writing

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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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One of a new pair o’ digms

Hello again.  This is hopefully going to be the first event in a new pattern of behavior in which I write blog posts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday and write fiction on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  The future is always in motion, of course, at least from our “worm’s eye view” of the universe without any access to enough information (let alone computing power) to make us anything like Laplace’s Demon, so things may not turn out according to plan‒but it is the plan.

I used the MS Word app on my phone to take a look at Outlaw’s Mind yesterday, just to see whether it looked like I might want to work on it again sometime.  I think it might benefit from eliminating the opening portion, which has an adult Timothy Outlaw approaching what will be (according to the original story idea) the climax of his tale.

I wrote this based on a story idea that I had written down in my “Story Ideas” file (appropriately enough), and the rest of the tale took off from there.  But I think‒perhaps‒that it has changed into a slightly different story than the opening idea, and I think it might be better if I just throw that little concept away and focus instead on the account of Timothy’s difficulties with rage and his exploration of his mind and its nature and the real or imagined horrific forces that plague him.  For one thing, this story connects with ideas that involve the larger Omniverse of my stories, including everything from The Chasm and the Collision and my potential story Changeling in a Shadow World, all the way back to my first completed (and now lost) book, Ends of the Maelstrom.

I like the process and concept of joining disparate fictional universes together, as in Stephen King’s whole Dark Tower concept, to say nothing of the (earlier) multiversal connections in comic books and graphic novels such as, for instance, Marvel/DC crossovers, and even, on a less “meta” scale, the merger of Asimov’s Foundation novels with his robot and empire novels and so on.  I’ve certainly done this on smaller scales myself already; careful and committed readers of my stories (if such people exist other than I) will know that the world of Unanimity is the same as the world of Hole for a Heart.

I guess that’s all still up in the air in many senses.  Extra Body, the story I’m ostensibly working on “now”, has some references‒highly speculative ones‒to a particular world of light-hearted, classic sci-fi.  It will be a rather nerdy sort of speculative connection, but I have no trouble with that.  I am certainly a nerd.

In other news, I did indeed walk to the train station again this morning, and I feel reasonably well, physically.  Yesterday I walked a total of about seven or eight miles, roughly, and I feel fairly okay.  I considered walking back to the house from the train in the evening, but my boss‒quite correctly, I think‒warned me against overdoing it.  This is quite sensible.  I think for most of this week I will stick with just the morning walk, but then next week I intend to add the return journey and eventually work my way along from there.

As for sleep:  well, I didn’t seem to get any worse a night’s sleep than usual, though it wasn’t particularly better.  I still started waking up very early, but knowing that I was going to be walking allowed me at least to put a decent spin on that fact, since I could just tell myself that, if I was unable to go back to sleep, I would just get up sooner and start walking sooner.  I did finally leave about five minutes earlier than yesterday, and I took a slightly different route, just to keep things fresh.

Yesterday while walking I listened to the audiobook of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, volume 1, whereas today I listened to some of Sean Carroll’s latest AMA podcast.  I highly recommend this; it’s both enjoyable and educational.  In the book, yesterday, I had to rewind and relisten to portions a number of times when I realized I had zoned out on some things he said (or wrote).  That’s fine.  It helps me learn better.

I wish there were an audio version of Quantum Field Theory, as Simply as Possible, and some others.  I suppose I could offer to do the audio myself, and by doing it, would learn the subject better.  It’s something to consider.

We’ll see.  I’m going to call this to a halt for the moment because my train stop is approaching and‒funnily‒I’m dozing off while writing.  That doesn’t happen very often, but maybe I’m getting into a relaxed state because of the exercise.  Either way, I don’t want to miss my stop, so this’ll be it for today.  Talk to you Thursday.

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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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This is the way the whirled Ns knot…

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday morning, which long-time readers will be able to tell from the opening line of this blog post, even if they don’t happen to have the day of the week displayed on their computers.  Does that actually happen, anymore?  Are there people who have smartphones and tablets and laptop computers and desktop computers where the computer‒they are all computers‒does not keep them informed of the day and date?

Based on some of the things I see at the office, you would imagine it to be thus, but I think that’s mainly a function of people not paying attention.

Speaking of people not being as sharp as they might be, I was a serious mess yesterday.  I’m not at all sure that my blog post was coherent, but I know that at work I struggled to be sensible.  Numerous times while I was there I lost track of what I was doing, and had to shake myself into focus.  It’s a good thing I prepare for the payroll ahead of time and that the boss looks at the results before I send the numbers in.  Also, it’s good that I do it every week, so it doesn’t require as much concentration as it would if I were doing it for the first time.

I did not write any on Extra Body yesterday, despite my hopeful intentions.  I left the office after lunch, with my boss’s blessing (so to speak) because he and everyone else could tell that I was really a mess.  If I were someone with a drug problem, they would probably think I was using.

I wish I could say that I had been able to get back to the house and go to sleep and sleep until time to get up.  Well, I did get back to the house, of course; that much is true.  But it took me a long time to be able to get to sleep, despite half a Benadryl.  I also started waking up at a little after 11pm (!).  I didn’t get up then, of course, but I kept going through my frequent awakening more or less from then on, until I finally got up five minutes before my alarm.

I feel more rested than yesterday, but that’s not saying very much.  It’s like beating your personal best on the 100 meter dash when your personal best was 5 minutes.  My chronic pain doesn’t help any of this.

I’m sorry, I wish I could write about more interesting things, or even that I knew what readers would like to read.  It seems that unpleasant things are all that’s ever on my mind.

I know a fair amount about various science topics and obviously about medical matters, and some mathematics and some philosophy and psychology and (ugh) politics and whatnot.  But it’s very difficult for me to find the energy to do anything interesting because I’m always tired, I’m always stressed, I’m always in pain, and I never get enough sleep.

I don’t know if I’m going to keep doing this much longer.  I didn’t even bring my computer back with me last night; I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  I’m tempted to go back to doing at most once a week blog posts, and trying to do fiction on the other mornings.  But I feel this blog is the only strong connection I have with the wider world out there, other than my sister.  This is my only means of reaching more than one person.  It’s also my only good means of sending out my distress call, my cry for help to the world.  At least, it’s the only one I seem capable of using.

It’s not very good at that, though.  There just aren’t all that many people who read it, and though I get some encouraging words from time to time, that’s only going to have a limited effect.  If you’re trying not to drown, it can be nice for someone to shout for you to keep swimming, that you can do it, that you just have to keep treading water…but only if more concrete help is on the way, and you just need to stay above water until it arrives.  If there is no actual boat or floaty ring or rope or lifeguard coming, then at best you just become a spectacle, where onlookers perhaps try to guess just how long you’ll be able to keep afloat before you finally go under for the last time.

At least I guess I’ve been able to offer that bit of entertainment.  I wonder if anyone has been making bets on length of time and specific outcomes for me.  If anyone has, let me know‒I think I would find it funny.  Don’t tell me what you bet on, whether it be how long until I die or by what means I will die or what have you; I don’t want to be unfairly biased either in your favor or against you.  But it would be funny to learn that there were spectators who were willing to admit that they’re morbidly curious just to see if I’ll actually die, and when.

That’s enough of that for today.  I don’t know what I’ll do from here on out.  It was tempting just to drop onto the tracks in front of the train as it was arriving, and sometimes I feel like I don’t give a shit if I inconvenience all the passengers.  But of course, I do give a shit about that, at least so far.  I don’t want to screw up everybody’s day.  The world is hard enough as it is.

Also, it would be a frightening way to die, and I’m not sure I’m bold enough for it.  You have to overcome really powerful instincts to do something like that, which is no doubt why many suicides are associated with drugs and alcohol.

I don’t know.  I might go back to writing fiction every day except Thursdays.  Or I may stop writing at all.  Or I may just collapse and fall apart and give up, I don’t know.  I’m so very very very very tired and uncomfortable.  And I have no real reason to expect it to get any better.

TTFN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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With malice toward Aptos, with charity toward Calibri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On months and writing and self versus other mastery, and other mental flotsam

Well, it’s Friday now, and it’s actually the first of the month, which would normally have been yesterday, but this is a leap year (and so, in the US, a presidential election year).

I really do think the days of the months as we have them now are stupidly erratic and irrational.  I think it would be more fun if we had 12 thirty-day-long months and then just, at the end of the year, a five-day-long festival, when most people are off work and we celebrate the passing of the winter solstice*, and the coming lengthening of daylight.  Then, on leap years, there could be an extra day to the festival, and that would be a joyful thing.

Oh, well.  I don’t think that’s likely to happen.  But it’s a nice thought, I guess.

I did manage to write a page of Extra Body yesterday, and it was a computer-written** page, so it was maybe four hundred to five hundred words.  It is a slight shame, but writing on the laptop computer is just much more natural for me (ironically), and it doesn’t exacerbate the soreness at the base of my thumbs like writing by hand.

Of course, writing this on my smartphone makes the base of my thumbs get a bit sore, too.  I should probably just do both things on the laptop computer if I’m going to keep doing them.  I communicate best by writing on the laptop computer, anyway, probably much better than I do by spoken word.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.

Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing that I wrote a bit of fiction yesterday.  And I mean to write a page today, and tomorrow as well, since I work tomorrow.  The story is going okay so far, and since it’s not a horror story, it shouldn’t get too dark, which is a relative rarity for my fiction.  Once I finish it, I guess I can see if I’m ready to write HELIOS.

I guess, given the state of my thumbs, I’ll write that whole thing on the laptop computer.  It is a shame to have to let the two new spiral-bound notebooks go to waste, but I don’t see any other reasonably available alternative.  I suppose it would be nice if I used them to practice calculus and linear algebra and physics problems and so on, and if I do such problems, I guess I will use it.  But it seems unlikely that I’ll find the gumption to do those things.

I have my science and math books out and around my desk:  Classical Electrodynamics, and Calculus, and Gravitation, and Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, and Spacetime and Geometry.

I would love to get through all of them, but my mental energy is sapped and drained by having to deal with all the nonsense of the human world.  Unfortunately, I have to make a living‒no one is offering to support me and provide my basic needs while I study up on my physics and mathematics.  Why would they?  People have a hard enough time having me around even when I’m paying my own way.

I’m so tired of the world.  It’s really just a bastion of idiocy and irrationality and dirt and unnecessary suffering.  And it’s not as though I’m some exception to that description.  I certainly don’t see myself as superior to the nonsense around me.  Maybe if I did, I would feel better, but it probably wouldn’t be good for the other people in my life, in the world.  I could all too easily see myself becoming a hyper ambitious villain of some variety.

Of course, the real reason I don’t see myself doing such a thing is that it would be irrational and illogical.  While there are surely people who are exceptionally gifted and creative and productive, it’s absurd to think that any one person is the greatest of all, or is destined to rule, or is “special” in some fundamental sense.

No matter how smart you are, there is always going to be someone out there who is smarter than you at least at some things.  If there were no such one alive right now‒and there almost certainly is such a one‒then there will be in the future or has been in the past.  Going beyond even that, in the space of all possible minds there are potential thinkers compared to which Einstein would be as an amoeba is to Einstein‒and more so.

Also, in the real world, all people who have ever achieved great “power” have only had it through and by the acquiescence or cooperation or loyalty or whatever of other people.  And any power “over others” that requires the consent or the cooperation of others is not any power at all.  It’s just a transient configuration in a complex and chaotic system.

There is a line in one of the “chapters” of the Tao te Ching that reads something along the lines of “mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power”.  It sounds very Stoic in nature, though I seriously doubt that Lao Tzu ever met a Stoic.  Still, the similarity is not a mere coincidence.  One of the hallmarks of true knowledge and understanding is that it will tend to be converged upon by disparate people as long as they are all legitimately and honestly seeking to understand the universe.

I would quibble with the first half of the quote, maybe; I’m not sure that mastering others really is even any kind of strength.  It can probably be useful, but it’s not going to give one much beyond transient benefits.  And it’s certainly questionable whether one ever does or can master others.

This is corollary to something I often tell a coworker who troubles himself all the time about “why” people in the office (or on the phone) say and do the things they do.  I point out to him that even the people themselves who say and do things rarely (if ever) know why they do and say what they do and say.  There’s no point in him trying to figure it out from his third person standpoint.

Just observe what people do and respond to it and adjust to it as best you can‒but don’t dwell on how it reflects on you or what you might have done to deserve it, or whatever.  Just try to let inconsequential things like insults or jokes at your expense wash over you, like the chattering of squirrels or the crowing of a rooster.  Try only to pay attention to useful things.

And, of course, the Tao to Ching is not wrong to encourage mastering oneself, as much as possible.  That’s more than enough challenge for a single lifetime, frankly, and I am far from convinced that anyone has ever truly succeeded.

I certainly know that I haven’t.

*Yes, this is northern hemisphere biased, but the majority of humans live in the northern hemisphere.  Five days off in the beginning of summer wouldn’t be so horrible for those in the south, anyway.  They could go to the beach, for one thing.

**Meaning I wrote it using a computer, not that a computer wrote it.  Then again, my mind is a form of computer, a universal Turing machine (or nearly so), but if I were approaching the matter that way, then any writing I do, even with pen on paper, is computer-written.

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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