Victoria BC

Starting a new year in a new place. Sis and BIL have moved from Regina and are now living and working in Victoria, on the Pacific coast. As I write I can see the sun glinting off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Olympic Mountains behind that. I think I'll miss Regina, but this seems a very pleasant place to live.

I wasn't intending to be here, actually, I should have been back home in Germany a week ago. But there's no work that particularly needs doing, and my mother asked me to accompany them on their annual pilgrimage away from the depths of the Torontonian winter. By the time I leave on Thursday I will have been here a full month, 19th to 18th. I will be so very happy to get home and be able to close a door behind myself. I love my family, but my gods I really need some time alone.

My father continues his slow decline. There are some days when his hands shake so badly he can hardly feed himself. His handwriting, once elegant, is as scratchy and wobbly as a four-year-old's. Some days he can walk without his cane, others he wobbles even with the cane and needs to take a rest after walking from bathroom to sofa. He needs help getting dressed — hell, he needs to be reminded where his clothes are kept.

Probably most distressing to him is that he's losing the ability to converse: his memory is so bad that he forgets what he was saying before he reaches the end of a sentence. This is in part because he tries to speak elegantly and properly but is losing his vocabulary, so he spends all his attention on recovering the right word and loses the thread of his thought.

Mom cannot face his condition, she flips between supportive sympathy and harsh cruel-to-be-kind determination. She will not consider any alternatives to staying home to take care of him, even as she bemoans that she has no life of her own because she is compelled to stay home and take care of him.

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

Not California

Sometime ago, several weeks back now, I arranged to go to San Francisco for a RL meeting of Susan's SL meditation group (following on from the meeting in Malta in January). It was to be my first time in California, something I'd been looking forward to for many decades. For weeks I went around annoying people by singing "Spend my days with a woman unkind…" and various Beach Boys tunes. I found myself writing page-long lists of things to see and do (Berkeley! Salk Institute! Apple Store!) and had to keep reminding myself (a) that I'd only be there for a week, and (b) that I was supposed to be going there to meditate and relax and become more mindful.

I should have flown there via London tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn.

Unfortunately, events in Iceland have conspired against that. I cancelled my flights this morning, and will be remaining ground-bound in Europa. G and I have decided I will be on short time next week: not exactly a holiday but I will certainly be less often in the office than usual. Perhaps I'll take the train to Paris for the weekend or something like that.

Ah well. Shit happens.

[Updated, much later] Well, I didn't even get to Paris. Stayed in the office and worked all week.

Grim

I'm having a "Ballad of Lucy Jordan" moment.

I'm not quite sure whether what I am wallowing in is self-pity or self-hatred. (It's 6am and I was woken by toothache after four hours' sleep, this may play a part in both my condition and my inability to judge it.)

Toothache: in addition to the two broken upper molars that I wrote about last year, I've had an aching lower-left molar for a few days. I'm afraid that if I go to the dentist to fix these, that he will tell me why my teeth seem to be going soft and falling apart. I actually worked up the courage to send an e-mail to his office over Christmas, asking for an appointment in January and an invoice in advance of work for 1000 Euros as a token of my earnest intentions. Had they replied with a date and time, I'd have kept the appointment, but they didn't and so I have aching teeth and (presumably) another unpaid invoice somewhere in these mountains of unopened mail (think of the landscape of Wall-E).

My life is closing down around me, I'm unable to see farther than about a quarter-hour ahead and utterly unable to take any constructive action. Getting dressed and going to work in the mornings drains my supply of self-motivation. My kitchen table is piled high with unopened letters and empty cereal boxes, because in order to open the letters and throw away the boxes I would first have to empty my paper-recycling-box, already full to overflowing, and I can't do that because don't know whether there is room in the bins outside to put the paper into. That is the state of my soul: I am unable to organize myself sufficiently to go outside and look in a garbage bin. Dear gods.

I was in Malta on a meditation retreat last week. What a laugh. It seems like centuries ago and what happened there sounds like the absurdly exaggerated tales that travellers tell to gullible strangers in bars. It amazes me that I can sit in the meditation group in SL or in the office, and nobody sees that I am broken inside. It seems ludicrous that other people look to me for support and advice (which somehow I am still able to give, how odd is that) — and grossly unfair, too: who supports me? Perhaps maintaining this false front is what's consuming all my psychic energy.

I spend a lot of time in Second Life, actually, until after 1am every night; being there lets me feel that I am still functioning normally. Who knows, perhaps it's even true. I don't know what I'd be doing with my time if I weren't there. Reading more than I do anyway, perhaps, or drinking beer in front of the TV that doesn't actually work. Meh.

I understand the appeal of going mad — really mad, rubber sheets and no-sharp-objects mad; of abandoning all responsibility for oneself and letting somebody else take all decisions and instigate all actions. Psych wards have to be awful places staffed by sadistic scum, simply to prevent themselves being overrun by would-be inmates. Take it as a sign of my state of mind that surrendering and letting myself be locked away seems like a good idea. I'm not going to do it, but it sure as hell appeals.

There. I dare you to post this.

Don't worry, I'm fine, really; at least for certain values of "fine." I am not about to jump in front of a train, nor to have myself committed, nor even to bash out my aching teeth with a hammer. I just needed to get this shit out of my head.

Chicago

Arrived in the Windy City last night after a very pleasant flight: I was upgraded to Business Class because the plane was overbooked. The food was much better, the service almost embarrassingly attentive, the seats comfortable (mechanized things that folded out almost flat). Would I pay the extra for this? No. Because the problem with travel is not the food or the discomfort, as much as having to do it at all. I would pay extra for a flight that was two hours long instead of nine, but not even First Class can offer that.

There was some last-minute (almost literally) change of plans: My father was ordered to remain within car-driving distance of the hospital that is treating his circulatory difficulties, so they will not be at the wedding in Vancouver and therefore will not be in Regina with my sister next week. In the circumstances, my father's comment that "it would be nice if I could visit them in Toronto" felt pretty much like a command, so I dropped the Regina leg of the trip. Sorry Sis, but we'll catch up at Christmas.

Travel confounds expectations. One hears that Chicago is a big and dirty and dangerous city, as all American cities are; yet the first thing that Jubi said was "if you want to go out for coffee, just leave the front door open." We are right on a main street, close enough to downtown by American standards of space and distance, and yet it is no more noisy than my own apartment. I do miss hills though, Chicago is as flat as a tabletop.

I watched a tribute to Michael Jackson on the flight (without sound, my headphones didn't work and I couldn't be bothered to ask the crew to deal with them), and found myself feeling really sorry for that cute little kid Mikey. How and why did he end up as that ghostly, ghastly figure? Poor guy. Too much fame, too much pressure, far too much money. I wonder whether he had a life as a kid at all? Did he ride a bicycle and play baseball and hang about the mall exchanging half-truths and boasts? "Rosebud!"

Weather is grey, very warm and humid. Planning to take a boat tour of the river(s) and wander about downtown for a while, then to Milwaukee this afternoon/evening. But first, I shall go to the coffee shop across the street (whose wireless bandwidth I am currently scrounging) to charge up my inner batteries and clear my conscience.

On answering a good question

Dale asked, "Why do you guys *do* this to yourselves? Isn't life hard enough already?"

Why, indeed, do we do this to ourselves? In my case, I was trying to use NaBloPoMo as a jumper cable to recharge my batteries which had gone flat sometime this last year.

I had hoped that writing every day would help me recover some of the joy that leached out of blogging during this year. That hasn't happened, this posting-every-day routine remains a burdensome duty which I will hereby lay down. (NaBloPoMo that is, I shall continue to blog at semi-random intervals.)

I was also hoping to recover some of the joy that had leached out of my life during this year. I have been living in monochrome for quite a few months now, maybe most of the year. I can't tell you when the colours went missing, I hadn't noticed until quite recently. I had thought that my malaise was situational: everything will be fine once I get the competition finished, once I get the scripts written, once I get the database sorted out. Well, those things have come to pass and I am not fine, and the world is still mostly grey.

Oddly enough, this comes at a time when I am actually working on the state of my soul, trying to bootstrap myself into calm and happiness. My alternative, now principal, Second Life avatar (whose name is not Susan) joined a meditation and discussion group in SL, and the three of us (SL-Udge, Susan and the blogging Udge who is also the physical Me) have been trying out the practices, with much talking and listening and feeling and thinking. It is having an effect, slowly but certainly. That I have spotted the greyness in me is due to the inward looking-and-listening that we have been doing. It is also in large measure due to the assistance and encouragement of many dear SL friends, even if they might have thought that they were asking me to help them. I am very grateful for your kindness and your company, my dears.

I don't know what happens next. I have work to do and enough spirit to get out of bed each morning, I have friends physical and virtual to stand by. For now, I guess that will have to be enough.

I'm done.

Second Love

Can one fall in love in three days? In the course of three short evenings, in fact?

This has been one hell of a rollercoaster ride. Calling SL a "game" does not make what happens there less real. These aren't just pixels, people do get hurt here.

A personality has left SL, has left my lives; and although we only knew each other a few hours, although I will see that avatar again today, I am crying as I write because it will be someone else standing there in that form. It's a strange situation, I know, hard to imagine unless you have been in SL and experienced it yourself.

I had thought that I'd be writing very different words than these when I came to tell you about it.

Let's see how long I leave this post up.

Facing the facts

Being an attempt to hold my own hand.

Wrote a letter to my landlady's lawyers this morning, acknowledging her right to throw me out and stating that I will clear the apartment and give them the keys. It feels better to be taking action, even this action, than to sit and wait for the sixteen-ton weight to fall.

Today's xkcd is relevant, not so much for the forgetting as for the final frame.

In the interests of keeping the historical record straight (future biographers will thank me) I should mention that I slept about two hours on Thursday night after opening the letter from my landlady's lawyers. I didn't get up to blog it as usual, because I was far too fraught with fear and worry to compose anything sensible.

And now, to work in Rose Street.

Pleased

Spent most of the day (well, from noonish onwards) transcribing a single eight-page screen formular and its associated object actions (i.e. how a button knows what to do when you click on it) for the Münsters; packaged that up and sent it off.

To the office for two hours during the afternoon, to discuss both competitions with G, U and the two new hires who will remain anonymous for the time being. The second competition is floundering in waffling indecision, due in my 'umble opinion to too much theorification and not enough butts-on-chairs time. Architects have a horror of signage and would like to pretend that an ideal world could function without it, and therefore that this world must function without it. This leads to long and futile discussions of urban-planning theories and viewing angles and suchlike, whereas out here in the real world we all know perfectly well that the client will tack up a half-dozen signs the second your back is turned, dear Architect, so just suck it up and let us move on to something important, please.

I have sadly, after much struggle, decided not attend Princess' birthday jamboree tomorrow. It's just irresponsible to walk away from the competition for three days (I'd thought it would be one and a half days, with a single overnight stay) less than two weeks before it has to be handed in; and the Münsters need to be fed regularly to keep them happy. Sigh.

And now, to bed—well before midnight! [Updated] Wrong! I looked into Second Life "just for five minutes" and spent an hour chatting.

On self-censorship

Anyone who happened to stop by a few minutes ago will have seen a different post in this position, which I've taken down for the time being.

Although I post here pseudonymously, my identity is known to several friends—and to my sister and niece. As I re-read the now missing post, it occurred to me that what I wrote about was not my business alone but the story of our family, and that I might be spilling beans that were not mine to be spilled.

My mother (who happens to be my sister's mother, too, to avoid confusing anybody) has the habit of keeping things to herself, of suppressing news that she thinks might disturb us, e.g. the three-week delay between my father's stroke and her informing us that it had happened. My sister jokes that she always insists on speaking to him when she phones home, in case he'd died and Mom was keeping it quiet.

Moving rapidly along as I think we should, I've been in Second Life with M2 a few times now, and am beginning to see the point of it: it's like online chat with pictures. We tend to meet up in favourite places, and just stand around and "talk" for an hour or two. As we were discussing architecture last time, she took me to one of her favourites: a tree-house on the scale of a baobab, with hot tub and balconies and a dance floor. The latter are fairly common in 2L: you both click on the "let's dance" buttons, and the sim takes over your avatars to make them dance together. I found it quite amusing to watch us (note the pronoun).

And finally: L'shanah tovah tikateivu to my Jewish readers. Bless you, and the rest of us too.

Home

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; miss it and you're left up to your knees in sticky mud, watching the sail disappear below the horizon as gulls gyre and squawk above you.

My mood returning home today is very different from the happiness of my last southbound trainblog post. I am going to miss Ingrid and Hamburg, and I fear that the comforts of my own bed and kitchen will be pale substitutes.

Damn.

Unbelievable

From today's Guardian Unlimited:

Timberlan Addison, two years old, was staying with his 37-year-old father, Timothy, in Tampa, Florida... Timothy had had several brushes with the law, including time in prison for cocaine possession. But neighbours say he was an attentive father who often looked after Timberlan at weekends. Renee Henderson, who lives across the road, described Timothy as "a sweet person". Her daughter, Marquita, was pregnant with his seventh child. Timberlan was his sixth.

That Sunday morning, the two of them had gone out to get some breakfast. Back home, Timberlan was playing, climbing over the furniture, when he reached behind the couch and found a Sig Sauer 9mm semi-automatic... Timberlan pulled the trigger. When Timothy heard the bang, he picked up his crying son to comfort him, thinking he was just scared. Only when he saw the blood seeping through his red-and-white striped T-shirt did he realise that Timberlan had shot himself. [...]

Timberlan was taken to Tampa General Hospital. Timothy was taken to the station for questioning while the police searched the house. They allegedly found two 1oz bags of marijuana in the microwave and more seeds on digital scales on the kitchen counter. They also reportedly recovered a Glock semi-automatic pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, including some for an assault rifle. [...]

Two months later, Timothy was arrested while at his construction job and charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell, parole violation and possession of a firearm during a drug crime. He still faces state charges of culpable negligence for leaving the gun where Timberlan could get hold of it. Timberlan's mother was at the hearing, where she reacted angrily to the charges. "I forgave him from day one," she said. "These people are not taking into consideration that this man lost his child ... He wakes up every morning crying. He feels like it's his fault."

Whose fault do you think it is? How many separate things are wrong with this picture? Only in America.

Winter again

I just walked out to the shops to get some stuff for dinner (and breakfast tomorrow) and discovered that Spring has retreated. It's currently 3°C outside, and the forecast for tomorrow is for snow. SNOW! Bah. Yes, I know: I'm the one who loves winter, I'm the one who was always talking about how lovely it is to be outside at abstrusely low temperatures. But that was during winter. Winter is over, it's finished; why is it cold again? Bah.

My stomach improves and with it my mood—though you might not have noticed.

In sadder news my sister's first and bestest dog, Lucy, has died at age sixteen. She will be sorely missed.

Christmas in the Black Forest

foggyValley_detail
Originally uploaded by udge.

Imagine, dear Reader, that this were the view from your living-room this Christmas. Not bad, eh? G's parents are lucky to live in a very beautiful area. It's quite high, 720 metres above sea level, therefore colder than Stuttgart and often windy; this time there was a constant and slow wind, very humid, which built up ribbons of frost along the upwind sides of basically everything. The newest photos on Flickr were taken on a walk after Christmas lunch, it was about 3° below zero, but the humidity made it quite unpleasant to be out. There was no snow at all. Only G's brother and I were brave and/or foolish enough to go out, the others lay about tenderly prodding their full bellies and planning the next meal.

Eating too much and drinking far too much is a truly international aspect of the way Christmas is celebrated. We ate five times between Monday noon and Tuesday mid-morning, then went to U's parents and ate thrice more on Tuesday. Eight meals in thirty-four hours. Not to forget the snacks, of course: the bowls of cookies and biscuits and chocolatey things that appeared whenever we sat elsewhere than at the dining table. I feel absolutely ill from all the sugary confectionery, my nerves are jingling from the endless cups of strong coffee. G's and U's parents would fit right in with my uncles and aunts in Saskatchewan (leaving aside the language problem).

In other news my uncle AH, my father's elder and last remaining brother, has died. He was 84, and until this year was in fine health (considering his age, weight and habits). He was a good man, I liked him well. He was generous with his time and money, whenever we met (the family when we were kids, myself when I lived in London) he would always ensure that the bill came to him. I spent many weekends with them when I was a student, we would take the dogs to Bushey Park on Sunday mornings for a run, and talk about history and the meaning of life. He was a world-famous jazz fan, known in the clubs of New York and Paris, personally acquainted with Duke Ellington; when the Duke's sister visited London, she stayed with AH and his wife Pat (they had no children). Like many Englishmen, he would volunteer the most intimate information about himself, but would deflect or ignore a direct question; conversation was always on his terms and at his choice of topic.

AH worked every day until he went into hospital this Spring for a minor ailment, from which treatment he didn't recover; he was readmitted in the Autumn and died in hospital. I am dreading calling my parents this evening; both for fear of how this setback will affect my father's condition—which is a post that I've been putting off since this summer—and, quite selfishly, in case they should ask me to represent them at the funeral and the reading of the will.

There's a bitter episode of family history behind this. My father's middle brother's widow is a greedy, grasping, manipulative bitch (if I may speak freely) and always was. She's also a babbing idiot, chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter and never a scrap more content than that. God knows how or why BJ, who was an educated and intelligent man, put up with her. Anyway. She got—took—all of our grandmother's furniture and photos, and has refused to let anyone in the family look at them since; my father is certain that the same will happen with AH's things. He (my father) has often said that he would like to have AH's wartime diaries and flight logs (he was in the Fleet Air Arm, flying Swordfish from aircraft carriers in the Atlantic); well, if Mrs. BJ knew that, she would claim them straight off—and probably throw them in the garbage.

I dread being asked to intervene in this grim and bloody business, one of the many pleasures of leaving London was the thought of never seeing Mrs. BJ again; but if I am asked I will of course go. We shall see.

Poor AH. Pat and the dogs will be waiting, she'll have just put the kettle on for tea.

Dilbert strikes again

File this one under the truth hurts.