On spotting a pattern

Readers may — should — be aware of PostSecret, a kind of anonymous clearinghouse for secrets that people write on postcards and send to Frank, who posts (a selection of) them on the web. (To be clear: people post their own secrets, it's not for outing your friends or even enemies.) I read the site every Sunday (it updates once a week), and am always moved by at least one of the secrets.

For a marvellous time, there was a PostSecret iPhone app too, which did much the same thing — but without Frank's intervention, so people could and did post secrets at any time of the day or night. Since I liked the website so much, I bought and regularly read the app too.

The app had several effects, the one relevant to this story was that it increased by several orders of magnitude the number of secrets being published. This sudden superabundance made it really easy to spot patterns and commonalities. One pattern which I noticed early on, and which fascinated me, was this:

My dead [person I was very close to] spoke to me and saved my life.

Some examples (quoting from memory, obviously; the sense is correct even if the words may be misremembered):

I heard my dead father whistling in the kitchen like he used to do, so I went down to see. The stove was on fire.

The light was green but my daddy told me to stop the car, so I did. As I stepped on the brakes, a car ran through the red light in front of me. My secret: my daddy died three years ago.

My best friend died in a car accident n* years ago. I was driving across a highway bridge with my kids, when I heard her voice from the back seat telling me to change lanes. I did, and a truck blew out a tire and veered across the highway to crash into the barrier right where we had been. It would have killed us all.

Had this just been one secret of a single person, I'd have written it off as a hallucination or the babbling of an idiot. But there were hundreds of these! There was at least one every week!

I was and remain fascinated by these stories. I'd love to know what happened to these people: what exactly did they experience?

Am I saying that the dead remain on earth and communicate with us? No.

Am I saying that something inexplicable and very interesting happened to these people, which we would do well to study? Hell yes.

The app was taken down recently in an unfortunate victory of arseholism over decency. A minority of users were posting porn and/or abusive and insulting pictorial comments, taking advantage of the fact that the posting process was automated and instantaneous. A self-organizing committee of volunteers emerged who tried to dam the flood, but they were overwhelmed by the quantity of garbage that had to be found and deleted. Ah well.

* Can't remember how many years, it doesn't matter to the story.

Christmas

Hello blogosphere, it's been a long time since we met. I've missed writing, and I deeply regret the loss of the community that had developed here and in the blogs I read. I'm not going to promise to write every N days in 2012, as that would just be another stick to beat myself with when I missed a date; but I will start writing again.

I'm in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with cousins and other assorted family, eating and drinking and watching Jeopardy (don't ask). The concept of experiencing "together time" by sitting in front of a TV with the sound turned up too high for conversation is difficult for me to grasp, but we all have our foibles and mine would strike them as equally ludicrous. The weather here is odd, very little snow and unseasonably warm at only -7°C.

This is my second week in Canada, actually. I started in Calgary with Favourite Cousin, we spent a day drinking capuccino and stoking each other up for an active and growthy* 2012. She suggested the term "accountability partner", somebody to whom you report regulary and who calls you on your lazy-ass weak-excuse-finding bullshit; we'll be AP-ing each other next year as she gets her keynote-speaking business in gear and I try to level up after what felt like a year of stasis.

I've been working like the proverbial dog this year, building the competition project we won in the summer of 2008. Three and a half years, dear friends; I suspect that many outsiders have no idea how slow archtitecture is. It was a success: the public and the local press liked it, the staff find it convenient to work in. We were only around 6% over budget, which is pretty good; unfortunately it was months late and although it's been in use since the formal opening on October 8, there are still workmen onsite. When I left a week ago, the architectural snagging list was ten small-print single-spaced pages long. Just architecture, mind you, the electrical and services engineers have their own lists too. If you want to have a look at this, mail me (address is above left) and I'll send you a link.

It's funny that 2011 now feels like a static, almost wasted, year, because I did in fact do quite a bit of stretching socially and at work. I went onsite as supervising architect for the first time, all three of us were there six days a week for the last two weeks before the opening. That was a real growth experience, I can tell you. I thought I was just walking around talking to people all day, and at first felt vaguely guilty that I "wasn't really doing anything." It took me a while to realize that this is exactly what the job is, at least during the last few panicy days.

Funny how it worked out: G and Offsite Guy believe in supervising by shouting abuse, which is really not my style at all. I played good cop to their bad cops: encouraging the contractors, building up their confidence and courage, smoothing over tension between trades in favour of give-and-take cooperation. Another difference is that I always greeted everyone I met, every day, even if it was only to catch their eye and nod across a crowded room; G and OG seemed not to see people that they weren't engaged in shouting at. I think my results were at least as good as theirs. Certainly at the opening celebrations, people came up to thank me for my involvement. Even people I don't remember speaking to, like the wellness franchise women, knew my name and felt that I had helped them.

Other than that, I've been playing World of Warcraft and hanging out in Second Life, attending a meditation retreat in Halifax in July and an informal meetup of the same group in Berlin in early December. I think that SL, Facebook (spits) and Twitter between them are responsible for the decline in my blogging: not only the incredible amount of time that they consume (particularly SL) but that they came to fulfill my need to communicate. Second Life in particular has become a great part of my social life, I use it not for gameplay (it's not a game, as I have said many times) but to meet friends. It's my equivalent to going to the pub to chat with the guys, but without beer or second-hand smoke.

* Yes of course "growthy" is a word.

Awake (pre-birthday edition)

Woke at 5:30 after around three and a half hours' sleep. Milk is cooking for hot chocolate, and I am hoping to get back to sleep after writing this note.

Had a good day yesterday at the racetrack in Baden-Baden with G and U and their kids, despite torrential rain on the way there and a dead car battery and nearly 90 minutes of delay in tailbacks on the autobahn on the return journey. I spent … well, I did actually write down my costs and winnings race by race but I can't see the programme and I am too lazy to get up and look for it. Say that I bet roughly thirty Euros on six races and won roughly five Euros. Still, an enjoyable day.

Work is in a strange phase at the moment. There's not much for us to do except manage the last weeks of thrashing panic on the building site. G is on site 2.5 days a week, so Whiner and I are working 2.5 days a week in the office. Eight weeks until the opening celebrations, and there remains a metric fuckton of work to be done. It's going to be an interesting time (in the sense of that famous Chinese curse).

I'm spending most of the resulting free time in Azeroth, to be honest, levelling my discipline priest characters. (Funny, just spent a few minutes with google, trying to find a website that would give a reasonable overview of what WoW is; failed. Here's the official home page.)

All right, back to bed. Wish me luck.

Awake (New York edition)

I'm in the Big Apple, in a moderately lousy (but also moderately priced) hotel. I woke just before 5am local time, 11am my time, after getting to sleep around 6am my time. I'm unsure whether or not to call this "insomnia", but it is far earlier than I hoped to rise.

I have to give a kick in the head to the airport bus service (can't remember the name, will update this if I do) for lousy service. The driver put people down near, not at, the stated destinations, e.g. one block east of Grand Central Station. In the rain, mark you. For Penn Station the miserable son of a bitch actually dropped us at Times Square! I took a taxi the nine blocks south to the hotel, grumbling all the while. The driver was cool about the short fare, fortunately; he left the meter off and just charged me a fiver.

My parents are arriving today (with the rest of the opera tour group), I'll move to our common hotel and then go to the airport to meet them. The tour operator has apparently stopped providing transport between airport and hotel, which seems to me a pretty stupid decision given their customer profile (elderly and rich). The justification was that it was too difficult to arrange, but that sounds like horseshit to me: the world is full of bus companies. I suspect the company that does the actual grunt work is getting lazy and the coordinator/guiding light/überboss, himself elderly, has chosen not to spend his energy on disciplining them. So there are going to be two dozen elderly Canadians standing in the taxi queue for hours and hours, wrestling with their oversized luggage and foreign manners and diction. Meh. Anyway.

I flew over on an Airbus 380, for the first time. It really is huge, but one doesn't always notice this because its proportions are similar to a Boeing 727: it can look like a small plane if you don't notice the details, for example that the tailfin is in fact larger than a 727's wings, or that when you are seated and looking out the wing obscures the three-storey buildings beside the taxiway — and I was on the upper deck, so in theory I was looking down on the wing.

It's a fine plane, the ride is very smooth. But in the end it's just air travel. There is no fantasy or romance in the A380, flying to NY in one is like spending the day at a tedious conference in the meeting rooms of a pretentious-but-only-middle-range hotel. The seats are the same as on any other Lufthansa plane, the food is the same, the general discomfort and annoyance before and after the flight are surely the same. Actually, having said that: Boarding and disembarking were quick and easy, and I got my luggage within 15 minutes of the plane landing. I should give some credit there.

The coolest thing about the A380 is the live camera views on the entertainment system. There are three low-resolution videocameras built into the aircraft: in the nose pointing forward; in the belly pointing down, and at the top of the tail looking forward over the back and wings of the aircraft. The latter plays on the overhead monitors during the flight. The belly camera is pretty useless, to be honest, the low resolution and the air haze make the ground images close to worthless. Should have hired a photographer-consultant to tell them about polarizing filters. But the view from the tail was cool, and it was quite exciting to be able to watch the plane landing and taxiing to the gate from the nose cam POV.

I'm going to try to sleep a little more (no hot chocolate for me, alas; it's typical of the Hotel Pennsylvania that while there is a minibar, it's empty. There is an ironing board and iron in the closet, but no kettle. My recommendation is to avoid the hotel unless you are stuck for a place to stay. It is at least clean and central, but has nothing else going for it.

Awake

I'm sick. Only moderately, I believe and hope, but I've been sick off and on for nearly a month now. It started as a sinus infection, for which I had two different antibiotics and a week off work (for the first time in recent memory). The second antibiotic did the trick on my sinuses, mostly, but left a dry cough. Last night, for whatever reason, the cough "itched" so strongly that I've now hacked my way to a murderous sore throat. Guess I'll go see the doc again.

In other news it's Spring here. Tulips are up, lizards are sunning themselves on the windowsill (and getting into the office and running around in piles of paperwork for a half hour before being persuaded to leave again). Went for a walk at the Bärensee with G and U and the kids on the weekend, 20°C and sunny.

In other, other news I'm going mad. I've lost all sense of time: it seems that the kitchen always has a pile of three or four dirty cereal bowls to be washed, meaning that three or four days have gone past since I last looked in the kitchen. Clearly this isn't so, since I had to be there to eat the damned cereal, but … I don't know. Just between you and me, I think I'm arriving at the point where I am so lost, and so worried about being lost, that I can finally admit my "failure" and ask for help.

How does one go about finding a therapist? It was easy in London in the early 90s, I had a friend who happened to be deputy head of social services for a particular borough and asked him for a recommendation; he sent me to his own therapist. Perhaps I'd have the same luck if I just asked around here, but my impression is that German society is less tolerant/respectful of psychotherapy and mental unease than England was. We shall see. I'll ask the doctor, whom I like and trust, whether he can recommend somebody.

One of the topics that came up at the retreat in October was "letting yourself be seen." This is not something that I do, my natural inclination is to dissemble and conceal — despite my blogs and Twitter and Faecesbook and whatever all else. It occurred to me in conversation with a friend in SL that, were I to kill myself, there are only three or four people in the world who wouldn't say "But his life was perfect, he was so happy." (Don't worry, I am not planning to kill myself, not even thinking about it; that was an extreme way of saying that I hide what is going on in my life.)

I'm going to start telling much more of the truth here. I'm not going to say that I'll tell it all, and I'm certainly not going to promise that I'll write regularly or even more frequently, but I'll do my best not to reply with a shaky grin and a please-change-the-topic dismissive "Just fine" whenever somebody, even myself, asks how I am.

Wish me luck.

Risk and death

Like everyone else, I spent much of Friday (and indeed yesterday) following the events in Japan. I too was shocked and appalled, and frightened, by the force of Nature unleash'd (as the poet said) and the — what to call it? — the futility and uselessness of our technology and science in dealing with it. What exactly should we find awesome about nuclear power or the theory of quantum mechanics if neither can hold back a single wave?

I was also observing myself as I watched the reports, noting my cowering fear of the events and my horror at the rising death toll. I found myself starting to worry about earthquakes, anywhere and everywhere, remembering that there had been one here eight years ago — it was trivially minor, most people slept through it — and feeling exposed to a terrible and immediate risk. I realized as I watched that this was basically the same reaction I'd had to 9/11, and with that came the thought that this risk too was probably vastly overstated.

Let me be clear: the death of a thousand people in an afternoon is a tragedy. I am shocked and appalled, but the thing is this: thinking of their deaths started me thinking about our own. We are alive, and for most of us death is (fortunately) a singular and very rare event. We do not see that there are people dying all around us, all the time.

People die, and they do so in far greater numbers than we know. The mortality rate for Japan in 2010 was estimated at 9.83 per thousand*; given the population of 126.8 million, that means that that 1.24 million people in Japan were statistically expected to die during that year.

That's an amazing figure. I was astonished, I'd have been surprised if it were a tenth that many. But let's go on.

That works out to some 23970 deaths per week, 3424 deaths every single day. A thousand people die in Japan every seven hours, every day of every week of the year.

The earthquake and tsunami were terrible, yes, horrifying and appalling and deeply saddening. They were significant events, but they are not a significant risk. We mourn the victims of the tsunami because of the manner and the brutal suddenness of their deaths; who but their immediate families mourns the many thousands of people who died in hospitals across the world on Friday? Or the vastly greater number who died without benefit of medical care, from hunger and neglect?


* The source is Index Mundi.
You didn't ask, but I'll tell you the comparative figures anyway:
USA: 8.38 per 1000 = 2599476 per year = 1000 deaths every 3.3 hours
Germany: 11 per 1000 = 912230 per year = 1000 deaths every 9.5 hours
Canada: 7.87 per 1000 = 265219 per year = 1000 deaths every 33 hours

Finished

We sent the competition off at 3 o'clock this afternoon, and I have been lazing about since. The weather is wonderful, sunny and warmish and a perfectly blue sky, the air is fresh and clean and smells of the forest. After finishing up and debriefing, I walked downtown for lunch (at 3:30) and then bought supplies for dinner. I'm going to cook tonight and tomorrow, which I haven't done in ages, perhaps in weeks. I hate the collateral damage of working on competitions: the weeks-on-end of too little sleep and far too much packaged food. My body feels like I've spent a month at sea, eating nothing but sugared white bread.

We finished the presentation drawings at half past 3am last night, then drank a beer together to celebrate. In the end I only worked 26.5 hours this weekend, not the 30 that I had feared. Small mercies.

The project looks really good, it's got a simple, clear and sensible plan, we met all the stated criteria and only overran the required floor area by around 2%. Assuming that we don't fall through in the first round of judging, I reckon we'll land in the money again.

So, I had the afternoon off and will have tomorrow off too. I walked downtown and sat on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum for a sandwich and cappucino, thinking as I walked how nice it would be to escape to another city for a little break. As I sat over my meal, I changed tack and began to think of what I would do if I were in, say, Zürich rather than Stuttgart. Everything I thought of doing there, I was either currently doing here or could do with no additional effort or expense. Had to laugh at myself about that.

I watched the crowds flow past, and the circling pigeons, and the shadow of the setting sun creeping up the hillside opposite. There are times when I stop and look around and am almost surprised to remember where I live. This is a lovely city, and I'm lucky to have found it.

Updated to say that we lost in the second round. No money, no fame. Ah well. Sitting here (in New York, jetlagged and sleep-deprived, early morning) I find that I cannot remember what the jury said about our scheme, nor even how it looked.

Awake

Hello world, it's been a while since we spoke. It is 6:30am as I'm writing, but I have been awake and drifting since around 5am (having previously woken at 2am but gone back to sleep) so I am calling this "night" and "insomnia." Hot chocolate is in the making, and I will head back to bed after drinking and posting.

We are approaching the deadline for a competition aka the chance to have some work to do after the summer. The project looks pretty good: the plan is clean and simple, room layouts are efficient, it should even be fairly economical to build and operate. Next weekend will be tough, probably 30 hours' work.

Other than that, work on the still-current project is proceeding in fits and staggerings. Things are going wrong, many of them our fault. (It's always our fault, in the end: the architect is responsible for the errors and omissions of all other trades, including those of the experts who advised us. The situation is reminiscent of Josef K: "He's guilty! Now, what's the charge against him?")

I'm spending a lot of time in SL and WoW. I have recreated my more successful characters on a different server in order to game with some SL buddies who are there, and have got my favourite — a holy paladin named Woglinde — up to level 32. The game gets easier and more enjoyable as one rises through the levels.

Time is behaving oddly. I can't believe that it hasn't yet been a month since I returned from holiday! This feels like mid-March at least. I don't know whether to be glad or worried that the calendar is lagging so far behind my perception.

1.1.11

Happy New Year, my dears. May it be peaceful and enjoyable, and may you find happiness and fulfillment (in whatever forms you seek them in).

Regina, or: On the road again

So I was out on the frozen flatnesses of the Canadian Prairies (like the "boundless and bare … lone and level sands" of Ozymandias, with added snow) for Christmas (with Sis and BIL and their kids and our parents), and a goodish time was had by all. The only hint of trouble, significantly larger than a single cloud on the horizon, could be summed up in the phrase "getting old sucks." Not that anyone present actually said that, but I think I'm right in saying that it was on everyone's mind at some point or other. It would take longer than I have to explain this in full, so let's leave that for a future post.

(I'm in the lounge at YQR waiting for the first leg of my trip to Milwaukee; if all goes well I'll have another half hour to write. Flights are being cancelled but mine is still marked "on time.")

Just by the way: I infer from reading IP logs (and know from conversation) that some people who read this blog also follow me on Facebook, and you may have noticed modified (expurgated) versions of some of these posts appearing on FB. There is a reason for this, and I would ask you not to refer to my blog in comments on FB.

Sis introduced me to something new and wonderful this Christmas: yoga. She's been taking classes for some time now, and brought me along to three sessions this week. I loved it, despite my usual agony of apprehension before trying anything new. The exercises (mostly nearly-static stretch-and-hold) were enjoyable in themselves, as well as showing me aspects of my physical being that I'd never known. I came to the airport directly from the last class, and in the car I made a first New Year's resolution: I will meet Sis and Friend in the class next Christmas, and I will hold [that particular pose whose name I've forgotten] with my legs flat on the ground and my hand on my ankle. Friend snorted politely and Sis said "ooh, good luck," and I agree that it's pretty damned optimistic given my current state of stiffness and disrepair, but a man's reach must exceed his grasp as the poet said. It's a target to aim for, and I am determined to continue on this path. I was surprised to find how strongly the exercises overlapped with our mindfulness practices in Susan's meditation group, which perhaps just goes to prove how little I know about yoga or mindfulness.

Nowhere do I feel more of a fake and a failure than here with Sis and her family. Another resolution: I will clean and repaint the apartment, and put in a stick or two of furniture-for-enjoyment, before they arrive in June. And a third: I will restart my meditation practice, and Susan's participation in the SL group, and this time I'll take it seriously. I have gone as far as my dilettantistic curiosity will take me, and I have seen that this is not far enough.

'Tis time. Next post from Milwaukee, gods and terrorists willing.