I’ve been disappointed at the dearth of dreams I’ve been having since I watched “Inception”. There are only two that I remember. The first one was fairly vague. All I remember is trying to hijack a Final Fantasy-style airship. The second one involved me and my ex from high school in an alternate timeline where we never broke up and we were supposed to go to a wedding that I first assumed was in Las Vegas, given all the casinos and hotels, and the fact that it was the middle of the desert. The only thing that was totally off was the fact that this dream city had a port, and I remember thinking in my dream “When did Las Vegas get a port?” The dream involved searching for a particular book in all of this dream city’s bookstores. Yeah, not very exciting.

The last dream was really something that started off as an idea in real life that sort of mutated in my sleep (and which I would turn into a short story if I had the time and the skill to do so—but since I don’t, I’m just going to write an outline of it here so I don’t forget it.)

It involves alternate timelines, unrequited love, and a fantastical intersection between quantum mechanics and oneirology.

Now, I’ve always been interested in alternate timelines, alternate histories, things that can never be. I’m trying to pinpoint exactly when the idea arrested my imagination, but I think it may very well be when I first played the Super NES game Chrono Trigger, which, as the name might suggest, involves time travel.

If you’ve ever watched any time travel science fiction whatsoever, the idea of an alternate timeline is probably very familiar and even mind-numbingly cliché. Now that I really think about, the first time I must have encountered the idea was from the “Back to the Future” movies. The idea is really just an extrapolation of causality. If you change something in the past, you will necessarily change the present and the future. So now you’ve got two timelines—the original pristine timeline, and the altered timeline. Multiply this by the number of choices and degrees of freedom at every single moment in the universe, and you’ve basically created a multiverse, consisting of all the possible alternate timelines dependent on every possible branch point at every moment.

The thing that really blows my mind is that this is actually a totally valid interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Since there are an infinite number of alternate timelines, it basically follows that everything that you can think of that doesn’t violate the laws of physics will happen at least once in at least one alternate timeline. This is where I get disgustingly pathetic. Sometimes, when I’m lying alone in bed feeling sorry for myself, I console myself with the knowledge that on some alternate timeline, there is a version of me that managed to find his soulmate and is currently living happily ever after.

Which leads me to the nucleus of the story that took shape in my mind. I even already have a title for it. “A Never Event” (which is actually medicolegal terminology about something else entirely.)

So some indeterminate time in the future, people regularly manipulate their dreams the way you can manipulate characters in The Sims (yeah, I’ve been playing The Sims 3 way too much lately.) You have no control over what dreams arise or who ends up in your dreams, but you do have some limited ability to suggest that characters in your dreams do certain things.

Where it gets weird is that someone proves that dreams are really manifestations of alternate timelines, and soon an industry develops so that you can attune your dreams to view various alternate timelines that feature yourself.

Which leads to the protagonist searching the multiverse for that exact timeline where he does manage to find his soulmate and live happily ever after.

The thing is, he can never find it. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. That in all the infinite multitudes of alternate timelines, it actually never happens.

It’s sort of a soft science fiction version of Groundhog Day, except the guy never gets the girl.

OK, so it’s a really lame story, but maybe if I knew how to write, I could actually flesh it out into something interesting. Or not.

WARNINGS: (1) more “Inception” spoilers (2) more incoherent, meandering blog posts

It occurs to me that I only watched “Inception” last weekend, but I feel like it’s been occupying vast areas of my brain for much longer than that. It’s probably because I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, especially lucid dreaming. I could totally relate to the idea of building cities in your dreams. For a while, I kept having recurrent dreams set in the same unreal city, a weird amalgam of tattered memories from L.A., NYC, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego, and even Banff National Park in Alberta and the California Central Coast, all stitched together in Frankenstein-like fashion. I’ve even drawn maps of this imaginary place, everything so eerily familiar but so bizarrely off. But isn’t that the very essence of dreaming?

But the aspect of the movie I started thinking about was the team. The Architect. The Forger. The Point Man. The Chemist. The Extractor (or Inceptor, or maybe Inceptionist?) Even the Tourist. And the Mark. There have been interpretations based on how such a dream team mimics the core team required to make a movie: the screenwriter, the actor, the producer, the technical expert, the director, the studio chief, the audience.

Then I think of the teams I’ve been part of. A team at a teaching hospital is comprised of the Attending, the Resident, 1-2 Interns, an occasional subintern, and 1-3 medical students. A code team consists of the team leader, the bagger, the chest compressor, the meds pusher, and occasionally, a shocker. (Usually this is, respectively, a physician, a respiratory therapist, a nurse, and a pharmacist, and sometimes another nurse, but you can’t always be picky when someone decides to die unexpectedly. And now that I think about it, I have never led a code where (1) the patient hadn’t been predicted to die hours before they coded and (2) where we had to bust out the electricity. But I digress.)

In the OR, there’s the surgeon, the assistant, the anesthesiologist, the scrub nurse, and the circulating nurse. In the peds ER, when you’re doing a procedure, you’re usually going to need at least a holder, a hander-of-things, and the guy/gal with the needle and/or knife.

There are more baroque team compositions (like what’s required in “Ocean’s Eleven”) There are much simpler team combinations (bad cop, good cop)

But the team structure that I find infiltrating my thoughts with disturbing frequency is a MMORPG team. The simplest division of duties (as all you WoW players would know) is tank, DPS, heals, but there are a lot more roles than that, you just don’t usually need them to run 5-man instances where everyone is overgeared. There are specialist roles like crowd control, buffer, debuffer (although these tend to be secondary to the primary division of duties.) And then there are subclasses of the primary division—single-target tank, AoE tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, single-target heals, group heals, etc.

I find myself applying these divisions of duties to extremely disparate situations. During the NBA playoffs, I was trying to shoehorn player positions into MMORPG division of duties. To what do centers, point guards, shooting guards, power forwards, and small forwards map to?

But back to the dream team. There are a lot of ways that dreaming in “Inception” doesn’t really fit dreaming IRL. For one thing, I think starting shallow then going deeper is rather rare. It’s far more common to start deep, then go shallow, via the phenomenon of false awakening. Still, I do know that people have—in their dreams—gone to sleep and dreamt while in their dream, so it’s not like it never happens. And I also wonder how multiple consciousnesses interact with one another.

Clinical dream studies rely on the ability of the dreamer to accept outside output, so this isn’t that far-fetched. There are studies where the researcher has trained their subjects to dream lucidly, so that the dreamer can not only receive input from the researcher, they can send data back to the researcher via eye movements and other subtle motions.

But I kind of wonder: does a group dream sort of work like an MMORPG instance? The host dreamer is obviously analogous to the game server, but do all the other dreamers actually instantiate within the host themselves, or do they merely run the equivalent of a game client in their own subconsciousness, and relay bits and pieces of information via the Dream Machine to the host? If it’s the former (everyone runs on the same machine, so to speak), then how do the interpolated dreamers manage to control what they look like to the host? If it’s the latter (the host coordinates all the players, but each player is running in on an independent machine)—and this seems more likely, given that Cobb’s own subconsciousness tends to go out of control from time to time—then how do they keep their manifestations synchronized, especially when they go up and down levels?

What I mean is, when a dreamer sleeps in one level, thereby passing their consciousness on to a deeper level, while another dreamer stays in that one level, how does the dreamer who stayed behind manage to keep the scene stable?

More specifically, once you go to sleep, what prevents my subconsciousness (or maybe even the host’s subconsciousness) from taking hold of your projection on one level while your consciousness is a level deeper?

In other words, how does the software deal with zombie toons, I guess?

So “Inception” totally blew my mind. A lot of thoughts have been streaming through my head since, and the synchronicity of some of these thoughts have been kind of unnerving.

But this is only going to be a disorganized outline of my scattered thoughts. Much like Ariadne’s literal golden thread, my thoughts are going to go down one corridor, dead-end, then backtrack, again and again. Someday, I’ll come back to this post and reorganize it, but for now, I just want to articulate some of these ideas that have been percolating in my mind.

So, going back to my post almost a month ago, I still remember the dream that disturbed me so. The central conceit was the idea of obliterating memories completely. It was essentially a take on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, except it was a fantasy setting.

A king in some fairy-tale country has the power to delete specific memories. In fact, I think they may have had an entire order of magicians whose sole art was the ability to extract, obliterate, and reimplant memories at a whim, with each specific ability occurring at differing frequencies. Obliteration was frequently ordered by political figures as an alternative of just outright killing witnesses. The problem, of course, is how to tell whether obliteration is actually successful or not. How do you know someone whose memories was supposedly erased isn’t just pretending that their memory was actually erased?

The king’s daughter just so happens to have this specific ability—the ability to look into someone’s mind for specific memories. This differs from just trying to read someone’s mind—something that is always fraught with peril, able to be foiled with magical countermeasures. Her ability to detect successful obliteration appears to be infallible. As such, she is widely sought after by all the obliterators across the land, and has been the subject of multiple failed plots. Because of the turmoil this causes in the kingdom, the king attempts to protect her by obliterating her memories of being a princess, and sending her off into the wilderness.

The dream spiralled into vagueness after that. The last image I remember is that of two swirling whirlpools, which I think was the source of all magic or something like that. But the other thought that I woke with was, how does the king know for sure that he obliterated the princess’s memory?

Now I’ve always been a devoted believer in the idea that more information is always better. The more you learn, the better off you are. This has been tempered somewhat by my medical training, where I’ve since discovered that barraging people with overwhelming amounts of information all at once is counterproductive, and sometimes, it’s simply better not to know, particularly if there’s nothing you can do about it. Of course, you always have to give people the informed choice of knowing or not knowing. But you also have the responsibility to lay down the foundations so that that knowledge is understandable, so that the person receiving that knowledge can act upon it intelligently, and so that the person receiving that knowledge doesn’t plunge into irreversible despair. The freedom of information, while important, is not invariantly good. (And that quote about how information wants to be free is always cited without giving the full context.)

So after this dream, the thought I kept pondering was how would my life be different if I could obliterate some memories selectively? Not necessarily memories about past events or about people, but memories regarding things I’ve learned, things I’ve come to believe. Which, if any, of my memories are holding me back, are keeping me locked into the life that I’ve been leading, which, at times, I’ve been quite dissatisfied with?

These kinds of what-ifs always lead me down to the Borgesian concept of the garden of forking paths, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

It has been an inexorable fact that many of the things I once considered pivotal moments in my own personal destiny have turned out to seem like inevitabilities with fixed outcomes. There was probably no way I could’ve gotten [redacted] to fall in love with me, no matter what I did, for example. There is no escape from destiny, perhaps.

The things that seem to have multiple degrees of freedom don’t have the same emotional freight as some of these fixed outcomes, for some reason. There are a lot of what-ifs that just don’t seem as crucial. What if I had started off with this job instead, or done this rotation at this time, or gone to this city at this particular time? It may not have changed anything. It may have changed everything. We’ll just never know. It could be something good. It could be something bad.

But what if I could wipe-out memories of these what-if moments, so that I could stop wondering what-if, and just get on with my life? What things do I hold on to that continue to poison my very will, preventing me from reaching fulfillment?

These thoughts definitely came to fore when I went to my twenty-year reunion from elementary school. Old crushes, friendships, people I’ve lost touch with. How different would my life be if I had acted on how I felt? If I had kept in better touch? If I had gone to this school instead of that school? Twenty years is a long time.

Which brings me to another Leonardo DiCaprio movie: “Shutter Island” (SPOILERS!) The last scene focuses on this very idea—how forgetting a key fact of your life, even at the expense of your own identity or even your own humanity—may be the only way to reach peace. (There are a lot of superficial similarities between “Shutter Island” and “Inception” which I might go into at some other time. I’m in love with the shifting notion of reality, dreams, and madness.)

I mean, none of this is new. Unreality, irreality, and parareality have all been the realms of science fiction and fantasy. For a while there, Hollywood was churning out virtual reality movies back-to-back, what with “Dark City”, “The Matrix”, “eXistenZ”, and “The Thirteenth Floor”. Philip K Dick’s works wholly inhabited these worlds outside of reality. The Black Iron Prison, the unending Empire, VALIS—which of these are pure fiction, which are useful metaphor, which are actual reality, which are drug-induced hallucinations?

But the dreamscape has always been my favorite realm, ever since I first heard about lucid dreaming. And read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

I always wonder what parts of my dreaming are typical experiences, and which parts are completely idiosyncratic to me. I’m fascinated by recursive dreams.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than two levels deep. But you always start the dream at the deepest level, without knowing that there’s a level between that distal dream and reality. I always wake up in distress, after getting shot, or after falling hundreds of feet, which is usually enough to break me out almost immediately into reality.

But I’ve also had perspective changes, where at first the dream starts off as something I’m watching passively, but midway through I end up becoming the main character.

And I’ve had confusing flips, where two different dreams have gotten interspersed: in one level, I was sleeping in my bed continuously for 18 hours straight, in the other level, I was having chest compressions done on me and getting bagged ventilations in the ER—both states in retrospect seem like dreams now but at the time I couldn’t tell what was fake and what was real.

Which always leads to the solipsistic delusion that I’m in a dream right now, and my body is sitting in some ICU paralyzed and sedated. For all I know the last six years of my life could be just a dream, whereas in reality it’s still 2004, it’s only been a few hours since I’ve coded, but time works differently in dreams.

Which leads to a common theme in my recurrent dreams: the ever-ticking clock. I have all these anxiety dreams where I’m always late for something, and time moves insanely fast. Hours go by on clocks even though I’ve only just turned my head.

But memory is an interesting thing. I’ve spent a lot of time lately playing Sims 3, and much of it has been recreating various buildings I’ve lived in. Right now, I have a facsimile of my parents’ house, and one of my aunt’s old house in Milpitas which she sold over a decade ago. It’s just weird that I remember enough of that place to recreate it. I also have a replica of my old house, which I lived in until I turned six. I haven’t been in there for over 27 years, but I still remember some of my most vivid nightmares from there, in addition to how the rooms were all laid out. Oh, there are some details that I can’t remember, but being able to recreate things in a computer program really amazes me.

I’m definitely losing my coherence. I should probably get to sleep anyway. And maybe one of these days, I’ll actually figure out a way to weave all these thoughts together into an actual essay, instead of the meandering ramblings of a madman.

I seriously haven’t been able to concentrate on anything today. I wonder if I just had way too much caffeine today. Or maybe I still haven’t recovered from sleeping only for four hours Sunday night. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing anything substantive tonight.

It’s been a couple of days already and I’m still obsessing about a fairly vivid dream I had. I think I need to sit down and reflect a little, and maybe write out some of my thoughts when I have more time. We’ll see if that actually happens today.

I’m going to see how feasible it is to write a blog post on an iPad with my contacts off. The screen is probably only about three inches from the tip of my nose, and I have to do it with only one eye open because there’s such a big difference in the power of my left eye versus the right.

I was actually thinking about sitting in front of a real computer and writing some ideas down, but I just feel spent. It’s only 9 PM and I’m already lying in bed. This chronic cough is just driving me nuts. I first thought that I had caught something from all the little kids in the movie theater when I watched “Toy Story 3” on Sunday, but I’m kind of wondering about that, because it responded so well to massive doses of antihistamines and nasal steroids. Allergies suck.

Still, I’ve been feeling fairly crappy and have been going to bed really early all week, which I suppose is just as well since I don’t know what to do with my free time after work now that the NBA playoffs are finally over. I’m kind of not feeling baseball right now, what with the Dodgers sucking. I should probably be getting more exercise, and I suppose I could do that once I’m feeling better.

But whenever I get sick, even with what’s probably just a minimal cold (and not pertussis–I’m pretty sure) sometimes it feels like it’s going to take forever before I feel better. I’m hoping this cough will calm down by this weekend.

It is, however, somewhat symptomatic of this feeling of stagnation that has kind of settled down in my soul. Having been on an academic schedule for 25 years, I’ve really gotten accustomed to the notion of June being a signifier of endings and beginnings. For really the first time in my life, I don’t have any predetermined concrete goalposts to aim for.

Times like these, lying alone in bed and not being able to sleep, I find myself asking such questions as “What do I want to do with my life?” and then find that I’m too tired and too lazy to try to come up with a decent answer. Tomorrow is another day. And we all know that there’s no problem in this world that procrastination can’t make worse.

Procrastination is like masturbation. It’s can be a lot of fun as long as you don’t think too hard about the fact that you’re only screwing yourself.

I was listening to 30 Seconds to Mars “Kings and Queens” before I went to sleep last night, and the first thing that popped into my head was the Exile of the Noldor and the end of the First Age from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion

Being the abject pessimist that I am, I’ve always had the feeling that fascism would eventually rear its ugly head in the U.S., but now that it actually has, I’m just taken aback. There is no pleasure in these kinds of prophecies coming true.

SB1070 is now law in Arizona, and having brown skin or speaking Spanish is now enough probable cause to strip people of their constitutional rights, unless they can provide sufficient proof that they are deserving of these rights.

So now, if I want to visit the neighboring state to the east of here, I have to have a passport or carry my birth certificate. Even though I’m an American citizen, and I was born in the U.S.

Because, who are we kidding here? Can I really entrust my liberty to the hope that I won’t ever get pulled over or be considered “suspicious”? And if I do get stopped, can I really hope that a cop will really know the difference between a brown-skinned Filipino American citizen and a brown-skinned undocumented immigrant from south of the border?

As someone who has, at one time or another, been mistaken for Egyptian, Saudi Arabian, Samoan, Guatemalan, Japanese, and Mexican, I can’t help but conclude that racial profiling is totally worthless as a crime-fighting tool. If you can’t properly identify the person you’re profiling, how can it be possibly be helpful? What this means is that if they’re looking for Islamic terrorists, I can be detained. If they’re looking undocumented immigrants and I don’t have my papers on me, they can lock me up. If they’re looking for yakuza, ninjas, or sumo wrestlers, I can be held for questioning. It’s abysmally stupid.

On the other hand, racial profiling is an excellent tool for oppressing people of color. Particularly people of color who are citizens of the United States with rights protected by the Constitution. All they need to do is assert that they’re looking for a person with brown-skin, and it’s a simple matter for them to handcuff you, put you in the back of a police car, and send you to the proper agency for processing.

It’s really hard not to think of all the science fiction novels I’ve read depicting dystopian crypto-fascist states. Orwell and Philip K Dick’s heads would implode. Or all the World War II movies I’ve watched that are set in Nazi-occupied territory. Ausweis, bitte! And you don’t even have to sew a colored shape into your clothing.

The extra-freaky thing is that there are plenty of people here in California who think this is an excellent law, and that we should enact one just like it.

Fun times.

But what’s done is done. What do we do now? What can I do to help free Arizona from fascist tyranny?

So it’s been a little more than a month since I stepped away from Friendfeed. To be honest, I didn’t expect to be gone this long. I really did need to take a break though. My initial intention was to walk away for a few days and let the threads fall off my front page, and let my temper cool. But work got really busy, and the past month ended up being pretty rough. The whole episode pretty much took a back seat to everything else I had to deal with. But the longer I stayed away, the more I felt that I had to work through why I got so pissed off before I came back.

Just to let everyone know, I ain’t mad at ya. As many have pointed out, you can’t control how people respond to what you say or do, and you can’t force people to understand. A lot of times, you can’t even really control how you feel about something. The only thing you can really control is how you react to the circumstances, how you channel your emotion, and the reason I stepped away was because I was feeling out of control of even that.

It’s probably not surprising that, being a person-of-color living in the U.S., I’m pretty damn sensitive about the concept of race. My experiences end up being focused through that particular lens.

Now, I can’t fault people for not truly grokking certain things. Whatever the situation, if you’ve never experienced certain things, I don’t think intellectual understanding can truly substitute for that. Empathy can only get you so far. And all analogies are imperfect—they can promote intellectual understanding, but they’re never going to convey the unique impact of certain situations.

It wasn’t the actual inciting incident that bother me. And I honestly didn’t expect everyone to agree with my viewpoint. I was just putting it out there. Trying to say that it was a plausible reaction.

So what really riled me up was this admittedly paranoid sense that no one was taking what I was saying in earnest. I just felt like I was butting my head against a brick wall. And the longer I railed on about what everyone else thought was innocuous, the more that I was being judged as irrational, overly sensitive, and obsessed. (Though, considering the type of absurdly inane things that have spawned flame wars on Friendfeed, I would think such a charge would be hard to level without feeling ridiculous.)

Up to this point, I had taken it for granted that Friendfeed was a (relatively) safe space. I took it for granted that everyone I conversed with on a regular basis did so in good faith, and that they assumed I reciprocated such sentiments. Sadly, to be honest, I felt like that particular rug got pulled out from under me.

I’m not saying that anyone is actually culpable here other than myself. It was just my impression at the time, and I’d be hard-pressed to cite actual evidence that anyone expressed anything of this nature.

Most rational people can understand the evil of overt racism. But it’s the subtle things that actually keep the spectre of racism alive. The things that don’t seem like they should make a difference. Some of these things may seem downright absurd to be upset about. But people do get upset. I’m not asking you to agree with them. I just want you to be exposed to a countervailing viewpoint.

On my wanderings through the Web, I stumbled upon another example of this kind of thing.—an incident that a lot of people would just ignore, and would think that it would be completely ridiculous for anyone to fixate on. I can already anticipate that a lot of you will find some of the comments on this piece completely wacko. But my intention has never been to try to force you to accept these lines of reasoning. I just wanted people to be aware that there are actual living people who think about these sorts of things, to whom these sorts of things make a difference to. It isn’t just some intellectual abstract position.

The other part that bugged me will quite possibly sound terribly racist to some, but I have to be honest. There was a part of me that wondered, why is it that a white guy can make rules about what is and isn’t acceptable discourse, but anything I say gets totally ignored? Again, in retrospect, I don’t think any of this is explicitly there. But that’s where my mind was.

What I was hearing was this: it’s unacceptable to call out racism unless I’m 100% sure that’s the case, and I have to have actual evidence to present, evidence that everyone else has to agree is valid. Whatever I think or feel is irrelevant. Whatever definitions and paradigms I believe in are invalid.

So yeah. I still do find the idea that people find pointing out subtle racism just as offensive as calling someone a racial epithet extremely disturbing. Granted, I understand no one wants to be slandered. But you have to realize that, in cases where that assessment is given in good faith, amongst people who trust each other, the goal is to correct, and not to malign. Now I understand lots of people don’t appreciate that kind of correction, but I still think honesty is best.

But I don’t expect anyone to believe any of this. I just want to throw this out there. So that you know there is at the very least one person who thinks this way. But I don’t really believe I’m alone in this, although I certainly did at the time this all went down.

In Internet time, this is ancient history. I have no intention of beating an already well-beaten dead horse until it completely disintegrates.

But where do I go from here? I don’t know yet. I’ve popped on to FF from time to time just to see what people are up to, but I don’t know if I’m going to go back to posting. To be honest, it looks like FF is starting to fall apart. Maybe FF has always looked like this, and, sure, the Internet is the premier forum for people to go apeshit about the most asinine things, and maybe I’ve just been going along with rose-colored glasses. Maybe things only look different because this episode stripped bare my illusions and untoward assumptions.

All I can really say is, we’ll see.

You may scoff at this as being mere political correctness, but I say it’s about precision.

If you’re going to disagree with someone’s spelling/grammar, the precise thing to say (from a linguist’s perspective) is to note that their usage is non-standard, not that it’s necessarily incorrect. Because we all know prescriptivism is for losers. ;) (And the “wrong”/non-standard way to spell it/phrase it will probably be the “right”/standard way in a few decades.)

I’ve been struggling with playing Dragon Age: Origins on my MacBook Pro, mainly from problems that have nothing to do with actual game play. From the system requirements, I would’ve thought that I have an adequately spec’ed machine to play the game, but I’m plagued by mysterious intermittent slow downs and lock-ups. I’m fairly certain it’s the game, since I don’t seem to have problems running other apps. But what it reminds me is why I tend to stick to consoles for gaming.

I have never bought a game for a console where I was worried about whether or not my hardware was adequate to run it. I have never had random lockups and crashes from a console game, unless I’ve actually managed to wreck the console itself. (Like spilling water on it, or throwing it against the wall in anger. Yeah, I may have anger management issues.)

I attribute this to the fact that every console maker has tight control over who can develop on their platform, and have final say about whether or not a game can actually be released on the platform.

In many ways, iPhone OS development is almost identical to developing on a console. For the three existing consoles, if you want to do any serious development, you have to pay for a license to obtain the developer kit. (OTOH, the iPhone OS SDK is actually free to download, although you have to register.) Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft has to approve your game, and you have to pay to distribute your game, and you have to adhere to their content guidelines. (Nintendo is notorious for tight control over developers, going so far as to prohibit cursing and religious references.)

(I also realize that while Microsoft does have a free development kit that lets you develop for both Windows and XBox 360, if you actually want to distribute your game on the XBox 360, you have to pay $99/year to do so.)

I understand the objections, though, to this kind of lock-down on development. On a full-fledged computer, even on a proprietary OS like Windows or Mac OS X, there are no such limitations. All you need is a development environment and a web host, and you can crank out your own apps and distribute it to the world without Microsoft or Apple breathing down your neck. But then you run into the problems of unstable, crappy apps possibly making your entire system unstable that won’t uninstall properly, leaving you with no recourse but to reformat and reinstall. Or you get suckered into buying a game that has deceptively low hardware requirements, find that it’s actually unplayable on your system, and now you’re left with either just eating the cost of a game you can’t enjoy, or spending more money to upgrade your system. Such is the price you pay.

And when I want to play a game to relax, I’m not sure I’m really willing to make that compromise. Anyone have any recommendations for a good console RPG?

1. Hit Girl from “Kick-Ass”
2. Arya Stark from A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

(And of course, this reminds of the time when my sister was six, and she got really mad at our neighbors and chased them down the street wielding an axe. True story.)

So I just finished watching “Kick-Ass” and starting thinking about revenge fantasies.

The ones that come easiest to mind are the movies: Kill Bill. Payback. Gladiator. Man on Fire. Taken. (And a ton more, many of which I’ve never watched.)

Of course, there’s Batman. And the Count of Monte Cristo.

But my archetype for the protagonist of a revenge fantasy is Iñigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride”.

My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Before I ever learned the back story of Bruce Wayne, before I ever read about Edmond Dantès, I watched this brilliant movie, and found myself intrigued by this rather amicable Spaniard who works as a mercenary to pay the bills while trying to avenge his murdered father for 20 years.

(“The Princess Bride” being a fairy tale, or at least a satiric take on a fairy tale, I took his boasts about being an excellent swordsman at face value. Now I know that this is dubious, given the fact that he is handily beaten by a guy who, five years hence, had been nothing but a mere farm boy—although the whole farm boy thing does seem to work out for Rand al’Thor, too—and who had just, prior to the fight, climbed a sheer cliff, most of the way with his bare hands. But I’ve always figured Westley’s status as the main protagonist trumped everything, particularly since it manages to trump certain death multiple times in the movie. Plus, Westley was fight for True Love™, while Iñigo was only fighting Westley because he needed the money.)

But because of this movie, my baseline assumptions about the revenge business is that it need not be a dire and humorless exercise, and that it doesn’t need to turn you into a single-minded venom-filled person whose every waking thought is about bloody-spattered ultraviolent vengeance, unable to appreciate the levity of rhymes, the absurdities provoked by the misuse of words, and the aesthetic brilliance of a fellow artisan.

That Vizzini, he can *fuss*

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

You are wonderful!… I admit it, you are better than I am.

The other thing I really liked about Iñigo’s quest is the absolute simplicity of how he imagines he would exact his vengeance. None of these byzantine plots, destroying people’s lives in surprising ways with circuitous strategies. No borderline, obsessive-compulsive, psychotic tendencies while pursuing an all-encompassing life-long crusade dedicated to fighting crime. No trying to overthrow the government and blowing up Parliament. All he plans to do is stick the pointy end of his sword in the dude who murdered his father.

But the thing that endears Iñigo to me the most is his insight into how a monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance can really leave a gaping void in your life.

I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.

And it just occurs to me that if Iñigo did take up Westley on his offer to take over as the Dread Pirate Roberts, then his ship would already have been aptly named.

I think it’s naive to believe that for every argument, there is someone who is right, and there is someone who is wrong. The most fractious arguments I’ve witnessed are between people who were both right in their respective contexts, with no obvious way to harmonize their conflicting mind sets. The question is, in an argument, do you go for the win and try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you’re right and the other person is wrong, even if it means destroying a relationship? Do you try to aim for common ground, even if it means compromising on your beliefs? Or do you just keep arguing until the other person gets exasperated and quits entirely? Or is there some other option that I’ve never managed to consider?

The other day I was eating by myself at a restaurant and happened to overhear a heart-to-heart conversation between (two people who I assumed to be) a father and his teenage son. The father had (something like) this to say:

Now this is something I got from Buddhism. Bear with me now. A lot of people get caught up in their goals for the future. Now goals are good to have, in so far as they motivate you to action, but the important thing to remember is that we really only exist in the present. So you shouldn’t get so obsessed about the future that you miss out on things in the here-and-now. Take pleasure in the simple act of just being, of being alive, of breathing, walking, talking to friends. Always take in your surroundings and enjoy where you are at this moment. The people who get obsessed with their goals, about the future, and who never seem to focus on the present are the ones who have the hardest time with dying, because they never really lived.

And I thought this was really wise. It’s something that I’ve at least intellectually known for a long while now, although I’m not sure I’ve ever really managed to put it into practice.

Part of it is the career path I chose to take. I’ve been thinking about doing this job since I was old enough to think about jobs. Still, I know for a fact that there’s no such thing as inevitable, that there were plenty of opportunities for me to jump ship and plot another course. But if I look at it from more of an outsider’s perspective, taking into account the family I was born into, the experiences I’ve had, it becomes harder and harder to imagine that it was anything other than inevitable.

The path was long, tiresome, lonely as hell, and at times quite harrowing. And it took a long time. It’s 11 years at the shortest, and for me, it ended up being 13 years, and there were definitely times where if I didn’t hold onto some romanticized notion of the future, I don’t think I would’ve made it.

Which goes back to what that guy was saying about living in the present, and not overvaluing goals.

But how many nights did I study long past the point of exhaustion, thinking to myself that someday things wouldn’t be this bad? How many awful call nights did I think to myself that all I have to do is endure for a few more hours? They can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.

How many times did I manage to slog through the suffocating shittiness of the present, thinking to myself, life will be a lot better once I’m done with all of this, and I can get on with my life?

You know what they say. Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

I’ve known that this was going to happen for a long time, and yet managed to somehow delude myself into thinking that it would turn out otherwise. My life has pretty much shrunk down to work, and then trying to relieve myself from the stress accumulated from work. I have no real social life, I don’t really interact with people outside of my co-workers, my patients, my siblings, my parents. Unless you count social media, which, for these purposes, I don’t really count. I don’t meet new people. It’s always been something I’ve been bad at.

None of these things are going to change until I actually put some effort into trying to make them change.

The thing that I miss the most is free time for creative endeavors. There was a(n infinitesimally short) time in my life when writing was an honest-to-goodness Plan B. If I couldn’t make it into med school, then I’d find some crap job to subsist on, and use the rest of my time to write. I came this close to actually going for it, but then Chance—or Fate (are they really different things?) decided to make things interesting, and just when I had given up all hope, I got into med school.

Shoulda, coulda.

What is gone is gone.

The fact of the matter is that, given I don’t have a social life, and I don’t really interact with other people outside of work, I actually *do* have free time to try to write.

The problem is that (despite the fact that I’ve grown to despite Yoda and “Star Wars”) you can’t try to write. You have to actually do it.

(And I do realize that I am, after a fashion, writing right now. Although blogging isn’t really the kind of writing I want to do. You take what you can get, I guess.)

In the end, the problem is that I’ve always had a problem with living in the present. It’s something that my closest friends have chided me about repeatedly. I either fantasize absurdly about the future or dwell hopelessly in the past. (The image that suddenly comes to mind is trying to tune into a radio station with an analog tuner, continuously overshooting then undershooting the correct frequency. It’s kind of sad and freaky how obsolete this notion is these days.)

I’m not one for resolutions. I have this pathological antipathy towards self-improvement. But I really have got to learn how to take good advice, and just Be.

(And I find this saying cloyingly saccharine, and yet, it’s true: “Now is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”)