger”, and it gives me time to listen to educational podcasts and audible books on science and related topics.  I may even‒since there is no Audible version available‒read aloud and record Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible for myself so that I can listen to it later.  Just the reading will likely get the concepts into my head well, and then relistening will cement them.

If that works, I may do it with other deep books that don’t have Audible versions.  I remember there used to be a service called “recording for the blind”, for which I briefly volunteered as a proof-listener, that provided audio textbooks for those who cannot see, and for which there are no braille versions (surely the supermajority of textbooks).

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I have things I want to do, and I have an appointment this morning for an irritating, bureaucratic process that I have to do, or at least that will make certain other things simpler.  Just the prospect of it fills me with paranoia and stress.  I hope you have a good day.  And, since I am working this weekend, I expect to write a post on Saturday.

TTFN

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Top o’ the workweek to ye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m being silly, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s that there is no point.

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I should take a flying Leap Day

Hello and good morning.

Happy February 29th.  This is a date that only comes approximately once every four years.  I say “approximately” because as I’ve noted before, on three of every four turns of centuries, there is no leap day.  This is because the length of a year is ever so slightly less than 365.25 days…though I don’t recall if that’s measured in solar days or sidereal days.

Anyway, I’ve gone over this ground often enough already‒too often, probably.  I won’t bore you with more of it for now.  Probably I’m the only one who really finds it interesting, anyway.

Yesterday was a miserable day overall, though I did start off somewhat productively, typing all of what I’d written so far of Extra Body into the laptop computer.  It was almost five handwritten pages, which turned out to be just shy of 1400 words.  That’s roughly how much I used to write on any given day when producing a draft of a new work of fiction.  Anyway, I didn’t write anything new after that yesterday , but at least it’s primed and hopefully I’ll do a page of new writing today, once I’m done with this.  I’m heading to the office early‒even for me‒to try to make sure I have plenty of time to get that started.

I ended up leaving the office really late last night, because now it turns out that even the two people I like most there are getting to be part of the group who is willing to roll over the guy who’s not capable of just shutting out and walking away from work and saying to Hell with people who don’t worry about how what they do affects others.

I was already really depressed and frazzled to start the day.  I even put ear plugs in and then wore my airport-style hearing protector muffs to block out the noise of the music and the people saying silly things.  Neither of the two measures works adequately on its own, but together they do a decent job.  However, the ear muffs give me a headache after a while, because they squeeze my head.

I should just sabotage the stupid sound system; unfortunately, it is both fixable and replaceable.

Sometimes I feel almost as if a collection of a few people in the office‒among them people I thought were my friends‒are trying to drive me to quit, or to kill myself, or perhaps just to lose it in some other way.  I know it’s pretty silly to think such things, but in some ways, it’s emotionally less horrible to think that people are deliberately out to cause me harm than to think that people about whom I care, and who I thought cared about me, are willing to cause me distress and pain just out of thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

I’m probably being oversensitive.  I’m probably actually just on the verge of seriously losing my mind.  That probably wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Anyway, I ended up getting back to the house quite late, and then‒because commuting is not inherently relaxing‒I was a bit wound up and had trouble getting to sleep, so I watched several videos of people “reacting” to songs that I know.  This can be kind of fun, to a limited degree, because it feels almost like listening to a song (or similarly, to watching a movie or show) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before, though there is no actual give and take.

It also doesn’t give you the experience of watching some new thing (or listening to some new song) that you yourself have never seen with a friend, because the YouTube videos can’t really embed an entire show or movie, without being taken down due to copyright.  One has to join Patreon groups to watch things like that, and I’m really only following two people on Patreon.

I joined one of the two to see reactions to Doctor Who, but they are now all caught up, and there won’t be new Doctor Who episodes until May, I think.  They react to other shows, most of which I haven’t watched, but unfortunately, most of those shows are ones in which I am not interested.

I might be interested in them if I truly, literally had someone with whom to watch them; I watched many shows with my (now-ex) wife that I probably wouldn’t have watched on my own, because she was interested in them, and it made me happy to enjoy them with her.  Also, of course, we had similar tastes in many things; there was, after all, a reason we got married.  Or, well, there was a whole set of reasons.  Just one probably wouldn’t have been an adequate incentive for either of us.

But I’m a tiresome person, even to people who honestly love me.  I can sympathize, since I find myself tiresome.  Maybe people at the office really would prefer me to be gone, but are too kind to allow themselves to think such thoughts in their conscious minds, but end up acting on them nevertheless.  I couldn’t blame them, really, for such a thing.  How can someone be blamed for their subconscious thoughts?

I should just take myself out of everybody’s way.  I don’t make other people happy in any kind of reliable sense, but I do make many other people unhappy, though I would prefer not to do so.  Since I’m a net negative on the world, any personal return to zero on my part would be a net gain for the world at large.  And after that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

Time will tell, I guess.  I’ll try to screw my courage to the sticking point and see if I can eventually succeed.  Well, actually, I will only see if I fail.  Only others will be able to see if I succeed.  That’s the nature of the thing, as far as I can tell, and is one of the most potent arguments against it, given I would be causing problems for which I could provide no possible assistance.

But since other people seem sanguine about inconveniencing me‒and it seems to be a general tendency among humans‒I shouldn’t let it be an absolute barrier to my choices, though I still think it should be a relative one.

Anyway, that’s that.  I hope to get a page written on Extra Body today, if I can.  I suppose, if you’re unlucky enough for me to be still around tomorrow and writing my blog, I’ll let you know.

TTFN