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.
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.
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 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.
On the way home today, my train was delayed because of a fatality on the tracks
happening about forty-five minutes before I got on. It was on the other side of
the tracks, someone crossing over the tracks where they should not have been,
possibly a suicide. I was already on a later train than the one I usually took,
because of a late meeting at work, so the delays took me well past twilight into
night. This kind of event is not uncommon on this commuter train line,
occurring once every few months or so, and happening often around relatively
affluent suburbs. Sometimes as on this occasion it’s a pedestrian, sometimes a
car that drives around the gates or somehow gets stuck across the tracks with
an oncoming train.
Almost never does it seem to make sense for me to get off the train when they
open the doors and try to take alternative transportation such as a taxi or ride
sharing, given the kind of congestion in this area around rush hour, and I’m
almost always fortunate enough to have a seat on the trains I take (which was
not the case when I used to commute into San Francisco instead of the other
direction) so the only thing to do is to sit tight and wait until the tie-up
has sorted itself out. This time, the delay was about an hour, about average.
We were mostly standing
still waiting for trains ahead of us to pass through the area of the incident,
where medical first responders and law enforcement and transit officials are
busy following the procedures they each have in place in such cases.
