Wed, 31 Dec 2003
topit's over now
Just wanted to post on the last day of 2003. Suffice it to say that it is a bad idea to try to cut your Zoloft dose by 50 mg when scarcely half a year has passed since you started taking it.
Maybe it was because I was driving down to San Diego. For some reason, this took me all the way back to my San Diego to Sacramento road trip in the summer of 2001. (I know the entry says nothing about the road trip, but just take my word for it. Perhaps will be more illuminating, although, again, it says nothing about the road trip.) Like I hadn't learned a single goddamned thing in all this hellish time.
I also recognized what my most dream signified. Let's just say that I, perhaps like Frodo Baggins, might understand that there really are wounds that will never heal. So be it.
Oh. By the way. I took Step 2 of the USMLE today. Admittedly with much less melodrama than Step 1. (Unfortunately, the completion of which also lacked much fanfare.)
I'm just glad that I'm not drowning in sorrow.
I was contemplating just going to sleep at 9pm and waking up to the New Year. This is partly because I've got no plans, partly because my mom, my brother, and my sister are flying to the Philippines tonight, leaving me and my dad by ourselves. I know I should probably make some phone calls and figure something out, but my little bout with depression has left me inexorably anti-social. This is not the night I want to be reminded how excruciatingly alone I am.
Ah well.
I keep hoping that the next year will be better than the last, but I've come to realize that the universe cares very little about what I hope. Still, I will hope. What else is there?
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Tue, 30 Dec 2003
toptime, reality, and death
I had a really bizarre dream last night. I will try to relate it "chronologically," meaning, in the order that I remember events, but anyone who has ever had a vivid dream can tell you this is utterly futile.
The first part involved meeting a carload of people I knew who had died in a car accident. For some reason, me and my live friends could see them and talk to them, a la "The Sixth Sense." Afterwards, my live friends planned on going to the crash site, which happened to be somewhere on the eastern portion of Michigan, just north of Detroit. We were, however, in Chicago, and because no one would be riding with me in my car, I didn't feel like it. Instead, I tried driving home to my apartment, but for some reason I couldn't read the street signs, and the landscape was markedly changed, to the point where I didn't recognize it. For one thing, there were hills, and anyone who has been to Illinois knows that there aren't any hills for hundreds of miles.
The next freaky thing, though, was that I realized that I had seen one of my friend in social settings prior, but after the car accident had taken place. Meaning that she had been dead the last time I had seen her, except that everyone thought that she was alive. I later learned in my dream that the only one who knew the truth was the driver in the car accident, who had, miraculously, survived.
Because I have been reading Philip K Dick lately, I recognized that my sense of reality was being shaken, with ramifications throughout spacetime. A "realityquake" if you will. (This is a concept that requires thought and articulation, but I will defer for now.)
There was much weeping and wailing. I still feel drained right now from all the crying I did in my dream.
Later on, I found that my now dead friend would show up in random places and would start talking to me, and other people could see her too, as long as they knew her well. That is, the clarity with which they could see her depended on how well they knew her. So people who didn't know her at all would just see me talking to thin air, while people who were as good if not better friends than I to her would see me conversing.
Finally, though, I stumble upon a newspaper clipping discussing the fatal car crash, and while the newspaper was printed in 1999, for some reason, it was referencing events in March 2005 (yep, not this incipient year, but the next one hence) as if 2005 was in the past. At that point, I had a "Back to the Future" moment where I began to suspect that I was caught in some time paradox, and I would need to travel through time to prevent catastrophe from occurring.
The dream began to unravel at that point, where I had a vague feeling that 1. I could've been the driver of the doomed car, if time and chance had worked that way 2. I was dead, and the people who I thought were dead were the ones who were alive.
I also began to experience dread when one of the "dead" would manifest themselves. Because sometimes it wasn't someone I knew, it would merely be vague shadowlike manifestations of people (and perhaps even things—think Cthulhu mythos) that I had scarcely known. (Shadowy like those creatures in the game "Silent Hill", if you've ever played it, that could disappear into the floor and then reappear, grabbing at your leg.)
It took me a while lying in bed, still drowsy, to sort through all this. Remarkably, it took me a while to accept the reality that, in fact, my friends were not dead, and it was all a dream.
Huh. I have some really complicated nightmares.
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Thu, 25 Dec 2003
toplet there be light
i woke up ok today. it's a dark, dreary, gloomy winter day, as wintery as it can get in southern california, and it's raining, but i am at peace.
whatever needs to be, will be.
that is the simplified essence of my faith these days.
sitting at midnight mass, as the priest droned on nonsensically in the stark, underdecorated church and the soloists missed their notes and flubbed their lyrics, i pondered how ridiculous it is that people dream of a white christmas. (which, incidentally, is a song that is ruined for me because too many people keep reminding me about the possible racial interpretation of this.)
nevermind the fact that jesus was probably not born in december (corroborating with the fact that he was supposedly born during the first roman imperial census), and that december 25th was chosen by the early christians because it coincided with the saturnalia, allowing them to celebrate without undue scrutiny from the romans. but consider that bethlehem is located near the mediterranean. if anything, the winter weather in southern california is probably the closest to palestine more than anywhere else in the u.s.
i reminisce about all the peri-Christmas seasons I've spent crossing the Mojave Desert (and this year was no exception, crossing from eastern edge to western border) and i think about fantastic spiritual kinships with the magi (star of wonder, star of night.... westward leading, still proceeding) and maybe the Mojave is at least a little reminiscent of the wastelands that John the Baptist wandered, and later, where Jesus Christ was tempted by the Adversary, the desert of the Essenes, the desert where James A Pike met his demise in search of his faith, the desert where war continues to brew (o come, o come, emmanuel, and ransom captive palestine....)
the desert is such a strong human archetype. if you've never experienced the desert, i do not think you can be a sincere adherent of any of the religions of the book (zoroastrianism, judaism, christianity, islam). the desert is the crucible of these faiths. the desert defines many of the tropes found in the sacred scriptures, and i do not think it is possible to authentically interpret the scriptures without understanding the desert.
i do not claim that i know the desert, only that i have been around it for a greater part of my life, that i have many bittersweet memories attached to those wondrous wastes. (i need to expand on this idea i've been trying to develop as i was driving westward.... but not here. in any case, like lao tzu mentions, many things we find useful are defined as much by their emptiness, their lack, as they are by their materiality. "We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use." in the same way, civilization is probably defined by its deserts. anyway.)
but that is what christmas makes me think of. the holy land, the desert. the clear, brilliant sky with a trillion stars that kept the shepherds company as they tended their flock in the crisp desert cold.
more later.
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Wed, 24 Dec 2003
topgo jesus, it's ya birfday
(title courtesy of aaron mcgruder.)
i don't know why i do this. one, i'm horrible at gift-giving, two, since i'm a student, i have no money, three, i waited until the last minute and ended up spending way too much money and i only got things for my siblings.
being stuck in christmas eve traffic gives you way too much time to think. as faith hill's rendition of "where are you christmas?" from "the grinch who stole christmas" played, i pondered the trajectory of my life. as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to imagine it having gone any other way.
i don't know if it's only because i'm sick, and still weary from my sojourn, but the image i have in my head is a ship, an old style galleon, perhaps, with its sails tattered, becalmed in the middle of nowhere, without land in sight. (somewhat reminiscent of this post i wrote 2 years ago.
but, yeah, remarkably, blogging has become more and more therapeutic. writing about that brief depressive episode, it sort of all oozed out of me, and i feel ok.
heh. i don't know. i guess it's just been a long year or two or three.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2003
topi'm not dying, i just can't think of anything else better to do
it's like i've been in a coma ever since i arrived in l.a. on saturday. it is now tuesday and i couldn't really tell you what i've been doing the past few days. excepting sleeping. i've been averaging about 16-18 hours of sleep these past few days. my dad is convinced that i have infectious mononucleosis. i do have swollen lymph nodes and unremitting malaise and fatigue. but no pharyngitis.
the four day sojourn really took a lot out of me. it's kind of funny. while i was probably no less sick while i was driving, the clarity of purpose really kept me going. it's nice to have a simple goal for a change. go west, young man. if only all of life were that simple. now that i have about a million and a half things to do, most of them mutually exclusive, all i want to do is curl up into the fetal position and bury myself under the covers.
it was also probably a mistake to watch "the return of the king" on saturday. having come off the tail-end of a 2,000 mile journey, i started feeling like i was with frodo and sam on the last wearisome leagues of their quest. never mind the fact that arizona looks a lot like what i would imagine mordor to look like. (it doesn't help that mostly orcs republicans live in arizona.) i probably need to watch "RotK" again, but my initial impression was that peter jackson had to rush through what i think is the best part of LotR. you definitely don't get the flavor of how agonizing the siege of minas tirith was. although, i must say, the visuals of sauron's armies advancing upon the city of the tower of the guard were pretty impressive. the battle of the pelennor fields was, despite the obvious shortcuts, pretty awesome.
still, though. i think they made denethor too idiotic. in the book, denethor was a worthy adversary of gandalf. they knew how to play psy-ops. they didn't even mention the fact that denethor had fallen into despair because sauron had been feeding him bad intelligence through the palantir. in the movie, denethor was just some doddering old idiot, not the horrifically tragic figure that he was in the book.
He turned his dark eyes on Gandalf, and now Pippin saw a likeness between the two, and he felt the strain between them, almost as if he saw a line of smouldering fire, drawn from eye to eye, that might suddenly burst into flame.
Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful, and older. Yet by a sense other than sight Pippin perceived that Gandalf had the greater power and the deeper wisdom, and a majesty that was veiled. And he was older, far older.... And then his musings broke off, and he saw that Denethor and Gandalf still looked each other in the eye, as if reading the other's mind...."
and theoden's death (whoops, sorry for the spoiler, but hell, this is a book that is sixty years old, for god's sake) wasn't the tearjerker i was hoping it would be. that whole sequence, when theoden gets mortally wounded by the nazgul, and eowyn and merry finish the witch king of angmar off, at much cost to themselves, always gets me teary eyed in the book. when eomer finds his liege and his uncle dying underneath his steed, and when eomer finds his sister apparently lifeless beside him, and when he gets all fell and fey, with nothing left to live for, it sends a shiver down my spine.
He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart, and then his face went deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.
"Eowyn, Eowyn!" he cried at last: "Eowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!"
Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: "Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world's ending!"
And then when he sees the black sails of the Corsairs (not knowing that it is in fact Aragorn) and thinks that all is lost:
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
It makes me all teary-eyed too when they unfurl the banner of the White Tree and the Seven Stars, and Eomer realizes that Aragorn has won through the Paths of the Dead, and that they are saved, at least for the moment.
And, in all the wrack and ruin and confusion, after helping save Faramir's life, Pippin searches the battlefield for Merry. Pippin tries to cheer him up with hobbitish humor, but Merry just eyes him wearily: "Are you going to bury me?" and when Pippin chokes up, I have to stifle a sob too.
Yeah, there is a lot of variance with the book, but I can completely understand the limitations that Peter Jackson was working under. I am actually astounded by how faithful he tried to be to the book. Perhaps I am just being exceedingly forgiving since I never thought I would see the day that the book would be made into a decent movie. I also thought that intercutting Books V and VI was much better. It made the battle at the Black Gate much more suspenseful, and it made me despise Frodo and Sam a lot less. (My sister puts it this way: in the book, because Frodo and Sam's part in Book VI is so much slower than the action in Book V, you just want to say, die already! Who cares about the Ring?) I also thought the sequence depicting Smeagol's devolution into Gollum was really masterful. I wish Jackson had kept the sequence where Gollum contemplates giving up his evil ways, and just pledging loyalty to Frodo, when Sam shows up and misinterprets and ruins the moment, effectively sealing their fate. (I've had dreams about this sequence. Except that it involved a hovercraft and interstellar travel. But that is another story. Which I do hope to tell some day. Maybe even in novel form. Anyway.)
But enough of RotK.
there's a lot more to say about the past few days i've spent lying in bed, and of the days to come. there's just too much, too much.
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Thu, 18 Dec 2003
topgetting my kicks on route 66
I am currently in Amarillo, TX. I actually chose this hotel I'm at precisely because they have in-room Internet access. How geeky is that.
The first two days of my sojourn to the West Coast have been pretty good. The first leg, from Chicago to Springfield, MO via St. Louis had some nail-biting moments, as I was taken surprise by rain, and I feared that the road would suddenly freeze over, sending me careening off the Interstate. But this southern route is definitely more interesting than I-80. I guess it's all the Route 66 memorabilia.
This second leg, from Springfield, MO to Amarillo via Tulsa, OK and Oklahoma City, OK, was somewhat easier, since I started much earlier, the distance was somewhat shorter, and the weather was nice. (Wow. This entry is sounding truly inane. What can I say. I'm tired.) I did, however, take some interesting pictures. And I was plagued by my submandibular gland again, probably just a stone stuck in my Warthin's duct, although, of course, being the hypochondriac that I am, I started wondering if my salivary gland might be infected, or if I had Sjogren syndrome, or lymphoma. I'm not sure if I started feeling sick because of sialadenitis, or whether I had, yet again, caught a virus, or if I had had too much caffeine, too much sugar, and too much nicotine.
Now I don't have anything against fat people, since I do identify, what with a body mass index definitely above normal, but, damn, are people in the Heartland fat! Oh, to be a cardiologist in Texas. I'd have to have a drive-thru cath lab.
OK, I'll stop being mean.
Tomorrow, I'm aiming for Flagstaff, AZ, which is looking like the more grueling portion of my journey, being the longest leg. Plus, I'm crossing the continental divide, although hopefully it won't be as arduous as crossing the Rockies up by Vail, CO.
Anyway. Just wanted to say I'm alive and well. Hopefully my next hotel has Internet access too.
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Tue, 16 Dec 2003
topthe road ahead
It is strange, now. My happiness (as artificial as it may be) is starting to wear off. I guess it's the part of me that wants to stay rooted. Inertia.
I don't know why I can't keep my eyes forward. I am dwelling on how there will be no one to see me off, and that there will be no one, no special someone at least, who will be waiting for me.
I can picture it now, as I ring on the doorbell, my sister opening the front door. "Oh, it's you. What took you so long?" Probably as she is on her way out.
No. Now I am glad.
I'm going home.
Whatever that means.
I think, I hope, that my spirits will be better when I am upon the open road. I don't know why I am compelled to do this, to traverse two-thirds of this great nation, to parallel as closely as I can the route of those intrepid pioneers of the Dust Bowl era (ah well, I never read The Grapes of Wrath.) I mean, I do not really intend to stray off the Interstates (but still, that song floats around in my head...)
Hmmm. I wonder if I should have shot for Joplin, MO? Instead, I am going to strike out for Springfield, MO (in vain hopes of running into the Simpsons.) From then on, I intend to stay true to the lyrics of the song: A night in Amarillo, TX, followed by a night in Flagstaff, AZ, before swinging through Barstow, down to San Berdoo. (I anticipate a clusterfuck, although hopefully, traffic will be mostly Vegas-bound) Now that CA-210 is completed, I will really be paralleling Route 66 all the way to just short of downtown L.A.
If I had someone with me, I might actually do the original Route 66, but as it is, all I really want to do is get home. Even if it is with the usual trepidation.
Ah, me. It's not so much that I don't get sad as often. It's just a lot easier to bounce back.
I've spent a lot of time avoiding the demons lurking in my brain. They will be, for better or for worse, my only travel companions.
And, appropriately so, I will mention the following poem:
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. —J.R.R. Tolkien
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Mon, 15 Dec 2003
topthe illusion of "I"
So I am reading Barbara Jane's New Blog and stumble upon this interesting Quizilla, Which 20th Century Theorist are you?. Now I know absolutely nothing about postmodern epistemological theory—the farthest I really got was existentialism, with a dash of postcolonialism and neo-Marxism thrown in simply because I'm a person-of-color who hung out with other people-of-color who actually understand this stuff. I only know Freud from negative example: no serious psychiatrist or behavioralist takes him seriously anymore, and modern psychiatry and cognitive development is pretty much built upon neuroscience and cognitive behavior.
And now I know why this is so. Thanks to the seeds planted by Jacques Lacan, there is now a mechanistic theory of how various non-conscious neural networks conspire to form a vast, nebulous "I" (that is, Freud's vaunted ego.) As work in molecular neuroscience progresses, we are more and more able to localize where in space these non-conscious neural networks exist, but the "I" circuit cannot be pinpointed, and a contingent of neuroscientists and psychiatrists are starting to believe that there is no "I" per se, that instead it is an emergent property of the interaction of these neural networks. (To reiterate a popular catch phrase, there are demons lurking in your skull. I'll try to eventually elucidate what that means, but not now.)
Which brings us somewhat tangentially to both artificial intelligence and the nature of psychosis and what this means about reality. But I will not go into all that right now.
Anyway, the Quizilla said I was this guy:
You are Jacques Lacan! Arguably the most important
psychoanalyst since Freud, you never wrote
anything down, and the only works of yours are
transcriptions of your lectures. You are
notoriously difficult to understand, but at
least you didn't talk about the penis as much
as other psychoanalysts. You died in 1981.
What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
It mostly, for better or for worse, really does apply.
Calvin: I'm a misunderstood genius!
Hobbes: What's misunderstood about you?
Calvin: No one thinks I'm a genius!
Anyway.
> /blog-bites > permalink > 1 comments
topiBook saga continues
I miss blogging. Of course, lately I have very little to blog about, what with my life completely subsumed with my internal medicine subinternship, and interviews with med/peds residency programs, but, frankly, I'm beginning to feel pretty mentally constipated.
So I have been struggling with my iBook for a month and a half now. After two logic board changes, it still struggles fitfully with Jaguar, and invariably locks up completely with Panther. (I am typing this running Jaguar, over ssh. Although it still locks up even on 10.2, at least I can actually get a message out.)
So it was Saturday, and I was still recovering from my bout of flu, when I decided to go to the Apple Store on Michigan Ave. Of course, it started snowing, and being that it is the peak of Christmas shopping season, I had to park about half a mile away after circling for about 45 minutes. The guy at the Genius Bar was really helpful, running Norton Disk Doctor to make sure my hard drive wasn't screwed up. I'd already gone through the drill of testing my SO-DIMMs and pulling out my Airport card, and doing a clean reinstall of Panther, resetting the PRAM, and all the usual magical incantations that Macheads like to invoke. No dice. He then starts up my system with a Firewire drive, and it runs 10.2.7 without problems for the most part. Then he starts up my system from a Powerbook with Panther on it, and all seems well, as I startup massive, resource-intensive programs like Photoshop, Quark, InDesign, Final Cut Pro, and God knows what else, and, like clockwork, it eventually locks.
He offers to do a third logic board replacement, and I assent, given that I have thrown away countless hours trying to solve this futile puzzle. As long as it's fixed. He consults some coworkers, checks out some info, and comes to the realization that it would probably be more fruitful to simply give me a new iBook. Now, of course, since my model is no longer in production, they might have to give me a new one. And since it was Saturday, there were no higher-ups to approve or disapprove the request. So I wait.
Now, not being able to run Panther isn't the end of the world, I suppose, although these random system lock ups aren't exactly a walk in the park either. All I want is a working iBook, really, and if I have to send this one back to the depot, then so be it.
Still, overall, the experience is still superior to my historic battles with various incarnations of the evil spawn of Redmond, and still better than screwing around with Linux on my ancient i386-based computer. (For the latter, I may very well have either a flaky motherboard, some bad RAM, some other defective component, or some unholy combination thereof. It also doesn't help that it is oh-so-easy to install beta and alpha and just plain broken releases of any piece of software, from mp3 players to crucial things like GNOME and the kernel. I can do that on MacOSX, too, but at least I can't take out the kernel with a foolhardy foray into beta-land. So it works, and can maintain an uptime of several days, but half the time, things won't launch. Mostly because I went crazy with apt-rpm. Ah, the foolish things you can do as root. Oh, and now that Redhat uses the Bluecurve theme, it's actually quite aesthetically pleasing, although I can no longer put the window buttons on the correct side of the window frame.)
(This entry was inspired by Michelle's meditation upon, among other things, the genderization of computer operating systems. Don't ask me how, it just was.)
P.S. I am intending to drive from the frozen wastelands of the Midwest to proverbial sunny Southern California, roughly paralleling old Route 66. I have some trepidation as I know at least two people who have met their demise on the Interstate Highway system, but it is much too, much too late to get a plane ticket for a reasonable fare, plus I don't have anywhere to put my car to keep it from getting buried by snow, and I'd much rather have my own car when I'm back in L.A. So that's my cockamamie plan. I'm hoping that my avoidance of the high passes of Colorado through the Rockies will work in my favor, but, well, like the rest of my life in general, whatever happens is out of my hands. Fight fate, indeed. I hate sounding so ominous, but what can you do?
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Thu, 11 Dec 2003
topsmall tragedies
My sister calls me, her voice quavering, asking me if I want them to wait for me before they euthanize our 13 year old dog Lucky. I am nonplussed, taken aback, but I guess I've been desensitized to death, I've known that this would come at some point eventually, and I tell her, do whatever you gotta do. Lucky has lived a full life, especially for a dog her size, and it would grieve me to know that she was in pain for her last days.
Then my sister backtracks, says that, while Lucky is injured, it isn't fatal. She's gonna need some surgery, and I nor my siblings have no job and very little money, and while our mom might consent for surgery, it is almost certain that our dad won't.
So, like any other family contemplating whether or not to sign a DNR form (and I don't mean to make light of anyone whose family member is the end stage of a chronic disease, but Lucky is definitely a member of our family), we have nothing to do but wait. Because nature will take its course anyway, whether or not we make a decision, and sometimes you have to treat the family as much as treat the patient, and everything has a psychiatric component to it.
But I ramble.
So it has been about five weeks of practically living in my own filth (and I hate to brag, but, R, you ain't got nothing on me when it comes to disaster areas.) Piles and piles of mail sit unopened on my ironing board, even larger piles of clean laundry lie unfolded, partially mingled with dirty laundry, and it is only now at the end of a long, hard day of trying to put things in some semblance of order that I am able to walk a clear path to my bed.
I picked up my iBook yesterday (when I was certain that I had pneumonia and that I would die in the middle of the Magnificent Mile, but I'm over it) and I'm sad because it still doesn't work, and my faith in Apple is wobbling, but I will press on. And perhaps need to buy a new computer. With the money I don't have. Even as I can't afford to buy anyone a Christmas present. How sad am I?
Times like this make me despise the commercial nature of the end-of-the-year holidays.
Times like this I am reminded that I am still in the throes of a crisis of faith.
"Someday soon we all will be together, if the Fates allow. Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow."
I think that is the most poignant line I've heard coming from a Christmas song. I ponder the possibility of spending the next four Christmases out here in the frozen Midwest all alone, unable to come home, with no one to come home to, and my will just freezes, and I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life, what does it matter?
And still, I suppose I am doomed to make hard decisions for the rest of my life, knowing that I've closed some doors permanently.
They say you can never go home again. I never realized how that meant so much more than being unbearably distant from a geographic location.
I'm still looking for that light at the end of the tunnel, forging ahead on the rumor that there's something more than this.
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topdizzy
I love how medical school has made me a hopeless hypochondriac.
(If you don't like dark, depressing stories—even if they're entirely hypothetical—I urge you to skip this entry. That means you, B)
So I've been having these dizzy spells for the past couple of days. Now, while I'm pretty decent at eliciting a history from a patient, I'm absolutely atrocious at giving one. So this is not the beginning. A couple of days ago, I was exposed to a cat. I am deathly allergic to cats—typical type I reaction: allergic conjunctivitis/rhinitis and bronchospasm. So the next morning, I wake up feeling like ass, feverish and having chills. (Weirdest thing, my temporal muscles were involved....) Half convinced that I had pneumonia, I weighed the pros and cons of starting antibiotics. The public health official in me rebelled at the thought, so I thought I'd just tough it out. About midway through the day, I was pondering whether or not I should stop on by the emergency department.
So I'd get dizzy every so often, which is not that surprising when you're sick and dehydrated. So I drank a lot of water. At least a couple of liters. And, magically, I felt better by the end of the night. I felt tired and beat-up, but my chest no longer felt like it was on fire, or that it was trying to implode, and I was no longer hacking up icky-green stuff. (Thank goodness for the flu vaccine. Yeah, I still got sick, but, as I am wont to say these days, it could've been worse.)
And I was fine all day today, up until I finished my interview.
I suppose it could all be psychosomatic. (And for all of those who know me, I'm sure you're satisfied with this diagnosis.) I am, after all, in a rather stressful part of my life, where the direction I go is completely out of my hands, entirely at the mercy of Chance.
Or, it could be the obscene amounts of caffeine I've been ingesting (which is great for the bronchospasm, but not so good for trying to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.)
Or, because I love worst case scenarios, I could have a brain tumor.
I figure I'll just keep drinking gallons of water, try not to drink too much caffeine, and see if it improves or worsens in the next week, after which I am definitely going to see a doctor. I've always wanted an MRI. Heh.
(Of course, I can hear the governor of California now. It's not a tumor!)
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Wed, 10 Dec 2003
topinterlude
Four interviews within five days? Sure, no problem.
I clearly have no concept of reality. I've only done one site thus far and I am already deathly ill.
It boggles the mind, really. I swear I got a little dizzy thinking about how the next month and a half will determine the trajectory of my life. Or it could be that I'm just dehydrated and got a little woozy.
Why is it that when you're sick, you're always dehydrated?
What I wouldn't do to have some normal saline dripping in my veins right now.
Oh, and antibiotics, or no antibiotics? That is the question.
I'm so very tired.
More later. My mind is definitely not working correctly right now.
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Sat, 06 Dec 2003
topgraceful cascading failure
Renowned writer Arthur C. Clarke comments on information overload. From slashdot.org, natch.
My favorite quote:
But it is vital to remember that information—in the sense of raw data—is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight.
It makes me think of something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness:
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
It brings to mind the rationale of cascading style sheets. Ideally, every web browser should support CSS, but if not, then there should be a reasonable fallback. And you can specify different levels of fallbacks. And if you end up at the bottom of the cascade of failures, you still get the information, although perhaps it isn't presented in the prettiest way.
And for some reason, it makes me think of the three rules of internship: eat when you can, sleep when you can, shit when you can.
Oh man. Apophenia. My excuse is that I'm post-call.
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topruminations continued
I've just been pondering how too many people disdain activists. Yes, I accept the fact that people have jobs and have families to take care of and sometimes they can't afford to be idealistic. Survival ends up coming first. There is nothing wrong with that. You can't help anybody if you're dead.
But the disdain I often encounter is based on an observational fallacy. Because of my youth, I am often challenged to name my accomplishments. I am often assumed to be foolish and lacking wisdom. Not to say that I am all-wise and all-knowing, but I rarely get any credit for any wit I do have. The assumption is that I don't know what I'm talking about, without any regard to actually getting to know what I'm like.
This is the nature of the typical challenge: "It's not enough to just talk about something. You've got to do something about it."
This is, prima facie, a valid challenge. But here is where the fallacy comes in. Especially in American society, people tend to be very results driven, end-point oriented. Slow and gradual processes are disdained. No one ever gets credit for working in the background and making sure things run smoothly. Hilariously, these people are sometimes the first ones who get laid off, because when they get reviewed, they have no significant "accomplisments" to show for. And then, of course, once they're gone, the CEO starts wondering why productivity has dropped, ends up blaming it all on the tanking economy, never once realizing that they probably just pissed away their greatest assets.
Activism, despite all our talk of flash flood revolutions, and the torrential downpour of change, is a slow and gradual process that rarely shows any outward sign of accomplishment. But, truly, it is like a rainstorm. Occasionally it does occur, but for the most part, a single rainstorm is not going to dramatically alter the landscape. Maybe a few new rills here, maybe the mountains lose a few micrometers of sediment. Nothing to write home about. Who cares? But, given time, and enough rainstorms, even Mt. Everest will get eroded away. As Gandhi once said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is important that you do it."
Back to my point. So, when an activist is challenged to "actually do something about it," what can he or she say? If their goal had been already accomplished, would there be any need for activism? Of course not. So since it's not accomplished yet, what evidence could an activist possibly point to that would show that their words are not idle? Nothing. Of course a work in process will have no outward sign of accomplishment. There will be no finished product if the product is, in fact, not finished. So of course it will look like the activist does nothing, and just spouts out inflammatory, combustible rhetoric.
That, of course, is the nature of the revolution. When the Powers that Be allow freedom, the revolution is invisible, coursing through the water table underground, moistening the soil, welling up quietly in hidden valleys, concealed springs. When the Powers that Be demand obedience, create oppression, decide to dam up the rivers and fill in the seas, the revolution rises up like a raging river, like the wild tide on a full moon, like a typhoon, a tsunami. JFK noted this. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
I admit, the burden of proof is on the teller of the tale. But how can you prove something that is, for the most part invisible? You can't. You either have faith, or you don't. And most people in this time of the Age of Humanity have very little faith. Myself included.
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Fri, 05 Dec 2003
topthe way
I have been embroiled in a flame war regarding, of all things, Taoism in, of all places, the Alibata Yahoo! Group. Which is remarkably synchronous with my ruminations regarding Ursula K. Le Guin, whose works are pretty much infused with Taoism, and who wrote a poetic interpretation of the Tao Te Ching as well. The at-times rancorous exchange has gotten my mind back on the Tao, and how I really should get to finishing reading all those different translations that I've started, and how, ever since my crisis of faith, precipitated by September 11 and the Catholic Church's abysmal handling of the child molestation charges, the only thing I've really had any faith in is the Way.
Perhaps it's because, ultimately, I have a pessimistic nature, but I really like the naturalistic interpretation of the Way. It is Western physics expressed in poetry instead of equations. Both the Tao and the laws of thermodynamics reveal a relentless indifference to human aspiration and existence. They do not require human participation in order to be true. (Because, even if Heisenberg and Schroedinger are right, and the universe only exists if there is an observer, I think it's possible that the universe observes itself, though as a mind, it is Godel-incomplete, like all minds and mathematical systems.)
I like these philosophies because it frees us from the oppression of some greater deity controlling our destiny and demanding our worship. And I think, in its pure form, Christianity is also free of this oppression. The God I believe in (most of the time) is a God who believes most of all in Free Will. God created us so that we might love him, but a commanded love is not love at all. So he/she lets us hurt him with our rejection, because the reward of our acceptance, free from fear of punishment, or desire of secondary gain, or any sort of compulsion, is perhaps the greatest force existent in the universe. If God is Love, than everyone who loves him/her back, truly loves God, causes a multiplication of God, and of Love.
But I digress.
I have come to accept that the world's organized religions are mostly instruments for the consolidation and preservation of power, and power is always greedy, always paranoid, always oppressive. Oppression is to power, at least this kind of power, as gravity is to mass. Ah yes. Power. There is the typical power wielded by men of state, by CEOs, by abusive husbands, by the mighty. Most people, particularly those embedded in a Calvinistically embued culture, such as the U.S., readily recognize this as power. The power to make you do things you'd rather not do. The power that grudgingly feeds you, houses you, and clothes you, only because you aid it in continuing to consolidate its power. This kind of power is a voracious black hole that swallows anything within its reach, imploding further and further upon itself, until it swallows the entire world. This is the power that is wielded by Jonathan Edwards' wrathful God, the vengeful God of the Old Testament, the Punisher, the Destroyer.
But the other kind of power, the power that is creation and creativity, the power that is God, is the Tao, is generative and life-giving, that is the power that is given to the oppressed. It is all around us, unharnessed, because we continue to strive for the other kind of power. It is the spontaneous power of laughter, of hope in the face of overwhelming odds, of doing more than just surviving, but of living with integrity and passion, despite the forces arrayed against you. It is the power of the fluctuations of the vacuum, which literally creates something from nothing. From the Void there was everything, and remarkably, even Western Science has figured that out, at least those in the vanguard who have gazed upon the vastness of creation and were awestruck. And instead of feeling lonely and insignificant, they rejoiced. Even in the austere gleaming gems of the skies, the stars hanging out so far away that the distance is incomprehensible, there are enormous mysteries, beautiful structures to be explored and discerned, and comprehended, however imperfectly, by our minds.
I think, and it is only my humble and uninformed opinion, that a true follower of the Way is special because he keeps this power in his heart, despite knowing that the Way brings him to the edge of doom, that the Way will eventually overwhelm him or her, from nothing to nothing, back into the quantum foam from whence we arose. That the Way is unencumbered with worrying which power will prevail, because in reality, the two powers are in lockstep, parry-to-parry. Neither side will ever win, because the balance will always right itself.
But our part to play is not to save the world, which does not need saving. It is not to cure all the ills of the world, to once and for all solve the problems of the suffering. This is, if you think about it, mere laziness, the desire to not get involved, to refuse to be drawn in to the stinking muck and mire of the powerless. Just set it and forget it. Find the cure, and give it to them, and they can go home happy and stop bothering me. This is not the salvation that the Tao has to offer.
It becomes clear to me that the cliche "It's the journey, not the destination" in fact harbors much Taoist sentiment. The big things are impossible for one person to overcome. But the little things are many, and surmountable, and instead of giving into ego and trying to figure out how to save the most people in one fell swoop, start by fixing your own little corner of the world.
We are born to die. This is a consequence of the Tao, a consequence of the Laws of Thermodynamics. It is folly to rant against this truth, though we try, with our medicines and computers. We try to cheat death, to somehow live forever. But the values don't add up. Immortality is akin to the perpetual motion machine. If you screw with the variables enough and fudge some co-factors here and there, it seems like it will actually work. But something has to give. There is a price for everything, either morally or energetically.
So I ramble.
I was pondering the other night, how I felt tired and beat down. How my soul ached, not for one giant sadness that smashed me down, but the hundreds of tiny cuts and lacerations on my soul. I truly believe that it isn't the big things that get you in the end. It's all the small things added up. And for a moment, I mourned that there was no one I could share my experience with, no one who I dared burden with my sadness.
I know there are some who would listen. I thought about telling them, spilling the dark secrets in my heart, but I could not dare. What was my small, tiny suffering to them? They are good friends, and they would not turn me away, but, it comes back to that idea: I wish there was someone who had a stake in what I had to say. But this is not the sort of thing that gets granted out of thin air. Everything has to be in place. And I recognize that I haven't found my place yet. I'm getting closer, but I'm definitely not there.
And so I kept it to myself, and slept in silence, my unremembered dreams easing my care.
I think it might be enough. For now, at least. And I suppose that's all the really matters.
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Sun, 30 Nov 2003
topcreation
I forgot to mention another parallel between "The Creation of Ea" (the Earthsea Creation Story) and "Malakas at Maganda" (a Filipino Creation story). While the Immanent Grove figures prominently in the Earthsea Cycle, the grove of bamboo serves as the birthplace of humanity in "Malakas at Maganda."
Anyway, I decided to search Google for Manaul, one of the names given to the bird who flies between sea and sky, in search of place to alight.
- Philippine Creation Myths by Penelope V. Flores, Ph.D.
- Mythology and Folk Lore: A Creation Story
- "Manaul" is a name for the Philippine Eagle, also known as the Monkey-eating Eagle.
- Hiligaynon Mythology, although, for some reason, this reminds me too much of the Greek Myths.
- A brief mention of Maguayen, goddess of the Sea
- Stories that mention Manaul, Kaptan, and Magwayen. The bird and the war of sea and sky is attributed to the Indonesians, once again making clear the relationship binding all Austronesians. Interestingly, the grove of bamboo is on the island of Panay, one of the Visayan Islands. Since I'm not a native speaker, I can't say this with confidence, but I'm pretty sure that in one Austronesian language at least, panay means something like "completely," or "entirely." (Hmmm. So is Panay the equivalent to Roke, then?)
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topplumbing the depths of code
I've mentioned the fact that the twin pillars of the new economy, information technology and biotechnology, both deal mostly with information, specifically code, whether the binary digits of silicon, gallium, and arsenic, or the trinary codons of DNA.
In that (however tangential) vein, I find it fascinating that molecular biology is being used to pursue the theory of Austronesians reaching South America.
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topearthsea continued
I searched Google for the idea I threw around earlier, of how Austronesians sailed to Easter Island and maybe even to the west coast of South America and found it in the Valley News, among other places.
The search continues.
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toplazy sunday
Sunday calls can be bad, because since the day is often uneventful, you have to keep admitting through the night. Of course, this is when five people decide to walk into the ER complaining of chest pain, who end up having abnormal EKGs, and now you're admitting five people at 5 in the morning.
Of course, one can always pray.
Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
In any case, I am sitting here in the computer lab, browsing through The Ekumen, a Yahoo group dedicated to the writings of Ursula K Le Guin, of whom I have been gushing about as of late. In the message archive, I come across Le Guin's commencement address to the Bryn Mawr class of 1986 which perfectly jives with the sentiments which I have been ranting about in the Alibata Yahoo group. It is interesting that this comes to mind this Thanksgiving weekend, where I can't help but be reminded that this land was stolen from the natives who lived here, by a people who believed in a malignant, vengeful God. I remarked the other day to my roommate how Calvin has left a pretty indelible mark on U.S. history, stretching until present day, and ultimately, if you interpret it a certain way, American imperialism is an extension of the tenets of Calvinism.
But enough of that.
As a side note, I can't seem to get Mindterm to work off of my own webhost. Apparently, I need to figure out how to self-sign the Java applet. Which I apparently can't do here. So I have found this page off of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering which features Mindterm as a Java applet.
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topcatalog
Yes, your eyes are not deceived. It is in fact 3am Central Standard Time, and I am come from a rescue, though I knew it not until it was accomplished. The smell of drear smoke hangs onto me. (I think to myself, where is the rhyme, the reason.... But that is neither here nor there.) It has been a while since I went out onto the streets, had a few drinks, smoked a few cigarettes, an awkward moment, the meaning of my presence not registering until it is told to me baldly to my face, and, if I were someone else, if I were not who I was (and, I wonder idly, why is the subjunctive mood going out of favor in the English language?) I might suppose that I have but to wait, I have but to set my own terms, and they will come to me willingly.
I am rambling, with too much drink in me, despite the fact that I have a job to do tomorrow, I have duties to discharge (and I suppose that is a pun, albeit a weak one, and too circumscribed in its audience of who would understand it.)
And I am speaking in riddles, caught up in the fantasy world that I have immersed myself in for the past however many days, unwilling to face the world as it is. I have always been unwilling to face the world as it is, always wishing it were something else, something better.
But such is my Fate.
My blood is afire, for what, I do not know, the chance has long ago passed, why is it only when I am not-wanting am I given what I had long desired?
On the other hand, it most likely means nothing. And yet there are hard truths that I cannot reconcile with my certainty that nothing ever goes right.
I cannot change who I am.
Really, it does not matter, except that my mind is addled, disturbed by the interruption of sleep, of jumping upon the chance, the risk of the unknown. I was not troubled, and so of course the course of the evening turned until I was troubled.
It has been staring at me blankly to my face for a while now, something that I dare not grasp, have been warned against, and yet, it is there, even a blind man like myself, I can see it is there if I wish it.
I desire, and yet, something unnamed holds me back. I do not understand.
Enough crypticness. Hopefully the world of dreams will sort it out for me. Or not. Such is life.
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Sat, 29 Nov 2003
topthe smiths "last night i dreamt that somebody loved me"
Last night I really did dream. It was kind of depressing in a familiar sort of way, and I was not surprised when I woke alone. But what struck me wasn't the sex (although there was that in the dream), but holding her in my arms, trusting each other.
But enough of self-pity.
Still, I wonder.
Apparently, I am perseverating, thinking again and again of Le Guin's Earthsea, and now I think upon the matter of male and female. Gender roles (which Le Guin magnificently examined in The Left Hand of Darkness.) Are the stereotypes she makes in the Earthsea Cycle true to life, or are they merely a gimmick to explain some fantasy mechanics? (Yes still, it rings truer than the artificiality of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time dichotomy between saidar and saidin, the female and male halves of the One Power. The ying and yang feature significantly in this fantasy series as well.)
Even in this day and age, is it true that some things are still looked upon as "a man's job," while other things are "women's work"?
Although I must say, medicine is culturally behind at least a generation. The fact that the previous generation of doctors was white and male is still apparent, although, I must say, the majority of my teachers have been women. And yet, is there something about healing that is inherently female, somehow?
Anyway. I thought about my loneliness, and the solitarity of an Earthsea mage. In Le Guin's fantasy, there is a superstition that men, in order to have magical powers, must be celibate. (Although I suppose it is not far from the superstition believed by many of the religious. I shudder to wonder about the incidence of pederasty in the magehood.... Hey, I'm not a pervert. It's just that I finished reading Tehanu and just watched "Gothika.") And so wizards lived alone, not just without a woman, but often without true friends, except for perhaps other mages, and maybe not even those.
And, not to elevate what I'm doing beyond what it is—it is a tradition upheld throughout history, nothing more, nothing less—but it struck me how similar being a physician is to being a wizard. As Schmendrick the Magician from The Last Unicorn noted, "That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening. The rest is technique." What we do is descended from the priesthood, anyway. We are the gatekeepers to the spiritual world, easing babies into life, guiding the elderly out of life. We are the keepers of specialized knowledge, the prognosticators, the diviners of hidden processes.
After an intellectual debate I had with a fellow classmate, I thought: what is it that separates the practicing attending physician from the 4th year medical student? Surely, it is not sheer knowledge, for anyone can pick up a textbook or journal and read, and if you have a good mimind, probably understand. I truly believe that, for lack of anything more precise, it is mostly wisdom that makes the difference. A virtue that can only be acquired by experience, by trusting in your existing fund of knowledge, by building upon this steady base. The structure must already be built, the mast upright. We have but to raise the sails and gather the wind. What we must learn mostly in the intervening years it to have faith, to stay true to our oath, to have confidence in our craft, and always, always be willing to learn something new.
This is not the first time I've mentally masturbated thinking about this parallel. I remember when I first read the Harry Potter series, that it was strange, how not-unlike medicine and magic are. (After all, as Arthur C Clarke has remarked, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") The discipline required. The personalities that it attracts. The bizarre inferiority complexes that get manifest as arrogance and disdain for fellow human beings. As there is black magic and white magic, there is surgery and there is internal medicine. Sometimes what we do is empty of power except for the ritual. The orders written are like incantations, the drugs prescribed like magical ingredients, potions, and elixirs.
Someone else had written that the physician is this age's incarnation of the priest, the wizard. After all, in past generations, the line between magic and medicine was indeed murky. There are witch doctors, medicine men, healers. This is the tradition we are derived from. (And also, this same someone pointed out that entertainers, specifically, actors, were also derived from this tradition.) I think precisely because of the technological prowess of our era, not a few of us are longing for some real magic.
But back to my point: in Le Guin's books, the only men who know how to wash dishes, do laundry, sew their own clothes, are the wizards, because of their predilection to celibacy, and the lack of anyone else to do it for them. And I think back to when A laughed as I ironed my shirts, teasing E that he should learn how to iron from me, and after re-reading these Earthsea books, I wonder if there really is a connection to having knowledge and being alone, as if the two things were mutually exclusive. (No, I am not talking about knowing how to do "women's work"—I am using Le Guin's words just for simplicity sake, and I hope you won't read any paternalism in it. There is just the fact that I am trying to rationalize my solitude by noting how much time studying the Art takes.)
To cut to the chase (I don't even know how I am making this conceptual leap), is there really something about being a real man, and is it true that to have knowledge and understanding, you cannot be a man?
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tople guin, dick, and the matrix
I just remembered what else I meant to write.
It comes full circle, I suppose. As I mentioned before, both Le Guin and Dick have ties to Berkeley. And, although William Gibson indeed coined the term "The Matrix" long before the Internet as we know it existed and the Wachowski Brothers started thinking about their great project, I think it is Dick's story Valis that first gave form to the nightmares inhabiting the world of the Wachowskis' "Matrix."
What does this have to do with Earthsea?
Immortality, and the price that must be paid.
Now, granted, this is me reading between the lines again, but, as someone else wrote somewhere on the net, it makes more sense that the Matrix was created voluntarily. The machines did not enslave us. We enslaved ourselves. Imagine, for example, that we created these human farms, because we wanted to live forever, and many prognosticators note that the only way we can live forever is to leave our weak, decaying bodies and encase our spirits in metal, or perhaps live free on the electronic ether as pulses of light and electricity. So we programmed the Architect and told him our specifications for our electronic paradise, and he set about to make it so, to the extreme perfection that is a machine's wont, and perfection, as the Architect has noted, failed miserably. So the next incarnation of the Matrix was akin to our normal, grueling lives, and, perversely, this made people happier, and the Architect thought his job was done, except that what people want is not to live forever, but to be free. Because what is the use of living forever as an unchanging, unthinking program, really? It's one thing if you are like the maintenance programs that handle the pigeons, or, in fact if you are an animal with rudimentary sentience, or, as in Earthsea, you are a dragon who cast off the material world a long time ago. All you have to think about is the now, if even that. You perform your function. You obey your impulses. You live without asking questions, and then you die, eventually. You have refused to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and so you do not fret about the afterlife, and the undoubtable impending judgement. But, once knowing good and evil, you must choose, again and again, from moment to moment. As explicated by Camus, it is the existentialist dilemma. To know that your next move, for good or for ill, will reverberate across space-time, even if you don't believe in an afterlife per se, well, I think this is a horrible thing, and yet, this is what we wanted. What we chose. And since, if the story of the Fall of Humanity from Paradise is true, we once chose to know good and evil, it is against our nature to unlearn it. These become the rebels who flee to Zion, the ones who trust to choice, the ones who refuse to become automatic. (The comparison with the dragons rings false, now that I think about it. Theirs is, as a fallen priest once told me in another context, a third way. The animals, the maintenance programs, they are like brute force algorithms that have no use for thinking. But the dragons are truly free in a way that we can only hope for, though cannot really imagine.)
Now I am reinterpreting "The Matrix."
What follows from this is the realization that it is not enough to simply rebel against the System. When our fearless heroes are in the Matrix, they have superhuman powers, they are able to exploit the System and use the System against itself. But this is not freedom, only reaction. Another automatic response, to resist that which seeks to destroy you. The only true way out is to get out of the System, even if this requires sacrificing all the power you have accumulated in the Matrix.
Life is not simply a dichotomy between being free and being bound, although once you start binding things to yourself, you are bound to continue doing so until the weight is so great you can no longer lift your head up and death becomes a welcome release.
But I know in my heart of hearts that freedom is to be enjoyed now, that the oppressors must somehow be converted (one person at a time), and that Jesus was dead-serious when he said that we must prepare for the Kingdom of God. It won't be a kingdom that is handed to us scot-free. We really are supposed to build it from the ground up.
But here is the last of my mystical mumbo-jumbo. The twin pillars of the new economy—information technology and biotechnology (which if you think about it, are really the same thing, since they both deal with code, albeit in starkly different media)—are leading us to longevity, and perhaps maybe eventually immortality, and on the other side, the four horseman of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, and death, the forces of reaction, of trying to maintain the status quo of kill-or-be-killed, eat-or-be-eaten, might makes right, the rule of irrational beasts, and each side is a vision of grave imbalance. This one thing perhaps statisticians and Taoists believe in common: the truth lies somewhere in the middle, undefinable, ever changing, but nonetheless there. We cannot pretend we are automatic programs, trying to live life without thinking. Decisions must be made, and no algorithm in all the world will save us.
OK, I'm done.
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topfiction and so called reality
Since I sped right through Tehanu, I decided to keep going on to The Other Wind, and again, I am astounded by the faint echoes of things that I once knew, or had been told, once upon a time, in that imaginary place that was my childhood. My mind tries to reach for symmetry, for congruity, understanding that within every story, however fantastic, there is a bit of reality, that a story is a lie we use to tell the truth.
I believe that what separates humans from other animals is that we can imagine what-is-not. Even crazier, we can cause what-is-not to become.
Hopefully none of the following will make any sense if you've never read any of the Earthsea Cycle, as perhaps my meandering ruminations may spoil some of the magic of this series. In any case, you have been warned, and if you want to read the cycle without any preconceptions, it would be wise to skip the rest of this entry.
Earthsea has always made me think of the Philippines. Not that the Philippines is the only island nation in the world, but obviously, it is the one I am most familiar with. Moreover, the Hardic people of Earthsea are brown skinned, usually without much facial and body hair.
The modern nation-state of the Republic of the Philippines, however, is an artificial entity created by colonialism. It was not until I took a class in Southeast Asian Studies that I realized that my people's history, like the history of all ancient peoples, is not bounded by delineations of territory. I came to realize that, though my people are not really empire-builders (although some have created empires), the region of the Earth touched by the culture of my people is indeed imperial in scope, as far east as Madagascar, as far west as the Easter Islands, perhaps even the mainland of South America itself. That the island now called Taiwan may have been our ancestral homeland, and that what is now the Philippines become our bridge to the world (as it still is, I suppose), never becoming completely trammelled by an imperial power, as the islands to the south did in time.
In the beginning was freedom, because freedom and survival were one and the same, and if you did not survive, then you did not live.
Bondage was a thing created by religion, indeed, created even by our own religion, the Ways of the Sea and the Sky, the traditions of the animists, perhaps the reason why Catholicism (and Islam) was so easily adaptable to the environment.
The thing I learned about the animistic beliefs is the importance of boundaries. Of categories. Of names, i.e., labels. (This made sense to me, as many Filipinos I've met seem to be the most prejudiced people I know.) That which respects its proper boundaries is inert and safe. That which crosses boundaries is dangerous, and, well, powerful. So they told me that in the old days, it was the babaylan who was the spiritual center, the bridge, as it were, from the realm of physical objects and the realm of spiritual energy. The babaylan, who was ambiguously male and female. (And the word somehow became corrupted to bakla, the term for homosexual, which, perhaps mistakenly on my part, doesn't seem to have the same connotations that "faggot" has in English.)
Rivers were sacred things, not be lightly crossed. And if you strayed from the boundaries of the village, you were fair game for the spirits of the forest. The creation of the kris blade was an infusion of power: the elements of fire, metal, and water came together to forge that which was meant to sunder.
I have yet to articulate it all sensibly, but suffice it to say, learning this, it made sense why, despite being an island nation, descendants of a race of avid seafarers, many Filipinos did not know how to swim. Why, even with the coming of Catholicism, the animist ways still survived, couched in terms of the Roman catechism, perhaps, but nonetheless, plainly visible if you knew where to look.
So a woman who kept her long hair wild and free, unbound, as it were, was also dangerous. And to step over a person was as dangerous as crossing a river, or crossing the boundary between the village and the forest. Things that cut were practically sacred—tools used precisely for the breaking of boundaries.
There is more that I am forgetting.
But what does this have to do with Earthsea?
Well, as another excursus, there is the creation myth. In Earthsea, the Creator is named Segoy, who happens to be a dragon, and before Segoy spoke the words of Making, there was only sea and sky. My favorite version of the Creation myth of my people involves the sea and sky as well, and the trickster bird Manaul (who reminds me of Loki of the Norse, Inktomi of the Native Americans) who provoked the sky into throwing down rocks from the sky (meteors?!?) upon the sea to create land so that he could have a place to rest. (Is it mere coincidence and my apophenic mind to realize that, while dragons have traditionally been reptilian, reptiles have been discovered to be related to birds, just in our own era, and perhaps there were dragons in the long forgotten past before the human race had memory, although I still don't understand the breathing of fire.)
And, though perhaps not in as straightforward a way, in both cultures (the imaginary and the real), a name is used to bind. In Earthsea, giving a true name causes one to have power over whatever is named. In Southeast Asia, to give something a name is to define its boundaries, and thus bind its otherwise dangerous power. (Somehow, I can't articulate why, this makes me think of Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2. Each atom of creation is bound by Bohr's quantum energy levels, and the counterintuitive nuclear forces, without which the Big Bang would've just cooled off and faded away probably without creating matter at all. But I simplify things I don't really understand.)
And death: in the East of Earthsea, in the Kargad Lands, they believe that when we die, our spirits are yielded unto the universe, and are then reborn anew, without memory of the last life. Likewise, my animistic forebears believed that death was final, that the energy of our spirit was yielded back into the storehouse of energy in the universe, that our lives were ever bounded by life and death.
And here is the apparently political point that Le Guin makes. The obsession of the afterlife has caused an imbalance in Earthsea's Tao-like Equilibrium. In the West of Earthsea (although not the Uttermost West), the Hardic people believe that when you die, you cross the wall of stones (again, with the crossing), and enter upon the "Dry Land," where the stars do not change and no other living thing moves, and it is always night time, and the spirits of the dead do not see each other, such that loved ones will walk past one another and not recognize each other. (As someone else noted—I'll try to track it down someday—this is very much in tune with the original Jewish understanding of Sheol, which was, in many ways, the precursor to the Christian vision of Hell. We find out (this is a spoiler) that this Wall was created by humans to try to cheat death, and that this Wall caused what should've been Paradise to turn into the Dry Land, and only when they die do they realize their folly, that what they have created is not eternal life, but merely, eternal consciousness of being dead. And thus, they cannot be reborn, and are bound to this twilight existence, with no surcease of suffering.
I don't know why, but my ancestors' version of the afterlife seems to ring true to me. In the sense that there is no afterlife. When you die, that's all there is, there ain't no mo', and while there probably is a God, there is no heaven, not in the way we understand it. There are no pearly gates, there is no happily ever after. After the end and before the beginning is the void, and all we have is that space in between. A dead mind—no, that makes no sense, because what is dead cannot change, and what cannot change cannot be a mind. When you cease to have a mind, you cease to be, and we cannot imagine the void because to be able to imagine, you must have a mind, but to understand the void you would have to not have a mind. The Godelian paradox. You may define everything except what is not. You cannot truly define what is false. Again, I simplify matters which I have little understanding.
And I can't help but reflect how, despite the fact that the New Testament is in fact a handbook for revolution, that Jesus was a revolutionary, a subversive—that is another story, the Christian faith seems to have been completely perverted into a tool of oppression. Instead of reminding its people that the meek shall inherit the earth, that the first will be last and the last will be first, and that Jesus came to divide not to unite, to set son against father, daughter against mother, for much of its history, instead it preached that we should make ready for the afterlife, and that any suffering in this world was to be borne with patience. That the status quo was the will of God, that the abuse and oppression caused by the wealthy and the powerful was how it was supposed to be. I think it is only in the past generation that some parts of the Christian faith realized that their mission was in this world, not the next, and that if God was truly loving, then oppression would not exist, that oppression was a human-made thing, a transgression against the laws of God. Although many Christians still live in the Dark Ages, and use the fear of God's punishment as weapons against their enemies.
And so, perhaps, Roman Catholicism is the Wall which my people have accepted, a false promise of an afterlife that excuses the misery caused by the wealthy and the powerful.
But I have strayed.
In any case, the similarity is only faint, I realize. The languages Le Guin uses has nothing in common with Austronesian tongues, really, except that they are essentially quite alien from English, and from the Romance languages that Westerners are most familiar with.
But still, Le Guin was the daughter of the Kroebers, those infamous anthropologists who exploited the last of the Yani, and who have a building named after them at UC Berkeley. Her books show this influence (that of the white man's sience of anthropology, and also perhaps its cultural antidote that was born at Cal, ethnic studies) Perhaps it is just the commonality of a mythical island homeland (for, being an American, my imaginings of the Philippines are doomed to always be mythical) and the philosophies that were born in that cradle of democracy, the University of California.
I have wandered far afield. I will stop here to regain my bearings.
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Wed, 26 Nov 2003
topbezerkeley
Perhaps I was doomed from the start. I remember driving to high school and passing by Berkeley Ave. every single weekday as I headed south on Glendale Blvd. And even earlier than that, I had been using GEOS for the Commodore 64. (This here is geek history—the Commodore 64 is probably the computer that most Gen X hackers grew up on, perhaps alongside the Apple IIc. GEOS was a GUI for the Commodore 64. Can you believe it? A GUI on a machine that only had 64KB of RAM.) The creator of this awesome piece of software was originally called, you guessed it, Berkeley Software Design. In retrospect, hilariously, I recall that the decorative fonts were all named after either buildings on the UC Campus, or streets. So they had fonts like Telegraph and Dwinelle, Durant and Evans, Barrows, Bancroft, Wheeler, LeConte. And the system font? BSD. (After the software company, not the venerable Berkeley Software Distribution version of UNIX.)
Anyway, the reason I started thinking about this (besides perhaps being subliminally influenced by R's meditation on the nature of time and its passing) is because I found myself in the book store again. (Yes, as if I had involuntarily drifted there....) Now, I've mentioned Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea Saga. (I'm sure I'm making that title up, but I'm too lazy to find the correct one for the series.) So of course, I decide I need to reread Tehanu and also The Tales of Earthsea and since I was in the Science Fiction and Fantasy section anyway, I might as well grab some of Philip K Dick's short stories (and ended up getting the anthology containing "Paycheck," upon which a movie directed by John Woo and starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman is based.)
And guess what these two authors have in common? Berkeley. Ursula K Le Guin is the daughter of the infamous anthropologist couple Alfred Kroeber (best known for his exploitation of the last Yani whom he named "Ishi." One of the UC Campus buildings is named after him, right across from Cafe Strada.) Phillip K Dick moved from Chicago to Berkeley, and many of his stories are set in the Bay Area (and the one that sent shivers down my spine was Man in the High Castle, an alternate history considering what would've happened if the Axis had won WWII.)
I think about the last time I wandered those streets, about a month and a half ago, and I realize my college days are drifting farther and farther back in my memory.
Just as I am trying to latch my eyes onto the present, and stop trying to peer ahead into the future, I realize that I can't rely on the past for comfort.
No day but today. Heh. Easier said than done.
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Tue, 25 Nov 2003
topthe other wind/the war of souls
I just finished the War of Souls, the latest trilogy in the Dragonlance universe by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. (Thanks, E, it was a good read.)
What struck me was the similarities between the trilogy and Ursula K Le Guin's The Other Wind, the latest in Earthsea Saga. Now, the first book in the DL trilogy came out a year and a half before the Earthsea book. But the last book in the DL trilogy came out a year later, and Le Guin actually had already explored the issue somewhat in The Farthest Shore.
What am I talking about? * SPOILER WARNING *
- The importance of dragons, particularly in human form.
- The relationship of the dead with magic.
The first one is just some interesting trivia. I don't know enough about dragon legends to know whether or not this holds true across literary universes. But, in both series, dragons can shift in and out of human form. Other things I need to check out: I know for certain that in Earthsea, the language of Dragons is the same as the language of magic (and because of the way magic is based on true names, Dragons can't help but tell the truth.) Is this true in the DL universe? Anyway, both series are centered around dragons.
The second thing is the heart of the similarity. In both universes, magic exists only because of the dead, and is rapidly draining out because of the dead. While in tWoS (not to be confused by tWoT mind you), this is somewhat more of a gimmick, in tOW, Le Guin, among other things, uses it to expound on concepts of freedom and slavery.
And, another surface similarity that I realized: both the trilogy and the book redefine their respective unniverses.
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topblog from anywhere
As I have noted previously, I have no inclination to try and install wikieditish since it relies on trapping URLs that don't exist. I learned early on in my travails with Blosxom that if you don't generate a 404 error, this will cause some spiders to get trapped in recursion.
Instead, I have managed to install Mindterm, allowing me to SSH to my webhost through a browser, which works so long as the computer I use allows me to run Java applets.
Wow. I'm out of practice. I took nearly an hour to write those two paragraphs.
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Sun, 23 Nov 2003
topdemotivators
This phrase looks like it might be from one of those Demotivator posters:
In life, there are no rules. In death, you learn that life lied to you. —from the alt.fan.dragonlance FAQ
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Tue, 18 Nov 2003
topso much cheese it'll make you poop
To B: yes I'm still updating this blog, as sorry as it is. Before I make any excuses:
How can we ever have time if we don't take time? -- The Merovingian from "The Matrix Reloaded"
Yes.
Anyway, I just remembered this thing I read off of some Hallmark card or some such repository of cliched drek.
Now is a gift. That's why we call it the present.
Despite everything, as long as I remember this, I think I'll be O.K. At the least, I won't be circling the drain.
It's 1:30am. I am so fucked tomorrow.
C'est la vie.
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Sun, 09 Nov 2003
topfull circle
So I am back in Chicago. It's not as cold as I feared (although it's still pretty fucking cold.) I'm glad I haven't been here the whole time. For me, summer only ended about a week ago.
I am back on my ancient (in Moore's Law terms, that is) Linux desktop workstation. Remarkably, this is a less jarring transition from MacOS X than working on WinXP. (I mean, sure, I hate Microsooft, but, seriously, certain crucial features are missing. Like a usable command line. Folders that make sense. A way to start applications without digging through the god-awful start menu. (Although, I must say, it's probably GNOME running on Linux that first introduced me to the convenience of panels and docks.)
What I am is mostly tired. I don't know if everything is going to work out, but I'm seriously ready to just take a Rip van Wikle-duration nap, and sleep through the entire Bush administration (even if, God forbid, he once again illegitimately seizes the presidency gets re-elected.) Just because I've admitted that I can't ahndle life in a genearl sense doesn't mean that life has eased up and has stopped pummelling me in the stomach repeatedly.
Wow. Mucho typos. This remote copy of emacs is intolerably slow, so I won't fix them quite yet.
Oh. I watched "The Matrix Revolutions." It was OK. Not bad, but not great either. One more trilogy to go ("The Lord of the Rings") and that's all she wrote for my movie-going anticipation. (Although, I am curious as to what George Lucas will entitle his final monstrosity—final, at least, if there is a God.)
Fuck it. I'm tired.
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Sat, 08 Nov 2003
topthe fall just kills me - part 2
I am trying not to blog about other people's drama in order to compensate for my own lack of anything to blog about, but, yeah, someone else's drama momentarily intruded upon my own. This resulted in the smoking of two cigarettes and much projectile vomiting (not on my part, for once.)
Enough of that.
Anyway, yeah. Things floating around my head.
It doesn't matter.
Really.
I missed my dose of medication today, and I could feel it wearing off. Below the therapeutic level. I pondered.
The fall is so much more bearable when you have a fellow SAD sufferer around. (Not that that's all you are to me, dear friends!) I tell ya, misery loves company.
I realize the reason why last year didn't fuck me up as badly as fall normally does. My circadian clock was completely thrown out of whack because I had to do shift work for an entire month. So the darkness didn't really smack me down until mid-December.
I realize that, while, yeah, there are some pretty critical things missing in my life right now (I'm talking about basic things. Like, normal life skills that well-adjusted people have and take for granted), much of this misery is purely biological in origin.
My theory is that (I'm almost sure I've written this down before—deja vu!) because my ancestors are from a place where the daylight hours do not vary much according to season, I am genetically ill-equipped for handling fluctuations in sunlight.
I absolutely hate the days after the time change from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. (Goddamn tyranny of the time clock!)
Oh yeah. I sent my iBook away again. I hope they fix it. Or give me a new one. That would be sweet.
I'm blogging from a Windows machine. I hate it.
Ah, me. So anticlimactic.
What I am fearing (what I am always fearing) is the crash.
I can manage these low-level doldrums. No big deal. A little stagnation never hurt anyone.
I'm afraid of the Big One. One of these days I won't snap out of it. Catatonia city, maybe.
No use fearing the reaper.
I must say, though, I don't know what it was that triggered the unspoken, bottled-up thought in my head last night. The realization that every moment is a grudging gift from on high. The recognition that expectations are, for the most part, illusion. That if I just give up, then I can accept whatever comes my way without any bitterness.
I don't know, though. Despite all these twenty-thousand layers of defense mechanisms wrapped around themselves (Masamune's sword, I tell ya), I can't completely extinguish hope.
Maybe, though, I'm right, that the human body can adapt to any kind of pain if you give it enough time. (In the end, everything stops hurting anyway, right?)
I want to say something, even though I know that the time, the place, is all wrong, and I cannot trust anything that stirs in my heart.
Silence.
Trying is the first step to failure—Homer Simpson
So I will endure however many years.
I never knew how true it all was.
I am doomed to exile.
Oh. Because of my temporary computer-less existence, I missed my blog's birthday. Three years old, baby.
What madness.
I am incredibly incoherent at this point, so I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead.
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Fri, 07 Nov 2003
topthe fall just kills me
My mind is so devoid of anything interesting right now, it depresses me. Lying down for a bit, I felt like I was spinning.
No solid ground to stand on.
So, today, I committed myself to a quasi-flame war on the Alibata group listserv on Yahoo. (I could dig through the archives and point out the post that started it all, but, eh, who cares?) That's about the extent of my entertainment today.
So, yeah, I haven't been able to post in quite a while now. Not that you're missing much, anyway. But it has been a frustrating week in some ways. It all begins with the fucked up iBook. Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned that.
Anyway, my iBook started crapping out on me while I was still in the Bay Area, necessitating a trip to the Apple Store in Emeryville. (My God, what have they done to that place?) It apparently looked like a logic book problem, so I turned it over to them, and they promised to ship it to me in L.A. after 5-7 days (it only took 6, all told.) So I was happy. It was working. I decided to install Panther on it.
Now, I don't really think that installing Panther on it could've caused the problems. I don't think. Of course, stranger things have been known to happen in the quantum realm of doped gallium-arsenic (I am such a nerd, yeah, it's the stuff that computer chips are made of. At least they were the last time I checked. God knows that Moore's Law makes everything I know more and more obsolete.)
Anyway, it started with freezing up after bootup whenever I would take the iBook off of external power. While sucky, and rendering my iBook somewhat non-portable, I took it in stride. Eventually, though, I headed on out to the Apple Store in the Glendale Galleria to have them give it a once over. Yup. Freeze up after booting on battery power. Maybe it's the PMU. Isn't the PMU on the logic board? Yeah. Hmmm. Well, let me back up my data, then I'll come back if it still isn't working.
So I go to Fry's to buy a hard drive to backup my data with. (What's a trip home without a trip to Fry's? Man, I don't know why I keep going back to that place. I guess I am a masochist after all.) The first one I pick up is that Ximeta networkable hard-drive. I was disappointed. I thought it was a fully fledged server, but it's not. You've got to install some bizarre drivers onto a Windows machine. Unfortunately, these funky drivers managed to take out my brother's USB 802.11b attachment. So no network. No go. And I wasn't about to try backing up 30 GB across a USB 1.0 connection.
Back to Fry's.
This time I pick up an Iogear 80 GB external hard drive. It was actually pretty sweet. It's almost quieter than my Smartdisk Firelite 60 GB. The only thing is that it needs external power, and it's relatively honking huge, making it not-so portable. Psync'ing 30 GB across Firewire still takes an incredibly long time, but not so long that my beard starts growing or anything. I'm happy. Everything looks good. I wipe my hard drive and try a clean isntall of Panther. Booting up OK. No lockups. Hookup the hard drive. Weird clicking sounds. Uh.... No Firewire volume showing up on the Desktop. This isn't good.
Most of my data got wiped out. I was able to salvage some of it through some jujitsu-like hacking techniques that I won't go into to 'cuz my head hurts. But some key e-mails are forever gone. Good thing I backed up my hard drive before I headed out to the Bay Area. So I've only really lost about 6 weeks of stuff. I've suffered worse.
Of course, I stayed up until 5am trying to recover my crap, but hey, I guess I gotta get used to obscene hours again.
If I didn't hang out with R these past two weeks, I could honestly say that I did nothing while in L.A.
(to be continued....)
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Sun, 02 Nov 2003
topbread and circuses
Oh man. I'd like to see you top that, Rupert Murdoch. Can there finally be network that sinks to depths lower than Fox? Sky TV tricks six men into fondling and cuddling with Miriam, who is a pre-op transsexual.
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topkarmic debt consolidation
While amusing, and even a little practical, I was a little disappointed by this parodic educational fact-page about massive debt. I was expecting the Buddhist equivalent of Catholic indulgences, the kind of place that people like Hitler and George W Bush could go to in order to broker a less debasing next-cycle of life, and still be assured of paying their karmic debt to the universe.
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topjesus h christ in a chicken basket
The unedited audio from Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon.
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topsituation normal: who cares if it's all fucked up?
I think I can't drink alcohol any more. It really does act as a depressant on me. Not always immediately, but definitely in the aftermath.
Stark raving sadness and lassitude overtook me this evening. I really hate Standard Time. I remember last year, the fact that the sun set so damn early really messed me up. By December, I was approaching catatonia.
I really think that the fact that my ancestors were adapted to tropical regions where the duration of daylight did not vary much by time of year makes me unable to properly handle the seasons. Mind you, it really is the dearth of sunlight that messes me up, more than the temperature. I think I might be able to handle, for example, Antarctica during "summer," although, I suppose, I wouldn't be getting much sunlight being holed up in the base.
Eventually, I gave up and lay down on the sofa, in the darkness, and mulled over where I went wrong in life, pondering all the various dilemmas that I can't solve and all my assorted fears that I can't face. I spoke with M briefly, and since I didn't want to tell her about how I was feeling (no, not what you think! I just didn't want to burden her with my depressive episode) I think she got bored and excused herself.
I decided to really give up and go upstairs to my room. I took out my contacts, then brushed my teeth, then prepared myself for spending a sleepless night staring at the ceiling. Luckily, my sister started playing Norah Jones' CD in her room, Norah's sweet, rich voice (OK, I don't mean for it to sound like chocolate) wafting through the walls.
It never fails to surprise me how music can utterly change my mood. Before I sunk into deep despair, I had been downloading the random pictures I had taken during the month while I was in the Bay Area from my camera, and I was listening to the Gabriel and Dresden remix of "Clocks" by Coldplay. (Like I've said, I'm obsessed with that song.) Now, I've attached memories from mid-June (when my sister graduated) to this particular remix of this song, and I guess thinking about the summer cheered me up a little bit. It definitely made my recent memories somewhat bittersweet. (Again, if I could only bottle up those times when I was happy.)
It really feels like autumn now. Summer lasted abnormally long, and then ended abruptly. I think my mind is reeling, refusing to accept that, even here in Southern California, it's a little chilly.
"Shoot the Moon" by Norah Jones really got to me as I moped in my room, trying to get some sleep. I definitely have memories attached to that song, all the way back to April, and long, fretful afternoons spent on the balcony, chain-smoking and listening to some music.
shoot the moon
by norah jones
The summer days are gone too soon You shoot the moon And miss completely And now you're left to face the gloom The empty room that once smelled sweetly Of all the flowers you plucked if only You knew the reason Why you had to each be lonely Was it just the season?
Now the fall is here again You can't begin to give in It's all over
When the snows come rolling through You're rolling too with some new lover Will you think of times you've told me That you knew the reason Why we had to each be lonely It was just the season
I am in the