The more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems that I’m going to end up staying here in S.D. While the weather is nice and I have some connections that would make it easier to find a job out here, I think I’m just sick and tired of most of the people here.
This is not to say I haven’t met cool people here. S.D. has far more cultured, liberal, progressive people here than you would think, despite the stranglehold the Republican Party and the military-industrial complex has had on it for most of the 20th century. And ironically, since it *is* a military town, the quagmire also known as the Iraq War has alienated a lot of soldiers, especially when the leading GOP politicians continue to spout outrageous lies about what its like over there. Keep digging that hole, Bush and Company. Let us know when you get to China.
But there are too many meth heads, too many racists, Neo-Nazis, and Klansmen, too many hookers and “massage parlors”, too many wife-beaters and child-abusers, too many of the worst kinds of humanity. While I have no problem whatsoever with moral vice, and I’m generally a very forgiving person, I have no patience for hypocrisy whatsoever. And, in the four years that I’ve spent here, I’ve quickly learned the following equation:
Republican = big fat hairy hypocrite
The other thing that has been irritating me a lot is that for some reason, Clear Channel has deigned it necessary to pull KLSD, the local Air America affiliate, off the air. This despite the high ratings the station is getting.
But I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was the pathetic response in San Diego County to the wildfires that started on Sunday, October 21st.
All told, there were 9 different fires in San Diego, although a few of them actually started on October 22nd or later. Meanwhile, in six other counties, there were a total of 14 different fires, five of them being in Los Angeles County.
Despite this distribution, the area of land burned and the number of homes destroyed in San Diego County far exceeded that of the six other counties combined.
| Location | Acres Burned | Homes Destroyed |
| San Diego County | 369,396 | 1,681 |
| Witch Fire | 197,990 | 1,121 |
| Harris Fire | 90,440 | 211 |
| L.A./O.C./Ventura/Santa Barbara/San Bernardino/Riverside Counties | 148,346 | 289 |
| Los Angeles County | 104,186 | 2 |
(Numbers derived from Cal Fire)
The discrepancy is very telling. After all, there isn’t very much difference in climate between the seven Southern California counties. We’re all suffering from the drought. We were all impacted by the Santa Ana winds.
So tell me why, more than a week out, three of the nine fires in S.D. County are still burning, with one of them only 70% contained? Of the two fires still burning in the other six counties, one was the result of arson, and the other is 97% contained.
Now, S.D. County is notorious for harboring all sorts of conservatives and liberterians—in other words, people who hate paying taxes. This translates into a real lack of community resources. S.D. County does not have a municipal hospital, for example, thereby foisting all the people who have no insurance on the local Children’s Hospital and the University of California. And S.D. County does not have a county fire department, either. Which means that when the outlying areas of the county start burning, there is no unified response. In the other six counties, fire fighters got to the respective locations pretty quickly, hampered mostly by terrain (as in Malibu, which is just a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, and in Santiago Canyon, which consists of mostly mountainous, undeveloped land in Orange County, not to mention the fact that that fire was the result of arson, with the fire starting in three or more initial sites.) In contrast, in S.D. County, there were huge areas of fire that no fire fighters were available for, and in many cases, because of the poorly planned roadways built ramshackle by rapacious developers, even if there were fire fighters available, they couldn’t get into good position.
The things that pisses me off about this is that these very same conservatives and liberterians are the ones who bitch about welfare and illegal immigration and how people-of-color are mooching off the system, when, thanks to their unwillingness to contribute cold-hard cash to the government, the rest of the state, and the rest of the country (assuming that FEMA won’t completely fuck up again) is going to have to take care of their sorry asses.
Even before the fires, this was true. Case in point: UCSD Hillcrest, the de facto county hospital (which is, by the way, the regional burn center, and where all the burn victims pretty much ended up going), is a University of California institution. So guess what? Even if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, or if you live in L.A. (which, by the way, has exceedingly large numbers of people who consider themselves liberal and/or progressive), your tax dollars make their way to S.D. care of the UC Regents in order to pay for all the unfortunate uninsured folk who come our way because the people who actually live here couldn’t be bothered to contribute to the community and take care of their own.
And guess who funds the Cal Fire firefighters who had to come out and rescue San Diego County? That’s right, the liberal/progressive taxpayers of the other urban centers of California. Guess where a majority of the National Guardsmen who happened to not be in Iraq and were able to mobilize at minutes notice? That’s right, the S.F. Bay Area and L.A.
And of course, there are all the fire fighters who came from Northern California, and who came from other states in the country. So here they are getting all this help, and they don’t have to pay a single dime for it. Such crap.
So much for refusing handouts, huh?
The other thing that pissed me off were all those idiots who refused to evacuate despite repeated warnings to do so, to the point where the firefighters had to come rescue them instead of actually fighting fires. You’ve got to wonder how many more homes ended up burning because of these morons distracting the firefighters from their job. And these are the same people who have the gall to rag on the poor black folk who got stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, many of whom had no transportation to get out even if they wanted to.
But the worst part of it all were all the stupid local politicians fellating each other (yeah, you, Duncan Hunter), taking credit for all the hard work of the firefighters and the volunteers. This, despite, axing all sorts of funding that would’ve hired more firefighters and bought more equipment, so that disasters like this wouldn’t escalate to such ridiculous proportions. (I’m talking to you, Governor Schwarzenegger. For better or for worse, California will continue to burn in a cyclic pattern, and there ain’t nothing we can do to stop it short of spraying Agent Orange on everything.)
Again, I have no problem with vice. Drugs, commercialized sex work, whatever. You’re all adults, do what you gotta do. In contrast, while I’m not a fan of corruption and greed, I realize that it’s extremely unlikely that these things will ever disappear. But when you exhibit all of these shitty things, and you hypocritically get on your high horse, and you have the audacity to call yourself “America’s Finest City”, you’re just asking for an ass-whooping from God Almighty. Think Sodom and Gomorrah, guys.
San Diego, I hardly knew ye. I can’t wait to get out of this fucking place.
And it came to me then that every plan
is a tiny prayer to Father Time,
as I stared at my shoes in the ICU
that reeked of piss and 409.
—”What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie
I’m continuing to read S. narrative of her time spent working in the ICU and I am flung back to my own time in that hellish pit of despair. I did my own ICU intern month around this time of year, and looking back at my blog entries at that time, I barely wrote anything at all. Mostly because I was living in the ICU the entire month, and the only reason I would go home would be to sleep and shower.
But the only times I managed to vent my sadness and frustration actually bracketed that month of pain.
Before I started the ICU, I cross-covered for Peds Hem-Onc {pediatric hematology-oncology}, and that pretty much set the tone for the next couple of months.
Despite the suffering and the death I was confronted with every day, I managed to stay mostly narcissistic, thinking about nothing but my own misery, although peripherally aware that, as bad as it got, at least I wasn’t sick.
(Rule #4 from “The House of God”: The patient is the one with the disease. Or, as my senior in psychiatry said back when I was a 3rd year medical student, “At least you don’t have lymphoma.”)
The madness continued, as I found myself marooned in the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, blindsided by Death almost every day, floundering and flailing like a drowning man, as I tried to actually take on cancer, and failing miserably.
For better, or for worse, I made it through somehow without needing a psychiatric hospitalization. I’ve had to face death again on more than a few occasions, but I don’t not if I just got used to it and stopped caring, or it really got easier.
Don’t get me wrong. I still have my regrets. But I can honestly say I tried my best, to not let my patients suffer needlessly, and to send them peacefully on to whatever comes next.
I learned that there is actually such a thing as a good death. To be as pain-free as possible. To tie up all the loose-ends. To say goodbye, without grudges, without too much regret.
At least I can say I tried my best.
But we do a lot of things in those cold sterile rooms that make no sense whatsoever. But you still have to do them.
Even though you knew they were going to die, that you could almost pinpoint it to the hour—even though you knew they were going to die, because you were the one who was purposefully pulling out the tube, and letting nature take its course, at the behest of the family members, or at the behest of the patient, who was able to record their final wishes before they slipped into that awful twilight unconsciousness of grave illness—even though the monitors display quite clearly that the patient is not breathing, that the heart has stopped pumping—you still have to go in there and listen for sounds that you know you won’t hear.
He’s dead, Jim
—Bones from “Star Trek”
I’ve gotten really good at stating the obvious.
Even when you know they’re dying, and there’s nothing you could possibly do to stop that downward spiral, you still have to start chest compressions on and crack the ribs of someone whom you haven’t been able to contact the loved ones of, and whose last desire before slipping into unconsciousness was for us to do “everything that could be done.” Never mind that her veins are filled more with bacteria and pus than with blood, and the bacteria are so resistant to treatment that you might as well be giving her sugar water instead of antibiotics. Never mind that when your heart stops while you’re in septic shock, that you ain’t doing anyone any favors by bringing them back, with their brain all turned to mush by the lack of oxygen, and the bacteria basically eating away at gray matter.
Never mind that, for all intents and purposes, you basically killed her when you stuck that tube down her throat and put her under, because there was no way she could breathe with her chest 75% filled with incurable tumor no matter what you did, and at the rate they were growing, her heart and lungs would be completely wrecked by cancer in 48 hours.
Never mind that the surgeons have tried for four weeks, and now you’ve tried for another four weeks, and even though she was completely awake and alert and communicative, you couldn’t pull that tube out of her throat, and all it seemed that you were doing was prolonging agony, and why do I feel evil for being relieved that we finally let her go? Am I just rationalizing?
Never mind that he had been all ready to go home when disaster struck, and a vessel burst within his gut. His brain died a little that day, and probably died a little more as we flogged him back to what you could technically call life, but after that he just sat there, writhing in delirium, and maybe there were a few moments when he could see his daughter clearly, but for the most part he was convulsing uncontrollably, untouchable by anything we tried.
I don’t know. Thinking back about all these cases—all these people—many of whom I never knew when they were just like me—laughing, talking, playing, working—was it enough?
I guess I’ve been through enough to know that no one is ever going to be able to answer that question for me.
‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room.
Just nervous faces bracing for bad news.
And then the nurse comes ‘round and everyone lift their heads,
but I’m thinking of what Sarah said:
That love is watching someone die.
—”What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie
It still remains to be seen if the U.S. can be salvaged from the claws of totalitarianism, but I remember the dark days of the botched 2000 election, when the Supreme Court stripped the people of their sovereignty and selected the guy who didn’t win the election, and I remember the cynical use of the destruction of the WTC as an excuse to foment war in Iraq.
I was against the war from the onset, and I despaired because it seemed that everyone supported the war, or didn’t care. As Karl Rove committed treason against Valerie Plame, as W and Darth Vader Cheney blatantly lied to the American public, I remember thinking that we were screwed as a nation, and that the fall of the Republic was at hand.
But then I remember when the tide began to shift.
The first thing that made realize that the neocons weren’t going to be able to just steamroll the U.S. into a fascist state was when I heard a radio station in Chicago play “Changes” by Tupac Shakur, interspersed with the bullshit that W and company were feeding us. Whoever made the decision to play it was brave, at a time when it seemed that just questioning the joker sitting in the Oval Office would land you in Gitmo.
The lines that sent shivers up and down my spine were these:
And still I see no changes.
Can’t a brother get a little peace?
It’s war on the streets and the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs
so the police can bother me
The prophetic words about war in Iraq were eerie. The song was released in 1998, and Tupac had already been killed in 1996. I know it’s not that remarkable of a prediction, considering that the Middle East has been wracked with turmoil for a long time, but it still hit me.
Around that time, the protests against the war started. Progressive bloggers started to make their mark on the blogosphere, providing a welcome counterpoint to the right wing hacks and shills.
The war to take back our country is far from over, but at least it’s being fought.
To quote Andre the Giant, “I hope we win!”
As I shot down the I-5 listening to my iPod, this song came up, bringing up memories from my first year in college, way back in 1994-1995
To quote Mos Def, “A lot of things have changed. A lot of things have not.”
But the song is [“You Gotta Be” by Des’ree][1], and the most vivid memory is hanging out at the Berkeley Marina, and gazing at the hills to the east, and the Campanile towering in the distance.
We used to go to the marina to get away from campus, and sometimes we’d fly kites.
you gotta be bad
you gotta be bold
you gotta be wiser
you gotta be hard
you gotta be tough
you gotta be stronger
you gotta be cool
you gotta be calm
you gotta stay together
all I know all I know love will save the day
Anil Dash objects to the subtle mockery that Apple throws towards Windows, and I do see his point. It’s yet another sign of “immaturity”, in the same vein of the shit-talking found in the Mac vc PC ads.
But I think its a little overstated. If you can’t take a little joke at your expense, that’s just sad. It’s not your religion. It’s not your ethnic background. It’s just the OS you choose to run.
(And, yeah, while Linux can support SMB shares, the protocol is extraordinarily slow and ugly. If you’re going to run a *nix box, I suggest NFS, which, with the correct software, is supported even in Windows. And if you don’t need Windows at all, then even AFP performs better than SMB in Linux.)
Sure, maybe it’s a sign of “immaturity.” But I think that’s a good thing. God help us if Steve-o sells out to the corporate culture of naming software releases by cryptic two or three letter acronyms like NT or ME or XP. I like the OS X release names. For one thing, it’s not like there are hundreds of Mac OS X variants.
*10.0 Cheetah *10.1 Puma *10.2 Jaguar *10.3 Panther *10.4 Tiger *10.5 Leopard
That’s just six releases since 2001.
Compare that to the six variants of Windows Vista:
*Windows Vista Starter *Windows Vista Home Basic *Windows Vista Home Premium *Windows Vista Business *Windows Vista Enterprise *Windows Vista Ultimate
Yeah. That’s not confusing at all.
Frankly, I’m fond of the snide attitude against Microsoft, and the corporate culture in general. It’s something that Apple and the Open Source movement have in common.
I first encountered the phenomenon of weird release names back when I started playing with Linux. The distro I used the most was Red Hat, from version 6.0 to Fedora Core 7.
*6.0 Hedwig *6.1 Cartman *6.2 Zoot *7.0 Guinness *7.1 Seawolf *7.2 Enigma *7.3 Valhalla *8.0 Psyche *9.0 Shrike *Fedora Core 1 Yarrow *Fedora Core 2 Tettnang *Fedora Core 3 Heidelberg *Fedora Core 4 Stentz *Fedora Core 5 Bordeaux *Fedora Core 6 Zod *Fedora Core 7 Moonshine
The most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu, uses a similarly obscure but evocative naming scheme:
*6.06.1 Dapper Drake *6.10 Edgy Eft *7.04 Feisty Fawn *7.10 Gutsy Gibbon
Now, bear in mind, Apple’s main target demographic is not the musty corporate halls of Wall Street or the confines of the IRS. (With regards to Red Hat, their Enterprise releases are more sedately named.) The kind of corporations that probably use Macs make movies or publish magazines, and even more users work for medium-to-small design shops. The cultures of these places don’t necessarily place a lot of importance on what the suits might call “maturity.” A great number of us just like using a more human OS that actually functions, and if the OS makers want to have their little joke, who cares? We’re physicians, teachers, union organizers, students, lawyers, scientists. Our lives are not predicated on the newest IT buzzword, and if we actually recognize what a BSOD looks like, you only have Microsoft to blame for making it such a familiar sight.
Still reading The History of the Hobbit by John D. Rateliff. There have been loony theories around the Internet which ponder whether the Arkenstone from The Hobbit is in fact a Silmaril.
Interestingly, while the Arkenstone may not actually be* a Silmaril, it shares a lot of characteristics with the holy jewels, and these similarities are unlikely to be an accident, since Tolkien was working on *The Hobbit simultaneously as he continued to elucidate the stories of his legendarium.
And in Tolkien’s version of the Quenta written in Old English, he writes the following (translated by Ratecliff):
Here through cunning craft/artistic skill the Noldor elves devised and created many gems, and Fëanor the Noldor lord wrought the Silmarils, that were holy stones: Eorclanstánas or Arkenstones.
It has been about six months since the last time I had to give The Talk™. It’s not something I’m particularly good at, although I’m better than I used to be. In the end, it’s about getting to the point: your loved one is dying, and everything we’re doing to her/him is only prolonging suffering. Will you give us permission to stop these things, and focus on making her/him comfortable?
S. describes the situation eloquently, hauntingly, in words that I wish I were capable of. I’ve forgotten the names of some of the patients I’ve led to that Final Darkness, and I regret that. But I remember their faces. Their families. Their tears.
I can’t even get death right
Despite what the reassurance of ICU docs and the oncologists (the specialties which seem to live and breathe death), I’ve never felt at ease with letting someone slip off into the next world. Even when I knew that nothing I could do would change anything. Even when I knew that, for all intents and purposes, they were already dead.
Sometimes I like to think that I was able to give their family members a chance to come to terms with things, and time to have some sort of closure. Most of the time I’m doubtful, and it distresses me that I can manage to screw-up even the process of dying.
Like that time they started chest compressions on a septic lady who had been on five pressors for nearly 24 hours, struggling futilely against the bacteria floating around her bloodstream. The grotesqueness of it all made me nauseated, and I called it as soon as I got there. Asystole never calls for electricity, and with the epinephrine running full blast since 4 am the last morning, we had already been effectively coding her. I had to make The Call™, and they came in at the middle of the night. It’s terrible when the first time you meet them is when their loved one dies, and I don’t blame them one bit for not trusting me.
And then there was that time when I ended up intubating a poor woman who had metastases filling both of her lungs. There was something awful about knowing that I would never be able to get the tube out without killing her, and I still wonder if it was really the right thing to do. Maybe I should’ve just gone into the The Talk™. But I’m not sure her family was ready to let go.
The bloodiest disaster yet, though, was this poor guy who had cancer invading his larynx. It was starting to erode into a major artery, and soon, the guy was bleeding profusely out of his mouth. The surgeons threw up their hands, knowing that there was no way to repair a ruptured vessel that was eaten through by cancer, and we were left to comfort his family as he literally bled to death in front of us.
Somehow, that last one was the death that turned out best.
Rituals
I liked S.’s description of that final, futile ritual we doctors have in the face of the ineffable. We take out our stethoscopes and listen for sounds we don’t expect to hear. The time of birth actually has a lot of clinical ramifications (Do we need to start antibiotics on the baby? Is her/his bilirubin level too high? Can we call the blood cultures negative? Is it too soon to discharge?) But the time of death seems to be a medico-legal nicety, something with which to trap malpractice witnesses with on the witness stand. The words “I’m sorry” seem so woefully inadequate, and I worry that it sounds too insincere, but I end up saying it anyway.
My Fate Was Fixed
I envy S.’s ambivalence about her job, despite the fact that she does it well. The longer I stay in this game, the more and more I take it as a given that there was no way to avoid it. I have so many family members in health care, I didn’t even know there were any other possible career choices for me until I was 17, by which time it was too late.
One of my preceptors on a 4th year medical school rotation teased me in a sing-song fashion, “You’re doomed, you’re doomed!” And then he went into a Darth Vader impersonation. “It is your destiny!”
I worry that I’m not as good of a physician. I’m doing this because, ultimately, I can’t imagine doing anything else. Certainly there isn’t anything I’m particular better at. If the choice is this versus working in some godforsaken cubicle, the choice is easy, but even this late in the game, I have doubts about my own abilities.
But I have this One Thing™. Do I really have any right to ask for more? (And yet I *do* want more.)
Now I realize there is no way to avoid The Talk™ no matter what I do, even if I never set foot inside an ICU ever again. Sometimes death comes lightning quick. One day you’re walking, talking, laughing, having a good time, the next you’re gorked in the ICU with some fumbling intern jamming a catheter accidentally into your femoral artery. But the worst cases are when death comes slow and lingering, so slow that no one believes its coming, so slow that they’re angry at you for even bringing it up.
But I can smell death from the next room. I can see death a mile away. Just from the story you tell me, I can hear death at the end of the tale.
There’s no other way out of this universe. Sometimes all that is left to us, the healers, is to make sure you get to the exit without suffering too badly.
I don’t know why, but suddenly I had the urge to try yet another blog engine, even though I haven’t really hacked into SimpleLog’s internals and given customization a chance, which was the whole point of using it.
The first thing I did was search through freshmeat. I found a few blog engines that hit all the right buzzwords for me, and which sound intriguing. One of the cleaner looking ones is Bloo—it’s new, it looks simple, and it’s based on a PHP framework(!) which is object-oriented. The other one that sounded interesting is minb, which does not need a db, and uses XML as its storage model.
The thing that made me hesitate—a lot—was that they’re both written in PHP.
PHP is a kludge
Don’t get me wrong. I admire a good kludge when I see one. And PHP is certainly one of the biggest, most successful kludges out in the world today. (Although, granted, it is certainly cleaner than Perl/CGI, but that’s another rant entirely.)
But I’m a guy who does other things than code. Kludgery is always good for the one-off. But it’s terrible for maintenance, and it’s terrible when you want to actually learn how to code properly.
I don’t have anything against PHP necessarily. It’s just that my first direct interaction with the stuff was a Bad Experience™.
Wordpress gives me the heebie-jeebies
Now granted, Wordpress is good at what it does. It is the most widely deployed Open Source blog engine, and in 2007, it seems to be more ubiquitous than even Blogger and Movable Type.
But if you ever want to get Wordpress to do something a little different than usual, beware.
I used Wordpress from February 2006 to June 2007, having moved from Blosxom. But what made me jump ship was my problems with themes.
Frankly, most of the Wordpress themes look extremely crappy. I can’t believe that, in this day and age, people are still doing fixed-width designs. (I guess I should be happy they’re no longer using tables.) Or the designs are too noisy, too crowded. Three columns, with more of the look of a web forum or a Slashdot-clone, than that of a personal journal. And the ones that look good and are innovative (the Hemingway theme comes to mind) are mindlessly copied ad infinitum.
Which in itself is not a problem. Nothing that a good text editor and some XHTML/CSS can’t fix.
But then I found myself wading through hundreds of lines of PHP embedded within the themes. Maybe this was just an abberation. But I looked and looked, and found that Wordpress seems to be anti-encapsulation. A theme developer is forced to put business-logic in their theme.
I Can’t Help It, I’m an Artist
Now I don’t know why I’m so against nested angle-brackets. I get the shivers whenever I see a bit of code like:
<a href="<?php displaylink[x]; ?>" title="<?php displaylink_desc[x]; ?>">
<?php displaylinklabel[x]; ?></a>
Now maybe I just need to configure my copy of Emacs better, but it sometimes drives me nuts when I’m missing a closing angle-bracket, because Emacs doesn’t care about tags that are embedded in quotes.
But nested angle-brackets seem to be a characteristic of PHP, and try as I might with assigning commonly used functions to variables, I couldn’t eliminate every instance of code sitting inside the design.
I gave up.
OOP. Bright and Shiny.
Now I realize that Wordpress is just badly coded. Sure, it does what it’s supposed to do (most of the time), but trying to change anything is an exercise in frustration. There are redundant sets of functions (one for display, and one for assigning to a variable), the code is pretty much spaghetti, and a lot of things just don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. I realize that the spaghettification of Wordpress has a lot to do with it inheriting a really old codebase, which was written in a now-deprecated (although still widespread) version of PHP.
At the same time, I was learning about the new darling of the Open Source world: Ruby (not to be confused with its even more popular framework, Rails)
I’ve always been intrigued by object-oriented code. I like the idea of mapping code to real world objects and processes. I suspect that true AI systems will require an object-oriented implementation, because human brains seem to function in an object-oriented manner. (Don’t ask me for evidence on this one. It’s just my intuition from studying both neuroscience and computer programming.)
My interest in OOP also lies in the fact that I’ve been running Mac OS X for the past few years and the entire system is based on OOP (Objective C, to be precise.) The most interesting thing that Objective C and Ruby have in common is that they both borrow from Smalltalk, the language developed by Xerox, which is the company that spawned the whole GUI revolution. (OOP and GUIs seem to go together so naturally, its amazing that there are actually few instances where the two are intertwined.)
Smalltalk seems like a cool idea that was just too ahead of its time, and even Xerox didn’t have hardware that could run it at a usable speed.
Long story short, I ended up jumping on the Rails bandwagon. I’ve tried Typo, I’ve tried Mephisto, and now I’m using Simplelog.
“Slow and Easy” beats “Fast but Arrogant”
The thing with Ruby (without and with Rails) is that “I just get it.” Like I said, I’m not a professional code monkey. I just do this for fun, even though I’ve been screwing around with computers for more than 20 years now. I found C difficult. I found C++ more bearable because at least it had the C++ standard library, although ironically I never got the hang of the object-oriented side of things. I found Perl and specifically TMTOWTDI refreshing, and for the longest time, I didn’t use anything else.
But, while it’s really easy to write one-offs in Perl, it isn’t always the easiest to comprehend.
This is what makes Ruby different.
I can look at a piece of code and figure it out just by looking at it, fast. It’s such a different experience than when I’ve used other languages. For me, it’s like the difference between moving my lips while reading and sounding things out phonetically, and comprehending entire words and sentences at once.
And while a lot of this magic is Rails itself, it seems to pervade the entire language. Because Rails doesn’t just hide the messy internals from the naive programmer. If you really wanted to, you could look at the Rails code itself, and you could probably figure out what it does just as quickly.
Grrr.
Which leads me to this entertaining reactionary rant from a PHP guru directed against Rails fanboys that I found on Google while trying to look for more blog engines.
Now, maybe the underlying tone is purposefully, ironically, full of piss and vinegar, to match the caustic feel of the “Fuck You” slide from the Rails talk that he cites. Still, it sounds a lot like some wimpy Asian geek who just managed to pwn you on Counterstrike and who keeps rubbing it in, talking shit.
And I totally understand the reaction to abject fanboyism. Back in the day in the late ‘90’s, I had it in for the Mac fanboys (despite eventually converting to Mac fanboyism in 2002.) But at the same time, I can’t stand Microsoft butt boys, and the Rails fanboyism can be cloying.
And Chay’s rant stinks of PHP fanboyism.
I recognize that PHP runs a lot of the web (which is what Perl used to do back in Web 1.0) But the fact that the most popular sites, and the biggest site in the world—Yahoo—runs PHP is mere accident of time and implementation. If Yahoo (and the Web) had been built earlier, it might have been scripted in Lisp or even Smalltalk for all we know. If it was just being written now, maybe Haskell or Erlang might be the magic language. (I mean, just think how fast Yahoo would be if it were fully parallelized in Erlang?)
And the idea of not using frameworks sounds ludicrous. While we may have hit the quantum mechanical wall when it comes to CPUs, there is still a lot of optimization possible with memory buses, with storage media, with network switches, with data transmission technology. Some day the performance optimization you did in PHP will not matter a damn, and the time lost trying to decipher your kludge is going to cost a lot.
Not using a framework is like coding in C++ without using the standard library, or coding machine language by hand instead of using an assembler. Maybe it executes faster. Maybe it performs better. But there’s a terrible cost in maintainability.
The Road to the Future has a lot of speedbumps
I know first hand what a pain in the ass Rails. Even though my blog has like one reader, it used to crash and give 500 errors quite regularly. Some of this, though, is the fact that my webhost isn’t really optimized for Rails.
And without caching, it’s slower than molasses. It might take a full minute to render a page, which is rather pathetic.
But the quickness by which I can comprehend the code and customize it to my liking is worth it. Someday, it will not be slow, without me changing or optimizing a damn thing.
Sure, there is indeed merit in living in the present, and dealing practically with problems. Sometimes all you need is a piece of duct tape, and PHP is a lot like duct tape. If your paycheck is entirely dependent on your coding skills, and you know PHP like the back of your hand, of course it makes sense to deploy it. Your employers are paying you to fix problems, not to create aesthetically pleasing pieces of code.
But to ignore the future is slitting your own throat. Someday, the 9 year old script kiddie who is screwing around with [Scratch][14] today is going to be kicking your ass around the block with apps written in two or three lines of code in the Next Generation Programming Language, built on top of the Next Generation Framework, and it’ll perform just as well or better than any soon-to-be obsolescent PHP kludgery you’ve written today and have tons of new features.
I agree that Ruby and Rails is not the end-all-be-all of Web 2.0. In the end, it’s going to be a stepping stone to Web 3.0. But I guarantee that five years from now, the paradigm represented by PHP is going to be long-dead, and if you don’t move on to Bigger and Brighter Things™, you’re going to find yourself unemployed.
After grabbing some grub and buying more toilet paper, I noticed for the first time the unnatural, diffuse glow that seems to envelop all of San Diego. The sky is this bizarre faded and yet deep blue, like the color of the light filtering through an aquarium, maybe, or maybe more like a TV screen that’s on but without any input coming in, not even static. Or maybe more like an overexposed picture, and just as grainy.
Words are clearly failing me.
The light is ghostly, more like St Elmo’s fire than the greenish glow in which radioactivity is cartoonishly depicted, and the sky is surprisingly bright, despite it being near midnight.
It’s just all the smoke drifting through the air, especially now that the winds have died down, and the air has grown still. All the city lights are scattered wildly by the suspended particles of soot and ash.
I ponder the quote that S. posted about wonder, and also the Blind Chatelaine’s thoughts about beauty, danger, and destruction. I think about J.R.R. Tolkien’s fascination with the land of Faerie, and remember that Lyra Belacqua, also known as Silvertongue, crossed worlds on a night like this, with the sky afire with electric light, burning with eldritch fire.
I wonder if this is yet another false portent that will send me off into a wild goosechase, though I realize deep down inside that there is no pattern in any of this, only the reckless dance of capricious chance, and I have no one to blame but myself for following faery dreams. And yet, I hope that this time the signs are aligned. Though the smoke has smothered all the starlight, I keep wishing that my chance has come at least, when all my striving and yearning and longing might come to a peaceful end, and I can be still and silent, and live at last in quiet joy.
There is that urban legend that the Chinese character for “crisis” is composed of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity” and while the linguistics may be faulty, there is an underlying truism: without risk, there can be no reward. And without the chance for failure, there can be no success.
I feel like I’m once again embarking on a quest.
As I try to clear my head from the fires, S. gets me thinking.
Specifically, thinking about things that make me uneasy.
Before Southern California went up in flames, I was pondering how isolated I’ve allowed myself to become. Deep down inside, the objective, diagnostic part of my brain recognizes that this is extraordinarily unhealthy. And yet, I feel helpless to rectify things.
Without the deep, abstract ideas (that ultimately have no real meaning) to distract me, I’m left with this empty void.
At the least, it’s no longer dragging me down. It’s just there. This space-filling emptiness that’s almost like a tangible wall. I need to get to the other side of it somehow, but the solution continues to elude me.
For some reason, me and my sister got to talking about capitalism on the drive down from L.A. to S.D., as we drove past the burning hills of Irvine. And it occurred to me, no matter what you do, markets will always exist, simply because of the existence of two human impulses: desire, and the need to create. Economists might call it demand and supply, respectively, but it explains why Communism has always gone wrong. Besides the fact that human nature may not be basically benign, and that power corrupts, the problem with trying to control markets is that the path of least resistance is invariably to suppress these very human impulses. Communist governments are reduced to trying to get people to stop wanting stuff, and barring that, they try to get people to stop wanting to make stuff. By definition, you need a totalitarian government in order to try and accomplish that, and unless you actually destroy your people’s humanity, there’s just no way to eradicate these impulses.
And it struck me. Does my mind wander like this, and think about random topics deeply, for any good reason? (I has occurred to me that I may simply be insane, but this doesn’t really lead me to any practical course of action.) Is there something I am meant to accomplish in this life time? (The objective part of my brain say, no. The universe is governed mostly by Chance, and there is no such thing as Destiny™, at least, not in the way that human beings have personified her.)
For an long time, I’ve been preoccupied with the fear of dying without realizing my full potential, and the fear has occasionally become so overwhelming that I’ve freaked out. To the point where I’ve given up, and let my talents go fallow. Like that passage in one of the Gospels says not to do, I’ve spent a huge portion of my life hiding my light under a basket.
I mean, I could either let go of my overdeveloped sense of significance to the universe, or give up on being a chickenshit, and I think I either course could solve a lot of my problems. But for some reason, I’ve failed to make any headway on either road.
I am fated to remain In Between™, and perhaps condemned to inertia.
It’s quite possible that my adrenal glands have finally given up. The wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of the wild fires has worn me down. I don’t remember being this wired since the destruction of the WTC or maybe not even since the L.A. riots.
Part of it is probably the acrid stench of smoke. The smell of burning probably activates nerves that hook right into your primitive brain. For some reason, I start thinking about the last scenes of the movie “Bambi”.
The thing about fire is that it’s a case of “hurry up and wait,” which is a phenomenon that is, I suppose, well known by fire fighters and police and paramedics, and it is also how we tend to practice medicine in the United States. On certain rotations, I find my job consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Eventually, you stop caring, I think. The adrenal glands can only pump out so much adrenaline.
I’m tired of the mainstream media. The local broadcasters aren’t very good to begin with, and their constant polemicizing and politicizing of the fires was making me nauseated. I got most of my updates via catdirt and SD Dialed In. Maybe Gil Scott Heron didn’t get the whole picture. The Revolution may not be televised, but maybe it will be blogged. Or even Twittered.
But things seem to be winding down. The high pressure system that was driving the Santa Ana winds is migrating away, and the marine layer is supposed to re-establish itself. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t made any difference in the weather yet—it’s still hot and dry as hell—but the smoke isn’t nearly as bad as it was. The fires have retreated from the urban interface, although they are still actually raging off in the rural hinterlands. The Witch Creek Fire is only 20% contained, although almost all of the flames are on the eastern front of the burn area. The nearby Poomacho Fire is only 10% contained. The Harris Fire, near the Mexican border, is also minimally contained, at 10%, although it doesn’t look like it’s threatening Chula Vista and vicinity any longer. (The CAL FIRE site has status reports available.)
It strikes me that the Witch Creek Fire alone has burned more land area than all of the fires in the other six counties (L.A., O.C., San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and Santa Barbara) combined, and I can’t help wonder what the hell is up with that? It isn’t like there should be a huge variation in the amount of dry brush between S.D. County and the others. (Or is there?) And we’ve all been affected by the drought.
Why is that even after the disastrous Cedar Fire (which the Witch Creek Fire has already eclipsed tremendously), San Diego County still doesn’t have enough fire fighters and equipment to protect its citizens?
It looks like The New York Times is asking this very same question. And sadly, some of the answers seem to be deadly obvious. Miriam Raftery describes how victims of the fires are blaming the officials. In particular, Governor Schwarzenegger had vetoed a bill that would’ve hired more fire fighters and purchased more equipment, and he had disregarded all the recommendations of the commission that had reviewed the Cedar Fire. And the County Supervisors appear to have turned a blind eye to large-scale developments in highly combustible regions, exacerbating the problem. Kathy Christie Hernandez puts it more bluntly: No new taxes equals no new firemen.
While it’s going to take a while to reach containment, much less actually extinguishment (optimistic estimates are containment in more than a week, as November rolls in), the real pain is going to be the rebuilding. The number of homes destroyed is simply appalling and boggles the mind. Over a thousand structures burned. It’s like the hand of God just went off and obliterated a small town. Already, the scammers have moved in to bilk the people, the insurance companies (i.e., the people, since it’s our insurance premiums their paying with), and the federal government (i.e., the people, since it’s our tax money.) I don’t think we have a good picture of the devastation yet. It’s going to be awful. I mean, where are all these people going to live while their houses are being rebuilt?
For me, the idiocy of the entire conservative philosophy is starkly manifest here. I don’t think it’s an accident that the more liberal L.A. County has managed to avoid the massive destruction of property that is happening down here in S.D. County.
Sometimes the only answer is effective government. I’m not just talking about evacuation plans and such. I’m talking about prevention. I’m talking about preparedness. As much as the politicians down here are patting themselves on the back, they really had neither, and I wonder what it’s going to take for the people down here to accept the fact that they way they’re running things (or more accurately, not running things) is simply unsustainable.
But you knew that already.
Instead of agreeing with the fire fighters and placing the blame on the rampant development in dangerous areas, and the failure of McMansion owners to clear their brush properly, Duncan Hunter blames the environmentalists.
Asshole.
One might even argue that these augmented Santa Ana winds are yet another product of pervasive climate change, the end-result of you driving your 10-ton Excursions and Suburbans and guzzling gasoline over the years. Despite only being a week before November, the ground in Minneapolis has not yet frozen. It’s going to be a balmy 84°F in NYC today.
Bear in mind that this is only the start of the California fire season. Santa Ana wind activity peaks around December.
While Governor Schwarzenegger, Mayor Jerry Sanders, and Representative Duncan Hunter continue to fellate each other about what a good job they’re doing, I’d like to point out that the evacuation effort actually underscores the fact that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were grossly mistreated and neglected.
The contrast between Hurricane Katrina and the San Diego wildfires points out the fact that if you are poor, and dark-skinned, your country will abandon you and let you rot in hell and will in fact send mercenaries over to shoot the place up, but if you are reasonably well-to-do, and light-skinned, everyone will be falling all over themselves to give you “lavish buffets” and back rubs.
And I invoke Kanye West obligatorily when I say: George Bush only cares about white people.
Me and a colleague speculated over why San Diego County can’t seem to protect their citizens from something as regularly cyclic and expected as wildfires. Everyone knows the drill come October. The Santa Anas come blowing in. The brush dries out. Eventually something is going to catch fire, and the fire is going to spread. Fast.
And yet here we are again, with houses burning to the ground, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Holy shit.
I have my theories about the county’s refusal to use any principles of urban development whatsoever. I have no doubt that this misguided clinging to libertarian principles contributes to this tragic repetition of events.
But we started amusing ourselves by going down the conspiracy track. Certainly, there’s a lot in it for the developers and their dependent contractors. Rebuilding homes will create jobs, and money will be flowing out of the pockets of insurance companies and into the pockets of the developers and contractors, all of whom have no desire to abide by sane building regulations, apparently.
When’s the next time the city is going to burn down, I wonder? 2011, maybe? Sooner, if this drought doesn’t end?
In San Diego thus far, no one is pointing fingers quite yet, at least not in the pwned mainstream media. (I think Clear Channel owns half, and Rupert Murdoch own the rest down here, but I could be exaggerating. A little.) But L.A. is a little different. The people are blaming the local policy wonks. The council members are blaming the state of California. But I was amused by the scathing criticism levelled by a climatologist against the marionette-like city planning committee in Malibu.
Not one of those McMansions is worth the life of any firefighter. Whoever is handing out building permits in Malibu should be indicted. —Bill Patzert
I can’t imagine anyone in San Diego having the balls to say something like that, even if it’s totally true. And the thing is, none of the victims really have much to gain by telling it like it is, because in a year or two, the insurance companies will pay developers and contractors to rebuild their houses.
Whatever. I’ve given thought to possibly staying down here and working at least for a few years more, but I’m starting to get sick of the idea of being surrounded by morons and lunatics.
Leave it to San Diego politicians to turn a natural disaster like the fires that are currently running rampant throughtout San Diego County into a partisan issue.
Susan Taylor to Katrina Victims: You Suck!
So maybe Qualcomm hasn’t turned into the Superdome quite yet. But it’s only day two, folks. Maybe if you gave it a month of receiving no help whatsoever, with the surrounding city completely obliterated, it wouldn’t look so rosy.
And it’s not like San Diego is exactly immune to looting, either. Imagine what would be happening if people’s stuff didn’t, you know, actually go up into flames? (Maybe I’d have myself a nice new plasma screen TV, you know?)
I am simultaneously amused and disgusted by the auto-fellation going on amongst the hacks politicians. Both Catdirt and Rosemary describe the distasteful scenes with barely restrained sarcasm that makes it a little more palatable, but I still can’t help think of the scene in “Pulp Fiction” where Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta leave a dead body at Quentin Tarantino’s place.
Let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet. —the Wolf from “Pulp Fiction”
Flatulating asshole Neil Cavuto likens Qualcomm Stadium to a big old party. OK. Sure. Your house just burned down, but at least you’ve got “lavish meals, piping hot coffee, even massages. Almost all the comforts of home.” Uh huh. That’s cool.
And the vile cunt known as Glenn Beck thinks that San Diegans deserve to lose their homes, because, you know, we’re all a bunch of sodomites and dope-fiends.
You can’t help but wonder, where was all this help in 2003, when Gray Davis was being kicked in the head while he was lying face down on the ground by the Right, never mind the fact that San Diegans refuse to have their taxes raised so they can actually fund fire departments enough so that fire fighters can have a fighting chance to defend the city. And the entire state was pleading with W for federal assistance, a plea that was summarily denied, no less.
What has the federal government done for California lately, I ask? And what if the good ol’ governator didn’t have an (R) next to his name, I wonder?
Just watch the Bush Administration take credit for the “success” of the timely evacuation, never mind that the mobilization was a result of the painful lessons learned by the city in 2003, and never mind that the property damages are far worse than for the Cedar Fire. Heckuva job, Chertoff. Thanks for cheering us on.
Kevin Drum is incredulous about Joan Didion’s description of the Santa Ana winds. While it is probably a little over the top, there *is* a change in the atmosphere when those blasts of moisture-stripping wind barrel through the canyons and passes, howling and shrieking, and making your house shudder every once in a while.
Even though I grew up in Southern California, the traditional portrayal of the seasons holds sway even in *my* memory. Until I was 23, I had never seen the leaves turn color in fall, and yet I always expected them. I had never lived in a place where it snowed until I was in my 20s, either, and yet I always waited expectantly for it as winter made its way through the calendar. I’d wait like Linus, always disappointed about the Great Pumpkin not coming.
So the Santa Anas always had an otherworldly association with them. Who thinks of summer in late October? Of 85° to 90° highs?
It’s the cry of the wind that’s really eerie sometimes. There is something about it that disquiets the mind. And the dryness can leave your skin tingling.
But it has always been the fires that have been truly frightening. As I sit here in this urban oasis, tens of thousands of acres burn to the south of me and to the north of me, and hundreds of homes have been ravaged.
The smell of smoke upon the air has always made me think of autumn in So Cal.
The fires jump across canyons and across 15-lane freeways, with ease. The drought-stricken terrain literally explodes, and the fires race through almost a fast as lightning. It devours houses like some kind of angry, red/orange, wild animal.
(I still wonder if there is any way at all to prevent this. It can’t be mere coincidence that the Witch Creek Fire has taken some of the same paths that the Cedar Fire in 2003 took. Are developers not required to consider fire danger when they build?)
The big problem with Southern California in general is hop-skotch development. Even in dense areas like L.A., islands of wilderness lie in between developments. Think of the Griffith Park fire just a few months ago, within sight of Downtown L.A. Some of this is decreed by topography: it’s just impractical to build on steep mountainsides sometimes. But sometimes it’s also just poor planning.
Part of what is making the Witch Creek Fire so devastating is that it is blazing through tracts of mostly undeveloped land, interspersed with huge houses. All the roads leading through that area are two lanes wide, again partly decreed by topography, but also probably another symptom of poor planning. Despite the density in places like Escondido and the Tri-City area on the coast, there is that huge swath of land between Sorrento Valley and Encinitas, Rancho Bernardo and Escondido. Ironically, maybe that area would’ve fared better if it was fully developed, instead of harboring dessicated brush just waiting to be ignited.
It seems counter-intuitive, maybe. Maybe you would think that sprawl would be easier to defend, since everything is spread apart. But if the structures you’re trying to defend are spread apart, your fire fighting crews will have to spread apart as well. And the gaps in your defenses can be deadly.
New York, Chicago, San Francisco. Each of these densely populated urban centers have had their eponymous fires, practically obliterating them entirely. But with buildings relying more on concrete and steel than on wood now a days, when was the last time a huge American city burned to the ground?
In Southern California, autumn does not bring the changing of the leaves, nor the bluster of the cold. Rather, it brings fire and ash, as the Santa Ana winds dry out all the brush, leaving behind powder-keg conditions. All it takes is a stray spark, or the mindless malice of an arsonist, and literally all hell breaks loose.
The weather forecasters had been dreading the winds already last week. A huge high pressure system was sitting above the Great Basin, pumping hot, dry air outward, accelerating as it funnels through the canyons and passes. Hurricane force winds gusted up to 100 mph, faster than anything I can remember in a long time in Southern California. (There were days twenty years ago when I was a kid, where I remember gusts of wind being so strong that they brought me to my knees.)
I was only a matter of time, really.
The harbinger of the fire storms of the fall were the falling ashes. My sister thought it would be fun to dig up all the weeds in my parents’ yard, and she convinced me and my brother to help her out. As we dug and scraped and hacked and tore, flakes of something white fluttered through the air. Burnt newsprint. We worried that it was somewhere close. (There was that year when one of our neighbors thought it would be a good idea to stick newspaper in their fireplace as the winds blew, and maybe six houses got torched just two blocks from where we lived.) That was when we discovered it was Malibu that was burning down.
The class war is alive and well, folks. Various fora and bulletin boards spouted alternating messages of support and indifference. Quite a few people expressed contempt for the Hollywood bigwigs whose house were going up in flames. Malibu is surely getting far more media attention than Agua Dulce, or Silverado Canyon, much less Rice Canyon.
The pall of smoke still hadn’t obliterated the sun. Me and my sister headed down to S.D., and caught site of the Santa Ana Mountains glowing eerily orange with fire. This particular fire was the work of sick arsonist fuckers. We barreled through a cloud of thick smoke settling down on the I-5, leaving a stench that followed us all the way down to coast.
The next dawn was greeted with disaster. No fewer than six fires were burning in San Diego County simultaneously. The Harris Fire, starting near the border at Tecate, had already killed someone, and severely injured several others, and it was burning westward completely unabated. 0% contained, they said. The Witch Creek Fire jumped across the I-15 and merged with the San Pasqual fire, and headed west towards the sea, burning through Rancho Bernardo, and destroying homes in Escondido and Poway. At this point Solana Beach and Del Mar are being evacuated, and some believe that only the Pacific is going to be able to stop the flames.
A fire sprung up in Fallbrook, and also ended up jumping the I-15. Fires burned near San Marcos. Another fire sprung up in Descanso.
The unpredictable winds have caused things to spread lighting quick.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be in a Code Triage. Like most things in medicine, it’s much more boring in real life than on TV. One of the hospitals in the burn zone evacuated their patients, sending a few our way. Adminstrators paced the hallways worriedly, trying to figure out how many people they could cram into the unused rooms and offices, in case worse came to worst. There were fleeting thoughts of sending some of us down into the Emergency Department to help with triage, but other hospitals seemed to be absorbing much of the chaos. They were trying to save us for last—for the worst cases, the sickest patients. That’s what we get for being a quaternary care center, and one of the only burn intensive care units within a 500 mile radius.
But while the property damage has been appalling, so far, lives have been spared. A few fire fighters are recovering in our wards, some in critical condition, and an unfortunate soul died trying to futilely protect his house from the on-rushing flames with nothing but a garden hose. Most of the people coming in were suffering from respiratory problems—people with chronic lung diseases being aggravated by the smoke and ash. Or people with other chronic illnesses who were being taken care of at home, except home is now nothing but a memory, some ash in the wind, and some rubble left lying on the charred earth.
The fire storms of 2003 come to mind again. Those days, it seemed like anarchy had finally taken hold in Southern California. Every thing was ablaze. It was snowing ash. The transit workers and the grocery store workers were on strike. It was a wonder that the martial law wasn’t declared.
You would think that we would learn from the past.
But the cycle of destruction followed by renewal has always held sway in Southern California. The life cycle of one of the few indigenous plants in So Cal, the chapparal, relies on fire to allow new plants to germinate. Even before we had electrical wires and arsonists, autumn has always been marked by fire, when the Tongva were the only ones who lived in these green coasts in between the ocean and the desert, long before any white people came. The site that became Los Angeles already had a smog problem even back then because of the infamous inversion layer. The Tongva called it Yang-na, the place of smoke.
Still, for some reason, rich people have this thing with building their houses in places where they really shouldn’t be building their houses. I mean, think about Malibu. If your house doesn’t burn down, it’s probably going to slide into the ocean once we get any rain. The fires char all the vegetation, and the cliffs are vulnerable to erosion. And so the cycle goes on: fire, deadly mudslide, rebuild and renew.
Like Sisyphus rolling up that goddamn stone up that hill, only to watch it fall down again.
The biggest tragedy, though, are the folks who really aren’t all that rich. The ones following the American Dream. Looking for that 3 bedroom, 2 bath pie-in-the-sky out in suburban hell. It’s beats living in a closet that you’re paying $3,000/month for, even if you’re commute time is tripled.
And despite having lived here for three years, despite seeing that even conservatives are human beings, and not these automatons deployed by Fox News to destroy democracy, it’s still hard to be completely sympathetic.
These are the same guys who balk at paying taxes, who scoff at developmental regulations, who spit at the environment. And yet, without taxes, fire departments can’t meet the needs of the community. Without regulations, you end up with a house that is in harm’s way, that ends up burning down every four years. I don’t about the rest of the country, but in California, Mother Nature is still boss, no matter how hard we try to ignore it. You flaut the limitations of the environment at your peril.
I don’t know. Is L.A. not burning to the ground only because of topologic fortune? Because most of L.A. is on flat land, and it’s protected by moutains on the west and the north? Or is it because the freeways and the roads were designed by sane people who realized that sometimes you have to think about infrastructure, and whether this piece of land can actually support what is going on on top of it. Even if we can only drive about 17 mph during rush hour, at least we aren’t doomed when a car crashes and closes down all five lanes on one side. You can always exit the freeway and take various surface streets. In L.A., there are usually at least four different ways to get anywhere. (Except if you’re one of the damned who live on the Westside.)
San Diego is not like San Francisco. While San Diego does have undulating mesas, and canyons intersperesed everywhere, it doesn’t have a huge freaking body of water that limits the number of routes you can reasonably build without bankrupting your constituency. I mean, it’s probably not ideal that the only reasonable way to get from the East Bay to the City is via the Bay Bridge. When a tanker truck blows up, it’s all over. You’ll have traffic jams all the way to Sacramento, easy. But it would require taxing the denizens of the Bay Area to death to build something like the Southern Crossing. And San Franciscans have very finally said “no” to building more freeways. What can you do?
But in San Diego, the infrastructural paucity seems entirely the fault of the developers and the politicians. There are bottlenecks galore in their non-sensical freeway system. There are many areas where you have to use the freeway to get from here-to-there. There simply aren’t any alternatives. While the core city is somewhat intuitively built in a grid-like pattern, everything else looks like a five year old picked up a crayon and starting scrawling on a piece of paper, and some city planner decides to use that piece of paper as the basis of the infrastructure.
Worse yet, the insane infrastructure makes it even harder for the already thinly-stretched fire department to actually get to where they need to go.
And hence, we have disaster.
Maybe one of these days, the conservative throw-backs will finally be put in a museum where they belong, and San Diego might actually have a chance at becoming a world-class city, instead of losing rank to some God-forsaken place in Texas like San Antonio. But I certainly ain’t gonna hold my breath. If people continue the idiocy of doing exactly the same things over-and-over again, but expecting different results, well, they might just get exactly what they deserve.
A biography about Charles Schulz’s biography was recently released, and the blogosphere has had a field day analyzing it. While the Amazon reviewers are apparently disgusted by the dirt that Michaelis dishes up, other readers have found it wonderful to discover/have it confirmed that the creator of such a well-known cultural phenomenon as Peanuts was all too human.
This Recording’s analysis uses the image of the wolf a lot, which is, I guess, a popular metaphor for the loner. Except that that isn’t usually what happens in nature. Wolves tend to hunt in packs. They have hierarchical societies. They’re pretty similar to humans, in a lot of ways. That’s probably why we got along so well back in pre-history, resulting in their domestication. (I glance at the two mutts sleeping lazily outside.)
I suppose more appropriate animal analogs would be the tiger, or the bear. And sometimes lions. (Oh my.) Although there doesn’t seem to be as much literature out there making psychological metaphors about lone tigers or lone bears.
But I stopped to think about this a long while ago. Maybe this sense of exceptionalism is simply a symptom of mental illness, along with my depression and my feeling of alienation from the human race. Sure, I’m an introvert, automatically making me a minority (only one-third of us are introverts), but this feeling of not-fitting-in has gone back along way.
Even in high school, I would half-jokingly tell my oldest friend that I had a terrible inferiority complex because of my superiority complex. My sense of alienation has contributed a lot to my depression. Maybe it was all just a rationalization back when I was a lonely kid, but I used to console myself with the thought that I was smarter than all those guys who made fun of me in elementary school.
And in a lot of ways, I recognize that just statistically speaking, I *am* exceptional. (You know, how everyone is unique. Just like everybody else.) But there are plenty of people in similar circumstances to mine who live relatively normal lives. You know, the whole meeting people, making friends, falling-in-love thing.
I’ve just given up on it. I’ve probably gotten as much mileage as possible with the rationalization that I don’t have enough time. For one thing, as I’ve said, lots of other people in my circumstances have time to have relationships, marriages, and kids. For another, I’ve just used it too much. If I really wanted to, I could make time.
But there’s the rub. I’m not sure what I want. The other rationalization I make is that I think my job contributes to my non-desire to meet people. Maybe it’s overstating things, but I feel like the physician has taken on some of the duties that used to be the exclusive demesne of the priest or shaman. Think about it. You tell your physician things that you tell no one else, maybe not even your spouse. (Mostly because people don’t have very many conversations about the excretion of bodily fluids.) There is a particular relationship of trust involved with talking to patients, and maybe, as an introvert, it’s just too draining. I just have no desire to meet new people. No desire to go out there, make friends, hang-out.
Maybe it’s just my depression again.
But still, the image, however erroneous, sticks. The lone wolf. Wandering around the wilderness. The lone bear doesn’t seem the same. (Although I suppose there’s Beorn the Shape Changer from The Hobbit.) Nor the lone tiger.
Am I happy? Not really. But I’m not sure what would make me happy. And I’m not sure it would be right to drag someone into my cloud of depression.
You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.
—Unknown
The L.A. Times Opinion section has an article entitled “In the beginning” by Gregory Rodriguez, in which he deconstructs the story of Hernán Cortés and Doña Marina, also known as La Malinche, the indigenous translator and mistress of the conquistador, and how her story has continued to sow conflict in the national psyche of Mexico. This is the first time I’ve run into the term malinchismo to denote sort of the same thing as vendido (sell-out) or even Quisling. In Filipino post-colonial studies, the term I’m most familiar with is colonial mentality. In the end, it all means the same thing: preferring the dominant/conquering culture over your own culture.
But it’s not a simple cut-and-dried story, good vs bad, sellouts vs the faithful. The most manifest result of colonialism that makes it much harder to tease things out are the children of the conquistador and the native: the mestizos.
Interestingly, one of the most iconic fictional characters in Filipino literature is Maria Clara, the bastard daughter of a Spanish priest and a native woman, the product of a twice-illicit affair, given that the priest is supposed to have a vow of celibacy and the fact that the woman is already married. Maria Clara is one of the main characters in the political satire Noli Me Tangere, which sometimes referred to in English as The Social Cancer, written by the national hero José Rizal, whose execution became the flashpoint of the Filipino independence movement.
The concept of Maria Clara persists to the present day in Filipino and Filipino American cultures, but in some ways, it seems like many of the sociopolitical implications of her character have been elided, or forgotten. (One of the biggest perpetrators of this selective amnesia is the Bayanihan Dance Troupe. Their misguided nationalism frequently caused them to omit various parts of Filipino history that are often deemed unsavory and that paint Filipinos—and subconsciously, our white conquerors, both Spanish and American—in a bad light. Unfortunately, their bawlderized description of history has been popularized by successor dance troupes, and have even metastasized to that peculiar social institution known as Pilipino Cultural Night, and even fifty years after the disbanding of Bayanihan, a lot of weird perception about Filipino and Filipino American culture continue to abound.)
Of course, there is always my own internal bias. While both my parents are of Austronesian/Malayan stock, with perhaps a few ancestors with Chinese or Spanish blood, my existence—like the existence of the mestizos—could not have come about without colonization. While I find the idea of imperialism repellant, I still have to come to grips with how—in terms of my own personal narrative—it seems like it was a necessary evil.
For the longest time, I’ve felt that, like it or not, we Filipinos have been absorbed into Western culture, and for better or for worse, it is the dominant narrative that propels our destinies. I’ve even thought it through in terms of mythology. Like Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth, I found myself trying to create a chain of destiny between the Great Empires of western culture.
Rome, once on the western periphery of Alexander’s great Hellenistic empire, conquers practically all of Europe, and subjugates Greece. Then, after the Dark Ages, England, once a peripheral part of the Roman Empire, becomes the dominant colonial power, and the center of the western world. And finally, the United States, a place England used to send its religious fanatics, its debtors, and its criminals, becomes the new hegemon, conquering almost an entire continent, and extending its own overseas empire.
One of its first colonial subjects was, of course, the Philippines. In this very western narrative of manifest destiny, of the conquered becoming the conqueror, the baton is passed on to this post-colonial nation-state, the first Asian nation that was conceived from its onset as a democracy, a system of government that was not foisted upon the people by their colonial oppressors, but rather assimilated by the grassroots. The Katipunan was well ready to establish a representative government before the Americans forestalled them.
The flip-side is that democracy is, of course, entirely a Western idea, conceived in the near-legendary era of the city-state of Athens, passed down through the Hellenes, then the Romans, and even trickling down to Spain, where Rizal and his Filipino contemporaries managed to learn about it, and grow to realize that it was an ideal form of government for their own people.
Growing up in the U.S., where they give a lot of lip service to the notion of democracy, it is difficult for me to conceive a more just and fair form of government, although like Winston Churchill, I agree that it is quite possibly the worst form of government, only it is far superior to any of its alternatives. I think I would rather live in an extraordinarily corrupt representative republic than in a monarchy, no matter how constitutional, and no matter how benevolent.
But maybe I’m horribly wrong about this. Maybe Western civilization is simply doomed.
John Rateliff makes an interesting point about how The Hobbit is actually pretty closely linked to the material that would become The Silmarillion. In the original drafts of The Hobbit, Tolkien makes it seem that Beren and Luthien had only recently destroyed Sauron’s base on Tol-in-Gaurhoth (which he built on top of the original Minas Tirith), and that the Fall of Gondolin also quite recent. (I even remember that when I read the final version of The Hobbit when I was 9, I came away with the impression that Gondolin was only recently destroyed.)
This actually makes quite a bit of sense, since Tolkien started writing The Hobbit at the same time he was working on the drafts of his tales that would be compiled into The Book of Lost Tales. In those tales, the time frame of the War of Wrath is actually somewhat ambiguous (it seems to have been originally envisioned as the End of the World, when the Gods > the Valar would finally recapture Melko > Morgoth, and Túrin would deliver the killing blow) and even in the time of Erriol > Ælfwine, it hadn’t happened yet.
It was as if the entire Second Age never happened, and as if Númenor never existed. (Interestingly, while Elrond was already imagined to be the son of Eärendil, Elros did not yet exist.)
What struck me most is the parallelism between two important geographic features of Beleriand vis-à-vis features of Rhovanion.
The land of Dorthonion (north of the Ered Gorgoroth) becomes infiltrated by evil things and becomes Taur-na-Fuin, which is at one point explicitly translated as Mirkwood and which is also infested with giant spiders. Interestingly, after Sauron is ousted from Tol-in-Gaurhoth, he flees to Taur-na-Fuin, in complete parallel to his defeat at Barad-dûr and his eventual flight to Dol Guldur in Mirkwood.
The river Sirion is also called the Great River, just like the Anduin. In fact, at one point, the Anduin was first named the New Sirion.
Rateliff speculates even further, equating Anfauglith with the Withered Heath. And the fact that the Ered Mithrin is known to be a remnant of the Ered Engrin is already accepted as canon.
This leads me to speculate that Bilbo may have originally been situated somewhere in Hithlum. (Maybe Lake Mithrim was the Water?) And the misty mountains that they cross are the Ered Wethrin. It isn’t clear to me whether Himring (which must have been relatively high in elevation since it supposedly survived the drowning of Beleriand) or Mt Rerir would be more suitable as an analog for Erebor, but it does reawaken one of the wildly speculative theories about the Arkenstone actually being one of the Silmaril. (After all, Himring was Maidros > Maedhros’s base of operations, although it is written that he threw himself into a fiery pit.)
Right now I can feel my plasma glucose levels slipping. My liver seems to have exhausted all of its supply of glycogen or something, too.
What I really should do is get something to eat.
And then I recognize that sometimes too much freedom can be more paralyzing than too little freedom. (Not that I’m advocating the restriction of freedom. It’s just an observation, that’s all.)
The past few days have been something of a whirlwind. I gave my talk in front of (what turned out to be mostly) a group of medical students (although other residents and attendings were supposed to be there, too.) Not as polished as what ̛I would’ve liked, but, hey, I only really had three weeks to do it.
The night before was kind of torturous, though. I had to make some major revisions, and I struggled to stay focused and awake between the hours of 1:30 am and 3:30 am. Somehow, I powered through, but paid for it afterwards. I ended up going to sleep from 11 am to 6 am the next day, something I haven’t done since the last time I took overnight call. (Oh man, it’s going to hurt when I’m back on wards.)
I feel like a month has gone by in these past three days.
I am starting to realize (much, too much, too late) that thinking gets me into way too much trouble. For the past week or so, I’ve struggled savagely with the idea of not overanalyzing things. For a big fat nerd like me, this is way harder than it sounds.
Now that I have some of my free time back, this becomes even harder than usual, and even now I’m struggling to keep the lid down on some unbidden thoughts, many of which are guaranteed to send me into a downward spiral of depression.
Not that anything bad has happened. In fact, many good (although small) things have happened, and I’ve always been the kind of person who gives far more weight to the bad things than to the good things. A single bad thing can wipe out any joy brought by a thousand good things, and I’ve really got to learn how to fix this imbalance. (There I go again, thinking about things too hard.)
But I’ve just got this creepy feeling that since everything has been relatively good lately, there’s bound to be a catch somewhere. A snag in the carpet, as it were. Right before someone pulls the rug from under me.
I’ve got to stop being so damned optimistic.
Still, trusting to luck has worked for me pretty well lately. (Of course, the only thing sure about luck is that it’s going to change.)
There is a lot to be said about rushing into situations blindly and crossing your fingers, just hoping Lady Luck will save your ass. Most of the advantage comes in the fact that everyone else tends to get taken by surprise.
But for some reason, I haven’t yet learned how to take advantage of these kinds of situations. Here they are, all gaping at me, not believing what their seeing, and the first thing that comes to mind is, how do I get away from these people?
I’ve gotten pretty good at running away from things, and hiding, but I’m not sure where it’s really gotten me. There is something to be said with survival, but it strikes me that there is something innately futile about surviving for the sake of surviving. (Nevermind the fact that eventually entropy wins in the end.)
The age-old question that has haunted Humanity for all time—at least since we decided to climb down the trees and brave the savannah—comes to mind at this moment (again violating my promise to not think.) What are we here on this Earth for exactly?
Now, granted, I never really thought I was going to make it past the age of 27, and so never projected my life farther than that, so maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that at the age of 31, I still have no clue about the answer to that particular thorny Question. I think of the simple, pat answers that any moron can give—getting married, having kids, living the American Dream—that sort of tripe, but the triteness of it all makes me gag, and I’ve left that field fallow for quite some time now.
Then there are the insane idealist answers—world peace, the cure for cancer, the end of poverty, the end of hunger—and I realize that I have neither the time, nor the resources, nor—in particular—the brains to be able to succeed in such an enterprise. Most of the great minds who ever accomplished anything did so long before they turned to 30.
What faces me is the long, dark, night.
You would think that after all these years of staring headlong into the abyss, I’d’ve gotten used to it somehow.
I suppose, in the end, there are certain things that human beings will never get used to, even if they lived to be 105 years old, I’d wager.
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
—”The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel
In the end, the voice of my oldest friend comes back to me, spookily echoed by a beautiful, brilliantly intelligent, insanely hilarious woman who probably saved my life once upon a time.
It’s the things that made you happy as a child that are worth doing, it seems.
You told me to go back to the beginning. So I have. This is where I am, and this is where I will stay. I will not be moved.
—Iñigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride”
So like the absent-minded fool that I am, I left my psychotropic medications in L.A. Because of the terrible, terrible withdrawal side effects, I was compelled to pick them up after finishing work.
The shortening of daylight hours is starting to really get me down. It feels like it was just last week when the sun would set after 8pm. Now it’s pretty much darkr right after work. What’s worse is that when I wake up, it’s still dark. I’m not even working obscene hours like I usually do.
It took me about an hour and a half to get back up to L.A., despite fighting through the straggling remnants of rush hour traffic. Since it seemed silly to just come home to pick up my meds and then pop back into my car to head back, I hung out with my dad for a bit. (My brother and my sister were both out somewhere.) I also managed to watch yesterday’s episode of “Heroes,” which is starting to infiltrate my dreams (but that will be the subject of yet another blog post entirely.)
After playing with Angel and Pazzo for a little bit, I finally decided to take off around 10:30 pm, but not before stopping at the nearby Barnes and Noble. There I finally found the book I’ve been hunting for, entitled Mr. Baggins: The History of the Hobbit Volume 1. I had found volume two (entitled Return to Bag End: The History of the Hobbit Volume 2) at the Borders in Mission Valley a few weeks ago, not realizing it wasn’t a stand-alone volume.
I made it to S.D. a little after midnight, completely wired and unable to go to sleep right away. On the way, though, I had to stop in Santa Ana to get gas because the yellow light on my dashboard (the “out-of-gas” indicator) was making me paranoid.
Apparently I had gotten the O.C. all wrong. There are rather shady parts of this haven for recidivist Republicans, and I knew I had found one of them when I turned right from the off-ramp and found three or four stores selling bail bonds. Just then, a guy bikes past my car. Let me tell you, even though I’m an advocate for the environment and enjoy bicycling (or used to until I turned into a sedentary blob akin to Jabba the Hutt), there is something unnatural about riding a bike at midnight. It’s like flying a kite in the dark.
There’s something about flying a kite at night that’s so unwholesome.
— Marge Simpson
And finally, the Vietnamese guy who was filling canisters full of gasoline did nothing to allay my bewilderment.
Is it sick and wrong to want to plan my funeral? Every time I go to a wedding, this is what I think about.
As I took the curve from the 134 west to the 5 south, and as I gazed at the glimmering lights of the skyline of Downtown L.A. peeking out from the hills, I thought to myself that I want my funeral to be a cosplay.
Would it be massively inappropriate to make my pall bearers wear plate armor and swords, and have them play the Prologue from Final Fantasy as they carried my casket to my grave?
Even though this is awfully macabre, my iPod also contributed to my brainstorm, playing random songs that would work pretty well, in no particular order:
- “Magic” Ben Folds Five
- “Hear You Me” Jimmy Eat World
- “What Sarah Said” Death Cab for Cutie
- “Do You Realize?” The Flaming Lips
- “Take Me Home” Phil Collins (I think I’ve mentioned how fitting this one is for a funeral song, plus it’s kind of upbeat, compared to the last few)
- “Celebrate Me Home” Kenny Loggins
- “Good Riddance” Green Day (stole this last one from a lot of people, but it fits very well, reminding me of my days at Cal, and the unlooked-for aftermath. It’s also the first song I ever learned to play on the guitar, I think.)
How deliciously narcisstic and melodramatic.
Statistically, they say you are most likely to die in a car crash within 25 miles of home at speeds of less than 40 miles per hour. As I headed south on the I-5, this led me to the (probably erroneous) perception that as I neared my apartment, the probability of getting into an accident was precipitously increasing towards P=1.00. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been tempting Fate way too much by driving all the time.
(And yet, statistically speaking, given my co-morbidities, the most likely way I’m going to die is by suicide, although car crash is probably #2 on the list.)
Yeesh. This discussion makes me want to take the train the next time I head up to L.A.
But I always wondered about the “… and back again” part of the equation. I’m not ready for this adventure to end anytime soon, I guess. In the end, I’m ready to keep on truckin’, I guess.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
—”The Road Goes Ever On” J.R.R. Tolkien
You would think that being a trained medical professional would make me immune to supratentorial disorders.
—Calvin playing doctor from “Calvin and Hobbes”
Be that as it may, I’ve tried my damndest to ignore this pain in my back and right leg. Sure, I’d had had to escalate my dose of OTC pain-killers to Tylenol 1250 mg every eight hours and Alleve 440 mg twice a day, but since it was doing the trick, I figured it was just some inflammation, and that it would eventually go away. Or I would get a bleeding ulcer or maybe fulminant hepatitis. Whatever, same difference.
But what really freaked me out was when the stuff didn’t touch it.
That’s when having a medical education starts becoming a problem.
You start thinking about all the random things you learned and wish you hadn’t.
Of course, it’s not cancer. As the esteemed governor of the State of California might say, “It’s not a tumor!” I mean, there is no mass in my leg. And it’s not really bone pain. (I don’t think.) I haven’t been losing weight. Sure, I’ve been getting night sweats (and maybe this is more a manifestation of my guilty conscience more than anything else), but I haven’t been spiking any fevers or having any chills. And sure, I’ve been having numbness and tingling down my right leg, but I haven’t been having any bowel or bladder incontinence. Besides, I’m like 30 years too young to be having prostate issues, much less bone metastases to my spine.
And I don’t think it’s a DVT {deep venous thrombosis}. Even though I do get swelling around my ankle, it’s not like it’s a huge amount. And while my calf is killing me, it isn’t this point tenderness that I would expect if I had a clot blocking up my veins. It’s more of a gnawing sensation, really. And, as sedentary as I am, it’s not like I’m bed-ridden and completely immobile. I *do* get up to walk around once in a while. There aren’t any clotting disorders that run in my family.
So what could it be?
The logical thing would be to go and see my primary care physician. Barring that, I could probably ask anyone at work about my symptoms and maybe even have them look at my leg.
But, like the bastards who show up at the emergency room with horrific diseases that could’ve been prevented had they seen a doctor every year like they’re supposed to, I figured I would just wait.
The epilogue to all this is that I figured out it’s my stupid ankle that I ruined once and for all in 2001. To put it in medical mumbo-jumbo, the laxity of my anterior talofibular ligament has affected my gait, and because of the resultant abnormal body mechanics, it’s been affecting the more proximal muscles of my leg, eventually resulting in some impingement on my sciatic nerve, and causing muscle spasm in my paraspinal muscles. In other words, my ankle sprain has never healed, and it’s caused me to walk all funny, so that all my leg muscles are starting to hurt, and now my back muscles are causing problems too, not to mention my sciatic nerve.
So for the past week I’ve been hobbling along. Ever since I started wearing the ankle brace, the back pain has (mostly) gone away, the sciatic nerve pain has eased off, and I’m not having to gulp down fifty pills every morning, noon, and night like I was 60 years old.
The sad thing is that I only have guaranteed health insurance for the next nine months. You would think that I’d take advantage of it, but like must Americans, I guess I must be afraid of seeing doctors.
Inspired by a random blog post.
At the age of 31, I think I have finally figured out what the difference between a child and an adult is.
When you’re a kid, typically your only responsibility to take care of your self. Your school work. Your extracurriculars. Your chores at home. Maybe your job at retail.
When you’re an adult, the realm for what you are responsible for expands immensely. It is (sometimes catastrophically wrongly) assumed that you already know how to take care of your own shit. Now it’s time to take care of other people’s shit too.
In practical terms, this means that if you have a boss, the boss doesn’t give a damn about how your underlings are screwing up. As far as (s)he’s concerned, you’re in charge, and if something doesn’t get done, it’s your fault.
So excuses like “they never called me back” or “the group I assigned to this task is 4 weeks behind schedule” or “the equipment we rely on is broken” won’t fly. You were supposed to take care of this shit. And if it isn’t taken care of, you should take the fall.
Of course, American culture and society has long ago given up on the concept of responsibility. People give these crap excuses all the time, and sometimes even expect to be rewarded for having to put up with such horrendous work issues. Or they might even sue the company because of being forced to deal with such inconveniences.
And just look at how the federal government is functioning these days. Look at how pathetic the administration’s cabinet is, trying to pass the buck like it’s some kind of hot potato. Instead of taking responsibility for the debacle in Iraq, W is hiding like some school boy who didn’t do his homework. What, the dog ate it? The CIA chiefs have been pointing fingers at each other for some time now. Generals like Peter Pace and “Betray Us” Petraeus keep dancing around the shitpile, trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.
It wasn’t until reality finally decided to pimp slap them upside the head that Rumsfeld and Alberto “Torture” Gonzales finally owned up to their abysmal inadequacies, and even still, they haven’t really faced the consequences of their criminal acts. If there were any real justice, these bozos should be locked up on death row in Texas.
The devolution of Western society is evident in the kinds of scandals we pursue. I can’t believe I’m actually thinking about the National Enquirer and realizing, you know what, they used to be classier back in the day.
Seriously. Ten years ago, the paparazzi were chasing a Princess who had worked hard to make people aware about AIDS and about the evils of land mines, who had made measurable differences in the way people thought about these issues. Now all they have to chase are the pathetic scions of the wealthy, people who have never done an honest day’s work, except maybe to lie on their backs and get videotaped. From Princess Diana to Paris Hilton. Yay.
As a guy who has fought long and hard to keep from growing up, I at last recognize what I need to do to actually become an adult. It’s going to be a struggle. I’m much better at accepting responsibility when I’m at work. I make sure shit gets done. And if shit doesn’t get done, then I do whatever it takes to get it done, even if I had delegated it to someone else already. Such is life. And death. Meanwhile, in my personal life, I still can’t get my shit together and sometimes even need my mommy and daddy to bail me out. Pathetic.
But there’s not much else to do but keep on trying. I never thought I’d make it this far, after all. Everything else I accomplish in life is icing on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.
OK, I’m not talking about my drug problems. I’m talking about the terrible shape my body is in.
Now for the past year I’ve been suffering from either sciatica or piriformis syndrome (it makes no difference—either way, something is squishing my sciatic nerve.) Pain would suddenly get me, literally right in the ass, with some radiation down the leg, and even sometimes numbness and tingling. Nothing that some naproxen couldn’t take care of. Some weeks would be worse than others, but I didn’t really spend much time thinking about it.
In retrospect, I realize things have been slowly progressing for the worse.
Last week, I nearly fell down because of how much it hurt. I luckily was able to sit down in a controlled manner, but then I couldn’t get up again for several hours.
This is very bad.
I like to blame the fact that I bought a pair of shoes that were too big for me, and too damn heavy besides. This is roughly when I started having symptoms back in August of ‘06, and the symptoms got better once I dumped those shoes.
But most likely, this is just the end result of being way too sedentary, and being way too overweight. I mean way too overweight.
The sad irony is that now that I’m constantly in pain, I’m even less likely to want to exercise. I can’t even walk from one end of work to the other without having all the nerves in my right lower extremity feel like they’re shrieking in agony.
The slothful part of me just wants to get the decay and decline to get to the point. What’s the end point of all of this? Well, besides death. I mean, can you actually experience significant morbidity and even mortality from sciatica?
I mean, I guess I could just become even more and more unwilling to move. Eventually, my coronary arteries will narrow with cholesterol deposits, and then it’ll be the cath lab for me. Or v. fib arrest, dead on arrival, but I’m really trying to be more optimistic these days. I suppose this pain will encourage even worse body mechanics, making me prone to more injury.
I suppose I could become so sedentary that I end up with a DVT {deep venous thrombosis}. Leading to a pulmonary embolism.
But as much as I whine about how sucky my life is, I really don’t want to undergo a steady, excruciatingly slow decline in function, only to be killed by something massive, sudden, and excruciatingly painful, like a heart attack or an embolism. (If I could choose my mechanism of death, it would be via respiratory arrest from morphine and/or benzodiazepine poisoning, preferrably in the setting of a hospital or even better, in the hands of hospice care, without having to get a plastic tube rammed down my throat, or getting my ribs cracked by overzealous interns, but I digress.)
So I’m actually looking into trying to get better. Literally one step at a time.
Sunday night, before I got on the freeway to drive back to San Diego, the pain was so distracting that I had to stop at a Ralphs and buy an ACE wrap. For some reason, wrapping it around my ankle really helped. (Although I suppose the 500 mg of naproxen and the 1250 mg of Tylenol probably played their part, too.)
I figured out that the pain in my right leg (if it isn’t a DVT) is probably a combination of things: the sciatic nerve pain and the sequelae of a couple of bad ankle sprains.
In high school my sophomore year (15 years ago!) I missed a little ledge and ended up twisted my ankle really bad. I mean, my leg and foot probably went at a 90° angle, except usually that part of the ankle doesn’t really move that way, or move at all, really. I was on crutches for a week. But I didn’t think about it again.
Then in July 2001, I sprained it again walking around NYC. I remember the pain being overwhelming. I almost blacked out (although a lot of that was probably because it was hot, I was dehydrated, and I was hypoglycemic or something.) That was probably one of the first times I remember being in so much pain that I wanted to throw up. But I managed to limp along. Again I didn’t think anything of it.
Most likely, I’ve seriously jacked up or even possibly completely torn my anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL), which happens to be the most common ligament injured in an ankle injury. Since I’m not athletic at all (although there was actually a very, very, very brief time in my life where I was actually running miles at a time), I never really noticed too much instability, although I did recognize that my ankle wasn’t as solid as it should be.
Well, apparently, it’s taken its toll. For the past few days, the area around my lateral malleolus (the outer knob of the ankle) has been aching, and getting worse with even just a little bit of walking, and I feel like I can’t put reliably put weight on this foot. My calf muscle is aching too, and I can feel my hamstrings atrophying.
I’ve heard quadriceps strengthening will help, but I can’t even imagine putting resistance on this leg at this point. Right now I’ve got both an ankle and a knee brace on. (While the ankle brace alone helped, the more I walked, the more I realized how weak my quads and my hamstrings are, and I felt pretty unsteady, and after a while, my knee started hurting too.)
Since I spend most of the time at work sitting down, I can barely tell if it’s helping. I’ve been having to park in the lot farthest from the clinic I’m rotating through right now, so the morning and the afternoon walk leave me aching and sweating. I guess the difference is that I can at least walk around the clinic without having to grit my teeth.
I’m being uncharacteristically optimistic. I’m hoping this is a sign that my limbs are starting to heal, and that as the days go by, it’ll get easier and easier to walk around like a normal person, and then I can start actually exercising.
It’s one thing to be fat and therefore unattractive to women. I’ve been dealing with this for a good decade or so now, so it doesn’t wound my psyche too badly. But it’s another level of awfulness to be fat and to be in physical pain because of being fat. Seriously. This sucks.
I mean, seriously, if I’m not going to get better, I wish someone would just put me down then, like a race horse that’s fit for the glue factory.
That horse better win, or we’re taking a trip to the glue factory—and he won’t get to come.
—Homer Simpson
There is this punk on the Alibata Yahoo Group that I find myself arguing with whenever I participate in a discussion. Calling himself Malachi, he uses tactics that are reminiscent of the average troll. But for some reason, people never call him out for it.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s all about kasamasama, a trait that I despise which is ascribed to the stereotypical Filipino.
Kasamasama, if interpreted benignly, translates roughly to keeping harmony within a group. The stereotype of a Filipino is that he/she will never disagree with you to your face, and will never bring conflict out in the open. Of course, what this means is that every argument becomes passive-aggressive, hidden behind an infuriating protocol of smiles and kind words.
This behavior is not something that is confined to the colonized realm of the Philippines. It casts its pall upon Filipino Americans as well, and many people who attended college and participated in Filipino cultural groups are probably pretty damn familiar with the bullshit that I’m talking about.
One day, I just got fed up, called Malachi an asshole, and put him on my blacklist. With all the bullshit going on in the world, I didn’t need yet another source of aggravation. And yet I haven’t unsubscribed because sometimes someone actually posts something worthy of intelligent discussion. (Although, I have to say, it’s been a while.)
But the reason I bring Malachi up is because we once got embroiled in this discussion about how developing countries are riddled with corruption, and qualitatively speaking, developed countries aren’t. Or, realistically, they aren’t *as* corrupt, but it spells the difference between a prosperous, nominally democratic, capitalistic society and a semi-feudal state of oppression.
Now corruption isn’t limited to the Philippines. Look at any developing nation that was once a colony of a European power. You don’t really have to look that far—just 15 miles from where I sit is Mexico, which isn’t exactly known for being free of corruption.
While both Mexico and the Philippines were former colonies of Spain, you could just as well look at former British possessions and former French possessions. And it may look like I’m riding on nations that are run by people-of-color, but from my perspective, the only thing these disparate nations and cultures have are the fact that they were invaded and occupied by white people once upon a time. It can’t be a coincidence that this is the thing that all these countries have in common.
I have nebulous theories about why this would be, even after the imperial power has been driven out, and even after the nation has been taken over by Communists or fundamentalist Muslims.
You figure the folks who managed to survive the imperial invasion were people who either (1) had reasons for laying real low anyway during the invasion—like maybe they were murderers or thieves or slave traffickers or something else unsavory like that, or (2) they kissed the white man’s ass as hard as they could.
You figure anyone who resisted either ended up exiled or killed. (And suddenly I remember that it is Che Guevara’s death anniversary, but that is neither here nor there.)
I remember being dismayed when I realized why a huge number of 1st generation Filipino Americans are politically conservative, and in fact, why many of them backed Marcos’ fascist regime. It’s not just the fact that many Filipinos were able to immigrate because of the US Armed Forces, which tends to foster a conservative mind-set. Rather, we have a lot in common with the Cuban Americans who were decry Castro while they live out their exile in Florida: people left the Philippines in the ‘60’s because it was being destabilized by a lot of grassroots and proletariat forces, and it may have easily gone the way of Cuba or Vietnam if not for the interference of the CIA and their support of Marcos’ power grab. The folks who left the fastest were those who were afraid the Communists were going to win.
This divide is pretty stark whenever I go back to the Philippines. In some ways, Filipinos who were reasonably educated in the Philippines are far more progressive than Filipinos who fled to the U.S. It struck me that even mainstream Filipinos generally refer to the aftermath of the Spanish-American war as the Filipino-American war, something which even to this day, American textbooks call the Philippine Insurrection. Signs that proclaim “End U.S. Imperialism Now!” lined the streets of Manila long before W proved to the world that the U.S. is intent on world domination.
Filipinos knew what was up. Meanwhile, my relatives still can’t understand why the Americans got kicked out of Subic Bay.
So basically my point is that the survivors of imperial invasions are either criminals or Quislings, and many times they are both. This goes a long way to explain why developing nations are riddled with corruption.
The other factor is the fact that developing nations are poor. This is not to say that rich developing nations (I think of the oil-replete Middle East) are not corrupt, only that when there’s so little to fight over in the first place, you tend to play a lot dirtier. Oscar Zeta Acosta has a poetic description of this phenomenon in his book Brown Buffalo. White people have always been good at the whole divide-and-conquer thing, and this dirty tactic seem successful in continuing to keep developing nations from prospering.
The flip side of this is the assertion that developed nations are typically far less corrupt than their developing counterparts. I’m not ascribing some magical virtue to people of developed nations. For one thing, a lot of it has to do with prosperity. If it’s relatively easy to make some money without doing anything dirty, then people will make money above the table instead of under it. It’s just the laws of thermodynamics. Why risk going to jail when it’s almost just as easy to just pay your taxes.
I mean, clearly, there is some corruption going on in these nations. I mean, it’s not like the Mafia is a legitimate family-oriented organizatoin entirely dedicated to purely legal pursuits. But I guess it’s the whole rule of law thing. Americans may decry the fact that we’re a litigious society, but the fact that you can make a few million bucks by suing the crap out of a wealthy corporation helps keep even the big and powerful in check. No one is above the law (or at least no one was above the law until W pissed on the Constitution, but that’s another rant entirely.) The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they put in checks and balances, and I’m not entirely sure that their intent wasn’t to have the legislative and executive branches always at loggerheads and making sure that gridlock was the rule of the day.
This is the reason why the Roman Republic and early Empire was able to prosper so much. I remember reading how only trustworthy generals were sent to rule provinces, and this ensured that collected taxes actually came back to Rome instead of lining the pockets of the general and his cronies. Obviously, there’s no way the Senators or the Emperor could ensure that they weren’t getting screwed, but again, when it’s relatively easy to make bank, you might as well do it the right way rather than risk getting executed.
It’s only when the gold started to thin out and they couldn’t pay their mercenaries when the Western Empire started going to hell. (Mercenaries. Hmmm. Looks like America fails to learn yet another lesson from the fall of Rome a millenium and a half ago.)
So yeah, without throwing off the yoke of corruption, your little banana republic ain’t going nowhere. It’s going to take a lot of bloodshed to get your people in line, but sometimes a dictator’s gotta do what a dictator’s gotta do.
I have to ask you, Michelle:
Wala ka bang hiya? Kahit kaonti lang? Have you no shame? Even just a little?
Seriously, what do your parents think about all this?
Our illustrious sell-out re-ups her wingnut cred by bashing and stalking a middle class family that happens to have benefitted from SCHIP after being involved in a serious car accident that severely injured their two children, leaving one of them with irreversible brain injuries.
Where have I been? What have I seen?
The past few days have been a blur, shrouded in the glamour of pain not responsive to NSAIDs or Tylenol.
I’m falling apart.
Saturday I decided I had had enough of the squalor I have been living in, and managed to gather together (6) 13 gallon bags of trash. I also managed to pick everything off of the floor. Now it’s just a disasterous stack sitting on top of my drawers and tables instead of underneath them.
There is clearly something wrong with me.
Afterwards, I decided to go up to L.A. I hadn’t yet seen my sister even though she had been back in the U.S. for a week already, and my brother had just turned 27, so I figured those were as good enough reasons as any.
I managed to reach San Clemente as the sun sunk slowly behind the Pacific, illuminating Santa Catalina Island off to the west. I don’t remember the sky ever being that clear before. I’ve only caught sight of Catalina once on a drive up from S.D. to L.A. in the three years that I’ve lived down here. One of these days, I’ll actually download my pics off of my phone.
Because of the prognostications of the Internet, I decided to take a rather circuitous route to my parents’ house: I-5 to CA-73 to I-405 to I-110 to I-5 to CA-2. I took me only slightly more than two hours, and the only traffic I really ran into was in Downtown L.A. (naturally) Of course, I kind of wonder if I couldn’t’ve avoided traffic entirely if I had just stayed on the 5 in the first place.
By luck, I managed to catch the Manuel Pacquiao vs Marco Barrera fight, which my dad decided to order for $50(!) I swear, in some ways, featherweight matches are more brutal than heavyweight matches. While I’m sure it hurts like hell when someone like George Foreman or Mike Tyson hits you, it’s not unreasonable for a match like that to end in three rounds, or even in just one round. The crowd may not be happy, but that’s what happens when one man gets severely concussed by another man. In contrast, featherweight matches are guaranteed to be long, drawn-out fights, depending a lot on a fighter’s endurance and ability to throw good punches, rather than on knock-outs. I wasn’t surprised that this went all the way to the 12th round and had to be decided by decision.
I spent most of the next day sleeping.
Gary the Tolkien Geek has been reposting blog posts that analyze the text of The Lord of the Rings, so I haven’t tried to reread the thing itself. (Despite the fact that I’ve read the book multiple times, it’s absurd the things that I’ve managed to miss: for example, the insinuation that Eärendil’s ship Vingelot may be a spaceship or the fact that the place name Nargothrond actually occurs in the text.
The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin’s Day.
—Gimli, son of Gloin, singing about Durin the Deathless
At first I, too, was outraged by Peter Jackson’s decision to have Faramir take Frodo and Sam back to Denethor as prisoners, but interestingly, after reading The History of Middle Earth, I discovered that this is what Tolkien had originally envisioned (although Faramir was not yet Faramir at this stage in the game.)
He also originally envisioned Elves from Mirkwood (and Ents from Fangorn!) joining the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which makes the idea of Haldir and the Galadhrim showing up at Helm’s Deep less crazy, I guess.
One wonders how many Tolkien scholars Jackson hired to help him with his masterpiece.
Neil Gaiman brings up the linguistic phenomenon of infixation, which is extremely rare in English, but is part and parcel of Austronesian languages.
It turns out that Tagalog is the most common example of a language that uses infixes.
I find it funny that I’ve never heard of Michelle Monaghan before, and all of the sudden this weekend I’ve watched two movies she stars in: ”The Heartbreak Kid” and ”Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang”
Val Kilmer plays a hilarious character in “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang”: a gay private detective. He isn’t your stereotypic flamer. One of the best scenes was when he shot a bad guy with a gun hidden in his crotch, later explaining, “Homophobes never look there when they’re frisking you.”
Still surfing randomly through the net, I run across this juxtaposition of “The Lord of the Rings” with the immediate aftermath of the fall of the WTC, which explicates what has happened to America since WWII.
There was a time when the U.S. really was one of the good guys, the defenders of freedom and democracy, but six years after one of the greatest traumas our nation has sustained, probably only surpassed by the Civil War and the burning of D.C. during the War of 1812, when W took that opportunity to start fucking everything up, this time is clearly long gone. It is questionable when everything went to hell. Some like to say it was when JFK was assasinated. Others point to Nixon’s desecration of the Oval Office. Then there was Reagan’s unholy alliance between the military-industrial complex and the religious right that continues to haunt us to this day. But I wonder if it wasn’t as early as was when the Enola Gay nuked Hiroshima. Maybe lots of American soldiers would’ve died in an amphibious assault of Honshu, but there is something to be said about being on the moral high ground instead of being the only nation in the world to have used a nuclear weapon on a civilian population. While Winston Churchill encouraged the idea of killing civilians to put pressure on the Nazi government, and while the fire-bombing of Dresden was probably just as hellish and gruesome, nothing is as emblematic for the efficacy of terrorism as the nuclear holocaust of Japanese civilians, and the radioactive aftermath that lasted for a generation.
Because isn’t that exactly what terrorism is? The harming and killing of civilians in order to get their government to comply? Wasn’t this the very rationale for dropping the atomic bomb?
But as the Reagan administration demonstrated, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re on their side, you’re a terrorist. If you’re on our side, you’re a freedom fighter.
But it’s interesting how we, caught up in the whirlwind of global capitalism, are worried about how we might fit into the mythologic narratives of the new millenium. Even if global capitalism is Mordor, does that mean we are necessarily the bad guys?
While Tolkien does utilize the stereotypes of race and nation in his narrative, it is clear that this agent of morality is the individual. For example, even the Shire becomes industrialized in the end, but it is the act of certain individuals, not a collective decision by the entire population of the Shire.
While it’s not like California is immune from sprawl, it definitely has tougher environmental regulations than most places in the U.S. Interestingly, while S.F., L.A., and S.D. are highly urbanized locations, nature is interspersed in between. It’s not just Central Park embedded within the grid of Manhattan. We’re talking about mountains, rivers, canyons, beaches without leaving the city limits.
I can’t help but think that parts of California could be paradigms of sustainability, although this could be misleading, considering we are still tethered to fossil fuels, import a lot of our water, and are unlikely to leave the environment untouched as growth continues to explode.
I forget what exactly I typed into Google, but somehow I ended up at this archived discussion about the motif of static history in stereotypical fantasy. It’s true, Western Civilization seems to be obsessed with the idea that things were better in the past, and things really suck now. Tolkien called this idea ”The Long Defeat,” specifically referring to the Fall of the Noldor, from a state of Valinorean grace to becoming refugees fleeing Middle-Earth furtively in the night.
The idea is basically an interpretation of the Christian concept of Original Sin, in which humanity started off in the bliss of paradise, which then becomes corrupted. But one wonders how much the idea of the fall from grace is influenced by the historical devolution of the Kingdom of Israel, from a conquering people that subjugated all of Canaan, to a conquered people subject to Rome, and eventually scattered across the world, a people without a nation.
And I also wonder if this idea of devolution was reinforced in Christianity, which eventually became the state religion of the Roman Empire. One of the most traumatic ruptures of the history of Western Civilization is the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Dark Ages that arose afterwards lasted for nearly a millenium. (Interestingly, these are the exact Dark Ages on which most fantasy universes are based on.)
But modernity seems to contradict this idea with the mythic notion of Progress™. Looking back at the past 150 years, though, I can’t help be impressed by the Moore’s Law-like progression of not only technology, but of society as well. 150 years ago, the steam engine was finally (re)invented. Non-Europeans were seen as subhumans. Monarchy (either constitutional or absolute) was still the most dominant type of government. Now we have nuclear power, the Internet, cel phones, recombinant gengineering, and receptor-targeted pharmaceuticals. Representative democracy is the norm for government, and people of color have made significant strides in civil rights.
It tends to be a Western-chauvanist view of the world, but the mythology is nonetheless compelling, starkly contrasting to the notion of the The Long Defeat and also to Eastern philosophies of cyclic time. And in the end, it may be a victim of its own success, as the trajectory of progress becomes asymptotic, subject to the laws of diminishing returns, and eventually culminating into yet another Dark Age. (The U.S. seems to be following this particular course, with the culture’s degeneration into religious superstition and its disdain for the scientific method.)
But the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of the European nation-states is not the only dark age in Western Civilization.
The one that intrigues me the most is the still unexplained downfall of Mycenaean Greece, resulting in a 300 year dark age until the rise of the Greek City-States. I first came across this idea while reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan. He speculated about whether Greek civilization might have pioneered not only the Industrial Revolution, but the Space Revolution as well, if it had not suffered this period of decline. Consider that before the Common Era, Greek philosophers already had a rough theory about the nature of matter, speculating that everything is made up of indivisible, elementary particles. Not only did they figure out many of the core principles of physics and engineering that are still in use today, Hero of Alexandria had even invented a prototypical steam engine by the 1st century CE. Imagine if things had happened 300 years earlier. Would humanity have reached the stars nearly two millenia earlier? (To imagine how much time the Greek Dark Ages were, consider that 300 years ago, the United States of America did not even exist.)
Other civilizations have had similarly tumultous Dark Ages: China has had several. (I’m most familiar with Three Kingdoms Era after the collapse of the Han Dynasty.) The Mayans have that unexplained period of deurbanization after the 9th century AD. But I wonder if members of these particular civilizations feel the same trauma about the fall(s) of their respective civilizations as Westerners feel about the fall of the Roman Empire. I wonder if the difference can be attributed to the fact that both the Chinese and the Maya are culturally disposed to believe in cyclic rather than linear time.
But back to Tolkien: you might argue that his legendarium exhibits an unnatural historical stasis from the First Age to the Third Age, but even when just examining technology, it seems clear that the Noldor were far more advanced in the First Age than they were in the Third. Using Arthur C Clarke’s dictum about the equivalence of magic and technology, I would argue that the Silmarils, the delving of Nargothrond, the founding of the city of Gondolin, even the Palantirí, are evidence of technological skill that are afterward lost completely. And while Círdan was Teleri, there are inklings that Vingelot, the ship he built for Eärendil, may have actually been a starship. And in the Second Age, Númenor was an ocean-faring civilization that had established ports all over the world, and even discounting the apocrypha of The History of Middle Earth in which Númenoreans had airships and Melkor had helicopters and ornithopters, Númenoreans were still far advanced compared to the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor.
While I am a scientist and therefore have a biased view of history, I can’t help but believe that technological and social progress are inextricably intertwined. Cities could not have developed with agriculture. Banking and accounting, while helped greatly by the invention of the double entry ledger, but would not have been possible without the vast amounts of wealth procured by the exploitation of the Americas, which in turn would not have been possible without the advances in shipbuilding and navigation, which in turn was dependent on advances in astronomy. The Protestant Reformation was aided greatly by the invention of the printing press, as were democratic revolutions. The principles of mass production and the assembly line led to the widespread use of the automobile, which made time and distance shrink, which contributed to the homogenization of the U.S. (already started by the steam engine and the railroad), and these technologies started to dispel provincialism.
Movies, and then television were necessary precursors to global capitalism. Without an relatively democratic society backing it, it’s doubtful that the Internet would’ve flourished. The personal computer and cel phones were direct consequences of the encryption and code-breaking technologies of WWII.
Given the Valar’s exercises in terraforming during the Age of Legends and the Noldor’s smaller scale exercises in environmental engineering and fashioning of artifacts, I’m not sure you can say with absoluteness that Tolkien was against technology per se. A more nuanced interpretation would be that he despises the excesses of technology, most literally evoked by the industrialized wasteland of Mordor, and also by the despoilment of the Shire.
Tolkien’s proto-environmentalist message is embedded in Gimli’s vivid description Aglarond and how the dwarves would not callously exploit the mines for treasure but would turn it into a sustainable habitat.
Even a nuclear bomb up my ass
might fail to move my sad sack, bloated body off of this chair
stuck stupid and slack-jawed, gaping at this screen
(to filter through reality
like stripped shorn pantyhouse in front of a sewage drain
leaving the cigarette butts and used condoms to wallow
in that sepulcher of corrugated metal and chemical despair
letting the fecophilic micro-organisms,
the rich culture medium of turd
float out in the cold of the unforgiving sea)
the words come
like vomiting up a champagne flute
after eating it shard by shard
after someone had taken a sledgehammer to your gut
it’s almost as bad as the Turkish prison trick
where they jam a glass stirring rod into your pee hole
and smash your dick with a ball peen hammer
herpes and chlamydia ain’t got nothing on that sort of pain
and the words are just like pus dripping down
like spit and mucus, the dried crust of tears
and clotted blood
there is so much blood
this despair too much like the flu
and every muscle aches, every move spews forth fire into your flesh
or acid
etching away through your flesh
carving out some cryptic message in your bones
melting, searing, cooking your heart
still
and silent
Better lucky than good.
writhing with frustration
aching with desire
wrestling with indecision
still as a mountain top looming over the City
madness like electricity
like gouts and bursts of searing fire burning through my nerves
like flashes of blinding lightning tearing through the evening sky
the soul shudders, the mind recoils
sends pinprick shivers up and down my spine
as I stare eyes open
seeing nothing
but the darkness in this squalid, fetid tenement
hurls me out of my dreams
jolts me out of my sleep
and maybe it was just the earth groaning
sliding, thrusting a millimeter east
a millimeter skyward
or the rumbling of a well-laden Mack truck
careening down the claustrophobic street
negotiating the sudden gusts of wind
leaving behind a sonic wake
like the roaring of a transient waterfall
or a supersonic burst of air
a shockwave as the fighter jets scramble
and the stealth bombers deploy
In this stillness, this sloth, languishing in indecision
the soul quivers, thrashes
locked within this dilapidated body gone to pot
worn down and encumbered
by 100 kilos of slow, torpid flesh
and all decisions look wrong
It’s not a question of wrong and right.
It’s a question of wrong and very wrong.
All paths lead out into the darkness
into the fog of war
into the foam of quantum uncertainty
it’s not so much the sense of barrelling down the freeway
at 200 km/h, tied down in a straitjacket, sitting bitch in the backseat
otherwise unrestrained, with no one at the wheel
it’s that wriggling/shivery feeling at the back of your head
wondering how you ended up here in the first place
knowing that the past is irrevocable
but the future is going to be damned fucking short
and even triumph become tragedy
It’s just the gnawing hunger in your belly
and the frantic urgency of basic bodily functions
You’re trying to be still, but the nerves jangle
the muscles spasm
each breath drawing down the sharpness of knives
aerosolized glass shards lacerating your airways
there is no relief until the end
and is that all you’re waiting for?
You can always find a bit of synchronicity if you look hard enough. Also known as the Forer Effect.
Anyway, there were aluminum bats: D recounts his tale of some random Filipino guy threatening him and his cousin with an aluminum bat. His description of the guy makes me think of a tweaker. Or a guy who is ready to run amok. (OK, I admit it. I carry an aluminum bat in the trunk of my car. ‘Cause you never know.) And then there was the guy beating on Ben Stiller with an aluminum bat in the movie.
And there were straight edge razors: I have this gnarly scab on my neck from where I shaved too close with a dull, disposable razor. Me and D started to get talking about straight edge razors. My uncle, who is a barber, has one, and it’s a pretty neat way to get a shave, although I’m not sure my skin could handle doing it chronically.
In any case, ”Sweeney Todd” starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter is coming out by the end of the year. I can’t wait.
The fact that both Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman are in the movie made me think of Harry Potter. (I wonder who is going to play Gregorovitch and Grindelwald in the last installment?) Hearing Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter speak with English accents makes me imagine “Pirates of the Caribbean” mashed up with “Order of the Phoenix.” (Is Alan Rickman the only real Brit in the movie?)
And finally: the first 20 minutes of the movie “The Heartbreak Kid.” The panoramic shots of S.F. were murdering me, especially juxtaposed with going to the wedding of an ex, and the pressure to settle down and get married. Lord have mercy. The overhead shots of Altamont Pass on the way to Southern California got to me too. And then the movie descended into all-out lunacy. Nothing particularly original (unsurprising since it *is* a remake), but I laughed my ass off. Naturally, since the movie has Carlos Mencia in it, they have to insert some mention of a donkey show. And the Farrelly Brothers seem oh-so very fond of displaying disturbingly abnormal genitalia and their environs. I love it.
Plaster on a fake smile for the next half-century and wait for the sweet embrace of death
—Mac from “The Heartbreak Kid”
Too true, too true. It just goes to show that life is all about timing. There is no such thing as “meant to be.” And when your timing sucks, like mine does, the only thing left to do is wait. And if you’re lucky, time will run out sooner rather than later.
(And to think, in some cultures, wishing someone a long, happy life with a quick, painless death is considered a foul curse. When my time comes, I just hope it doesn’t drag out for too long. All I ask for is a sturdy large bore IV with morphine running through it as fast as it can.)
Aim low, kids. Aim so low that nobody cares if you succeed.
—Marge Simpson
Here’s to giving up completely, once and for all, and to embracing utter defeat, and to not giving a damn.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. —Iñigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride”
Not sure if Scott Adams manages to convey the notion of cognitive dissonance in his post. I think I get what he’s trying to say: training in economics (among many other disciplines) protects you from experiencing cognitive dissonance.
In other words, economists have no problem keeping two or more completely contradictory ideas in their head at the same time. Supposedly.
But I don’t think the phrase “cognitive dissonance” actually encompasses the disconnect that the panelists on “Politically Correct” experienced.
In other words, I think the phenomenon he is describing is a concept that needs a name.
Sure, there is the concept of binary thinking: if you’re not with us, you must be against us. Failing to believe in the orthodox thinking about global warming/climate change must mean you don’t believe that humans are increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, according to the binary thinker. I think psychologists/psychiatrists use the term catastrophizing in a similar context. Binary thinkers are apt to catastrophize. Clearly, this is not identical to the ordinary connotation of catastrophe. It is rather more akin to the mathematical connotation of catastrophe: a value of the domain that is undefined, from which values either diverge or converge but never achieve. A synonym to this would be singularity.
But you can see how catastrophizing a situation would result in a dichotomy. There is no way to stay in the middle. You are either on one side or the other of the mathematical catastrophe.
I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with economics per se. I think it has much more to do with the scientific method. Or at least with the ideal form of the scientific method.
Because even scientists are human beings, they tend to catastrophize too, and start believing that the evidence either supports their pet theory or it doesn’t. Sometimes they manage to remember there is a third category, which is that the evidence has no bearing on the theory whatso ever. But even geniuses blink.
But in an ideal world, a practitioner of the scientific method would be able to accept conflicting models simultaneously, up until the point where one model completely fails to describe reality.
You can see how it should work by how we teach/deal with mechanics. Despite the fact that Einstein proved Newton’s theory of gravity wrong, unless you’re an actual physicist, most of us pretty much get by with deploying Newtonian concepts (although frequently with the caveat of ignoring friction.) But no one really uses the General Theory of Relativity whenever they are dealing with sublight speeds. Newtonian mechanics gets it right to as many decimal points as it humanly matters, so why bother? But when you start having to deal with particle accelerators, or light streaming in from several billion light years away, you have to use General Relativity. There is no cognitive dissonance here. To people whom it matters for, they can comfortably frame shift from one model of the universe to the other, never mind the fact that the two are not, in the utmost details, compatible at all.
I think an even more dramatic illustration of warding off cognitive dissonance is the ability of physicists to accept both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics simultaneously. There is (as of yet) no actual way to get the two theories to agree. Sure, there’s String Theory/M-Theory, but really, M-Theory is more of a description of an actual theory. A meta-theory, if you will. In the way that Deep Thought was but the designer of Earth, M-Theory is but a blueprint for what the actually Theory of Everything will look like.
But in theory every scientist has to think this way. On one hand, you have to understand the current orthodox understanding of things. For example, Alan Guth’s inflation scenario. On the other hand, you have to also believe in the experimental theory that you are pursue. For example, the cyclic brane collision theory. So far there is no piece of data that proves one is right and the other is wrong, and both theories apparently make the same testatble predictions thus far.
I suppose cognitive dissonance comes down most hard when your brain has decided to espouse on philosophy and reality chooses to try and negate that philosophy. Like, for example, a Republican who finds out that not all poor people are lazy and stupid. Or the fundamentalist Christian who finds out that their best friend in the whole wide world is gay. Cognitive dissonance is known to drive people insane.
But I may be wrong about the whole connotation thing about cognitive dissonance. I’ve been known to create private meanings of certain words and phrases. What a word or phrase means frequently may not be what I think it means.
For example, I’ve always thought of social engineering as the act of becoming “civilized,” that is, of growing accustomed to the customs and mores of the society you are in. You become engineered to act a certain way in certain contexts.
So I’ve always thought of social engineering scams as scams that take advantage of these reflexes.
Like how we’ve all been socialized to obey authority, for example. So when some assertive dude with one of those weird cop mustaches pulls out a little flashy thing and claims it’s their badge, we may end up dropping our pants like they tell us too even though we haven’t actually positively ID’ed them as law enforcement.
But apparently I’m on the wrong end of the stick. It’s the scam that is labeled social engineering. But it still feels weird to call the perps who do these things social engineers. It doesn’t seem right for some reason.
Ah well. The science of linguistics is about being descriptive, not prescriptive anyway, and even if the usage is wrong, eventually it’ll be right.
Truism #31415: No one likes being called an asshole. Especially when they deserve it.
I find it disheartening that someone would feel aggrieved enough to lash out when it is pointed out that they are wasting electricity by keeping their computers on 24/7. But such is human nature. No one wants to be told that what they are doing is having negative consequences.
Which leads me to the realization that we will never solve the problem of racism.
White people don’t like being called out for doing/saying racially offensive things. Especially when they meant it to be funny. (Because, yeah, some of them think it’s funny. I mean, what can you do? I say təˈmeɪtoʊ, you say təˈmɑːtəʊ. One person’s joke is apparently sometimes another person’s hate crime, I guess. I find fart jokes funny sometimes. Is that a capital offense?)
Because no one likes being called an asshole. And calling someone an asshole usually puts most people into a defensive position. So you end up with white people reflexively defending their ham-fisted, dumb-ass, disgustingly offensive behavior. “You’re playing the race card. I didn’t mean it like that. It *is* a level playing field.”
Right.
The thing is, real assholes don’t care what you say. Meanwhile, people who behavely assholishly but are otherwise sensitive, culturally-enlightened people don’t like being told they’re behaving assholishly and then they get all self-righteous and turn the end of the gun around on you, calling you an asshole for being a judgemental prick by calling them an asshole. And therefore, the Democratic Party will never really unite people-of-color and white liberal intellectuals. White progressives will continue to insist that there are bigger fish to fry (which is probably true at this point in time, what with the complete transformation of the United States from a nominal representative democracy to an out-and-out police state, the nationwide adherence to a philosophy cum religion that proclaims that facts don’t matter, thereby completely abdicating America’s technological and scientific leadership, and the fact that we are hemorrhaging several hundred million dollars a day which will eventually be called out by China someday that will be particularly inconvenient.) People-of-color will continue to insist (rightfully so) that we’ve got to deal with matters of race before we can really get anywhere.
And so it goes.
I’m not saying we should stop trying to find a solution, but one of these days, one side is just going to have to end the argument by saying, “You know what? You’re right. Let’s move on.”
I swear my iPod is becoming sentient. Somehow it always manages to pick the right song at the right moment.
Sooner or later this will fall apart.
It takes more than science to save a failing heart.
I wanted to keep you and hide you from the sun.
But no one could reach you.
You say I’m a black hole.
Singularity.
My own supernova,
a blazing blind catastrophe.
And for once I was a star.
A long time before that
somebody’s sun
But enough of these pointless noises,
enough of just counting down.
This is not a test.
If love is not the answer,
then maybe I misunderstood—oh—the question.
Oh there must be some way out of this.
We stand in a circle
hand in hand in hand.
There’s talk of a comet
over moon and land.
The sand has run out of the glass.
We stand in a circle.
We stand in a line.
But enough of these pointless noises,
enough of just counting down.
This is not a test.
If hope is not the answer then maybe I misunderstood—oh—the question
because there must be some way—
I want it so, so—
there’s always some way—
Well enough of these final nothings.
There’s no time to reconsider.
So love was not the answer, but maybe I misunderstood the question,
because it must be somewhere—
I read it somewhere—
there’s always some way—
Even before the Ajaxian bubble is burst, the net is already a-twitter with prophecies about Web 3.0. Wikipedia already has an article for it. And I’m wondering if we aren’t nearing some divergent singularity. Maybe not the Vingean Singularity, just one with a little ‘s’.
As far as Wikipedia is concerned, it seems like there are a few defining characteristics of Web 3.0. I’m not sure we’re really that close quite yet. But consider (1) the overlaying of virtual space on top of meat space, AKA the geospatial web, with echoes of ubiquitous computing and (2) the deification of Google further evolution of Google as an AI entity. Never mind mindless Googlebot spiders crawling the random web. We’re talking about the ability to pass Turing Tests here, people.
If the telcos and cable companies get their way with the obliteration of net neutrality, ubicomp is off the table, which will postpone the otherwise inevitable advent of the Matrix, as visualized by William Gibson.
The way I see it, Web 2.0 still has a ways to evolve. Maybe we’ll be making a stop over at Web 2.718 first.
I’m reading Halting State by Charlie Stross right now. The man can write. It’s like the first time I opened up Neuromancer, except with methamphetamines. And some mad overclocking.
I’m feeling a wave of nostalgia here.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
— Neuromancer by William Gibson
I first came across Stross when I read his short story ”Lobsters”, which formed the nucleus of his novel Accelerando, which is itself an exercise in future shock. The nerdcore poetry of technobabble backlit by the unexpected end of the Cold War was quite inspiring. Add to this the fact that I had just joined Web 1.414, what with me starting a blog at the dawn of the new millenium, using all GPLed tools, running on Linux, posting on Slashdot. Those were quite heady times.
(The concept of uploading a genome into cyberspace and accidentally having it turn into an autonomous virtual organism still fascinates me. I eagerly await the release of Google Genome, featuring C. elegans and D. melanogaster. It’s only a matter of time, folks. I figure once we outlaw the practice of patenting basepair sequences, we’ll have H. sapiens online in no time.)
Stross hasn’t been one to disappoint, either. His speculations into farther, interstellar, futures are interesting as well, with Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise featuring the universe-wide AI known as Google the Eschaton.
Halting State takes us a little closer to the present. Ubicomp and autonomous search agents (think RSS readers with intelligent, educable filters that learn what you like, which is code that is probably already cooking in Google’s Labs, to be released as version 3.0 of Google Reader) are pedestrian utilities in Stross’ novel. All you have to do is cross the Nintendo Wii with MMORPGs and his vision is complete.
I just keep hoping that tech will continue to evolve despite the apparent devaluation of human knowledge in the U.S. I don’t think we’ve had such an anti-science period in history since the Spanish Inquisition. Sure, the American abdication of its leading position in science will just mean that the brown boys in Mumbai and the brown girls in Manila will have to take the baton from MIT and Silicon Valley, but that means it’ll definitely suck if you’re stuck in the Midwest having to live through the Dark Ages 2.0. (I mean, c’mon. It took like 1,000 years for white people to remember that the world was round—something that Eratosthenes had already figured out in 240 BCE. Western civilization would be a quaint footnote in the history books if the Arabs hadn’t been around to preserve Greek and Roman science.)
I imagine that the red states will turn into some libertarian wet dream/apocalyptic wasteland akin to Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior, and technology will be regarded as magic and witchcraft, and Texans will start burning people at the stake. Maybe, just maybe, places like California will maintain some semblance of civilization, but that’ll only probably happen if President Schwarzenegger manages to secede from the Union and start flying a Bear flag over Sacramento again. Or if the Left Coast decides to join either Canada or Mexico.
America. Just like Rome. Except much faster.
Not sure if you’ve come across the latest outrage du jour. Apparently, Teri Hatcher’s character in ”Desperate Housewives” thinks her gynecologist is a quack because he just diagnosed her with being perimenopausal, and she demands to know whether or not he graduated from a medical school in the Philippines.
(All this while hundreds more American soldiers die needlessly in Iraq, probably because Blackwater mercenaries continue to recklessly provoke the Iraqi population. And W kills SCHIP, pulling the rug out from under a couple of million of kids whose parents make just enough money to pull them above the poverty line, but no where near enough money to take their kid to the doctor’s office when they get sick. Where’s the outrage there, I ask?)
Now as a person-of-color, and as a Filipino American specifically, you don’t have to preach to me about racism. It’s a given that the average white man or woman is ignorant about what life is like for someone with that little extra melanin that God gave you (and I’m not talking about going to the tanning salon, either.) White writers are bound to write stupid things about people-of-color. There’s just no way around that.
But whatever happened to observing Heinlein’s Razor? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.. C’mon now. Elevating this faux pas to a level of outrage far exceeding that which was mustered against, oh, I don’t know, the continued operation of the illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay, or the continued shredding of the Constitution by the extension of the Patriot Act, or maybe even the continued abuse of undocumented workers in the U.S. is, frankly, worse than stupidity. It’s insanity. Now I’m beginning to understand why white people can’t take Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton seriously.
(Now, Don Imus now, he had what he got coming to him. That was just plain mean. Why the hell are you going to call a championship college basketball team a bunch of nappy headed hos? White, black, polka-dotted, or striped, that’s just uncalled for. I mean, it’s like me calling your mom a cheap $2 hooker who specializes in teethless fellatio, because she all her teeth have rotted and fallen out. It has nothing to do with race. It’s just plain disrespectful.)
But since the Pandora’s Box has been opened, I think it needs to be deconstructed. This isn’t some simple “they’re wrong, we’re right” scenario here. I mean, this touches upon a lot of little interesting details in the client/patronage relationship between the United States and the Philippines. It also actually touches upon what a disaster the health care system in the United States is evolving into. And lays bare the depraved legacy of colonialism.
I’m serious!
But, in no particular order:
Unus
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the doc was a white guy, wasn’t he? Meaning, here was (putatively) a white guy who couldn’t get into an American medical school or even a foreign medical school affiliated with an American medical school, so he had to pony up a few hundred thousand dollars to pay for the privilege of learning medicine as practiced in a developing country.
Now don’t get me wrong. I had a hard time getting into medical school myself. I had to take a few detours before I finally got in. I ended up paying for a questionable master’s degree of no apparent use except as a way to grease the rails. Me and my classmates used to joke that we got into the one school that was probably only a hair’s breadth away from ending up in the Caribbean.
And it’s no fun to be a foreign medical graduate. Just ask my dad. In the throes of my dark despair, I would bring up the idea of going to medical school in the Philippines and he would just laugh his ass off. He would tell me I’d be better off going into computer science or something.
Now here’s the big, dirty secret. Much like most of education, medical school is just another hoop you have to jump through to get to where you actually want to go. Ask me just exactly what it was that I learned in medical school that I still find useful in actual clinical practice, and the first thing that will jump into my mind is: Why exactly did I spent a quarter of a million dollars? Oh right. That piece of paper.
I’m still a big time believer that it’s your residency program that determines how good of a doctor you’ll be. You could’ve graduated from Harvard for all I care, and you could still have crappy bedside manner, and you could still make fatal mistakes by misdiagnosing and mismanaging your patients. The pedigree of your M.D. or D.O. says little about what kind of physician you are going to be. What matters—what has always mattered, and what will continue to matter—is how much time, energy, passion, and dedication you put into your chosen field of study. Oh yeah. That and brains. You’ve got to have a big brain. Otherwise your head will explode. I kid you not. All that information has to go somewhere, and if you just don’t have the capacity, POW! Grey matter all over the walls. But I digress.
So yeah. Big deal if you had to go to Southwest University in Cebu because you couldn’t get into Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in the hinterlands of Illinois. If you manage to grab a residency spot at UCSF (and yeah, even UCSF will take FMGs sometimes) that’s all that matters. You’ll be just as well trained and just as board-eligible as the guy who graduated from Yale and did his residency at Duke. No one would be the wiser, unless you happen to have an accent, but anyone who discriminates against you because of your accent deserves to referred to die at the hands of an incompetent surgeon anyway.
(Don’t piss me off, man! I know a lot of knife-happy monkeys out there who would be happy to needlessly open your abdomen and sloppily close it, leaving you to die an awful death in the throes of fulminant bacterial infection and septic shock.)
Duus
It’s one thing to go to a medical school in a developing country so you can learn how to practice medicine in a developing country so you can take care of sick people *in* a developing country. I think that that would be highly admirable, and it’s something that we clearly need a lot of. Even if that developing country happens to be the inner cities of the United States. The fact that we have the best medical technology in the world does you no good if your insurance refuses to pay for any of it. Not too many people I know can shell out the several hundred dollars required to pay for a CT scan out of pocket. But I digress.
It’s another thing entirely if you’re coming from a developed country and end up having to bribe some petty bureaucrat to let you into their school in a developing country, just so you can take the ECFMG and go back to your developed country to practice boutique medicine, administrating botox injections and writing for pain meds all day. And don’t tell me this doesn’t happen.
It’s also another thing, I think, if you’re going to med school because you’re in it for the prestige, or because you think it’ll improve your chances of leaving for greener pastures. One of the most mind boggling things is the pervasive brain drain from the Philippines.
Now I know that the semi-feudal economy rigged by the elites in Manila leaves little opportunity for the bourgeoisie to develop and possibly bring the Philippines into the 21st century global economy. (I’m not talking about the import/export of warm bodies here, which is apparently the lone pillar of the Philippine economy. Tax revenue from overseas contract workers is the only thing keeping the government solvent.) Ask my mom how many nursing jobs in Manila actually paid wages you could live on in the 1960’s, and watch her laugh for hours on end. If you think nurses here in the U.S. have got the short end of the stick (and, honestly, they sort of do, if you compare what an RN has to put up with with what any other professional has to deal with), you ain’t seen nothing until you see what RN’s in developing countries have to deal with.
I realize that without the brain drain, I would not exist.
But it still ain’t pretty. Just because we learned a lot from Nazi human experimentation doesn’t mean that it was a good thing, either.
The worst part about the brain drain is that bona-fide M.D.s from the Philippines are skipping the country and making their way to the U.S. to work as R.N.s! I mean, sure, we always need more nurses, but this has got to be a colossal waste of resources. Training M.D.’s in the art of medicine in the developing world, only to have them become R.N.’s in the developed world. There’s something awfully perverse about that.
Tertius
Which leads me to the sorry fact that the medical profession has nowhere near the level of prestige that it used to. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m happy that obnoxious, arrogant white guys who talk too much and think they know everything but who make you do all the work are an almost extinct species. The hierarchy is oh-so-slowly being dismantled. Residents and interns are now becoming recognized as having human rights. No one thinks working 60 hours in a row is a good idea any more.
Medical students no longer tremble in fear of the attending physicians. (OK maybe they still get cold sweats, but they don’t visibly tremble anymore.) Interns don’t have to kiss their resident’s ass. Surgeons aren’t allowed to throw things in the OR with impunity.
Despite my postmodern/postcolonial cynicism, sometimes there is such a thing as progress.
But at the same time, patients laugh at you when you give them recommendations. Aggrieved estranged illegitimate children will sue you for all you’re worth because their dad whom they haven’t seen in 25 years died under your watch, never mind the fact that he lived alone, and no relative could spare the time to take him to his doctor’s appointments, and he didn’t have any money to buy medication anyway.
And—oh yeah—honest assessments are met with insinuations of quackery.
Medicine has neither the respect nor the money of the bad old days. Oh yes, they were bad. You know that sinking feeling you get when you take your car into the mechanic, and they diagnose your car with some improbable condition, but you have to take their word for it, because you don’t know anything about cars, and that red blinky light is driving you crazy? That used to be the feeling people would get when they took themselves to the doctor’s office, and they would order some random blood test or imaging study in order to get their kickback, write you a prescription for some expensive proprietary medication that has never been shown to have more efficacy than a placebo, and then they would reel you in with some non-physiologic mumbo-jumbo that vaguely sounds like the threat of death if you fail to follow up. But you never studied endocrinology, so who are you to gainsay the good doctor. You get your tests done, you take your meds, you follow up obediently, all to the tune of several hundreds of dollars in cold hard cash. Flim-flammery. That was how you made money in the bad old days. (Come to think of it, that’s how you still make money in the bad new days.)
If the HMOs seem like a bad idea to you, just remember that they’re supposed to be a solution to a much bigger problem. (Seriously. Don’t try to convince me that the days of paternalism and cheating widows out of their fortunes with diagnoses of hysteria were better days. Sure you may be rich, but I have to be able to sleep at night without my conscience giving me B symptoms.)
Maybe one day we’ll give up on the whole prestige angle. And actually organize and fight for our rights and the rights of patients. But I’m not going to hold my breath. And first I’ve got to pay back my loans. But that is neither here nor there.
Quartius
The only other Filipino American resident in my program brought up a good point. Despite the fact that the city we practice medicine in has probably the second largeset concentration of Filipino Americans in the United States (the first largest being L.A.), there aren’t exactly a plethora of us brown dudes wearing white coats and stethoscopes. Sure, at least 75% of all hospital wards are staffed by Filipino nurses. There are Filipino respiratory therapists. There are Filipino physical therapists and occupational therapists. Filipino social workers. Filipino nutritionists. With almost every position available in a hospital, there are a huge number of Filipinos.
Not so with physicians.
Maybe, like my dad warned me almost 15 years ago, it isn’t worth the pain and suffering of 28 years of formal education. (That’s right. 28 years. K-12. High school. Undergrad. Med school. Internship and residency. And that’s the minimum. God help you if you want to become a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon or something.) Maybe most Filipinos are simply smart enough to realize that there are better ways to spend your life than paying off (on average) $150,000 in educational loans, or spending every fourth night awake and in constant fear of your pager going off.
Then there are the fools like me, who couldn’t figure out anything else they could possibly do with their lives.
But since I haven’t won the lottery, and I don’t have any dying rich relatives, if I have to work, I suppose I would rather be taking care of sick people than sitting in a cubicle all day.
Quintus
So, no, as a Filipino health care professional, it’s no skin off my back. After all, I’m not the one on the receiving end of an 18 gauge needle going into your spine or of the cold, stainless steel speculum going into your vagina while you lie there trussed up like a slab of meat. (Like they say, ‘tis better to give than to receive.) I’m allowed to write for controlled substances and know how to say things like “metastatic pilocytic astrocytoma.” I get to wear those stylin’ white coats. Maybe once in a while, I even get to make someone feel better. And the golden moments, the moments that make is seem almost, almost entirely worth it, when someone actually says thank you.
It’s even better when someone realizes that getting to leave the hospital alive and mostly in one piece is a miracle and not something they’re entitled to. I’m not saying that you have to pay necessarily. I just wish more people recognized that health is a gift. As far as I know, no other species of animal expends any effort to make their fellows get better. How lucky you are that there even *is* such a thing as health care.
I’m not asking for kudos for myself. I don’t care if you recognize that this is hard work, or that we health care professionals have spent years of our lives dedicated to this task of healing. I just want you to look around once in a while, and realize that it’s kind of a magical thing, this thing we call modern medicine. Ultimately, it’s a complicated system that needs maintenance to keep running. No single component is more important than all the others. We’re all in this together. And I just want everyone to recognize that we all have a stake in keeping it running.
Sextus
I mean, seriously, though. Just how pristine do we think medical degrees from the Philippines are? It’s not like former colonial possessions are immune from things like, oh, I don’t know. Corruption. Bribery. Graft.
Even the dean of my Catholic high school admits that everyone has a price.
How much do you think it would take to buy a medical school diploma?
And am I dissing the hard-working, dedicated physicians from the provinces back in the Phils? OK, maybe I am.
But ask my dad about what his classmates back in med school were like.
I’ve never heard of such venality, such wanton classism and elitism outside of a Charles Dickens novel. Such sloth and excess. Such disregard for the poor and unlucky. It’s interesting how sending me, my brother, and my sister to private schools taught us to hate the bourgeouisie (despite being part of it). In the same way, going to medical school taught my dad how to despise the rich (despite milking his associates for all their worth.)
Please. Let’s not pretend that everyone goes into medicine for purely altruistic reasons. (I mean, you can make hella bank as an RN. Especially if you cross those picket lines. Mmmm.)
Despite being people-of-color, despite having a legacy of colonialism, (or maybe precisely because of all these things) Filipinos are like some of the most racist, most elitist people I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen such high regard for material possessions, for brand names. I’ve never seen so much name dropping or connection pulling. Such exclusivity, such ostracization. For the longest time, it was hard for me to stand-up for our postcolonial culture, mostly because for a big chunk of my life, I never felt like I belonged. Maybe this is every person-of-color’s experience with their own culture. Maybe we suffer from the exact situation that Oscar Zeta Acosta describes: you learn to distrust your own. Crab mentality. Colonial thinking. Maybe I’m just hating on my own peeps.
If you think it’s a big deal, you’re entitled to your opinion.
But don’t think you can just foist yours on me, either.
Oh her blog, S. (not S) posts this quote from T.S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— from ”Quartet No. 4: Little Gidding”
I feel like I’m remembering something that I once knew, but forgot.
Autumn on this desert shore
sputters and drifts, stutters and stammers
skipping/scratching/scuffing/grooving
and it’s DJ G O D in da house, muthafucka
Autumn starts with fits of summer
tantrums of not willing to let go
of sleeplessness nights unending
of what-might-have beens unceasing
(We dance in the moonlight, in the pale glistening light
of the waning moon, you and I, in the shadows of those silent hills
in that ancient pass where they built those ultra-modern towers
noveaux faux neoclassical postmodern
with those mirrors and glass ceilings
ready for some gonzo porn or a wedding reception.)
Am I going to hell?
because when I heard that Orange County
was sliding into the sea
I smiled.
Fits and starts
like an autistic kid (yo momma did too many drugs, foo!)
or an epileptic off his meds
alcohol withdrawal, maybe, or crystal meth
(And maybe even God has to get high once in a while.
If I created this shit hole, I’d want to be high all the time, too.)
Forgetful of where I’ve been, trailing the masters like a beaten dog
or maybe a whore who’s done a few too many tricks
‘cause you gotta remember that loose lips sink ships
and no one likes a captain who’s Grade A looney-tunes
‘cause he ain’t never gotten penicillin for his neurosyphillis
(I hear Beethoven playing those heavenly chords
oh where would western civilization be without STDs?)
There is poetry in all that sordidness
If you never had the pleasure of penile discharge
or the joy of the burning dick
wouldn’t you think gonorrhea sounded pretty?
Or how about chlamydia?
This modern world is all about acronyms now
like HIV or HSV, PID or AIDS
whatever happened to the lyricism
of singing odes and curses to Venus
Cytherea, Aphrodite, goddess, brightest, nearest the dawn
And starts. The smoke tinged air lingering
of the peat moss of years long gone burning into ash
(chapparal takes the metaphor quite literally
and death becomes life
If Tongvans crucified their saviors,
would we have Joshua Trees in our living rooms every December?
O ransom captive Californ-i-a)
And fits: September fades into October
and even now we remember Samhain
and the Days of the Dead
and the Communion of Saints
Pray for us
(The sky is not empty
rather it is filled
is it the boundless, infinite emptiness that we fear?
or the impossible abundance, the grotesque profligateness of the universe
that makes us cry out in terror?)
Mortal.
Man.
Doomed.
To die.
(Still waiting for that new moon.)
¿La linea rojo o las lineas albas?
Pagbigyan mo naman ako
in that space unrecognizable,
scotomata perforating your visual fields
the mind fills in the gaps
elides the ragged, raging ends of
punctured, gaping reality
all is well with the world
as far your aching mind is concerned
ignore something long enough and
trust me
it will eventually go away
and all bleeding stops eventually
in this oxidizing atmosphere
you forget every exhalation is a puff of smoke
and every breath causes every cell in your body
to burn
it is fitting that the Holy Spirit
came upon the Apostles like a tongue of fire
not the exhalational gust of spent breath
rancid and tubercular from God’s ancient mouth
but the fuel for the fire
oxygena
that is
sharpness-former
pointed-beginning
and each breath is like a knife
like acid burning in your chest
we die by burning, one way or the other
even when we drown
our neurons go up in flames
sharp-pointed, keen-bladed free radicals
come charging in
at knife point
they steal electrons,
tear them off our quivering flesh
and that electrical fire that courses through our nerves
goes out out out like Broadway finally closing
on the eve of Armageddon
like the foundering Titanic sucked down into the vortex
created from its own fractured ruin
drowning to the plaintive cry of violins
Oh, T.S. and I
We’s tight, no lie
what he makes out with his profundity
I make up with my profanity
Like the bastard children
of this post-modern world
forever feeding on Lacan’s tits
searching for that veritable penis that can never be found
(and whys you always gotta be thinking wit yo dick, man?)
that center that is no center that flies from the center that seeks the center
That crossroads that is a tangle
that madness that grows on vines
lifegiving blood feeding a cancer
dead bodies mutilated, littered along the desert floor
Oh, this desert shore
come sea, come dusty winds
Satan farting across the Anza-Borrega
the Mojave
the Sonora
Oh noosphere
like that monkey-eating eagle
between the twilight sky
and the deepening sea
On the interstices of the boundaries of the peripheries of the limits
God’s 10,000 fingers interlaced
interspersed
every dust mote
fragment of star dust
every raindrop
every meningococcal bacterium
(breathe in and let it burn)
every grain of desert sand
every soot particle
(this is cosmic fabric, my friends
this is what universes are made of
what 9 out of 10 deities recommend)
Oh, this desert shore
that is the past and the present and the future
fantasy, modernity, madness, and impossibility
all intersect with the 101 and the PCH
with El Camino Real and the Mother Road
The blueprint of America
a working scale model
and what America could only hope to be
This noospheric ephemerality
this transient indefatigability
‘cause California was never real
and yet we’re as real as you can ever get
La Republica de las Californias
Alta y Baja Reunidad
In this occupied territory
stolen by the gringo
(don’t even pretend that this isn’t true)
And a brown man who don’t speak Español
Soy buscando para la verdad
lantern in hand
worse off than some Greek fool who is probably still
wandering all of Tartarus
looking for something that just don’t exist
Worried that some puti hopped up on some crystal meth
is gonna make an example of me
show those brown guys who’s boss
put that uppity bastard in his place
(And hell yeah, Kanye
my degrees are gonna keep me safe and warm and bulletproof.
I truly believe that. While I’m fingering that hole in my belly,
still incredulous that I got shot.
But whateva, cous’
All bleeding stops eventually.)
Circles upon spheres upon helices upon spirals
vortices and whorls
Scylla and Charybdis
Jorgumand eating his own tail
like a dog licking his own balls
Two Klein Bottles opening up into each other
like some eleven-dimensional educational demonstration
of the reproductive systems of galaxies
or maybe it’s just porn
(and ain’t everything just porn?)
Everywhere but here
here in this circumscribed
delimited, defined
assayed, appraised
every bit tallied and marked
every penny accounted for
everywhere but here
(and the target keeps moving
goddamn it! Why don’t you hold still?)
You’re moving around the sights
like an epileptic with Parkinson’s disease having an orgasm
Keep still, goddamn you!
Keep fucking still!
I have yet to determine when the ideal time to have my last cup of coffee is. I feel like if I don’t have it before 6 pm, I’m totally going to fall asleep, but if I have it at 7 pm, then I’m going to be awake all night.
I’m just not a morning person, I guess.
So here I am sitting at Influx, pondering all the time I spent here wrestling with my blog engine, just drinking in the sunlight and the caffeine. There was probably more caffeine than hemoglobin in my veins those days. (I can’t believe that was more than month ago!)
I sit here pondering things, and wonder about things that I’ve wondered about a million times before, knowing that there aren’t going to be any satisfactory answers. Not now. And probably not ever.
But what is it I want out of life?
Why are all the things I want, things that can’t really be attained, only because they’re moving targets.
It’s like trying to reach for the future, when by definition, the future is always going to be out of reach. It wouldn’t be the future if you could actually get there. It would just be the present.
Love. Happiness. Madness.
So where do I go next? There is no guiding principle behind my aspirations at this stage in the game. It would be an abuse of semantics to say that I’m content with how my life is these days, but I can’t think of a better way to describe this languid torpor that pervades each day, where I’m just happy with surviving the here-and-the-now, and screw the future, I’m never going to get there so why bother?
Hand to mouth. Paycheck to paycheck.
Sisyphus rolls the stone back up the hill yet again.
What I *am* is lonely. Even though I feel like there’s no way I’ve got time for companionship, I still crave it. I mean, what must that life be like, where I can come home from work to find someone waiting for me? Or to wait for someone to come home? Either way, I’m not picky.
But I’ve lived completely by myself for the past three years now. If anything, it’s made me more insular, more insane than I already was.
I can’t win.
The problem is that in the most obvious aspects, stillness has a lot in common with death. In the animal kingdom, if you’re not moving, you run the risk of becoming lunch. In terms of species, the rule of the day is “Change or die.” Fail to adapt to the environment, and risk extinction. Simple as that.
But clearly there is something different about being actively still, and being dead.
Hmmm. Active stillness. I like that. Very Zen or something.
If I could just stay within the already voluminous confines of my ruptured, warped brain, I think I would be OK. But I’m always probing, pushing, and poking at the limits. What I’ve got is never enough, even though it’s probably more than I need, more than I deserve.
I feel like the ideal human state is the state of near-completion. Of being in the process of completing one’s self, and yet still vibrantly incomplete. Always and eternally missing that final piece. (A picture book by Shel Silverstein suddenly comes to mind. Tyler Durden making declamations to his space monkeys also enters my mind. “I say, never let me be complete!”)
And yet, is this not some Zeno-like paradox of always failing to catch the tortoise? Halfway there, and then halfway again, ad infinitum? Can you be complete, truly still, and not be dead?
Bottom line: I’ve got a million and a half thoughts running through my mind, most of them bordering on if not outrightly invading insanity. One of these days, so God help me, I’m going to find myself on the wrong end of a 5150 psychiatric hold.
…left in 2007. Where does the time go?
It’s been a year since I’ve been dealing with this pain that I’ve assumed is either sciatica or piriformis syndrome, and have usually gotten around it with either naproxen or Tylenol, but today was the first day where it just laid me out flat. I haven’t been able to function normally, and my back is killing me.
Ah well.
This trip to L.A., my check engine light turned on, making me apprehensive about my engine suddenly giving out as I traversed the I-5 at 80 mph. The car held out, but now I have to pay something l like $1,000 to get it fixed. So I had to drive my sister’s old car (a 2002 Tan X-Terra) down to S.D.
Which is an interesting frame, because before my sister left for Guatemala, I had to get my car serviced then, too, and had to borrow the X-Terra for a week. (Supposedly, my sister is returning to these United States on Tuesday.)
As usual, I find myself sifting through memories and blog posts, which is actually quite entertaining, but sometimes quite painful. I’m starting to really feel the futility of it all. I really don’t think I’ve learned a goddamned thing since I started keep this journal.
I’m just one voice clamoring into the uncaring ether.
Whatever. It’s late. I need to go to sleep.
I really find this song haunting. And fitting, as the memories of this last summer and the summers gone before blow away upon the wind of smoke.
For some reason, the first thing to come to mind is [Edenborn] by Nick Sagan, the disturbing future that he envisions, with humanity wiped out by a plague. The main character’s son’s self-destruction in the face of what may be love.
The book in turn reminds me of NYC (I picked up the first book in the series Idyllwild on one of my trips to NYC) and lost opportunities, crossed signals, and asking myself, why do I keep doing this to myself? Hmm?
Did you ever think of me
as your best friend?
Did I ever think of you?
I’m not complaining
I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your Eden
Did I ever think of you
as my enemy?
Did you ever think of me?
I’m complaining
I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your Eden
This song seems curiously apt with regards to the thoughts flowing through my head in the last 48 hours or so. This song actually reminds me of those days when the evil resident was raping my soul and somehow it ties everything together and closes the loop.
I’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreYou’re physically in this, but how could we tell
If we was meant to be in bliss if you’re not mentally as well?
This energy you’re sending me is tricky as hell
Usually it’s like a 50/50, we could take a L
Before we start things, at this point being apart brings
The feeling of somebody plucking at your heart strings I know it probably shouldn’t feel like this
But any other woman I see is in your likeness
It’s from your cheekbones
to your lips, to your curves, to your deep moans
To that walk, to your words
You love feeling like a breakdown on the verge
First we on good terms, then you on my last nerves
Got my back just aching, my shoes is all tight
It’s too complex when we choose to do it right
It’s wrong, one minute you a soldier strong
Then you trying a route talking about it’s over and goneI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreWhen your boyfriend’s in town, it’s bound to be trouble, Love
His name Black, and he known to be a lover of
Getting it on with my smoker’s jacket on
Eyes racing back and forth listening to Chaka Khan
Trying to figure the cause why you always acting off
like I’m slacking off
Maybe our signal’s getting crossed
For the case Love, you feel like you making a waste of
Your precious time you need to get a taste of
Some space to breathe, a moment as friends
We should’ve felt ourselves slipping into it again
Cuz it’s like off and on, on and off
Passion, lost and found, found and lost
Clashing, asking for nothing but understanding
Your heart’s made of glass, use care when handling
Girl, all in all I never leave you stranded
Cuz my respect you commanded, you figure it outI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreI used to come into the party and stand around
Cuz I was kinda too shy to really get down
I used to play the corner and watch the scene
Deep down knowing I wanted to find me a queen
And I could feel that in my stomach and up in my chest
Because I knew a lot of women, and some was fresh
But then I found you girl, and just like me
You had a heart that was yearning to be set free
Now listen, see you and me we need to take the time
To erase any doubt that’s inside your mind
It’s not a mountain that I’m ever too tired to climb
And who’s counting, but I know at least a thousand times
I let you know I’m here for you, care for you, and confide in you
Break bread, share with you, and provide for you
And that’s full time, it’s no 9 to 5 with you
That’s why I’m trying to work it out with you, it’s gonna workI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
MoreI’ve been wondering about the complexity
Of what we have it shouldn’t be
More
Just can’t see
More