The Fluening is upon me. About once a year, I get Sick. Not sick, Sick. Chest cold, head cold, though thus far this year I thankfully haven't gotten an inner ear infection. Those are the worst.
I'm pretty lucid right now. A pretty large chunk of the time spent in my disease state is filled with dreams that border on hallucinations. It's kinda like an acid trip, but without any sense of euphoria, just tiredness. Usually I dream about impossibly complex puzzles--my brain is making shit up as it goes along, but it usually feels like some sort of cohesive cipher. Last year, it was building a vented underwater dome in Minecraft (which I have never actually installed, much less played); this year, apparently I'm dealing with some kind of The Mentalist murder-mystery with several thousand suspects that I'm trying to sort into various categories. I make it sound a lot more coherent than it actually is.
At any rate, this isn't an update so much as it is an exercise to try to remain, y'know, thinking straight. I'm a little curious about what I'll be reading in the space once I'm feeling better. Last year I did something similar in Notepad, and when I went back later I found a winding narrative about being an insurance adjuster partnered with the Sun, right in the middle of my existential ruminations. I was pretty damn Sick last year.
I'm pretty lucid right now. A pretty large chunk of the time spent in my disease state is filled with dreams that border on hallucinations. It's kinda like an acid trip, but without any sense of euphoria, just tiredness. Usually I dream about impossibly complex puzzles--my brain is making shit up as it goes along, but it usually feels like some sort of cohesive cipher. Last year, it was building a vented underwater dome in Minecraft (which I have never actually installed, much less played); this year, apparently I'm dealing with some kind of The Mentalist murder-mystery with several thousand suspects that I'm trying to sort into various categories. I make it sound a lot more coherent than it actually is.
At any rate, this isn't an update so much as it is an exercise to try to remain, y'know, thinking straight. I'm a little curious about what I'll be reading in the space once I'm feeling better. Last year I did something similar in Notepad, and when I went back later I found a winding narrative about being an insurance adjuster partnered with the Sun, right in the middle of my existential ruminations. I was pretty damn Sick last year.
Shit, didn't realize I still had that month-old doom-and-gloom post up. Update: she's doing fine, she's got a new doctor who is taking a more careful approach to the diagnosis, and one thing has become clear: no popcorn for the nieces. Looking over the food diary (my sister is a goddamn genius, I'd have never thought of a food diary and her doctors apparently didn't either), it seems that all of the flareups happened right after eating popcorn or other high-fiber foods. Thanks for everyone's thoughts.
Around age 25 or 26, I stopped keeping track of how old I am. That can lead to some moderately embarrassing situations, such as going around for a week telling people that you're turning 33 when you're actually turning 32. Aside from basic math, though, it seems like I get better at everything with every year. I love getting older. When I get my yacht I'm going to christen it the Age and Treachery.
Around age 25 or 26, I stopped keeping track of how old I am. That can lead to some moderately embarrassing situations, such as going around for a week telling people that you're turning 33 when you're actually turning 32. Aside from basic math, though, it seems like I get better at everything with every year. I love getting older. When I get my yacht I'm going to christen it the Age and Treachery.
There's a pretty distinct sinking feeling associated with being told that your niece is on morphine for pain. I mean, this is a tough kid. Last year, she cracked her wrist, and my poor sister didn't notice until a few days later when Rosalyn mumbled something about having to carry her books with her other hand. She just doesn't complain (at least, not about pain), so to hear that she was literally lying in the hospital bed yelling until they doped her... jeez.
She has, like her mom and my brother (I apparently lucked out), some manner of mysterious gastrointestinal funkishness that is autoimmune related. Her stomach appears to have been holding onto food for days and days, which is Not Good. On the bright side, this incident makes it really clear that Something Is Wrong; my sister will be able to use that to force the doctors to keep looking until they figure out what it is.
Edit to add: It depends on what the condition actually is, and the individual's specific biological quirks. My brother has joint issues and a tendency for inflammation in his intestines; he has fairly loose dietary restrictions--not too much meat, stay away from chunky indigestables such as kernel corn, nothing spicy. My sister has intestinal and urinary tract issues, with similar but stricter dietary restrictions, but no joint issues that we're aware of. Rosalyn... all they know at this point is that she's not passing food through her system the way she ought to be. And I don't have any serious GI issues at all. (Knock on wood.)
Thanks for the thoughts.
She has, like her mom and my brother (I apparently lucked out), some manner of mysterious gastrointestinal funkishness that is autoimmune related. Her stomach appears to have been holding onto food for days and days, which is Not Good. On the bright side, this incident makes it really clear that Something Is Wrong; my sister will be able to use that to force the doctors to keep looking until they figure out what it is.
Edit to add: It depends on what the condition actually is, and the individual's specific biological quirks. My brother has joint issues and a tendency for inflammation in his intestines; he has fairly loose dietary restrictions--not too much meat, stay away from chunky indigestables such as kernel corn, nothing spicy. My sister has intestinal and urinary tract issues, with similar but stricter dietary restrictions, but no joint issues that we're aware of. Rosalyn... all they know at this point is that she's not passing food through her system the way she ought to be. And I don't have any serious GI issues at all. (Knock on wood.)
Thanks for the thoughts.
Swapping out an old video card for a shiny new one, I remarked that the old one's connection ports are situated such that one must make a blood sacrifice in order to connect the damn thing to the motherboard. This stands to reason, because blood is red, and red is faster. It overclocks the GPU with the user's precious life essence.
I have been coding for over 29 hours at this point, with a single 3-hour nap. The overclocking joke seems way, way funnier than it should be.
UPDAYTT: As of around 4AM this morning, the Dark Time is over. Well, not counting the Dark Time Addendum from around 7:30-9. I was doing some math during my first shower in three days, and I figured out that from 8AM Monday up to when I went to bed this morning, I spent a total of 19 hours this week not working on this project. And only ten of those were spent sleeping.
I have been coding for over 29 hours at this point, with a single 3-hour nap. The overclocking joke seems way, way funnier than it should be.
UPDAYTT: As of around 4AM this morning, the Dark Time is over. Well, not counting the Dark Time Addendum from around 7:30-9. I was doing some math during my first shower in three days, and I figured out that from 8AM Monday up to when I went to bed this morning, I spent a total of 19 hours this week not working on this project. And only ten of those were spent sleeping.
The world we are born in is not the world we see. The world we die in is the world we deserve.
Heaven produces myriads of things to nourish man;
Man never does one good thing to recompense Heaven.
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
--Barry Hughart
Man never does one good thing to recompense Heaven.
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
--Barry Hughart
Everybody's got one; here's mine. Might have posted this before, don't feel like digging to find out or to figure out which details have changed in my memory.
We were at MPRC, which is a big, permanent field site, exercises at which were almost like a vacation (at least for HHQ), especially in comparison with the usual tent-and-MRE crap. It had barracks with bunks to sleep in, a DFAC where they could prepare... well, less awful food, a Katusa snack bar where everybody ate instead, a miniature PX stuffed into a trailer, and even an Anthony's that you'd have to be stupid to order from because the pizzas were made up several hours away, frozen, and driven over every morning.
The whole point of an exercise at MPRC is to allow the birds to do actual live-fire training and qualification. So basically, everybody relaxes except poor III/V platoon--but then, the guys that fuel and arm the birds aren't ever going to not be busy, so at least they got hot meals and real beds.
For the rest of us it was mostly R&R. It was a little noisy; the walls were corrugated sheet metal and the birds were taking off and landing constantly--but after six months in an Apache unit, it's almost harder to get to sleep without that racket. I want to say it was the third day or so. I'd started up an ad hoc D&D campaign, using the template characters and the sample map that came in the DMG. I had a surprisingly large group; when there's bars and juicy girls available, nobody wants to sit around rolling dice and marking stats on notebook paper, but lock a bunch of people into a tiny-ass complex in the middle of nowhere...
When the news came in, it was surreal and exciting. Reminds me of being just over the top of the first big hill in a rollercoaster--you're having fun, but there's that feeling in the pit of your stomach. It spread by word of mouth, and at some point there was a short troop meeting where Six told us what had happened--not news to anyone, just making it formal. We didn't stop training, but we doubled our guard rotation and readied live ammo. My troop was using the MPRC downtime to set up a rifle qualification. We tied turbans around the heads of the vaguely man-shaped plastic targets.
For the most part, we were buzzing a little. We had a few guys with family or friends in NYC; they got priority use of the little laptop computer lab our section managed. Other than that, the general feeling, I think, was amazement: those ragheads really picked a fight with us? Man, they must be suicidal. (The sentiment was rarely expressed that politely.)
For me, that going-down excitement/dread ratcheted up when I read Bush's statement about going to war against nations that supported terror. This, I realized dimly, was some heavy shit. All it meant to me on the surface was that once we got back from MPRC, the entire post went on complete lockdown for two weeks. Only personnel allowed off-post were those who actually lived off-post. And even afterwards, traffic through the main gate was glacially slow, what with all the concrete dividers and the searches. During this time I learned how to negotiate a fifteen-foot high double fence topped with barbed and razor wire, because I needed some things I could at that point only get off-post.
It didn't really sink in how much 9/11 had changed everything until several years later, when I got back stateside. During my actual service I only dealt with the service side of it--friends who'd lost friends, losing friends and acquaintances of my own, the strain a stop-loss/stop-movement can put on a unit (the day it was announced, all non-essential company business ceased, and my roommate--who'd had less than a month before PCSing and was now in-country indefinitely--promoted himself to Chief Warrant Specialist Sixth Class and walked around smoking four cigarettes at a time, having already demolished a bottle of Crown after demolishing most--but not all--of its contents).
I didn't feel the fear till I got off the plane in Baltimore. Not my fear, I mean The Fear, the one that radiates from every surface and allows us to devolve into a police state in the name of freedom. What really struck me is that very little struck me. There were a lot of similarities between living at an Army post on lockdown and living in the US.
Arriving at that realization was, for me, when the towers stopped falling.
We were at MPRC, which is a big, permanent field site, exercises at which were almost like a vacation (at least for HHQ), especially in comparison with the usual tent-and-MRE crap. It had barracks with bunks to sleep in, a DFAC where they could prepare... well, less awful food, a Katusa snack bar where everybody ate instead, a miniature PX stuffed into a trailer, and even an Anthony's that you'd have to be stupid to order from because the pizzas were made up several hours away, frozen, and driven over every morning.
The whole point of an exercise at MPRC is to allow the birds to do actual live-fire training and qualification. So basically, everybody relaxes except poor III/V platoon--but then, the guys that fuel and arm the birds aren't ever going to not be busy, so at least they got hot meals and real beds.
For the rest of us it was mostly R&R. It was a little noisy; the walls were corrugated sheet metal and the birds were taking off and landing constantly--but after six months in an Apache unit, it's almost harder to get to sleep without that racket. I want to say it was the third day or so. I'd started up an ad hoc D&D campaign, using the template characters and the sample map that came in the DMG. I had a surprisingly large group; when there's bars and juicy girls available, nobody wants to sit around rolling dice and marking stats on notebook paper, but lock a bunch of people into a tiny-ass complex in the middle of nowhere...
When the news came in, it was surreal and exciting. Reminds me of being just over the top of the first big hill in a rollercoaster--you're having fun, but there's that feeling in the pit of your stomach. It spread by word of mouth, and at some point there was a short troop meeting where Six told us what had happened--not news to anyone, just making it formal. We didn't stop training, but we doubled our guard rotation and readied live ammo. My troop was using the MPRC downtime to set up a rifle qualification. We tied turbans around the heads of the vaguely man-shaped plastic targets.
For the most part, we were buzzing a little. We had a few guys with family or friends in NYC; they got priority use of the little laptop computer lab our section managed. Other than that, the general feeling, I think, was amazement: those ragheads really picked a fight with us? Man, they must be suicidal. (The sentiment was rarely expressed that politely.)
For me, that going-down excitement/dread ratcheted up when I read Bush's statement about going to war against nations that supported terror. This, I realized dimly, was some heavy shit. All it meant to me on the surface was that once we got back from MPRC, the entire post went on complete lockdown for two weeks. Only personnel allowed off-post were those who actually lived off-post. And even afterwards, traffic through the main gate was glacially slow, what with all the concrete dividers and the searches. During this time I learned how to negotiate a fifteen-foot high double fence topped with barbed and razor wire, because I needed some things I could at that point only get off-post.
It didn't really sink in how much 9/11 had changed everything until several years later, when I got back stateside. During my actual service I only dealt with the service side of it--friends who'd lost friends, losing friends and acquaintances of my own, the strain a stop-loss/stop-movement can put on a unit (the day it was announced, all non-essential company business ceased, and my roommate--who'd had less than a month before PCSing and was now in-country indefinitely--promoted himself to Chief Warrant Specialist Sixth Class and walked around smoking four cigarettes at a time, having already demolished a bottle of Crown after demolishing most--but not all--of its contents).
I didn't feel the fear till I got off the plane in Baltimore. Not my fear, I mean The Fear, the one that radiates from every surface and allows us to devolve into a police state in the name of freedom. What really struck me is that very little struck me. There were a lot of similarities between living at an Army post on lockdown and living in the US.
Arriving at that realization was, for me, when the towers stopped falling.
Fable has strong shoulders that can carry far more truth than fact can.
Some of what I write has no more connection to my experiences than the fact that I'm writing it. The story I'm working on now is more or less a transcription of events, couched in enough imaginary stuff that I'm able to get it out cleanly. That's a lot of why I write: to get it out.
I've been putting it off, but I'm approaching the point where I'll have to decide how it ends. I know how it actually ended, of course, or at least I know where events began to separate enough that they can't really be wound into a single narrative. But that's not how it should have ended. I'm not sure which is more honest--to relate the way things really turned out, or to face what ought to have been. There's as much cowardice in wallowing in failure as there is in trying to pretend you didn't fail. Neither is a path forward. And it's even harder when there's others involved. Do you show them at their lowest moment? Or do you show them to be who you knew them to be? Who they proved themselves to be in hard times--just not this hard time?
Some of what I write has no more connection to my experiences than the fact that I'm writing it. The story I'm working on now is more or less a transcription of events, couched in enough imaginary stuff that I'm able to get it out cleanly. That's a lot of why I write: to get it out.
I've been putting it off, but I'm approaching the point where I'll have to decide how it ends. I know how it actually ended, of course, or at least I know where events began to separate enough that they can't really be wound into a single narrative. But that's not how it should have ended. I'm not sure which is more honest--to relate the way things really turned out, or to face what ought to have been. There's as much cowardice in wallowing in failure as there is in trying to pretend you didn't fail. Neither is a path forward. And it's even harder when there's others involved. Do you show them at their lowest moment? Or do you show them to be who you knew them to be? Who they proved themselves to be in hard times--just not this hard time?
