I have a milestone to reach this Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 when I should (by my best estimate, assisted by Wolfram Alpha) pass the age of 2,000,000,000 seconds.
As part of the last few years of the Baby Boom generation I partake in some of its deplorable characteristics I have no doubt.
It has me feeling like a space probe propelled by the larger forces surrounding me, starting its third and likely final stage rocket burn to some place far from where I started.
Two billion is a large number, but I’m living on a planet with eight billion people now.
To count one person per second would take twice my age to complete, an absurd length of time.
Once again we are moving, this time all the way back to the East Coast of the United States to the state of Delaware.
Now that my parents are no longer living the biggest reason for our moving to California is no longer present, and an urge to simplify our lives seems to be calling us.
Pamela also lost a family member who lived near Sacramento earlier this year who was the last member of that generation of her family living close to us.
Neither of us has ever lived in Delaware previously, but we visited the little state for the first time about nine years ago and gradually came to the realization that this could turn out to be a great place for us to escape some of the bustle and expense of West Coast urban living back to a house of our own again.
I’m bumping up the version of Hugo from 0.92.0 to 0.101.0 and specifying nodejs 14.x instead of 11.x at Netlify, so I’m moving my content to a new structure from the older version. Please let me know if things are broken.
We went to Massachusetts at the end of July for the first long trip since the pandemic started.
It was for a memorial for my wife’s mother who had died of Covid-19 in May 2020 at age 89.
She caught the disease in a New Jersey nursing home, and by the time she was admitted to a hospital there didn’t seem to be much they could do to help.
Arrangements were made to transport her remains to where her long time home had been in the Berkshires where she was interred with no one to witness, which seemed a great lack.
The church was unable to allow a memorial service until just now because the small group we invited, a few dozen family members and friends, could receive vaccines.
My wife and I spent four days there, two days around Boston where we flew in and the rest at the western end of the state a few hours away.
There is a controversy out just now about whether holders of doctoral degrees other than medical doctors ought to use the title of Doctor before their names. I have some thoughts on the subject as a PhD holder in Physics.
When I was in graduate school we would joke about the German practice of using honorifics for people according to their precise level of advancement, so a Herr Doktor would be outranked by a a Herr Professor Doktor and so forth. I was working at places which related to my subject for about eleven years after then and used the title partly not to be confused with graduate students who didn’t yet have access to it, partly because it was the thing that other people at my level just did. When applying for grants, there would be places where one was to specify one’s educational background and it would be foolish to leave any of that out, as though there were something to hide. My father liked using this form of address immensely but pretty much no one else outside of academia and not everyone within it.
I read a piece today about how prolonged stress can lead to persistent fatigue in a person who might be at a loss as to an obvious cause, and I’m thinking that that is what’s going on with me now.
The worst comes at the end of what seems like a terribly long working day, which is frequently one where I felt like I came up short in results.
I had a Telehealth call with my dietician this morning and was recounting the last six weeks since we talked.
It seems like the stress of losing a family member to the virus and the job uncertainty caused by the layoffs has deepened the burden of stress on me.
Right now I’m just holding onto the two days of leave at the end of next week which I don’t have any firm plans for.
It’s conceivable I’ll just spend a good chunk of that time sleeping in response to the weariness that I feel every weekday.
I like saying “I’m entering my seventh decade” today.
It’s completely factual, because of the way we count things starting with one, and at the same time it sounds more weighty.
Here is a time capsule from the Covid-19 plague year for future readers who might be interested in what it was like around these times.
The cold rain has come back, comfort to those who worry about drought, but making it difficult to go outside to take in a little bit of exercise.
Spring has been as slow to come as it has been every year, and since it doesn’t snow here we don’t have the receeding line of old drifts to tell us how much progress we’ve made since the beginning of January.
It’s been the strangest kind of Palm Sunday, switching between three different Masses online this morning, the palm branches blessed to be distributed at some later unspecified time, the story of the Passion oddly resonant with this backdrop of so much suffering and death.
The usual refuge of taking refuge in a book or something on television no longer holds as much appeal as before, with so many shows and so much reading matter piling up and still somehow unsatisfying.
We find a kind of solace in meeting over the internet as millions of other people have discovered, but it’s a nearly uncharted kind of social interaction place still especially with people we have known for decades but only in the face to face fashion or by email.
The disturbing thing that happens as you age, I find, is that you begin to notice your mind working subtly differently from the way it used to.
From an early age I have set great store by my thinking organ, through all the years of school and the years working in technical professions, and taking care not to mess it up with chemicals or risky activities.
Boxing was not for me as a college student, or football, because of the way these would dash the skull about, but instead the safer sport of fencing.
And I never wanted to drink enough to black out, not when I would worry about what mathematical subtlety might begin to elude me afterwards.
But now, over the last dozen years, it’s become clear that the mental tricks I always used to count on as being easy to pull off have stopped coming to me as readily.
I can still pack things into my memory the way I used to, but they don’t form the sorts of associations I need for recall, and I have to repeat the process maybe twice or three times as often to get the same confidence that a memory has been laid down.
Of course there are ways to make up for the lack.
I have always been a big notetaker, and it helps a lot to jot things down in a peripheral storage system I can get to on my phone.
If I’m trying to understand some complicated thing for the first time, I can’t really slurp it all on in one go like I used to, but have to focus on the individual chunks making up the whole and then learn about how they interconnect as best I can.
It all feels tedious compared to the way I used to remember breezing through these kinds of gymnastics.
The sudden violent death of someone in our extended family has brought back some thoughts of a philosophical nature to the surface for me.
As near as I can tell, our circumstances did not match up closely: he was living in the East, I on the West coast, he was killed in the kind of rough urban neighborhood I rarely come into close contact with, and while have a workaday routine like hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the Bay Area, he earned money piecemeal buying and selling electronics to individuals in person.
Still, the cataclysm is close enough to me to make an impact.
He was not a stranger I might hear about on the news, or someone I had to think about before I could recall our last interaction.
He was also a half dozen years younger than me and recently recovered successfully from a serious health scare.
It seemed like he had actually gotten past a number of close scrapes in life, the kind that a person might only recall as stories to talk about when we might get together in the future.
Moving from one part of the the San Francisco Bay Area to another seems like it should be a pretty minor change, but it’s actually been the biggest thing that happened with me in the last six months.
Originally we chose to live in San Mateo because of its location halfway between the tech centers of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
It’s about forty-five minutes to an hour by train or by car, going north or south respectively, to reach a high concentration of tech companies.
There are others in between, such as the one I worked at before my current job, but by and large things are more residential in between, less concentrated.
For the same reason, San Mateo is fairly desirable for people working in the tech ecosystem and the housing prices reflect that.
There are tech companies on the east side of the bay, but not nearly as many, so prices aren’t nearly as ridiculous there as on the Peninsula.
So, we discovered that we could afford a condo on the water in the city of Alameda, which is practical as long as I don’t need to insist on a short commute to Silicon Valley and the South Bay.
At this point in my career and in the present economic climate, this seems like a reasonable thing to give up.
The advantages are the chance to own something instead of relying on some property management company’s restraint in raising rents, a beautiful view of the bay practically at our doorstep, and a much more pleasant commute by ferry instead of train.
Aside from the cost and trouble of moving, the other main sacrifice this cost us was having to leave our comfortable community and our friends we made over the past four years, and a somewhat more difficult trip to visit my family on weekends because of the extreme congestion on the Bay Bridge.
We haven’t re-established all the services we need close to our new home base, but enough to feel more or less at ease.
By this time four weeks from now we will have moved to a new place in
Alameda.
The preparations for taking possession of this condo are well on their way thanks to a whirlwind two weeks of activity. They tell us it’s a slow season for people hunting for a home because of the holidays and the rise in interest rates, so we haven’t had to compete with other people for the same properties.
Here is a description of the National Novel Writing Month stories I’ve done so
far:
2011 Return of the Equinox: A man awakes to find he has been revived five
centuries after his death in a world where Earth is dominated by a species of
artificial humanoids.
2012 The Rise of Mother Blue: A small tech startup is creating 3D printers
incorporating organic parts but the devices become self-aware and things go
badly awry afterwards.
2013 Breakfast at the Turn of the Holocene: Mutated humans from the distant
future watch a twenty-four hour recording of some people in a diner in order to
learn something of what people were like.
2014 Beyond the Midnight Gulf: A middle-aged woman goes out to find her son
who has gone off into space for reasons she doesn’t understand at first, then
ends up crossing to a different galaxy.
2015 The Last Parsec: A recovering alcoholic is pursued by extremists angry
that she is cooperating with an advanced alien species.
2016 The Path That Was Never Planned: Five stories from the near to distant
future with slight thematic connections. There was a girl set upon undergoing
alien neurosurgery, a violin maker on a space station, people fleeing a pandemic
threatening to wipe out humanity, a ship goes to the space between galaxies and
back again, a group of vaguely human types are having a cocktail party and the
subject of art comes up.
2017 Io Fries: A girl who had become infected during an outbreak of a
strange pathogen that caused many people to become shunned by society so she and
her working-class father had to locate to a colony on a remote island. (I
blogged about this story
in this post)
2018 The Ivory Island: A young man searches for his identity in the course
of investigating the nature of a coastal island being built by
extraterrestrial nanomachines.
Some of my stories were more purely science fictional and some were a little
less so, but they have all had some kind of speculative element in them. This
one, for instance, used some alien creatures I had come up with in a previous
story and considered what might happen if they sent self-replicating probes
to Earth. In recent years the focus of the story has shifted away from the
speculative hook and centered more on other elements I came up with. This time
around, I spent most of the time considering the events of the story from the
viewpoint of my main character who had been one of those children who had
been separated from his family when crossing the US southern border. This let me
consider what it was like for him growing up without the kind of roots most
children have quite a bit more than the original alien plot. I haven’t gotten
to the point of writing a non-genre story at all, preferring to live in the
ill-defined realm of the interstitial novels I like to read, but maybe I
will someday cross over completely away from science fiction and fantasy.
It took ninety days.
Was 190 pounds, now 150 pounds.
Was officially over the line between overweight and obese, and now I’m down to dimensions I haven’t sported in maybe twenty-five years.
It was becoming clear to me that most of my
long-term health issues were linked with diet and fitness, and that that was going to be the only way to avoid worsening quality of life in my remaining years, I was going to have to do something major about it.
I have been attracted to religion from an early age, though I have lots of
friends and acquaintances who have no interest in it or have an active dislike
of it. Towards them I bear no ill will, though I understand that this blog post
is probably not going to be their kind of thing.
For Lent I listened to the audiobook
version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward as my assignment and it was an
experience of a contrary way of looking and doing things. Rohr is a Franciscan
priest who has written many books on spirituality. This book is one which
concentrates on the part of life where the things that we were taught for years
as children and as new adults first getting established in the world, the things
which have always been promoted as the underpinnings of society and the basis
of a good life, no longer address the things which matter when a person reaches
full maturity, the “second part of life.” After a certain point, the frenetic
activities of establishing a career, making a home for oneself, living in a new
family or in community or by oneself, can all start to feel less relevant. They
call novels about young people concerned with fitting into the world
Bildungsromans but as far as I know, there isn’t a term for a story about the
similar kind of struggle at the other end of life (books like Philip Roth’s
Everyman).
I look at what my own life after work will be like, at what it is to stay on
top of multiplying health concerns, and at the accumulation of stuff I own
and this observation of Rohr’s resonates with me. Of course we’ve heard about
this before, from many other thinkers, but Richard Rohr spotlighted the problem
in a way that seemed to grow out of a solid basis in philosophy.
One of the things I like best about the end of the year has to do with music,
which is one of the main ways I pass the time all year round. Now, I
don’t hang around in places featuring non-stop Christmas carols on loop so that
is not the kind of thing I’m referring to. I am also not big on the music
countdown segments that certain DJs like to put out during the last week of the
year. It is a different kind of nostalgia that gets me in the last days of the
calendar that I want to talk about for a little.
On the one side, it’s been an absolutely brutal time in which to generate
creative ideas for
reasons
described well by author
John Scalzi.
And yet, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo
every year since 2011. Basically, I think that doing any kind of creative
writing is like developing proficiency in a sport – you have to exercise the
basic skills, over and over, until they become automatic.
The way I’ve always prepared for NaNoWrimo before was to put together a plot
outline, a list of characters, some idea of pivotal scenes, and, sometimes, a
timeline of the world I’m building. Coming into the beginning of November, I had
none of these, so no blueprint for a story that would occupy most of my free time
for the next thirty days.
I have been spending the majority of my time these last four weeks talking about
myself to people I don’t know. It isn’t something I would choose to do, but it
is a necessary part of the job interview gauntlet. I talk about what I’ve done,
and about things that have been done to me, and about what I thought I was
good at doing, and about what I wish I were better at. I talk about the times
when things went bad and what I did about them, and about the things where I
was happiest about the way things turned out, and talk about what I imagine I
might want to do in some hard to define near future. I talk about what people
have paid me and how much I want other people to pay me and I talk about how
many pieces of potential ownership in a particular company I don’t know that
well I might want to receive. I talk about where I have been and where I might
like to go and what I want to gain from going there. I have talked about the
food I could have to eat, the ways I could get to work, the merits of places I
don’t intend to visit. I have said things just to make the minute hand advance
when I felt like I didn’t want to talk any longer, and I have said things to
try to capture the attention of someone who seemed uninterested in having a
conversation. But mostly, I have been spending a lot of time talking about what
makes me different and how I got to where I was and how I might want to see
myself taking a path that is more or less similar to the one I have been
traveling recently, and it’s gotten to the point that I don’t completely know
what I’ve really done or what I want or why I’m doing what I’m doing
fundamentally.
The job where I am working now is
going away by the middle of next month, so there is some urgency right now
to work out some
alternate work arrangement, and no way to rig up some sort of
a remote engineer position. And so, yesterday I was booked on the short flight
there, and ended spending about ten hours waiting
in airports because some cloud cover appeared in Los Angeles
and some rain fell in San Francisco. It was four hours in the morning flying
from SFO to LAX, and six on my way back. I was there to hear about what it would
be like to take a transfer from my company’s office in Silicon Valley down to
California, but it was this experience bracketing the work trip which has nearly
completely convinced me that at this time in my life the prospect of moving
even that far from here is not for me.
Twice a year, during Advent and Lent, I try to do some spiritual reading as a discipline, and this Lent I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, generally accounted to be a masterpiece of contemplation. The idea is that the human soul is pictured as a transparent castle containing many rooms, sort of a diamond cloister, the most impregnable fortress against the dangers of the outside world. It was natural that this member of a cloistered order would write based upon something she knew, of course, but the interesting thing will be how much I can make of this idea living in the world. Is a transparent mansion a cosy place, shiny and pristine as it is, or is it more like a prison to the modern reader?
For a number of years
Michael Dylan Welch
has been organizing National Haiku
Writing Month, more commonly known as
NaHaiWriMo during the month of February where
anyone can post their minimalistic poetic contributions every day. There would
be a prompt for each day the participants could, if they wanted, use as a
theme for that day’s installment. I had fun
participating this year and would like to present a selection of what I came up with.
For every post here I write maybe three for my own use over on
Penzu
as a sort of diary of what’s going on. I’ve learned that it’s too easy to forget
a lot sooner than you expect just what you were experiencing and saying and
doing if you don’t leave some kind of traces for yourself to get back into your
head in times past. What I write are things too personal or
professionally sensitive to want to put out on a public blog like this, or more
often things that only I figure I would be interested in knowing about. For me
there needs to be a kind of a space between what I think about and what I put out
there, which I think is nothing like the way a lot of people approach their
social media presence.
It’s been years since I have worked at a place where I’ve had an office of my
own. In fact, only two of the eight jobs I’ve had since finishing schools
have featured this
My first job teaching physics at a college was the only one where I had an
actual room with bookshelves and a desk and a phone of my own. I also had a
lab with benches and cupboards and could ask the departmental secretary and
the departmental machinist for help. From time to time I would be supervising
a student or two on research, never as a teaching assistant, unfortunately,
since the grading load turned out to be more than I liked, and I served on my
share of faculty committees as well. Of course I didn’t really know what I
was doing, not for a long time. I had office hours where students could come
around for help, though of course few did.
I have some ideas of stashing some of my tech work here, links to my creative
stuff, pointers to things I’ve found on the web, and other miscellaneous items.
I have been on Twitter and
Facebook
and Pinterest and
Linkedin for a while now,
but it seems like social media has mostly resisted the idea of sharing content
outside of their walled gardens. It sure makes it hard to find the things
I have shared in the past without heroic efforts. So someplace where I can
put up whatever items come to mind and control on my own is attractive.