thetatiana

This is a musing prompted by the story I read recently of the suicide of Tiffany Sedaris, youngest sister of David Sedaris and of Amy Sedaris, both notable writers and generally funny people.

Here is an article about it. http://www.vice.com/read/remarkable-messes-0000671-v22n6

Here is a piece David wrote about it, not long after it happened. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/now-we-are-five

I was struck by this story, speaking as someone who's had to cut off almost all contact with her siblings in the last few years. Not in a way that blames them for anything, or feels anything but sympathy for them and hopes that they can have good and happy lives. And not without trying hard for decades to find another way. But just in final recognition that it's all I can do, that it's for the best. Nobody wants to be without family.

David Sedaris in his piece asks, "How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else." He goes on to say "Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting."

I thought about this a lot over the last couple of days, as I've read more about her life and work. Tiffany obviously had a very different experience as part of that family than David did. I can't speak for more than that. I can't judge this family that is not my own.

But I wanted to state this fact that may be entirely obvious but yet I think is often missed: that different people can grow up in the exact same family and have very different experiences of it.

My Aunt Nonie was the youngest of five in her family. She and my mother, who was the next youngest, struggled to get along all their lives. There's a story that the four older siblings tell and laugh about, how Nonie once stormed out of the room after being teased mercilessly by her older siblings, saying "I've tooken all I can take!" then stopped to find a magazine to take to her room with her. They all thought this was so hilarious and I'm sure it was very cute of little Nonie, and endearing. But the grown woman Nonie once mildly remarked after that story was told for the umpteenth time, "I never really saw what was so funny about that story. After all, it centers around someone who has taken all they can take. Why is that so hilarious?" And indeed, I saw her point. Nonie moved across the country to California when I was very young, and we rarely saw her again until she was a grandmother, after her husband died, and she moved back here for a while.

In my family, like my mother's family, we didn't treat each other very well. Nonie and I talked about it some in the last decade of her life. We had independently come to that conclusion, and decided that's not how we wanted to be. I'm so glad I had a chance to be around Nonie more, to get to know her better, before she died. She died on my birthday a few years ago. I miss her. Mama slipped up and called me Nonie a lot, and called her by my name too sometimes, during that time when we were all together again here in town and visited each other frequently. I think Nonie and I were a lot alike. Both of us were programmers and science and math nerds. When I first hung out with her at her apartment here in town, I went through her lovely library and realized we cherished many of the same books. Whenever I visited her we would talk for hours about all the things that interested both of us. I still have many of her books that her daughters gave me. I love to read them and remember her brilliant mind and gentle heart.

So why would someone want to leave a family? Why would someone move seven or eight states away as soon as she possibly could, and rarely come back to visit? Maybe because it's not the same family for them as for other members. Maybe there's invisible privilege or acceptance and love there that some have but not others. I think about James Baldwin leaving the US to go live and write in Paris. Why would anyone want to leave this great country of ours, this America, we might well ask? Well, maybe it's because America isn't the same for everyone who lives here. Invisibly, maybe, but pervasively not at all the same.

I pray blessings on David, Amy, and all the Sedaris family. May they be comforted in their grief.

Technology is my thing. I love it. It's transformed human life for the better again and again in the last few million years. This is a series in which I try to imagine future technology, and how it might change our lives again.

I can imagine swarms of tiny robots that constantly surveil nuclear power plants inside and outside the buildings, and compare the way things are with some baseline. They compare to the average of last week's configuration, and point out any changes. They notice if people are in places they don't always go. This would be a good security feature. They notice if water is somewhere it doesn't usually go, detecting any drips or leaks right away. They notice changes of temperature, if a certain pipe is hotter or colder than it usually is. Maybe the insulation got knocked off in one spot, or something. They also can read radiation levels, to alert health physics if anything is changing in a way it oughtn't to change. They get to go all into containment when the reactor is running. I can see these being super helpful on all industrial sites, to prevent accidents and catch anything out of the ordinary that maybe human watchers wouldn't see right away. Those would be cool.

I'm working on my Spanish again (hence the title) using duolingo, this time. I can see all learning getting a whole lot easier with excellent games and programs like that. I can see that working much better for languages, so that in a generation or two everyone on earth will speak a dozen or more common languages. Probably English, Spanish, French, Russian, Mandarin, Portuguese, and perhaps Swahili, Tagalog, Japanese, Arabic, not sure what else. I'm probably betraying my Eurocentrism here. What languages do you consider most important in the world? Which have the most speakers? I'm thinking if your ancestors spoke a language without many speakers, that you'd want to learn that one too. So courses-games for Navajo, Hebrew, Homeric Greek, and all the many thousands of tribal languages, all those in danger of dying out soon, everything we can capture, will in 30 years be easy to learn as your twelfth or twentieth language. That means we need to work really hard to capture them all now as fast as we can. We don't want them to be lost to posterity.

Another task I think we're very close to automating is logging what happens in your life. How long ago did we get get groceries last? When did Ghost have his coughing fits and how has the rate changed over time? Did I remember to take insulin when I ate this afternoon? How long am I sleeping this month and has it changed from last month? Print out all the grocery items I added to list lately. It looks like the Amazon Echo is going to have some of this functionality. And the fitbit or other fitness tracker needs to be incorporated into the app, I think. It would be a great help for forgetful old ladies, parents, and really anyone else. Since Echo is going to be half off for Prime users for a limited time, I think I'm getting one. I got Prime this year so I could order my cat litter from Amazon one bag at a time and have some chance the FedEx and UPS people would carry them up the stairs to the front porch. (This saved me the expense of buying a ramp for the back right now, so it was totally worth it.) I'll let you know how well it works. I kind of hope it has unlimited lists it will keep for you, but the ad copy implies it's only grocery and todo. The limitation, it seems, would be how well it can understand what you say. And that funny video of the voice-activated elevator which gets everything all wrong comes to mind immediately. So we'll see how well it actually works when it comes.

Next, I see housekeeping technology as being way, way behind. We haven't had any major improvements other than the microwave oven since WW2. I can picture a combination washer dryer that will handle 3 or 4 loads at once. You sort your clothes into the load baskets on top. They're probably shaped like short cylinders to fit into the machines. You load the detergent, bleach, fabric softener bins, program the type of washing and drying you want (as with existing machines) but for each of the 4 loads. I do pretty much all my loads the same, but then I understand that most people take better care of their clothes than I do. Then you press start and the machine washes and dries each load in turn. When you return, however many hours later, all the loads are dry and sitting again on top of the machine in their individual baskets. Then you hang or fold the clothes and put them away. No more rerunning the same load 3 or 4 times because you left it wet in the washer when it was done. No more doing laundry all day long or for days at a time switching things out every few hours. You just set it up and it's done. In fact, to make it extra easy, they could have a typical setup as default and then label the baskets darks, whites, colors, etc. Or else you could choose your own system and leave it set like that. It would be so much better than we have now.

When I want something to be really sterile, I put it into the dishwasher. So my scrubby mesh sponge thingy that I use in the bath goes through the dishwasher after every few uses. Seems like the dishwasher gets things clean like nothing else. That made me think that we should design our bathrooms and tubs and showers like dishwashers, to wash themselves and get sterile. I can see sealing off anything that can't get wet, like the scale, the toilet paper, towels, etc. They could all be kept a little outside the sealed area that contains only the tub and toilet. Then fill the detergent and rinse cups, seal the door shut and run the cycle once a week or every day or every time you use it. Let it wash then dry itself similar to a big dishwasher. Presto! Sterile bathroom! Leave your scrubby mesh sponge thingy inside to get it sterile at the same time!

What advances in technology can you see in the future? How will they change our lives?

This came up in a recent Facebook discussion in the Feminist Mormon Housewives group. Some people felt that using the word “know” about our belief in God was always (or nearly always) inappropriate. I posted to go on record that I do know, that my belief is at the same level as things about which we customarily say “I know,” such as I know my son’s birthday, I know Puerto Rico exists, I know the Earth is a spheroid, not flat like a pancake, etc. Several people were curious how I could know God exists, and asked me to explain. So here’s my explanation. I warn you, it’s long. Here’s your chance to get out now and quit reading.

Maybe before I launch into this, I should give a synopsis for the tl;dr people. After all, your time is also precious. So here it is. My spiritual experiences, though subjective, have been at least as repeatable, reliable and unmistakably real to me as other perceptions I’ve had in this mass hallucination we all call “waking reality.” A lifelong study of science and metaphysics leads me to have perhaps a different view of this brain-construct that we label as “waking reality” than nonscientists may have, as well as a healthy respect for the vastness of human ignorance. This is not an attempt to persuade anyone else of the existence of God. Obviously, other people will be convinced, (if they are,) by their own subjective experiences and not by mine. But I think what I’ve seen constitutes an important area of inquiry that perhaps is worth an extension of science to explore. After all, subjective experiences make up a large part of our reality. As great as science is, surely we can benefit from studying the enormous amount of personal data that we each receive, even those observations that are explicitly excluded from the excellent system of gaining knowledge that we know of as “the scientific method”.

So let’s unpack how this came about. The first thing you have to know about me to make my explanation make sense is that I’m a huge nerd. Since I was about 2 or 3 years old, I’ve been trying to figure out how everything in the universe works. I read science for laymen books from earliest childhood. I experimented with physics all the time. For example, by jumping on my parents’ bed while holding my stuffed dog Poochypoo, releasing him at the top of the jump, and watching our relative location on the way down, I learned that all things fall at the same rate regardless of their weight. That was something that shocked most of my Freshman Physics class at Engineering school. They were 18 when they learned that, and I was about 4. So picture someone truly nerdy like this.

I learned about inertia from watching how balls roll in wagons when the wagons start and stop. I learned about electricity from batteries and light bulbs and circuits with switches, and little DC motors (not to mention a good many zaps to my hands) when I was still a young kid. I had tons of science kits and experiments. I used to sit in the tub by the hour and make waves and watch the shadows on the floor of the tub to see how waves behave and interfere. I read Scientific American from cover to cover every month starting around age 16. I looked up any words I didn’t know, and puzzled over anything I didn’t understand until I could easily read the articles on any science subject. I studied Electrical Engineering, Modern Physics, Astronomy, Cosmology, Computers, and everything like that I could find out. My degree is in EE. My life’s work has been designing, programming, and implementing control systems on industrial automation. My whole life has been dedicated to a deep understanding of science and the universe.

I was raised Catholic but never believed it. From high school to about age 36 I was a philosophical materialist, a scientist, an atheist, and my worldview was entirely dictated by science. I never expected any change from that position. I read hundreds of books about science (I read for fun and I’m a readaholic.) I loved learning about stuff like quantum physics and pondering the different interpretations of quantum electrodynamics, and trying to wrap my head around them. (The Copenhagen interpretation, which most scientists today follow, leaves a lot to be desired, as you may know. The alternates all also have bizarre features which are unsatisfying. Don’t misunderstand: the theory is proven to 15 decimal places. Just nobody knows how to interpret what is actually happening on the quantum level.) So that’s something to know about science that most nonscientists don’t realize. The things we know best about reality are just bizarre on the smallest, most basic levels. They are certainly, definitely, totally real. They just are super weird and difficult to believe or wrap your head around. The things we “know” on a macro level, our own level of perception, are quite often illusions.

For instance, Newtonian physics is very intuitive. There’s fixed space in 3 dimensions and time that marches on the same all over. Though this view represents a huge revolution from what people believed before that, from Aristotle and so on, it seems to suit humans very well. We can make sense of it, and we can believe in it. Trouble is, the universe just doesn’t match up to it very well. It kind of does in the main parts, but there are observations that don’t fit. The moons of Jupiter seem to gain and lose time in their revolution around their huge planet. But the time changes don’t rely on anything happening on Jupiter itself, but rather on how close or far away the Earth is to Jupiter at the time of observation. Light has a velocity, it seems, and the really weird part of it is that regardless of our relative motion, light always is observed to go at the same speed. That just plain doesn’t fit in classical Newtonian physics. Electromagnetic waves, as Maxwell found, don’t behave in classical ways. Light acts like particles, thought Newton, but then a very simple thing like partial reflection off the surface of glass, can’t be made sense of with particles. So that’s okay, we can decide it’s waves and not particles, but then when you turn the light down very dim, a photomultiplier just sees one particle at a time, or else none. Not a steadily decreasing wave energy dimming. Whenever you look, there’s either a whole photon there or there’s not. It’s never a matter of anything waving. So we had to decide we don’t really know what to call it, just we know it acts thusly (according to the equations). Whatever is happening on the low level defies our intuition, our sense of how to make sense of the world, which comes from stuff that happens at our level and our speed, not on a micro level or near the speed of light.

And, in addition to what we know about the universe (and we honestly know it to 15 decimal places), about physics, we also *know* there is a lot we don’t know. 95% of everything there is, for instance, is dark matter and dark energy which we have no idea what they are, what they’re composed of, or how they can exist, why they exist, etc. This is from astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. We know there was a big bang about 13.77 billion years ago, but there’s a whole lot we have left to learn about why the universe is how it is. We don’t know what could have set the big bang in motion. And it’s perhaps not even a scientific question to ask how it came about, what happened before that, and could we make it happen again somehow, to make new universes, say, or for whatever reason.

String theory, which is the best candidate we have right now for a potential theory of everything, can't make predictions that can be tested, because the math is too hard for anyone to do yet. So in that sense it's not a scientific theory. When you look deeply into where new theories come from, when you ask scientists and study the history of science, there's a type of beauty or elegance that they sniff out on the various pathways that tell them they are on the right track. Follow the elegant, the simple, the pure, they say, and you will find miracles. They use those exact words. Read Roger Penrose's Road to Reality, for example.

When you ask what are the Laws of Physics like on their deepest level, Feynman answers you that they are just equations. Just pure mathematics. He gives an example of a "mechanical" theory of gravitation, positing that there are little invisible globs of stuff raining in every direction, and where they encounter masses, some of the globs are captured or stopped, causing two nearby masses to partially block the rain in each other's direction, which would tend to push them closer together. He gives that example so you understand what a mechanical theory would look like. The theory doesn't actually work, for a number of reasons. But it would explain gravity in a way that made sense to us in terms of small gears or cogs or doohickeys that generated the observed behavior. The *real* theory of gravity that we use, which is Einstein's general relativity (right now, though everyone expects some eventual quantum theory of gravity to replace it), doesn't have any such mechanical underpinnings. It's simply equations. So the book "The Character of Physical Law" is where you will learn that for reasons we don't understand, physics is just a bunch of numbers, of math functions, of equations. That's the deepest understanding we have of the universe.

The famous equation e=mc^2, which everyone knows, says that mass is energy, and energy is mass. But do we really understand the implications of that? It means that all the solid, tangible, table-thumping reality of our everyday existence is simply knots in the energy fields. Picture fields as numbers in space. Energy is quite intangible, being simply numbers assigned to various situations in many different forms that as they change through physical, chemical, nuclear, or other processes, they change to other situations in a way that the number (mass+energy) is conserved. So when you slam your fist into a wall in rage, that crunch you're feeling is a whole lot of electromagnetic fields and forces, transmitted through more electrochemical impulses up your nerves and to your brain. Solid reality is like that. It's quite abstract when you begin to look into it.

Our models of suns, of what is happening inside stars, right now don’t explain how a supernova can happen, something we regularly observe across the whole universe. There’s something going on that we don’t understand. In fact, stuff we don’t understand is absolutely everywhere you look in science. The science and technology of artificial intelligence is a great example, and has a lot to say about what it means to “know” something. Consciousness turns out to be much harder for computers to get than we expected. There’s a big philosophical discussion about “qualia” which means units of experiences, and under what circumstances they’re present. Scientific explanations of sensations, consciousness, why it’s like something to be me and not like anything to be a rock, all have this one hand-waving step where they say “poof, then consciousness appears.” I’m not sure how they’re able to convince themeselves they’re being scientific, since in no case does consciousness actually follow from the systems they describe. Nobody can yet put together the elements posited to cause consciousness in any way other than the traditional one that takes nine months using unskilled labor (i.e. in a mother's womb). We know so little, we don’t even know what it means to say we know something.

My son has psychosis, and his brain takes the exact same inputs I have and builds with them this extremely fantastical (from my point of view) worldview in which everything is about him, he’s a superhero, or Christ, or the Antichrist, or Satan, (it changes), and a world power that governments all over (including the aliens among us) must monitor and reckon with. From observing him and trying to help him live a good life, I’ve come to see that what his brain is doing is what brains do; they make up some sensible narrative to connect their observations. That narrative is somewhat different for all of us. And for those whose narrative is different enough, they count as psychotic. But human brains run a wide gamut that we still consider normal: politically conservative or liberal, racist or not racist, religious or not, scientific or artistic, INTJ or ESFP, steady-staters vs. big bang proponents, Aristotelians vs. Newtonians, young earthers and creationists vs. Darwinians, etc. If you go too far outside those normal bounds, while you’re dreaming, say, or if you have a brain infection or other brain illness, why then you’re considered psychotic. (Read Steven Peck’s paper describing how it felt to be psychotic, when he caught a brain infection during some field work once, and how it felt to come out of it again.)

Another thing to realize is that waking reality is really quite fragile. I mentioned dreams, and for some reason we all have to lie down and go into a temporary coma, with bizarre hallucinations, for several hours each day as a regular part of our circadian rhythms. But also anyone who does *not* dream for a few days running, if they’re sleep deprived, also slides into a brain state that we call psychotic. So dreaming is absolutely essential for us to maintain a normal waking state, and yet we don’t understand what’s actually going on that causes that. We have vague speculations, but not any real understanding, such that we could manipulate the process at will, or make sleep unnecessary, or point our finger at the exact mechanism on a molecular level. We don’t even know that waking reality is true reality. We don’t know what it’s like to be a dolphin or an elephant. We can only guess. We don’t truly understand scientifically what we mean when we say “I”, much less “I know”.

So the more you know about science, the more you realize the vastness of our ignorance compared to the few things we do know so far. But science is wonderful. It’s a very sure way to find out things, and be fairly sure of those things. But when you study science itself, metascience or metaphysics, you realize that science is only a method of approaching and learning about the world that we learned how to use a few hundred years ago. It’s an incredibly fruitful method, but it’s not existence itself. To do science you follow a certain process step by step.

1. Ask a question.
2. Guess the answer.
3. Make predictions based on your guess.
4. Figure out an experiment that will test those predictions.
5. Do the experiment.
6. If it turns out the predictions were not borne out by the experiment, you guessed wrong so go back to step 2 and guess something different.
7. If it turns out the predictions were right, your answer isn’t yet falsified, and if it stands up to all the future experiments thought of and carried out, can provisionally be thought of as true.
8. After a lot of people try for a long time to disprove your answer by experiment, if it still holds up we start calling it a fact. This is what we mean when we say we know things.
9. There’s always the chance, and in fact it happens all the time, that things that we once thought were true facts turn out to be slightly or rather or even completely wrong, and are replaced by things we think of as truer truths.
*Oh, also, we need to say that only shared, objective, repeatable data are accepted or considered. This gives us problems when studying things like meteorites, that can’t be produced on demand.
**We also need to say that any hypotheses that aren’t testable are outside science. If no experiment can be designed that will show something is true, then whether it’s true or not is simply not a scientific question. It could be true but science just doesn’t illuminate it. “Did time exist before the big bang” might be such a question.

It’s a really great system, but it’s not all of existence. Sometimes we are so into science, though, that we begin to ignore things that aren’t science and feel like that’s all there is, that anything outside science isn’t really real. But a few minute’s thought can make obvious how much of life there is that isn’t included in or subject to science. For instance, the method itself doesn't explain how to come up with new guesses, because that falls outside the realm of science. We can use rules of thumb like "guess the equation" or "play around with the system involved, do every weird test you can think of, and maybe some idea will pop into your mind" (which is my personal favorite when my machines aren't working right). But there is no algorithm for generating good guesses. If there were, we could just implement it on a computer somewhere and let it come up with the whole of science for us. But it doesn't work that way. There's some divine spark of genius that happens to people sometimes when they work very hard on figuring things out. Sometimes they dream of snakes swallowing their tails (in the case of the structure of the benzene ring.) Other times they take a step onto a bus, and then freeze as the whole idea floods their mind. Sometimes they walk across a bridge. However it happens, the "aha" moment occurs, and the a new idea comes into the human library of knowledge from .... elsewhere, wherever, brains or quantum fluctuations in the void or who knows where? That step is still mysterious magic.

So back to my life, at some point in my 30s I began being unsatisfied with my model of reality. It doesn’t tell one how to live (because those questions are also simply not a part of science), and I felt I was living badly. I had my same morality I have today, but I was so disappointed that I didn’t seem to be making progress toward living it more truly, authentically, and in a way that brought happiness to me or those around me. Instead I seemed to myself to be weak and ill-made. All my noble resolutions for projects of great import would fizzle out again and again in laziness or indecision. My joy had somehow dribbled through my grasp, or turned to ashes in my hands. My heroes were people like Gandhi, MLK Jr., The Dalai Lama, people who had made a great impact on the world for good. But I couldn’t even seem to help my own self to live a moderately decent life, much less positively impact the world. For all my gift of intelligence, understanding, education that I’d been given, I felt I hadn’t made good use of my time. I actually seemed to make people around me depressed and unhappy, to wear them down. Old friends seemed indifferent. I felt like this sonnet:

Alas, ‘tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offenses of affections new.

I was weary, disheartened, disillusioned. Everything good seemed to turn to ashes in my hands. I felt I brought only sadness and hurt to the people I loved most. A damning observation, that. How can you run away from yourself? Start over fresh, okay maybe, but I’m still me. I’ll still hurt the new people I’ll surely come to love, and once again make them feel terrible. I was simply ill-made, under a permanent cloud. The universe was still awesome, but the experience of being me was steadily deteriorating. I began to wish fervently to die. Misery nights, as I called them, began to happen with greater frequency, when I couldn’t sleep, was in mental anguish all night, and wished for surcease. I fought battles against that feeling. I drank from all the reasons that held me alive. I would trick myself in different ways to keep on facing one more day, one more hour, take one more breath and let it out.

So around age 36, it began to strike me that the religious people around me, whom I had always liked and even admired, knew something about how to live that I didn’t know. All my life I’d felt they just didn’t understand science as I did, that they weren’t hard-nosed, practical, and skeptical like me. I felt at home and in my element in the company of Feynman, Dawkins, Schermer, Asimov, Sagan. But I never had solved the problem of how someone as sharp as Newton, say, could believe. It must have been the times, or something. After all, I couldn’t understand how anyone could have believed Aristotelian physics either, though somehow they did. Nowadays we just know better. But what of all the other believers today who were vastly more intelligent than me? I always had argued vociferously against the existence of God. My mom pointed out once that there are people way smarter than either of us who both believe and don’t believe. So however belief for or against comes to be for each of us, it’s certainly not about intelligence. Mom was a religion major. Dad studied math and engineering. Intellectually I was more like my dad, but did love the literature that Mom favored, too: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Thornton Wilder, Faulkner, Kazantzakis, etc. We are a bunch of readaholics in my family.

This is turning out to be so long that I’m tempted to apologize, but I guess since C. S. Lewis wrote a whole book (Surprised by Joy) about how he came to be a believer, I’m okay using a mere few thousand words.

So, one key insight was toward the religious people in my life and in history who were making so much better use of their lives than I was, who seemed to know how to live. I came to see that just maybe, possibly, they knew something I didn’t. Maybe there was something to what they said, and where they said it came from. I had once believed they were just happy accidents, people who were well made and naturally kind and so on. But they all seemed to point to prayer and meditation as being big influences. I began tentatively to pray, and lots of people were praying for me too. I started being willing to suspend disbelief to just explore their reality a bit. Sort of a scientific experiment.

I got stuck on the doctrinal points, though. How could it be right for me to let someone completely good take punishment in my stead? That was a real stumbling block. I’d rather suffer for millennia than let some innocent dear soul (whom I personified in my mind as being like my kitten Drive By who had been hit by a car as a feral cat, and whom I had rescued) suffer because of me. C.S. Lewis helped me there by showing me (I read all his apologia around this time) that one doesn’t have to think of it like that. There are always alternate ways of seeing things. Maybe Christ just paid a debt out of his bounty that I couldn’t afford for myself. Maybe only some things about religious thinking are true and helpful and others not. Maybe some things help some people and other things others. Maybe I should take what helped me and seemed to open a path for me, and leave aside for now what blocked my path of progress. Maybe religious belief is different in some ways from scientific belief. But what you lose in having less agreement over, you make up in other ways. But since when have scientists been in perfect agreement either? Surely there are many different ways of knowing.

About this time I had also read a book from the Hari Krishna people called “The Science of Self Realization”, at first just for a joke but then realizing the writer (Sri Prabhupada) was intelligent, learned, and wise. Some things he said (like I am not my body) resonated and rang true, but others (like the fact that the stars don’t shine by their own light) were just wrong, as far as I could tell. I began to entertain ideas of more complexity in my understanding of knowledge.

One misery night when I was at an absolute low point, ready to just give up on life for good, seeking that oblivion that I knew death was, I happened to cry out for help from any god or God who might exist. I felt foolish and overly dramatic. I was infinitely disgusted with myself. But I needed help. I knew I could not go on living on my own behalf. I was used up. I gave up. It was about 4 am and I needed to go to work the next day, but it was simply impossible for me to stand, to shower, dress, and go on. I couldn’t do it. I’d come to an impenetrable barrier. I acknowledged that I sucked, that I didn’t know anything about how to live, and that I was done. I wanted to die. I failed at living. I cried out with all the energy of my soul for someone or something in the universe to answer, to care, to connect with, to save my life, if there was anything worth living for.

And suddenly I was overwhelmingly calm. Where I had been distraught, I was now sleepy. Where there had been me alone in the universe, I was now supported, uplifted, and held safe. I slept.

This came from outside of me, I know. I’d done every trick you could imagine for years to fool myself into going on and living. I’d been stretching my mind and heart for ages to try to figure out how to be alive. I had nothing left. And suddenly I was given this enormous bounty of sleepiness and peace. It was definitely not anything I‘d been able to do myself. But it allowed me to rest, to continue with life, to go back to work again. I gave my life to God with a bitter laugh, thinking what a miserable disgusting gift it was. They gave it back to me solemnly, as a precious gem, clothed in glory. I was not worthless after all.

So I experimented on the word. I planted the seed in my heart and I watered it. It grew. It began to taste wonderful to me. The more I prayed, received, and acted on what I received, the better life got. It’s like night and day, the difference between then and now, before and after. Now I love life, every single moment except when I forget. Now I feel the presence of God (both Father and Mother) helping me, caring about me, watching me. I see them everywhere now, how the universe is conspiring to make me happy. A little breeze touches my face, and it’s a caress. The awesome beauty of the sky is there, and it moves my heart. “For you, for you, we made all of this for you. We want for you a joy unlimited.” All this while God was waiting for me to call, hanging around the phone, missing me, aching for me, and finally, finally, I did call. Then they were right there, helping me. Then and every day since then that I don’t forget to ask, forget to think about them, remember them, and see the universe through their eyes. I’m alive because there is Someone there. I know it as well as I know anything at all. I know that as clearly as I know my hellish life has turned heavenly. I’ll never doubt again because I remember, clear as anything, what life was like before, without them.

Of course you’re going to think “that’s not applicable to me, she must just have needed it so badly that it’s all wishful thinking on her part.” And that’s how subjective experiences work. They matter, they’re real, but only to one single soul at a time. If you cry out, I hope you’ll be helped, but I’m not sure you will be. I don’t understand, really, why I never perceived God’s existence before, and now I do. I liken it to those magic eye posters. There are actually quite a few people who can’t see the pictures in them, and honestly think everyone else is just lying and pretending to see, or imagining they see. They don’t *really* see. It’s kind of like that. I had to believe it was possible before I could do the honest work of trying to learn how. But once you do really see the picture, it’s not just a theory anymore about offsets and angles of vision. You know. That’s kind of how it is with God for me.

People tell me they’ve tried for their whole lives to pray and heard nothing. Maybe it’s like that one guy who took swimming at Auburn when it was required to graduate. He took it a dozen times and never could pass. They finally made an exception for him, I heard. Maybe some people are God-blind the way there are people born eye-blind or deaf. That would be very sad and unfair. Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t really truly want to know God existed before. Because they could tell I didn’t, they were kind and stayed out of my mind. They stayed away. Maybe it’s a muscle that you have to exercise, like being willing to do bench presses for weeks or months before ever starting to notice the results. Maybe it’s something you have to be lucky to catch at the right time, like riding a bike. I tried to learn to ride the unicycle for many hours in my 20s, and failed. Finally after the hundredth time I fell and hurt myself, I thought “this isn’t worth it” and gave up. Yet my neighbors learned as kids and all could do it easily. Maybe the reason it’s contingent and fragile like that is because it’s real. It maybe doesn’t act like we think it ought to because there are all kinds of considerations of the actual reality of how it is implemented that make it confusing. Maybe sometimes the best way to see what God’s saying to you is to look at a luminescent stone in a hat. Real things are weird like that. Made up things, those are the ones that act exactly as you expected. Made up aliens look just like humans except with big eyes and gray skin, right? Real aliens are going to look like something more different from us than a sea urchin (who after all, is a relative).

So there’s a lot I don’t know. But what I do know is that God is really there. My life now is heaven, despite still having daily sorrows and cares. My life before was surely hell, an infinite anguish drawn in breath by breath for what seemed like eons. I’m able to access a peace that defies reason, a love and joy, whenever I really want it. I do get out of practice sometimes, begin to slip, but then I notice and begin again regularly to feed and water the little sapling in my chest, and it continues to grow. My knowledge of God is as sure as anything else I know.

The details, whether there’s one male god or many gods of both sexes, whether this or that ritual or ordinance is necessary, I don’t bother about so much. I love the restored gospel because it reached me and taught me these precious truths, when nothing else before or since has helped me so much. The partnership with a living God is the main thing. For those who‘ve never felt that, I totally understand why you can’t believe the gospel. I wish I could transmit my sure knowledge to those who doubt, but I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.

But maybe my testimony can inspire someone else to try again, or open someone’s heart to the spirit in some mysterious way. I tell this with great humility, knowing that all these things are fragile and contingent, not knowing why I’ve been so blessed and favored to have no doubts ever again. I say this knowing that I’m exposing myself to ridicule and put-downs by saying it, but not wanting to risk not reaching someone I might possibly reach. If there’s someone whose life can be transformed as mine was, how can I deny them any chance to find that? It’s too beautiful and too important to worry about fear of being scoffed at. It is indeed the water of eternal life to me. And I invite everyone to drink of it and be nourished.

http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/free-beer-the-truth-about-dishonesty

I think this is a fascinating subject for research. I just watched this presentation, and it got me thinking about honesty.

I'd like to approach this subject from the point of view that I want to be honest. I accept and recognize that Ariely is right that our human propensity is to cheat a little bit in small ways and still think of ourselves as honest. But I truly want to become completely and transparently honest in every way. I think it's just a really good idea to do that. I want not to fool myself. I want to feel that solid confidence in myself that I can count on me to do what's right. And I'd like for those who know me to realize and be able to have faith that I'll always do that. So how can I set myself up to be as honest and I possibly can be? How do I change my own internal reward structure to keep me as aligned with truth, honor, justice, etc? How do I consistently train myself always to choose what's right?

I've always thought that empathy is a large part of it. I try to encourage my mirror neurons, or whatever structures there are in my brain that let me think of how others feel, what it's like to be them, to let my happiness mirror that of others upon whom I have any sort of impact. But Ariely doesn't seem to consider that factor in his research at all. I wonder why not?

What I get from this talk is that I need to:

1. Constantly remind myself of my moral standards. (e.g. the Ten Commandments exercise he mentioned.)

2. Think of my in-group as being the honest ones. Identify with those who are honest. See it as defining who we are. See it as what we good people do. Think of anyone who cheats even a little as being outside my in-group. (This could be a source of self-righteousness, and shunning, actually. I probably need to examine this item more, and decide if it's the right approach after all. What do you think?)

3. Confess, assess, repent, come clean, get a new start as often as possible, even of any tiny hints of dishonesty or temptations to cheat just a little bit. Begin again every day, every week, even every few hours. Realize that as a human, I'm vulnerable to this like everyone. That I can mess up. That I need to make reparations and set things right when I do.

4. Be very careful of conflicts of interests. Notice when our self-interest leads us to shift our views in various directions. Recuse ourselves when we need to do that.

I wonder if these procedures would work not just for honesty but also for kindness, tact, humility, listening, or other qualities we might want to develop in ourselves? These are very interesting ideas. Can anyone think of more ways that I missed?

Just now I heard my neighbor come home and heard the banging of his garbage cans as he moved them from the curb after garbage pick-up day. Maybe it's because I bought the home that my Mom and Dad owned from the time I was 14, or maybe it's because the quality of the sunshine at the end of summer always invokes a sort of physiological nostalgia in me, but that sound instantly transported me back in time and made me feel it was my Dad coming home from work. Apparently, he would get the cans in on garbage day afternoons, too, or so my body just said.

What is this feeling in my lower abdomen that is such a mixture of pain and joy? Of longing, a deep homesickness, and simultaneously of completeness, of security, of love? Is it because as a child I knew safety, that I was accepted and I belonged in this one place, in my family in our home? I don't know, but I hope my son has the opportunity to feel that some day.

Every explanation I've read of this in biology books is circular and wrong.

Biologists have not realized that female sexual taste is a trait that's heritable and selectable as much as any other. So it is shaped by natural selection, too. What are the implications of this?

Females will tend to choose males who enhance their offspring's chances of living and breeding successfully.

So far so good? Excellent. So why, then, do pea hens, for instance, tend to choose those males with the garish though gorgeous, but totally unweildy tails? Does this mean their children will be fitter? Not the sons, really. They'll inherit those gargantuan unwieldy tails. But the daughters? You betcha! They get the fitness of a father who is so fit he can even carry around this extra baggage, this conspicuous consumption, this beautiful but ungainly appendage that has a metabolic cost, attracts predators, is too heavy and too long to make perching safe in the lower branches, etc.

So what does this tell us? That among species with male sexual selection traits, it must be more advantageous to secure high fitness for your daughters, even at the cost of lower fitness of your sons.

Don't tell me the sons have high fitness because of sexual selection; that's circular reasoning. Sexual selection has to persist in the face of the fact that female preferences are heritable. If your mom likes the big sexy dumb type of guy, it's more likely you will as well. If she goes for the swift but less flashy, intelligent type, that also has more chance of carrying over to you. And in the end, if she chooses guys who decrease her chances of having successful offspring, she'll get weeded out in the evolutionary lottery.

So this tells us some fascinating things. At least some of the time, for some of the species, daughters are much more important than sons in the fitness equation.

Moms among the Irish Elk, Pea Hens, Big Horn Sheep, Moose, Deer, and, well, actually quite a few mammal species, you should value your daughters more! Maybe even human moms should, too.

I wrote this up this morning and just wanted to share it with people, so I sent it as a guest post to fMh. I don't know if they'll be interested in posting it or not, as it's nothing particularly earth-shattering or new. So I'll post it here just in case it never sees the light of day over there. I made a little autobiographical blurb for the beginning and everything.

Tatiana Boshenka converted to the church in 2001 and is a frequent commenter around the bloggernacle. Her interests range from astronomy, evolutionary biology, and quantum physics to public health and epidemiology, poverty elimination, and averting human extinction. She adopted a teenage son several years ago, and resides with him and their nine cats in Birmingham, Alabama. She's been accused of being a starry-eyed optimist, and since retiring from her career in engineering design and project management for the nuclear, water and waste-water, steel, and paper industries, she has way too much time on her hands to read and think.

I was working this morning around the house, and thinking about the issues we discuss on the bloggernacle all the time, as I often do. Suddenly, I recalled and felt overwhelmed with how much I simply love my church, and love the Restored Gospel! Sometimes I think I focus so much on what needs to change that I forget how great it all is to begin with, why I joined a decade ago, and how much my life has changed since then for the better. So the idea came to me of writing up an overall report card for the church from time to time, to keep my perspective balanced. I took this morning and came up with my evaluation of the church right now in first quarter 2012. Please tell me in the comments what ways you agree or disagree with my assessment, which things I've forgotten to include, and what grade you yourself would give right now to the church overall.

The Restored Gospel: A++

o Eternal Progression and eventual Godhood: A++

o Teaching us Service to each other (perfection of the Saints): A++

o Intelligence being the Glory of God: A++

o Spirit being Refined Matter (philosophical materialism, and how much sense that makes): A++

o The Word of Wisdom (says this Irish girl whose family is littered with dead alcoholics, and a few living ones): A++

o The Goodness and Wholesomeness of Embodiment and Bodies: A (They lose a few points for excessive modesty rhetoric to girls and for teaching sexuality and masturbation to kids as being toxic, causing difficulties once people are married from suddenly changing ideas to married sex being all exalted and stuff.

o Teaching us Honesty, Industry, Thrift, Self-Reliance, Educational Achievement, Responsibility, Love, Kindness, Generosity, Empathy, Tenderness, Innocence, Strong Loving Families, Courage, Convictions, Standing for Something, Working to Build the Kingdom of God, Zion, Good-heartedness, Peacefulness, lack of Contention, Letting Go of Negative Influences, etc.: A++

o Providing a community of people who are struggling to learn all these good things and manifest them in their treatment of each other. B+ (Our communities are far from perfect but wow have you seen the rest of world lately? We’re doing our best at this and continuing to improve as we go. We’re certainly not perfect but we do try to keep our ideals in mind and continually aim for them. The extent to which many, many Latter-day Saints are manifestly wonderfully good people is the number one reason I began investigating the church years ago. I’ve long since quit being surprised when I see new evidence that LDS people are very good, so good, heartbreakingly good. (Thank you for that, brothers and sisters. When I think about this I get tears in my eyes.))

Provident Living: A++ (I've totally changed from a 'grasshopper' to an 'ant'. Well, not totally as in absolutely completely, but I definitely have changed a whole lot.)

Disaster Preparedness: A++ (Love this!)

Disaster Relief, Mormon Helping Hands, LDS Humanitarian Foundation: A++ (So dear to my heart!)

Lay Clergy: A++

Education, Intellectualism (and combating anti-intellectualism). A- (A few points off for Joseph F. Smith's denial of evolution.)

Independent thinking: B (On the one hand we have the school of teaching correct principles and letting us govern ourselves, but on the other hand there's that whole idea that when the prophet has spoken, the thinking is done. Average those two competing paradigms for my grade on this.)

Pinching tithing Pennies: A (they lose the ++ for the mall development in downtown SLC, though that will probably end up being a good investment anyway, so what the heck: A++). Oh but they’re not open with how tithing is spent so on second thought, make that a B).

Church welfare including farms, canneries, cheap staples, and encouraging self-sufficiency: A++, though it must be noted that I’ve so far not yet had the personal experience of using those things. What I do know tells me it’s awesome.

Missionary Outreach, proclaiming the gospel: A++ (I think we do an excellent job of this, and of updating our methods as technology changes and we learn what's effective.)

Callings and the development of speaking skills, management competency, fostering service to our fellow humans, and learning by teaching each other. A (this could be improved if we did more teaching of how to teach, speak, manage, and especially if opportunities now available only to men were extended to women as well).

Which brings us to, Patriarchy, Gender Roles, and Structural Violence Against Women. Oooo, I have a feeling our church GPA is about to drop.

o Mother in Heaven: B (It’s fantastic that we learn of her, but sad that we learn so little.)

o Eve’s Decision on the Garden as a positive thing: B (Again, way better than most Christian churches, but does she have to sit so silently and meekly in our version of the story?)

o Developing Talents in YW and RS: C- (There’s some good things happening, of course, but nothing like it should be, and nothing near as much as for the YM and EQ.) (By the way, this is not an evaluation of the teachers in YW and RS who are mostly doing a splendid job, but of the program itself, manuals, top leadership, etc. Also the lack of self-determination, and the neglect of the whole world including developing countries, which desperately needs women to help with education, infrastructure, microfinance, health care, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked, and all the stuff our charter says we're supposed to be doing. We have serious, important work we need to focus on much more than having ward princess pageants or whatever.)

o Modesty Rhetoric: D (The Taliban get an F, Saudi Arabia a D-, so I’m afraid it’s almost as bad as it could be.)

o Civil Rights for LGBT individuals, acceptance and love of LGBT family members and community members: D (Again, almost as bad as it could be.)

I don't know how to weigh everything and come up with an overall GPA. But you know what? I feel like the LDS Church is doing a pretty good job, is really wonderful, overall. Yes there are some grievous flaws but there are also many reasons I absolutely have to keep working with it, putting my faith in it, and giving it my full support. Sometimes I focus too much on what we need to improve, but I think sometimes I need to stop and remember how much we get right, and how very much I love my church community. Big hugs for all my Mormon Peeps! Thanks and grateful tears for all you do! Congratulations on everything you’ve accomplished. Now there’s a whole big world out there that needs us. So I hope I'll always be able to step back, renew my enthusiasm, put my heart into it, and keep working my tail off!

My son was playing music this morning that was so good it made me sing along. So I began to wonder what made this music so good. I was trying to analyze where the goodness resided. Was it in the melody? The singer's voice? The chord changes? Sometimes chord changes just feel so right, so satisfying, that I'm tempted to decide that changes are where the beauty of music comes from. The words contributed, too, I'm sure. The real truth is that we don't understand at all what it is that's so good about music, why we love it so, and why it moves us so much. We don't know what it is that makes music good, so that we could use that principle to construct all the most beautiful, delicious, best music ever, without end. Lots of people try hard to make good music every day and come up with dreck, with awful music, dull, repetitive, uninspired natterings. The beauty of music is a deep mystery, as deep as that of human existence. Why is music good? Because it is. We have no better explanation of it than that. So how is it we think we understand anything about life, if we can't even answer such a simple and important question about our daily lives? We know nothing!

Then that got me thinking about our picture of reality, our best view of what is, what constitutes the something (rather than nothing) that we experience as existence, as the universe, as this stuff here. And that picture of waking reality is entirely contingent on the fact that every so often, every 20 hours or so, each of us must go into a coma and hallucinate for some 6 or 8 hours, that if we're deprived of the ability to do that, our reality breaks down entirely and we become psychotic. Not after years or months but after just a few days. So our view of normal waking reality is utterly dependent on this entirely mysterious process of sleep, of dreaming, in which we lie still, but for some twitching, plus breathing and other autonomic functions necessary to maintain life in our bodies. We lie still and lose consciousness, and we hallucinate things that make no sense.

Our dreams are sometimes rich and detailed, with long narrative arcs, complete with foreshadowings, with symbolism and all the depth of a great novel. But much of the time they're just bizarre and seemingly meaningless. A lot of the time they mirror the frustrations and struggles we experience in waking life, but other times they just have us struggling and frightened over weird and nonsensical things we never come across during the day. I used to have a recurring dream in which I jumped from a very high diving board and missed the little postage stamp pool of water at the bottom and smacked into the concrete. I would think "so this is what it's like to be dead, odd", then wake up. Occasionally dreams are full of enjoyment and peace. There was that one in which I was making bacon, eggs, ham, toast for everyone on a grill at our cottage on the beach. The air had that quality of lightness it has when the summer sun is reflected off the white sands of the Gulf of Mexico. So lovely. But on the whole dreams seem rather random and disconnected, and really not much to do with anything.

Once when my son had an odd reaction to Ambien, he sleepwalked and sleeptalked all night while I sat up with him to be sure he didn't do himself any harm. He shared the contents of his dreams with me then, and they rapidly shifted from a huge party at our house, to the pirate ship ramming into ours and the pirates boarding us, to the circus arena we were in during the middle of the performance, to the beautiful rainbow which he asked me if I could see. I answered sadly no, I'm in the dream but I'm not experiencing the dream. So he leaned his head close to mine as though by so doing he would let me see through his eyes. It was marvelous and sweet, and I'm sure I would have appreciated it more had I not been so very tired and sleepy myself. But I was surprised that no connected narrative came though at all. Only a series of scenes, flashes almost, one after the other after the next, hour after hour all night long. Not at all what my dreams feel like when I remember them.

And this whole odd process is absolutely fundamental and essential for our brains to work during our waking lives. Without dreams, there is no waking, and no reality as we know it. So how real can such a reality be? How, if it's so delicate, so contingent on such a weird inexplicable process, can our waking reality be an accurate representation of *the* reality, of ultimate reality, if such a thing really exists at all?

For all we know, for all of science and orthodoxy, all of academics and prognostication, we still have absolutely no clue about such ordinary daily things as music, dreams, and waking reality. We don't know much of anything. We're left to goggle in amazement and wonder. Praise creation unfinished! Amen.

I never thought I would say this. I'm the ultimate in slackerdom and a devoted lover of play time. I think Volkswagon's Fun principle is the most important philosophical addition to the pursuit of engineering in centuries. Richard Feynman got all upset and nervy during his first couple of years of professordom because he felt like he wasn't worth his pay, he wasn't contributing enough, and then cured himself with a recommitment to the principle of having fun doing physics. He saw someone toss a plate during a food fight in the cafeteria, and began wondering about the wobble pattern of the plate and how it related to the spin frequency of the Cornell logo. This work led directly to his breakthrough in Quantum Electrodynamics and his Nobel Prize. He's so right, too! Everything truly inspired and clever I ever did came out of playing around, doing stuff for fun.

I only ever can make myself read books that I just want to read, have an urge to read. I mean, I read a lot of books that other people might consider tough or highbrow or technical, but I honestly only read them for fun. Actually I take that back. Occasionally I've read a book or two for the purpose of battling my insomnia that I've had since age 12. But those I either end up liking a whole lot, hence subverting their purpose as soporifics, (like The Scarlett Letter and the American Heritage Dictionary) or else I remember zero later of what I read (The National Electrical Code --- incidentally the very best soporific even known to mankind) and so might be said never to have read it at all. So fun is a required factor in my reading.

I love to read, and so I get an education that way for free, just as playtime. Books are definitely always something I'm doing when I'm supposed to be doing something more productive. I highly recommend that approach to reading and literacy in general. Find books you love. Don't keep trying to force yourself to read books you don't love. Believe me, there are so many good books out there that you can always find books you love. No matter who you are or what your interests, there are books you will love. If you don't think so, keep looking.

I heard someone who is a professional say they never read for fun anymore, because they have too much reading for their profession that they must accomplish. I personally think that's a tragedy. Reading for your profession should be completely independent of just plain reading, reading what you like to read, reading just for curiosity's sake or purely for fun. Like, no matter how much free time you give yourself in your work-life balance, some of that free time should be spent reading.

I realized in the 80s that TV is for me a really low-quality use of time. So I just stopped watching tv altogether in favor of reading books. When I've read a good book, I don't look back on that time and feel it to have been a waste. If the book was good enough to hold my interest, it was good, period. It was worth the time. Oh, I suppose I do let some books go and choose better ones instead. Like even after enjoying the mysteries of Elmore Leonard for a good while, I let them go because they left a bad taste in my brain. I mean, I think one of his (I think it was Killshot) I thought was a very good book by any standards. But overall his stuff is yummy but not nutritious to my tummy, so to speak. It's junk food. There are too many really good books that I have left to read that I haven't read so I renounce the junk food and look for something meatier and more sustaining now.

I've yet to parse the internet entirely, or settle on what is a waste of my time and what isn't. I go back and forth with this. Sometimes I'm trapped for hours reading a site I don't really find worth it. In that case I just don't go back. And other times something seemingly mindless like playing Freecell or solving Sudoku puzzles pleases me in ways that I don't quite understand. It's something about gaining mastery of a task that feels like solid food, even if the task I'm gaining mastery of isn't really one that matters very much or contributes to anything positive in ways I can easily trace. I have a Freecell addiction that I still don't know if it's healthy or good. Somehow it does feel worthwhile, but I'd be hard pressed to say how. Probably all those tens of thousands of games, those hours I've spent, could have been spent better.

As I age and my health grows ever more precarious, I have higher standards of use of my time. Sleep is always quality use of time, I think! Maybe I've been influenced in my view by all the cats I've had in my family. Naps are one of our favorite quality-time activities. Napping together is like one of the great joys of life, I think. When ever I've either babysat or had a current boyfriend, I've found napping with other humans even more pleasing and fun. I feel like I'm on solid ground that sleep is always a fantastic use of time. Despite Housman's admonition "Clay lies still but blood's a rover, breath's a ware that will not keep. Up, lad, when the journey's over there'll be time enough for sleep." I think he's missing a lot. He was young and probably overly-energetic when he wrote this.

I've reveled in slackery, in fun all my life. I bear my testimony that 2 Ne 2:25 "men are that they might have joy" is the truth! The purpose of life is joy, yes, totally!

But since I've been on a leave of absence for health related reasons, I've come to miss work. Seriously, badly, deeply, I truly miss working with all my heart. Isn't that strange? Over and over I have dreams that I'm working furiously to get some machine installed and running. I'm at a jobsite somewhere and we're working out all the issues and difficulties of construction, installation, and commissioning of some new equipment, structure, system, or machine. I wake up and think somebody ought to pay me for that effort I put in all night! I lie there and long for the fun, the purpose, the joy and thrills of working again at my chosen profession. I sure hope I get healthy enough to go back and do that again before I die! It was so much fun! Building things is very cool. Just like when I was a kid and built cities from blocks, I love to build. I guess that's my creative urge at work.

I like designing and making stuff like cabinetry, too, or quilts, or sweaters. Maybe I'll have to content myself with projects like that, now. Or with building a great team to have fun working at the new business. Or maybe just with building a healthy cat-family in my home. I don't know. But isn't it odd that not working is much less fun than working? Who'd a thunk a slacker and hedonist like me would ever say that?

I love the feeling of turning over a new leaf, starting a new phase, beginning again. One thing I miss about school is how it was all done every 9 weeks or so (we were on the quarter system at Auburn when I went). You went through finals and it was a huge push but afterward you got to take a break and then start fresh on something altogether new. That was wonderful!

My dad used to get a whole new job about once a decade. Mostly he worked for the same place, but he would start up an entirely new division or something, begin a whole new area. One time he bought a small business and worked at it for most of a decade, then sold it and went back to work for his old bosses doing something brand new. I think that propensity runs in the family.

I love to change jobs, myself. I've been a programmer, a computer consultant, an electrical engineer, and a project manager. I've always said I wanted my next career to be rock star or visionary. To tell the truth, though, I thought when I went to work as an engineer for nuclear plants, I thought that would be my last career, would take me through to retirement age. Unfortunately, illness got in the way and I was unable to work at that job after three years. I've had diabetes since my 30s, but gradually accumulated more troubles since then. First Barrett's esophagus, the predromal phase to the cancer that killed my dad. Then Plantar Faciitis, which made it painful to be on my feet and take even a few steps. Then this crippling fatigue that grew and grew on me until it overtook me. Along with that came Lupus and Immune deficiency. Also high blood pressure and difficulty losing weight. My cholesterol is way too high as well. Lately I've added Thyroid problems, and now kidneys. I haven't been able to keep my diabetes in good control for a while, which is apparently why the kidneys are starting to go. Either that or the high blood pressure. I take 30 different medicines and supplements each day. So I got more and more unable to last a whole day at work, and even to get up and bathe and dress and make it there on many days.

First I went on FMLA, (family medical leave act), which let me take days off without pay. I did that for about six months, then had to go on long term disability. I'm currently in a two year leave of absence from my job. At the end of the two year period, I go on COBRA for another 18 months, then lose my insurance. My disability insurance company keeps making the bar higher, and adds more and more difficulty to the process of being re-certified to receive my disability benefits. I do feel better after my two year rest, but I'm not really well enough to take another full time job. I'm also doubtful my previous employer would hire me back, and I'm not sure I blame them. Why take a risk on someone who is sick when someone younger and healthier is applying for the same job?

I've recently started a new diet that's helped me get my blood sugar down, and has given me a burst of energy so far. I'm really happy about it. I hope I can lose weight and roll back the clock to give myself a few more years of decent health. It's got me very optimistic again.

So at this stage in my life, I'm starting something new once again. With hope and trepidation I'm starting a business. It's something I do every day anyway, taking care of cats. It's something I love to do. I've always loved animals and especially cats. Here's the site I've made for it with my rudimentary web development skills. http://felinehs.com I'll be learning as I go. Wish me luck!