It is interesting that the dark night will arouse strange thoughts that you can’t imagine thinking during the day time. Maybe it’s because of the fact that I’m excessively sleep-deprived and not-a-little delirious. Maybe it was because it was 1 o’clock in the morning, and we all know only crazy people are out on the open road at that hour.

Disney’s seminal movie “Beauty and the Beast” came out in the late Fall/early Winter of 1991. That earlier summer I had already become enamored with it, having seen a preview at the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida. I must’ve watched it at least 20 times the year it came out.

I guess the story resonated with me.

At the time, it was the ultimate fairy tale story, where the damsel in distress had been replaced by an ensorcelled beast, and the hero was a beautiful, intelligent woman.

The curse never made sense to me, so I got to thinking.

What if the curse was unwittingly self-inflicted?

I had finally ripped the “Beauty and the Beast” Soundtrack to my iPod. I think the last time I had actually listened to it was at least 12 years ago.

Looking back at the last 15 years of my life, it is somewhat humorous what a strange loop self-fulfilling prophecies are. I have already met the woman who ensorcelled me, or more truthfully, who caused me to ensorcel myself, continuously reminding me that I cannot love someone else if I do not love myself. After completely failing to win her heart, I sought comfort in all the wrong things, trying to turn myself into the monster I believed myself to be. And that’s how it’s been for a long while now, never trusting myself to show my true self, believing that my light was doomed to be hidden and covered forever.

It was only recently that my heart stirred. I came to find someone who believes in the good in me, mostly because she always tries to find the good in everything, and by slow, creeping measures, I’ve started thinking about how I might break my own curse.

I also realized that life is not a fairy tale, that she need not be the princess who would rescue my imperiled soul, who would be the love of my life. Maybe she’s just a good fairy, the beautiful enchantress who aids the faltering protagonist, who would finally turn me into a real boy, or make me realize that I was wearing the answer right on my feet, and I’ll had to do was click my heels three times and say “there’s no place like home.”

It seems like this week has been filled with bad news. S’s grandfather died. My neighbor was recently diagnosed with metastatic small cell lung cancer. JdG—one of my closest friends from college—just recently found out her mom has breast cancer, and both the sentinel node and the margins were positive.

And my dad got admitted to the hospital because of chest pain that seems to be increasing in frequency and severity.

My dad had his heart attack in late July 2006, which I completely failed to blog about because I have the very bad habit of not communicating with anyone whenever something bad happens. I can’t even begin to recall the turmoil I experienced during those fateful summer days. What quickly comes to mind are the interminable sleepless nights, the foggy, inchoate, murky days, the anxiety-ridden round-trip train rides from S.D. to L.A., and that look that came over my dad’s face that sent chills up my spine, having seen that look on so many other doomed patients. But fate smiled on him, and he made it out of the ICU despite showing up with a good-sized LAD (left anterior descending artery) lesion and new-onset CHF (congestive heart failure.)

He is, however, the prototypical patient-physician. They always say that doctors make the worst patients, and he’s no exception. Not that it isn’t a pain-in-the-ass to take half a dozen or so medications every day. Especially ones that make him bruise all over the place, and that make him bleed for an abnormally prolonged duration. He would sometimes hold his Plavix and aspirin whenever he had such symptoms. I actually doubt that this is the reason why he’s been having chest pain, though. Most likely, it’s because he decided to self-discontinue his long-acting nitrate, and when he did take it, he was splitting it in half—always a dubious decision when you’re talking about slow-release formulations.

But the frequency of his chest pain seemed to be increasing, so he made another appointment with his cardiologist.

The next thing I heard—via text messaging—was “Dad’s being admitted” from my brother at 1:36 pm on March 25th. This was, of course, while I was on-call. And perhaps it was a blessing that I was being bombarded with pages from all directions, too busy to actually worry about what had happened.

Turns out that it wasn’t because anything had changed all-of-the-sudden. My dad’s cardiologist apparently felt it would be prudent if they expedited his work-up in the hospital. An echocardiogram revealed a borderline ejection fraction of 50%, which, while not great, was probably pretty good considering he had had an anterior wall MI. The other thing that was of some concern was a 2 cm diameter thrombus in the apex, which, while having the potential for embolizing and causing a stroke, doesn’t really seem to explain why he’s having chest pain. He did have a 6-beat run of ventricular tachycardia while he was being monitored, but it resolved on its own, and it isn’t that unusual since he has had a heart attack, and his potassium was 3.4 milliequivalents per deciliter at the time. They did start him on an anti-arrhythmic medication—amiodarone—but I’m not sure why. His chest pain does get better with nitroglycerin, so there’s clearly something going on (although I suppose it could always be esophageal spasm.)

He also had an adenosine MIBI test, which is basically a fancy stress test that doesn’t make you run on a treadmill, and which obtains images of the heart after injecting a radioactive isotope, and I have no idea what the result was.

The admission did scare him straight into taking his medications as directed, though.

Still, the last few days have been a blur. Post-call, after working 30 hours in a row, I drove to the train station downtown and got a round-trip ticket to L.A. I pretty much slept the entire way, and my brother picked me around 6 pm. For some reason, police cars and helicopters were swarming around Union Station, but we never figured out why. We went straight to the hospital from there, and it turned out they were filming something directly in front of the hospital. (Only in L.A.!) I was relieved to see my dad sitting up in his bed, looking like his usual self except for the fact that he was wearing a hospital gown. He was disgruntled by the fact that the Laker game wasn’t available on the hospital’s T.V., and was pondering whether or not to sign-out against medical advice just so he could watch the game. My mom was there, too, badgering the nurses about letting my dad take a shower despite the fact that he was on monitors. We hung out until around 9:15 pm, when my brother took me back to the train station to catch the last train back to S.D. Because of some delays, I didn’t get home until 2 am, and somehow I miraculously woke up at 6 am on Thursday in time to get to work. The entire day is a definite blur. I can’t recall anything that happened. And when I got home around 6 pm, I immediately fell asleep with my contacts in, and still half-dressed, with all my lights on. I keep thinking that it’s actually a day earlier than it really is.

I was intending to stay in S.D. today because, frankly, I’m exhausted, and I have to work tomorrow (yes, on Sunday.) But I actually didn’t even know if my dad had been discharged, so I came up to L.A. to make sure. I’m hoping to finally re-orient myself to time and place before the day is out.

[Jean’s post about how her parents did not think fiction was appropriate reading material][1] got me thinking about how I got sucked into the written word. As long as I can remember, I have this image of my dad reading something: the newspaper, Time magazine, the latest New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, or American Family Physician, or dime-store type paperback spy novels. If he wasn’t watching TV, he was reading, and sometimes he would do both—the book/magazine/or paper would get him through the interminable commercial breaks. It’s obvious that this impacted me greatly.

It’s hard to tell who is smarter between my dad and my mom. From an academic standpoint, my mom certainly did better, starting school a year early, becoming the salutatorian at her high school, and graduating summa cum laude from nursing school. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if my dad just wasn’t a classic underachiever. To this day, he takes pride in doing the minimum possible to get by.

This is kind of ironic, though, because my dad did manage to get through medical school, pass the boards in the U.S., and survive American residency training in the Bad Old Days™, where it was tacitly expected that you better start using amphetamines if you were struggling with making it through the 36+ hours of overnight call. (Now I know why Osler, one of the fathers of modern medicine, insisted that you had to stay at the patient’s bedside throughout the entire course of their illness. He was surely tweaking.) Still, he brags of barely passing every year of college and medical school. He has no use for professional accolades nor positions of leadership.

In terms of professional achievement, my mom is the same way, having eschewed higher-paying and easier administrative/management jobs for medium-paying jobs that consist of actual patient care.

Be that as it may, my dad reads a lot. My mom doesn’t. While a n of 2 is a poor sample size indeed, I can’t help but believe that this informs their political beliefs. My mom is a hard-core Republican. My dad, on the other hand, escapes conventional classification. He refuses to register with either major party, and has voted for both Democratic and Republican presidents. A lot of his beliefs probably fit better with libertarian, or indeed, anarchist philosophies, with a good helping of realpolitik that he picked up while in the Philippines during Marcos’ regime. He sees social democratic policies like social security and welfare as pragmatic sops from the moneyed elite to the common people, as cynical ploys to keep them dependent and to keep them from rebelling outright. I’m not sure if he’s actually read such philosophers, but I have a feeling that he would find Hobbes’ and Nietzsche’s thoughts familiar.

But in a further twist of irony, my dad doesn’t do much writing. He can tell a good story (when the Tim Burton movie “Big Fish” came out, I immediately thought of my dad), but he has never really succeeded in putting anything down on paper.

My dad’s influence on my career choice and philosophical trajectory is not surprising. But what is probably not readily apparent is how he affected my reading choices.

My dad is perhaps the prototypical nerd. Long before they acquired their patina of post-modern ironic coolness, my dad was reading comic books. Before it was even recognized as a genre, my dad was watching anime. Along with his spy novels, implicit in all of these things is the germ of escapism. He tells me that when he was young, instead of going to school, he’d sneak away to the movie theater and stay there all day long, even if he had to skip lunch all week to pay for admission.

So it was probably natural that I got sucked into science-fiction and fantasy. With regards to fantasy, I can readily trace this to 4th grade, when I first read The Hobbit, which eventually led to The Lord of the Rings, onwards through all of Tolkien’s legendarium. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass figures in here somewhere, and I think the Chronicles of Narnia pre-dated my obsession with Middle Earth. But, of course, Disney’s reinterpretations of classic Western European fairy tales intersperses itself amongst all these. (The first one I consciously remember is “Robin Hood”, perhaps subconsciously forming my class-consciousness and my disdain of the elites.)

With science fiction, it’s a little more murky. It may be that the first science-fiction novel I ever read was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’engle. Most of my science-fiction exposure started off in film. Obviously, there was the entire “Star Wars” Trilogy, but there was also the “Superman” franchise. And then there were even more obscure movies, like “The Last Starfighter”, “The Explorers”, “Flight of the Navigator”, “D.A.R.Y.L.” But there were three movies that etched themselves into my consciousness at an atavistic level. “Dune”, with the quasi-Biblical desert world of Arrakis and its massive sandworms, “2010”, which got me believing that we were making regular trips to Jupiter and Saturn, and the unsung, under-appreciated Disney movie, “TRON”, which pre-figured “The Matrix” by nearly two decades.

I also find it ironic that I read almost all of these books in Catholic school, and watched many of these movies in Catholic school as well.

For some reason, I’ve never really gotten into contemporary literature. The books that I have read that aren’t obvious science-fiction or fantasy still have a lot of science-fictional and/or fantastic elements to them. (The ones that comes to mind easiest are Chuck Palahniuk’s novels.) And if they aren’t science-fiction or fantasy, then they’re classics. I didn’t read any Dostoevsky until I was pretty much graduated from college. I found the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton more compelling than anything written in the last decade.

But I’ve been working on utilizing the form of science-fiction and fantasy as an avenue, not of escape, but of engagement. Sometimes the only way to come to grips with reality is to abandon all assumptions, and this is where science-fiction and fantasy succeeds the most in comparison to other genres.

[1]: http://okir.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/reading-material/ “reading material •

So I used to have an array of external hard drives attached to my Mac Mini by Firewire. Most of the hard drives were encased in Venus DS3s. Like many Firewire 400/IEEE 1394a hard drive enclosures, it’s based on the venerable but reliable Oxford Semiconductor 911 chipset.

But hard drives continued to get faster, bigger, and cheaper, so eventually I disconnected them all and settled for a single 250 GB Western Digital My Book Premium Edition. Mostly because all those hard drives made the room unbearably hot during the summer.

The other reason, though, was that one of the drives was notoriously unreliable. I think it may have been overheating, but it had the tendency to simply just go off-line at the most inopportune moments. In retrospect, it may have been because I had all these external hard drives with the same GUIDs, but I haven’t checked.

I ended up resurrecting the Venus DS3s when Fry’s had a sale on 320 GB PATA hard drives for $70, making the use of Leopard’s Time Machine feasible.

For the most part, this worked without a hitch. Except, quite mysteriously, Time Machine would barf and abort in the middle of a backup, and until I figured out how to fix it, I would end up simply just reformatting the backup drive.

Eventually, I started wondering whether there was something wrong with the firmware. And this is where all hell breaks loose.

I discovered the Oxford Firmware Uploader through Google (naturally) on the DATOptic Inc Support Page, which also happens to have a copy of the most up-to-date version of the Oxford 911 Firmware.

The uploader is a Java program, and apparently does not work out-of-the-box on an HFS+ case-sensitive volume. After unstuffing the archive, you have to rename the “Data” folder to “data”. Eventually after several hours of my life which I will never get back, I figured out how to reflash the Venus DS3 and it seems to have worked without a hitch.

Feeling overconfident, I decided to upgrade the firmware on my My Book, too. This was a big mistake. The Upgrade Program, a custom version of the Oxford Firmware Uploader, doesn’t even run, at least not in Leopard. So I decided to be clever and use the Oxford Firmware Uploader instead. Although it gave all appearances of actually working, what it really did was kill my My Book.

Luckily, Google led me to this fix. While the screenshots are from Windows, the Mac OS X version is pretty similar. Except I had to use the SST39xF400A instead of the SST39xF200A. I don’t know if this is because of my particular My Book and when it was released. I’m not sure how to check this in advance without actually disassembling your My Book. My method was simply to screw around with the Uploader until something worked, which is certainly not for the faint of heart, especially if you have important data on that drive.

After a dozen or so hours of my life completely wasted, I finally got Time Machine up and running again. So far, it hasn’t failed again, but I have no idea whether or not the updated firmware even makes a difference.

Still, I can’t believe Western Digital actually still has their updated online. This thing is a steaming pile of crap that will almost certainly kill your hard drive.

It is interesting that Arthur C Clarke recognized that physicians are more likely to be atheist. The first story of his that I ever read was ”The Star” which describes a Jesuit astronaut coming upon the blasted remains of a civilization that once orbited the star that supposedly went nova in order to announce Jesus’ birth. In other words, the Christmas Star. The question asked is, how could God destroy an entire civilization just so that the shepherds and the Magi would know where Jesus was born?

What is funnier is that I was introduced to this story by a Jesuit priest who mentioned it during Scripture class, back when I was a freshmen at a Catholic high school. I never understood the nature of faith and doubt until I met the Jesuits. Faith and doubt have the same relationship that light and shadow have. Without light, there can be no shadow. Without doubt, there can be no faith. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something. Seriously.

And in a moment of synchronicity, a real supernova seems to have anticipated Arthur C Clarke’s death.

His opponents on both sides of the aisle are trying to make hay with Obama’s comment about the ”typical white person” who is afraid of black men. But they miss the point entirely. He’s not throwing his grandmother under the bus, as some are wont to say. He’s not trying to insult white people. He’s merely illustrating an unfortunate truism about American culture, which Chris Rock touched upon a long time ago:

When I go to the money machine at night, I ain’t looking over my back for the media. I’m looking for niggers!

In America, the darker your skin is, the more you are feared. It sucks, but it’s true. It’s not just white people who do this. Brown people do it to. Even black people can be conditioned to be fearful of black people.

Because black people hate black people, too. Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people don’t like about black people.

But everyone is trying to hide behind the facade of political correctness. I can hear it now. I’m not a racist. How dare you call me a racist? But by definition, if you partake of American culture, you’re a racist. Even people of color can be racist.

The first step to recovery is recognizing the problem. Americans, especially white people, but including many people of color, continue to pretend that there is no problem, that racism is some relic from the past (even though fifty years ago, it was still legal to segregate.) People keep trying to pretend that we have a level playing field, and that anyone crying “racism” is merely playing the race card and trying to leverage their skin color for an unfair advantage.

Barack is keeping it real. The majority of American History has been hostile to people-of-color, and to pretend that this history is over and done with—that this history has no ramifications on the present—is to stick your head in the sand.

(from Deadly Computer Blog)

Arthur C Clarke has died. I’ve actually read quite a few books of his. Besides 2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001, I also read the Rama series.

But the story that actually sticks in my mind most dramatically is The City and the Stars, which is about Earth a billion years from now. The image that was seared into my brain were the three stars aligned in a straight line, which were actually artificially engineered as a monument of the hyperintelligences that superseded the human race. A lot of the imagery in The City and the Stars also reminds me of the movie “Dark City”. Diaspar is a city where people are randomly generated by a computer and assigned random back stories, similar to how the Strangers in “Dark City” randomly assign different histories to random people, and the protagonist has unique characteristics that make him want to escape the city, leading him to an incredible truth.

A lot of things have happened this week.

I think about the concept of a Gate. A Portal. Somehow it ties together with Holy Week, perhaps. I just finished reading a short story by Philip K Dick about crossing over into the Afterlife, which in reality is simply another universe within our multiverse, and he cryptically alludes to the concept that Christ was the only other person to cross universes back and forth.

The Gate makes me think of Palm Sunday, and Christ’s arrival to Jerusalem. Or Dave Bowman’s odyssey through the monolith.

But Portals and Thresholds aren’t necessarily tangible things. And Barack Obama seems to have crossed through such a threshold: he is the first politician in my lifetime, and perhaps in all of American history, to honestly address the problem of race in America. While I hope fervently that this signals a turning point in American history, I fear that we will only listen to him when it is too late, like the Trojans who ignored Cassandra and Laocoön, and finding their city, their nation in complete ruin.

And I have my own little thresholds to cross. Tomorrow is day 11 of 12 of the long stretch, and my third overnight call before I finally get a day off again. Today is halfway through this rotation. In two weeks, I will be done with the pediatric portion of my residency training.

The first day of spring is today.

Where does the time go?

Where do I go from here? Isn’t that always the question?

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to think about the future. For the first time in my life, I’m OK with dealing with the present. For the first time in my life, I don’t want these moments to end.

It’s such a strange thought. I’ve spent so much of my life wishing I were somewhere else. “The grass is always greener” syndrome. But what is it that is seizing at my soul these days? Sheer laziness? A sense of resignation? Stasis? Stillness?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t love this place, not by a long shot. There are plenty of other cities that I dig a lot more than this place. But the thing is, nowhere else have I been able to be just myself. For once, I can play make-believe, and do all the things I’ve wanted to do, unfettered by other people’s expectations.

Not that there aren’t expectations. But I got to choose this place, and in a way, I chose to accept those expectations. They weren’t foisted on me from on high, from some painful, self-sacrificial legacy rooted in the agony of a culture that was conquered, nor in the martyrdom of an alien savior from a place half-way around the world. Despite all the disappointments and all the vileness and debasement I’ve partaken in, I did it all on my own terms. I owned these last four years, for better or for worse.

Of course, part of this is immature fantasy. When I fell asleep this morning during a lecture, I found myself dreaming of things that only have a seed of possibility. There is nothing in my life that I can take for granted. The road ahead of me must be seized, must be tamed and ridden. It is not the passiveness that I’ve experienced thus far, the feeling of being carried by a surging river, impelled downstream whether you wish to or no. The road ahead is more like wind. A current of air that must be captured and held on to, bearing me aloft, with the possibility of dropping me into the abyss in the blink of an eye. If I want to take this road, I have to want it every second of my life, and that kind of force of commitment frightens me.

In these four years, I’ve learned to make definitive decisions. No more wavering or dancing around the issues. I’m still nowhere near as certain as everyone else around me is, but I’m certainly more certain than I ever was. And while I have figured out some things about life and about death, I’m still procrastinating about figuring out which way I want to tack my sail, to catch the wind, and to find the shores that I’ve been searching for all of my life.

Out of the desert
I am come to thine gates
I bring the emptiness of the wilderness
and the silence of the bitter wind
unlooked for, I crossed that threshold
no one cared whither I went or no
among the teeming masses
I am but one man
alone
voice drowned out by the bazaar
the moneychangers
the tax collectors
the merchants
the con artists
I tread the worn-down road
a million footprints
turning the soil into concrete

Out of the desert
and through the mountain pass
and the river valley rift
where continents collide
and shear and tear
the planets in conjunction on my left
heralding the rising sun
I steal past like a thief
and in that sea of chrome, the halogen headlights
illumining the six lanes ahead
thrumming underneath me
the sound of inevitability

The future becomes present
and predictions are hard coded into the archives
the road ahead
exceeding our wildest fantasies
giving form to the nightmares that crawl and burrow
as they feed on our grey matter
these parasitic atavisms
that remind us we come from primordial slime

and how is it that green goop
came to dream of God?

not every wound heals
some fester and drip
leaking poison into your blood stream
infiltrating your very being
even sometimes invading the chambers of your wounded heart
hiding in the scars of your memory
or in the pockets of darkness within your soul

some wounds grow worse with time
eating away at flesh
sucking away life
turning you to dust and ash before your eyes
until you lose all sensation
until what was once part of you
is dead, decayed
falling off like the broken stump
of a desiccated umbilical cord
discarded without realization
into the trash bin with yesterday’s leftovers

some wounds demand intervention
require rescue
without which healing is impossible
and if you leave it be
it will only get worse

what was once a tiny scratch
grows to a raw ulcer
consuming flesh, sinews
sometimes eroding as deep as bone

these wounds, sometimes you have to
break the scab open
cut away the decay
until blood flows freely
flay open the wound
and leave it exposed to the world
raw and angry
letting the putrescence evanesce
like some foul miasmatic nightmare
evaporating at the break of dawn

but most wounds, as they say
heal with time
like your mother always told you
never pick at your scabs
let the cut well up with bright, red blood
let the seeping blood crust over
because every time you tear at the wound
will leave a scar
every time you open it up again
creates a new wound
undoes all the healing
and remember,
in the end,
all bleeding stops
eventually

I must admit that I like the fact that the sun is still up when I come home from work. It gives me the illusion that my time off from work is much longer than it actually is. Waking up in the morning sucks big time, though. Nothing makes you want to pull the covers back over your head than waking up to your alarm clock, looking outside the window, and finding it pitch black.

When I was an undergrad, I had this ridiculous notion that if I slept for four hours at a time, and pretended that it was morning whenever I awoke, then I would feel more productive. The idea was that since typical sleep usually encompasses two sleep cycles, if I could just get one in at a time, it would be almost as good. So after class, I’d go to sleep right away before working on my problem sets, or writing my paper, or reading the assigned text. This worked for maybe two days before I would stop waking up in the evening and simply just sleep all the way through until the next morning.

Eventually, I just gave up and came to accept the fact that I really do need at least seven hours of continuous sleep to feel rested. (Add the fact that I usually did way better on tests if I just took it easy the day before instead of trying to cram, and eventually, I decided that adequate sleep was the key to my success.)

Ian Rosales Casocot writes that there is no past, but I got to thinking that, really, the past is all we’ve got. Much like the time delay involved due to speed of light, so that the light we see from the sun is actually 8 minutes old, and the light that we see from the star Sirius is 8 years old, the thoughts that we consciously hold in our head are about events that are already in the past. The raw sensual input gets rapidly converted and processed by the brain, and the actual input, for the most part, gets discarded. The present only intrudes when something happens that cuts directly to the reptilian, emotion-laden part of our brains, bypassing the evolutionary advanced cerebral cortex, like when danger approaches. And the future is almost always just a fantasy resulting from linearly extrapolating the past (which is the reason why we’re so bad at predicting the future.)

Today, I didn’t intend to go to sleep early, but ended passing out around 8:30 pm. And now, of course, I’m awake, and I can’t go back to sleep. Classic.

Man, I thought I was done with these. I don’t have another day off until nine days from now, and I’m already exhausted. I ended up being stuck at work until 7:45 pm today. I knew I should’ve just gone home and gone to sleep, but instead I went to Tommy’s and had a chili burger, which guarantees that I’m going to have a rough night of GERD symptoms. So I’m trying to postpone that moment of lying down supine.

I had the weirdest sensation last night. For some reason, my left tricep cramped up quite painfully, and I spent at least 30 minutes trying to massage it to relax. As a result, my left sternocleidomastoid muscle cramped up as well.

This resulted in me trying to massage this muscle into relaxation as well, knowing fully well that this would result in massaging my carotid artery. Well, wouldn’t you know it, nature called after a good while of occluding my carotid, and I nearly syncopized as I stood up. Wouldn’t that have been funny?

As I sat by myself wolfing down my burger and inhaling my chili fries (which threaten to rise up from my gullet as I type), I was overtaken by this odd sense of wistfulness. It wasn’t a rational feeling (if such a thing were not a semantic oxymoron.) Meaning that I couldn’t pinpoint the stimulus. These are the times that I wonder if I haven’t done too good a job with fortifying my emotional defenses. I rarely feel a thing these days, and the moment I start feeling something, my instinct is to avoid it entirely.

This clearly cannot be healthy.

But I always remember this quote (although I can’t remember who it’s attributed to): “There’s no problem so big you can’t run away from it.”

If I survive the next nine days (including two 30 hour call nights), I’ll deal with it then, I guess.

And isn’t it humorously ominous that this upcoming is Holy Week? That is, the week leading up to the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? How absurdly fitting.

It seems like an infinitely long time since I last claimed to understand what love is. There was a time in what seems like another lifetime when I thought I got it. In nerd slang, I grokked it, once upon a time.

In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious it wouldn’t last. When you’re a teen-ager, in high-school, or in college, five years seems like a long time, ten years seems like forever. I never really thought of being older than 27 years old until it finally crept upon me, still surprising despite how inevitable it was.

And if that was the extent of my heartbreak, maybe it still would’ve been OK.

Looking back at all this lost time, I become more and more at a loss to explain exactly what happened. Why it mattered so much. Why it went so catastrophically wrong. Why I can’t seem to let go of it to this very day.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just obsessed with the idealization of it all. The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but feel I would’ve inevitably screwed it up anyway, and I would still be exactly where I am today, except I would’ve made one more person that much more miserable.

Saying “It’s better this way” is such an empty rationalization, though.

But despite my repeated failings and disappointments with regards to romance, I still thought I had at least some inkling of what love is. I was inculcated with C.S. Lewis’ description of four types of love: affection, friendship, eros, and caritas, and knew that eros was just a single aspect of it all, a small facet of life in general. Despite my failings and disappointments, I strove to at least be better at friendship, and especially with caritas.

The highest order of love was described by Lewis as caritas, or agape (a Greek word that Christians are probably familiar with.) I figured if I couldn’t handle eros, I could strive for caritas. Unconditional love. Love without limit, without hope or expectation of return.

In a way, my career decision has been influenced by this aspiration. Even in high school, I took the exhortation to be “a man for others” seriously. To help other people out without hope of reward, or even recognition.

In all seriousness—I’m not just bullshitting—some days, some days, it feels like it might be enough. A lifetime of service. I could get into that. There are days where I seriously dig it.

Today is not one of those days.

I learned a long time ago that, for ill or for good, I am not a normal dude. I mean, it’s not like I’m gay. I didn’t come from a broken family. I don’t have a chronic disease against which I’ve striven against. I’m not a supergenius. I’m not some autistic savant. Still, I figure my life probably falls somewhere outside at least one standard deviation from the mean. So in time, I’ve grown to accept the idea that what may seem to be an ideal lifestyle for most people may not be the best for me.

There are pangs of jealousy, to be sure. Whenever I hang out with two of my friends from college—a fairy tale couple if there ever was one—I get this sense of longing. It’s odd to watch their children grow up. I’ve literally followed their daughter from being in the womb, to being a helpless little baby, to being an articulate and intelligent four year old. And though I’ve seen possibly quite literally hundreds of children grow up before my very eyes, I still shake my head in amazement when I consider that three years ago I had no idea that they would even have a son, two years ago he was a small (but robust) little infant crying, and a couple of weeks ago, I saw him running around, hurling baseballs inside of the house(!) and smiling at me both shyly and yet mischievously at the same time.

Some days I tell myself, “It’s not too late.”

But most of the time, I tell myself, “I don’t see how.”

The long road, for the most part, seems to go in only one direction, down towards the horizon, and while I might take a few detours here and there, I get this feeling that the side roads are all probably dead-ends, and that there are simply no forks or off-ramps coming up. No services for the next 350 miles. You can’t get from here to there, as they say.

But even a readjustment of my expectations from life can’t seem to save me. Even in things that I value the most—friendship, family—I feel like I’m failing. And the thing that can give me so much satisfaction at times, sometimes leaves me feeling like I’m just playing dress-up. Like I’m four years old again, wearing my dad’s white coat from when *he* was a resident, and playing with his stethoscope, handing out candy and pretending that it’s medicine.

Days like this, I feel like asking “what good is any of it?” I’ve learned to quietly bury these days in shallow, unmarked graves. When I’m feeling this way, probably the best thing to do is take a couple of Tylenol, and just to go to sleep and pretend that it was a bad dream, or that it didn’t happen, and to keep telling myself that tomorrow is another day.

You can only hang out in the Pit of Despair for so long before you get a very serious urge for committing self-harm. Or, to reiterate something I wrote a some time ago, continuously believing that you suck as a human being is pretty much incompatible with life.

Seriously, though, in these long, lonely years, I’ve made an art of hairsplitting. Sophistry. Semantics. Word play. I’ve learned quite well that there is difference between no hope, and having a small glimmer, a fading ember of hope. The former, while usually pretty sucky, is at least clear-cut. You cannot pass. Go directly to jail and do not collect $200. When you know you have absolutely no hope in all the universe, zero probability in all the multiverse, it’s easy to just shrug your shoulders, give up, and move on.

But it’s the latter that flickers on and off from time to time that absolutely tortures me. The idea that there is an exceedingly small and yet finite possibility that if I go all-in, I might actually take the pot drives me to insanity. Because with even a tiny smidgen of hope, it feels like the universe is sitting on my shoulder. Because if there’s hope, then if it doesn’t come to fruition, I’ll know that it’s entirely my fault that I screwed it up.

Thank God for the Arrow of Time. Time turns possibility into inevitability, and so I can look at ten years ago and tell myself, there was nothing I could do. It was just going to turn out this way. And yet I remember the self-recriminations going on inside my head. The self-doubt, the lost chances. If I wallow in it too much, it’s too damn much to bear.

Yeah, that damn glimmer. Like fairy dust, or a will-o’-wisp.

The older I get, the more I’ve tried to ignore it. You can’t be disappointed if you don’t try. (To quote Homer Simpson, “Trying is the first step towards failure.”) While it seems to be a reasonable strategy from preventing heartbreak (although I still fall for it from time to time), I can’t shake the feeling that I’m probably just killing myself slowly, in a rather excruciating fashion.

One of these days, there may be just a pile of dust and ashes where my heart used to be.

Such as life. Like I said, sometimes it’s better to have no hope.

cracked, but still I’ve got to keep it together
time out of joint, the sunlight seeps through the window pane
am I coming or am I going
hope is like a little gnat, biting and buzzing
that I can never swat away.

so many years past, and still my folly is laid bare
her face still etched in the foundations of my twisted mind
and everything I taste is dust
everything I drink is choking ash
the colors bleed out of everything
and the sky is featureless, suffused with only light

in these years that keep on turning,
all I’ve learned is how to
brick myself up into a corner
trap myself in the thickets of my mind
no one ever died of loneliness
so I tell myself as I lay awake at night
listening to the distant sirens
and the rumble of planes

and every so often the ember that was once my heart
burns brighter
a gust of wind blows in to make it flare
but from nothingness comes nothingness
as this ember burns, my heart only continues to wither
in time, nothing will be left but desiccated ash
my soul will never be greater than this
it’s evaporating as I write

I no longer dream of being saved
the ebb and flow of the tide of life
is the only movement I know
I turn to see you reach your hand out to me
but I just let the waves pull me out to sea

(Sardonic flag on. Don’t take any of the following too seriously.)

Sometimes I find myself commenting on a blog post for a completely tangential region. Stephanie Grey takes Ludacris’ song “Area Codes” and maps out where Luda’ has, ah, spread himself around.

But the thing that got my wheels spinning is Ms. Grey’s comment about being a woman and a feminist and therefore disliking the word “ho.”

Now, maybe because I’m a guy, I can’t understand the underlying narrative thread here. While I recognize that this word can be used quite oppressively, it does portray a real phenomenon. The way I look at it, it’s at worst similar to Chris Rock’s diatribe about black people versus niggers. (And you could do a similar diatribe in any ethnic community of color, really. Or talk about white people versus crackers.)

Hos (for lack of a better source, I’ve consulted [this article regarding the actual plural of “ho”][3]) do exist. While I guess it would be clearer to use the word “slut”, or less judgmental(?) to use the word “promiscuous” to describe the behavior, in any case, it’s a real phenomenon that deserves a word for it.

And while there is an anti-feminist subtext that is associated with the word, it is applicable to men who exhibit this behavior as well. For example, a guy who (like Ludacris’) has sexual relations with a lot of women can be legitimately called a ho. As can the guy who sells himself out in order to kiss the bosses ass. So Ludacris’ can be considered a ho in multiple senses: both in terms of sexual promiscuity, and in the fact that he has sold himself out to the white corporations who control the content of so-called gangsta rap.

Which, in truth, makes the word ho analogous to the word vendido/vendida in Spanish. While it is generally translated as “sell-out”, it actually incorporates a lot of the connotation of what being a ho is all about.

The fact that the word ho originated from hip-hop street slang is significant. While people-of-color can oppress their women just as well as white people can, remember that hip-hop is a literary genre as well as a genre of dance. So it has access to the subtexts that precede it. Remember that hip-hop is an offshoot of post-modernism and post-colonialism, and that it started off as much more intellectual than Clear Channel et al would have you believe. Remember that the gangsta rap you hear on the radio and see on MTV is a cultural appropriation by the mass media, and has been sadly subverted and turned into a weapon against people-of-color. This, I believe, is the more important context of the origin of the word.

I remember hearing this definition when I was very young. What’s the difference between a ho and a whore? At least a whore gets paid. A ho just gets used. And if this doesn’t describe how some people-of-color have acquiesced to their negative portrayal in the media, I don’t know what does.

[3]: http://newsbusters.org/node/11941 ” The Finer Points of Street Grammar: Ho’s, Hoes, or Hos? · NewsBusters”

There is a meme floating around on the blogosphere, promulgated by Duncan Riley’s spin on a post by Jason Calcanis of Mahalo fame, and seconded by technophiliac Robert Scoble. The idea is that startup companies cannot afford slackers, so anyone who is not a work-a-holic needs to be fired. (Note that Calcanis has eased off on this statement.)

Which, on principle, is true. By definition, a startup does not have many assets to leverage, and most of the time, it involves squeezing the last drop of productivity from everyone involved.

But it becomes easy to forget that employees are actual human beings and not just another type of machine that can be overclocked and otherwise hacked. Teams live or die by factors like morale and social cohesion, and to ignore this is to fail from the outset.

Firing people damages morale severely. It doesn’t matter if it was justified. It doesn’t matter if your employees totally agree with the decision. Something visceral arises in people when one of the member of the team is otherwise discarded, and it will take some skillful damage control to rectify the situation.

When you look at it this way, sometimes it may be more worthwhile to modify behavior than to cut someone loose.

In clinical studies, it has been repeatedly shown that positive reinforcement works much better than negative reinforcement when seeking to change behavior.

So none of this passive-aggressive work ethic bullshit. You need to make your expectations known up front. If you anticipate regular death-marches, you better tell your employees that before you hire them. Because if you don’t, and you need to have a death-march, there will be much anger and bitterness directed at you, and it will be completely deserved.

People have been known to give up their lives for their work in many situations. Take, for example, residency training in medicine. The pathway to becoming a board-certified physician is a long, thankless road, starting from four years of undergraduate study, followed by another four years of medical school. Almost all residency training programs are at least another additional three years after that, although most surgical specialties require at least five years after that. And if you want to subspecialize, look for at least another two years. So you’re looking at at least eleven years of higher education before you get paid reasonably.

One of the interesting phenomena during my residency training was the adaptation to the mandatory 80-hour work week maximum as prescribed by the ACGME. (Mind you, this is down from the average 120-hour work week prior to the guidelines. Yes, there are really that many hours in a week, though not many more.) In those first few years while programs struggled with making their hours more sane, there was a lot of passive-aggressive bullshit going on. The senior residents, who looked upon the limits with disdain, would deem you weak for demanding to be let out on time. Never mind the objective evidence that it was pretty dangerous for patients to have invasive procedures done to them by someone who is extremely sleep-deprived. Now that those folks are gone, people are more concerned about getting people home after working for 30 hours, and people are a lot more helpful, and willing to pick up the resulting slack. Morale is a lot better, and there’s a lot less bitterness and hatred flying around.

But why do people tolerate such absurd working conditions? Barring the possibility that some of these people are simply insane, part of it is the extreme ability to delay gratification. Note that I said delay, not foreswear. Even the most dedicated employees will want to get rewarded, and if there is simply no light at the end of the tunnel, then the only sane approach is to half-ass it and put in the minimum amount required to keep your job, or simply bail out completely. What kind of educate person will tolerate sweatshop conditions with no possibility of remuneration? None will.

The other thing that is absolutely required is passion. Absolutely no one will sacrifice anything for something that they don’t believe in. Even if death-marches are involved, people will tolerate all sorts of suffering if they themselves believe that it must be done. There is no other way that residents would endure the 80 hour work-weeks, with up to two 30-hour shifts per week, and only four days off a month. (Which, if you use my residency program as a guide, comes out to something like getting paid $11.50/hour.)

If you believe in the technology you’re deploying, or if you think that you are providing a service that needs to be provided, the hours, while painful, will be secondary to the cause.

We’re talking about fervor, people. You need zealots to be working for you. Otherwise, you’re probably going to get screwed.

And don’t underestimate the necessity for down time. If you just need workhorse drones who don’t need to think, flogging them until they collapse is probably a feasible long-term strategy. But if you need people to come up with good ideas, or creative solutions, you need your people to come out of the isolated cocoon of the work environment and experience some sort of alternate mental stimulation. Think about how Einstein came up with his best ideas. He was doing something else entirely different than physics at the time. Nothing destroys creativity better than monotonous toil, and if you treat your workers like prisoners, expect them to start behaving like prisoners.

So if I were you, I’d put away the whips and chains, and start thinking of creative but inexpensive ways to reward your employees for good work.

The great thing about running UNIX is that it’s like running around with a loaded gun rocket-launcher with a hair trigger. One of the things that frustrated me the most with Windows is that if something broke, the only reasonable solution was to reformat your hard drive and reinstall.

In contrast, when I used to use Linux, I could spend entire weekends happily byte-editing my filesystem in ridiculous attempts to recover files I had accidentally blown away with an errant rm -rf * (Don’t try this at home!) The challenge was really knowing when to quit. If you were dedicated enough/insane enough/had Asperger’s syndrome, you could probably eventually figure out some tricky nerdy way to do just about anything with a UNIX box (including many things that would probably end you up on the FBI’s watch list.)

Using Mac OS X, I sometimes forget that underneath all that eye-candy sits an official UNIX subsystem (which is actually more than a system running Linux can say.) Until the pretty GUI does something inexplicable and unrecoverable, spitting out a useless error message that doesn’t tell me how to fix things. (Time Machine is beginning to become the bane of my existence!)

So I accidentally stopped Time Machine in a middle of a backup, resulting in a backup file with “.inProgress” tacked on at the end. There was absolutely no way from the GUI to get rid of it. And even when I dropped down to the command line and actually logged in as root (by typing in sudo su from an admin account), I still couldn’t do rm -rf.

Which probably meant that the filesystem was borked.

I quickly learned that I couldn’t unmount the drive in question from the GUI, which meant that I couldn’t get Disk Utility to fix the filesystem.

Until (still as root), I did umount -f /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups. Voila! (Disk Utility is still churning away as I type this, however. We’ll see if it actually works. Well, there’s always fsck_hfs.)

UNIX is the only reason I switched to Mac OS X. Without it, a Mac would just be a prettier version of a Windows box that only 8% of all computer users use.

This morning NPR’s Renee Montagne interviewed Donald Ritchie, author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932. He seems to implicitly, tacitly compare FDR to Obama, noting that when FDR was campaigning, he stuck to a message of optimism, without getting mired in the specifics. He also pointed out that in 1932, the choice seemed to be between FDR’s message of hope and Herbert Hoover’s message of fear.

Ever since September 2001, I’ve kept FDR’s 70+ year old message in my heart, as an antidote to the fear-mongering and pathologic lying of the Bush Administration, the lame-brainedness and near-total worthlessness of the Department of Homeland Security, and the ignorance of some Americans who think all brown-skinned people are terrorists, who wanted to stupidly invade Iraq when our enemy was in Afghanistan, who probably couldn’t even find Iraq on a map.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. —[Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech, given on March 4, 1932][2]

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “it’s not rocket science” to describe something that should be easy. So Raymond Chen asks what actual rocket scientists say when they want to describe something easy. The common answer seems to be “it’s not brain surgery.”

Turns out that neurosurgery is not exactly the most delicate of surgeries, nor is it a field with all that much hard data. Most of the time, it involves boring a hole in someone’s skull or carving out a chunk of bone, and sort of mucking around in there. While precision would be nice, most of the things neurosurgeons have to do don’t really have the luxury of precision. It’s usually about hacking out a tumor, draining a pocket of pus, or more commonly, evacuating a large expanding collection of blood before the patient’s brain exits out of the foramen magnum, because of increased intracranial pressure, a process that is also known as herniation. Sometimes, they luck out, and it’s not quite so emergent. Then it’s usually about disconnecting parts of the brain to stop intractable epilepsy, or jamming an electrode into the grey matter for some deep brain stimulation. While obviously it takes some surgical skill, it’s nowhere near the incredible precision that is required in fields like pediatric cardiothoracic surgery. (I would hazard to say that it’s not easy to operate on a 6 day old ex-premie.) Other surgical fields that require almost superhuman feats of manual dexterity include vascular surgery (because it tends to be a high risk sort of surgery, mostly because, as clinical language would put it, “you’re working on a pretty poor substrate”), hand surgery (where they use sutures that are finer than a human hair in order to sew together peripheral nerves), and retinal surgery (which is a sub-sub-specialty.)

But if you’re talking about cerebral processing power, I dunno. I’d probably go with either allergist/immunologists or rheumatologists, because they’re both hard core bench-research type of specialties. They’re the physicians who are more likely to be talking regularly about biomolecular signaling pathways and molecular recognition mechanisms. The computer science equivalent would probably be like being able to comprehend straight-up machine language without even bothering with the assembly code.

While I am a physician (although not the kind that does anything cool like the things I mentioned above), I’m certainly not a physicist. When someone says “rocket science,” do they simply mean the engineers who figure out ballistic missile trajectories and how to get a space probe to Saturn with the least amount of fuel? (No mean feat, although they do have the help of computers.) Or do people mean astrophysics? Like cosmology, string theory, the theory of inflation, loop quantum gravity, that sort of stuff? I think it would be pretty impressive to be able to imagine 11-dimensional space-time.

For “fun”, I decided to try and build rpm5 on top of Fink. The ostensible reason was that I wanted to extract a source from an SRPM. It would be pointless and would probably bork my system if I tried to use RPM and dpkg simultaneously. But mostly, I just wanted to see if it could be done.

After several hours, many of which involved banging my head upon my desk, I managed to get it to build. It has a ton of dependencies, and beecrypt doesn’t exist in Fink. In the process, I ended up updating a few outdated packages in Fink.

WARNING: These are extremely experimental and may very well destroy your file system. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

1. beecrypt 4.1.2 (crypto/finkinfo) – beecrypt.info – beecrypt.patch
2. sqlite3 3.5.6 (main/finkinfo/database) – sqlite3.info – sqlite3.patch
3. neon 0.28.0 (main/finkinfo/libs) – neon28.info
4. libxml2 2.6.30 (main/finkinfo/libs) – libxml2.info – libxml2.patch
5. popt 1.13 (main/finkinfo/libs) – popt.info
6. db46 4.6.21 (crypto/finkinfo) – db46-aes.info
7. rpm 5.0.2 (main/finkinfo/util) – rpm.info – rpm.patch Counter to the recommendations of the RPM development team, I used the external version of the Berkeley Database in a futile attempt to circumvent the libtool bug that continues to plague even libtool 1.5.26, namely the inability to install to a staging directory without causing grief within the *.la files. I ended up replacing RPM’s ltmain.sh with the one from libtool 1.5.26 and adapting some of the patches supplied by the Debian libtool package. It looks like the Fink validator is now happy. And so far, I can at least run rpm --version without segfaulting. I have yet to see if I can do anything else with it.

I looks like the version targeting debacle is still very much a heated topic.

Instead of Microsoft forcing people to stick cruft into their code, there’s an alternate solution. Allow multiple versions of IE to co-exist.

The solution seems so much simpler than creating bizarre tags and resurrecting the ugly practice of browser-sniffing that plagued us during the Netscape/Microsoft Browser War, clogging our bandwidth with crufty, convoluted Javascript and redundant HTML tags.

Admittedly, neither Firefox nor Safari make it easy to have multiple versions of themselves to exist on the same computer, but it’s not impossible.

For Firefox, all you really have to do is create multiple profiles. (The post details how to do it in Windows and Linux, but you can do the same thing Mac OS X, you just have to run the actual binary from the command line the first time you launch.)

For Safari, it’s a little bit trickier. Michel Fortin provides Multi Safari, where you can get every non-beta version of Safari that has been released. (Unfortunately, you have to muck around with the command-line to get it to work on Leopard, and I don’t even know if versions less than 2 will actually work at all.) An alternative would be to actually build Webkit. (The source code is available back to r25668 from around September 2007, although unfortunately I’m not sure what version of Safari that corresponds to.)

Both of these approaches are really moot, though, since the goal of both browsers is full standards-compliance. It would be perverse to rely on a bug from older versions of Firefox or Safari. These approaches are probably more useful for people who want to try the bleeding edge browser while keeping their stable browser intact.

Now I realize that Microsoft is not one to give into open-standards committees or the open-source community. (Just look at the OOXML imbroglio, and the still ongoing saga of SCO, a subsidiary of Microsoft that tried to claim that Linux infringed on their IP.) But instead of mutilating the Internet, they could make version targeting go away completely by allowing the peaceful co-existence of IE6, IE7, and IE8 on one machine. Hell, Microsoft wouldn’t even to do that! They could just allow a user to keep whatever broken version of IE they want instead of auto-upgrading to IE8. Then if you needed to, you could just run a virtual machine for testing (since Mac OS X users have to do this already in order to test any version of IE.) No version targeting needed. What say ye, Bill GSteve B? (Not to be confused with that Steve. Nor the other Steve.)

Well, that was a little creepy. Some dude started knocking on my door around 3:55 am, calling out for Greg or Martin. I wonder if he was just so trashed out of his mind that he thought he was somewhere else completely. I did contemplate whether he would try to crash through my door, and figured that the only two thing I could fend him off with would be my kali sticks and my wrought iron coat hanger. I ended up not being able to go back to sleep and just camped out in the living room playing on my laptop with my kali sticks at hand. Stupid drunk people.

A week ago, it was sunny and warm, and I headed up to L.A. I was wearing my ”Barack the Vote” T-shirt that my sister gave me for Christmas. I didn’t realize I was running on empty until I got to Carlsbad, so I got off the freeway and stopped at the nearest gas station. All of the sudden, I got self-conscious about wearing the shirt. North County San Diego is notorious for being rabidly right-wing, and I wondered if anyone would react. But I finished filling up my tank, got back in my car, and got on the freeway. Somewhat fittingly, the next song my iPod decided to play was “Get Together” by the Youngbloods.

As I drove through Camp Pendleton, my thoughts went out to all the men and women putting their lives out on the line in the desert, and for what?

The parallels with the late 1960’s are kind of eerie.

As I sat here catching up on my RSS feeds, screwing around with Facebook, and trying to recompile some packages with Fink, I suddenly started thinking about this song:

I’m not sure what inspired that. Is it a piece of history that came floating out of the past? Or is it a prophecy of the times to come?

I just keep hoping that it’s really time. The wheel of history is about to turn. Change is a-comin’.

A movie (that I have yet to watch) produces a memorable catch phrase that is destined to be used and abused to no end, and which has already spread across the blogosphere like the way wildfires spreads through San Diego County:

I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

<bgsound src="http://disorderedthoughtprocesses.com/assets/2008/3/1/milkshake.mp3" autostart="true" width="225" height=20>

I surveyed the chaos and squalor that is my apartment and quickly stopped because I didn’t want to vomit. This is how insane people live.

OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s pretty bad.

(OK, so that’s not really my apartment, but it’s not that far-off. Scary, huh?)

Seriously, am I just profoundly lazy, or is this just a sign that I’m losing my mind?

This is probably getting a little obsessive.