Hollywood Pairs

Long ago I developed a theory of why Hollywood movies seem to come out in pairs.  I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.  The canonical example is generally Armageddon and Deep Impact, but I first noticed it when Volcano followed hard on the heels of Dante’s Peak (or vice versa; I forget).  Since then, it’s happened again and again: Antz and A Bug’s Life, Mission to Mars and Red Planet, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, Madagascar and The Wild, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line, The Descent and The Cave ... I could go on.

Sometimes they think they’re going to fool us by waiting a while before they release the second one.  Zoom was a full year after Sky High, but we still know it’s the same movie, right?  Or sometimes you forget there was a pair, because only one of the movies achieved any popularity.  I mean, after you saw The Matrix, you can easily be forgiven for forgetting about The Thirteenth Floor.  And The Sixth Sense really overshadowed Stir of Echoes, even though the latter movie is just as good (and maybe even a bit better, upon repeat viewing).  Or, to dip into the cheesy horror flick realm, remember Orphan?  Okay, now remember Case 39?  No, of course you don’t.  But there it is: same movie, different actors.

And it just keeps on happening ... tell me you haven’t, when watching a commercial for Wrath of the Titans, said to yourself: “wait a minute ... didn’t we just have Clash of the Titans?  Or wondered if we really do need two simultaneous movies about Snow White, even if one is serious and the other not? 

So I was sitting down the other night, watching Super and going “wait, how is this different from Kick-Ass again?” (although, to be fair, Super has a goofy, gory revelry that surpasses even Kick-Ass, although I still think Kick-Ass wins it in the end), and I was reminded (for the 87 thousandth time) of my theory.  It goes like this:

Have you seen The Player?  In this movie, which is about Hollywood elite types, and done by the amazingly awesome Robert Altman, we see what I deeply suspect is a very true-to-life depiction of how movies get made, mostly happening in the background of the primary plot.  (This movie, by the way is very good; if you haven’t seen it yet, go out and rent it.)  I suspect this because, by all accounts, Altman is just the sort of subversive director to do such a thing as reveal the duct tape and icky bodily fluids behind the curatin, and also it would perfectly suit the vibe of the movie if it were all true.  Thus I imagine that all the mini pitch meetings that Altman portrays really happened ... yes, even the one where someone says “it’s sort of Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate.”  And, in all these pitch meetings, the pitchee passes.  Can you visualize it?  “So, let me get this straight: an active volcano just suddenly appears in the middle of a major metropolitan area?  That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”  (It helps if you can picture Tim Robbins’ studio executive character saying it.)  “Go peddle that crap somewhere else.”

Which of course they do, right?  I mean, you’re a scriptwriter in Hollywood: pitching is what you do.  One guy says “no,” you just find another guy.  Ask enough guys, and someone is bound to say “yes” ... right?

Now flash back to the original guy who said “no.”  “Wait, someone picked up that story?  Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought ... what do they know that I don’t know?  No way I’m getting fired for missing the boat on this one!  Find me another writer to write a volcano story: pronto!”  And, poof: we have Volcano and Dante’s Peak.  Or whatever and whatever.

I have no clue if I’m right or not.  Although here is a blog post by someone who says they’re a real scriptwriter and it sounds remarkably like how I always envisioned it.  (Also he remembered a few pairs I forgot about ... Infamous and Capote: nice one.)

So maybe I’m onto something.  Or maybe not.  Maybe it’s just a coincidence that The Howling and An American Werewolf in London came out the same year.  Maybe two completely different people thought up the concept of movies about CGI talking penguins.  Or maybe it’s a giant Hollywood conspiracy.  Here‘s a list of pairs going back to the 1930’s and two films about Abraham Lincoln.

So obviously I’m not the first person to notice this.  TV Tropes (of course) has a name for this: “dueling movies.”  (Careful when visiting TV Tropes: wiki walks can consume large portions of your life.)  It offers even more great examples, like Treasure Planet and Titan A.E., or The Book of Eli and The Road.  Uncharacteristically, though, it offers no theories on why the phenomenon exists.

The thing I like about my theory is that it goes beyond just saying “Hollywood is so unoriginal,” which is itself a rather unoriginal statement.  No doubt true, granted, but surely we can do better than that.  Besides, if you think about it, it takes quite a while to develop, sell, produce, and market a movie.  If it was just a matter of studios copying each other, there would be a lot more time between the halves of the pairs.  Plus, it’s not like a movie like Sky High was so awesomely successful that it made a piece of dreck like Zoom inevitable.

So my theory still sounds appealing, at least to me, and I was even able to dig up some circumstantial support for it.  You gotta dig it, right?  It’s sort of like Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman ...

Night Life

So, I was reading this blog post the other day, and it was full of mostly good advice, but then I hit this statement:

Do the most important thing first in the morning, ...

And I thought: spoken like a true morning person.

If I tried to do my most important task of the day in the morning, every day would start disastrously.  Assuming I could manage to even remember what the most important task was.  Which, most likely, I couldn’t.

Because I’m a night person.

Now, for many many years, I’ve had a theory that the difference between a night person and a morning person is the ability to roll over and go back to sleep.  I think we all wake up at various and sundry ungodly hours of the morning.  It’s just that some of us have the good sense to look blearily at the alarm clock and say “fuck that shit!” and drift right back off.  Well, I say “good sense” with tongue planted firmly in cheek; the truth is, I’m lucky enough to have the physical ability to do that.  I’ve known people who simply cannot.  Once their eyes open for the first time in the morning, they’re done for.  May as well go ahead and get up, because there’s no way they’re going back to sleep.

I tend to sleep late.  Consequently, I stay up late.  My friends who are morning people all get up early.  By the time midnight rolls around, they’re exhausted.  And I’m just getting started.  So, there you have it: instant explanation of morning people vs night people, based on simple physiology.

Of course, we don’t have to trust my pet theories.  We have a whole Internet to consult.  Sure, I could point you at loads and loads of articles and blog posts.  I could tell you that your morning or night tendencies are called your “chronotype,” that it generally changes as you age (you’re most nocturnal during your teen years, and most diurnal starting somewhere in your 60’s), that some scientists say that instead of two types (morning people and night people), there are three: “larks” (from their habit of annoying chirpiness in the mornings), owls (obvious), and hummingbirds (somewhere in the middle / a little of each, from the practice of flitting from one end of the garden to the other).  I could tell you that, being a night person, I’m supposedly smarter, more creative, and that both my mood and my physical strength increase throughout the day ... and that I’m supposedly less reliable, less punctual, less proactive and therefore less likely to succeed in business, more emotionally unstable, and more prone to addictions.  At least compared to you morning people.

But screw all that (although most of that stuff is true, in my experience).  All it really means is that I’ve spent quite a bit of my life working out how to avoid having to be at work early in the mornings.  And, mostly, I’ve succeeded.

You see, us night people are hard to wake up early, and, even once we do wake up, we’re groggy, grumpy, and pretty well useless.  I’ve had to be at work early before, of course—I haven’t led a charmed life or anything—and I can tell you pretty much exactly how it goes.  I spend the first few hours concentrating on being physically present, staying awake, and responding in a more or less coherent fashion.  That literally consumes all my brainpower.  Then I eat lunch, then I fall asleep at my desk.  I generally wake up just in time to start wrapping up for the day.  When I have to be at work early, I basically accomplish nothing, except theoretically satisfying mid-level micromanagers who think that a body in a chair is the epitome of employee achievement.

This is not my fault, as near as I can tell.  It’s just the way I’m wired.

Of course, those articles will tell you that your chronotype, like so many aspects of your personhood when it comes to questions of nature or nurture, is a bit of both.  You have genetic tendency towards one or the other, as you may have a genetic tendency towards alcholism—but the latter doesn’t mean you’re doomed to become an alcholic, and the former doesn’t mean you’re stuck being awake at 4am (one way or the other).  But your genetic tendency toward alcoholism may very well be so strong that you’d better not ever start drinking, and your chronotype may be so firmly set that you’ll only ever have limited success changing it.  I know I certainly have.

I don’t think you “larks” (or even you “hummingbirds,” if such things truly exist) have any concept what it’s like to be an “owl.”  I get the impression that you think we’re just lazy.  We should just drag our sorry asses out of bed a little earlier and stop whining about it.  Ah, would that it were so easy.  Back in the days when I used an alarm clock, it was utterly ineffective.  I’ve tried multiple alarm clocks.  I’ve tried placing the alarm clock across the room.  I’ve tried using an radio alarm clock tuned to a type of music that I can’t stand (country, in my case).  Nothing works.  Yes: I can get up, cross the room, and turn off the alarm clock—in my sleep.  Once, I was crashing for a few weeks in the dorm room of two friends of mine (this was the college years, so we were all owls at that point).  One of my friends bought an alarm clock that was so loud and strident that it sounded like a fire alarm.  The first time it went off, we all lept out of bed, terrified—it was that bad.  After a week or so, though, we began to sleep through it, and eventually the real fire alarm went off in the dormitory ... and we slept through that too.

During the years when I ran my own consulting company and mostly worked off-site, I gave up on alarm clocks completely and just woke up whenever the hell I felt like it.  Generally, this was around noon.  Of course, I was also staying up till 3 or 4am, generally working.  I like to work at night.  I can think at night; my brain is firing on all cylinders.  I can think in the afternoon too ... but only if I slept late enough.  It’s not that I’m requiring more sleep than other people.  I generally sleep around 7 hours a night at this point.  But if that 7 hours ends at 7am, I’m useless for the majority of the day.

From the time I wake up until the time I get to work is about 3 hours.  45 minutes of that is the commute time, of course.  It takes me perhaps 30 minutes to attend to my daily hygiene—shower, teeth, hair, clothes, etc—sometimes longer if I’m particularly groggy, but I think we can safely say that no more than an hour and a half is spent actually getting ready and driving in.  So where does that other hour and a half go?  Well, there’s breakfast, which in the past few years I’ve been successful at forcing myself to eat (when you wake up around 10, it often makes more sense to just wait a couple hours and have lunch for breakfast, although it turns out this is a bad habit, for many medical reasons).  But mainly that extranneous hour and a half is spent just ... waking up.  Yes, it’s literally around 90 minutes—on average—just for me to get into a state where I can function as a normal human being.  I’d like to tell you I spend this time with my family, but the truth is my family knows better than to try to talk to me in the morning.  Fruitless, that is.  I generally get some work done during this time: I find that mindless tasks like answering emails are perfect for this period, when I’m pretty mindless anyway.  But mostly it’s just a really long, extended warm-up time.  Like, you know in the old days, when you’d turn on the television set and then you’d have to wait fifteen minutes before the picture would show up?  That’s my brain in the morning.

I’m actually very fortunate to be very good at what I do.  Even after I stopped working for myself, I managed to find two jobs in a row (8 years now, between the two of them) where people didn’t care that I don’t show up until lunch time.  And that’s mostly because I’m worth waiting for, if I do say so myself.  They’ve learned that the time they see me physically in the office is only part of the time they get out of me.  At night, when the rest of my family is off to bed, I kick back with my laptop, and I get some serious work done.

Right this second, in fact, it’s 10 minutes to 3.  AM, that would be.  Sometimes I write these blog posts during Sunday afternoons, but mostly I like to do them late Saturday night (hey, after midnight it’s technically Sunday, right?).  Unless I have some other work to do.  But I get to stay up late at night, despite having 3 children, because the mother takes the early shift and deals with them in the mornings.  That way, she can go to bed early and count on me to deal with whatever craziness is going on after 10pm.  So, right now I’m finishing up a blog post, true.  I’m also waiting on my daughter to wake up so I can deliver her to her mom.

So I’m lucky to have found a way to live and work much of my life at times when my brain functions best.  I know that many people aren’t so lucky, and I feel for them.  And, then, there’s you morning people.  You will always have an easier time than I do, because the corporate world is geared to your schedule.  As several of those articles point out, there aren’t any sayings about us night people getting the worm.

I suppose I’ll just have to content myself with being smarter than you.  It’s a burden, but I’ll manage somehow.

Perl blog post #6

Been trying to get back into the swing of things at work, so I’ve been doing a bit of Perl coding this week, and I decided to write about it.  Check out the other blog if you like such things.

Next week perhaps I’ll get back to this blog.  Or not.

Postprocedural Meanderings

Well, as advertised last week, I had my minor medical procedure on Wednesday (I generally say “surgery,” but, to be pedantic, it was actually a “procedure” because they didn’t cut me open).  I thought for a while I might be feeling up to a normal blog post, but no such luck.  Of course, you are undoubtedly a highly intelligent person who has determined that they should not read this blog (also as advertised), so you probably don’t care.  But, then, you probably aren’t reading this, so who am I talking to anyway?

Quite the dilemma, indeed.  While I ponder it and hope that I can eventually move past my liquid diet enough to stop feeling continuously faint from hunger, you can feel relieved that you don’t have to listen to me babble this week and look forward to next week, when you can ignore me properly.

Perl blog post #5

Another uber-technology post this week, and, since it involved Perl this time, I decided to post it on my Perl blog.  Continuing in the vein of This vs That, it’s Perl vs Shell Scripts.  Hop on over if you’re so inclined.

Next week, I’ll be recovering from some (minor) surgery, so we’ll see if I have enough gumption to post something.  Wish me luck!

Shell Game

[This week I’m essaying a very technical topic.  This is partially because I want to spit out something fast, and I can do technobabble pretty easily.  Plus I’ve always wanted to write this down, because people—other technogeeks, obviously—ask me about this all the time, and it’s difficult to sum up in a quick sound bite.  But, if you’re not a techie (and specifically a *nix techie at that), you may wish to pretend that I scribbled out another “I don’t have time to write a proper post this week” interstitial post.]

Let’s talk for a moment about shells.  Linux shells, I mean, although we’ll speak in broad enough terms that it shouldn’t matter which flavor of Unix you prefer.  If you don’t what a shell is, you may as well find another blog post to read.  If you do, you probably know most of the history I’ll cover below, but it’s a nice refresher anyway.

The original Unix shell was the Bourne shell (sh), by Stephen Bourne, which goes all the way back to 1977.  Like all things Unix, there was nearly instantaneously a competing product: the C shell (csh), released in 1978, by Bill Joy (who also gave us vi).  The C shell has a number of improvements over the Bourne shell, but they’re utterly incompatible: the syntax isn’t remotely the same, in some cases to the point where you suspect Joy just did the opposite of what Bourne had done, out of spite.  Broadly speaking, the shells that followed hewed to one or the other syntax, giving us two “families” of shells, which are mostly compatible among themselves and not at all with each other.

So, next to come along was the Korn shell (ksh), by David Korn, in 1983; then the Tenex C shell (tcsh), by Ken Greer, later that same year; then the “Bourne-again” shell (bash) by Brian Fox, in 1989.  On the one side, we have the Bourne shell family (sh/ksh/bash); on the other side, the C shell family (csh/tcsh).  There are some other options out there, but these are the most popular by far, with the youngest member of each family eclipsing (for the most part) their elders.  And, these days, bash has emerged as the clear winner, and the others are hardly ever seen.

Well, except on my machines.

You see, I have the following philosophy on *nix shells: use tcsh at the command line; program with bash.  These days, at least on the Linux machines that I work on, that means having to install (or request to be installed) tcsh manually.  Many people ask me why I cling to tcsh.  This post will hopefully explain why.

Now, the first thing you must understand is that, when I came along, it wasn’t a choice between tcsh and bash: it was a choice between tcsh and ksh.  I never even saw a machine with bash on it until sometime in the 90’s, and I was well-established in my patterns by then.  So some of the reasons I made my decisions don’t even apply any more: bash has features that ksh lacked, and is just as good as tcsh these days in many areas, such as history.  But there are still enough reasons that do apply that I continue to refuse to switch.  If you think I’m wrong, though, I welcome your comments to show me the error of my ways.  However, realize that, while I always switch my personal account, I never switch the shell for the root account, so it’s not like I never use bash at the command line.

So, why is tcsh better for an interactive shell?  First of all, let’s look at some of those reasons that don’t really apply any more.  I won’t go into too much detail here, since ... well, since they don’t really apply any more.

• Tab completion.  ksh didn’t originally have it at all; the ‘93 ksh added it, and bash can do it pretty much as well as any other shell around.  But tcsh was basically invented for this, and had it first and best for many years.  Completion of history commands, in particular, I have never gotten to work right in either ksh or bash, although both claim to support it.
• History recall.  Now that bash does it too, it’s easy to forget how awesome !! was when only the C shells could do it ...
• Command line editing.  tcsh lets me use vi keys to edit my command line (which drives anyone trying to use my terminals crazy).  I’m pretty sure bash can do this as well; if ksh ever could, I never knew about it.

Now, what about the reasons that do still apply?  (Or, at least, do still apply as far as I know ... no doubt bash might have snuck some of these in when I wasn’t looking.)

• Shell redirection.  If I want to redirect both stderr and stdout of a command in the Bourne shell family, I have to do something like this: command >/dev/null 2>&1.  Ick.  In the C shells, it’s simpler: command >& /dev/null.  The Bourne versions let you redirect the two separately, true, but, in practice, I never want to do that on the command line.  Whereas redirecting both at once is very common.
• “Separate” environments.  This one is more conceptual.  Shells maintain variables, and those variables can either be visible to subshells (and other child processes) or not.  In the Bourne family, you think of them as two different types of variables.  I can set a variable, and it’s local; I then “export” that variable and it becomes global.  In the C shell family, you think of them as two different sets of variables.  If I want a local variable, I use one command (set), and if I want a global variable, I use a whole different command (setenv).  No mixing.  Perhaps it’s just a personal preference, but this really works for me much better.
• Alias arguments.  All shells will let you define aliases.  But, in the C shells, your aliases can have arguments.  So I can define lln as ls -lhtr !* | tail (and I have, as it happens).  In the Bourne shells, the arguments to your alias go at the end of the command line, period, no exceptions.  If you want it otherwise, you have to write a function.  Why do I want to write a function when I have a perfectly good alias?
• Customized prompts.  It’s true, bash has come a long way in this department.  But I still find tcsh easier.  My current prompt is "[${LOCALHOSTNAME}:%.04] ".  To do that in bash, I’d have to fiddle around with $PROMPT_DIRTRIM or somesuch, and I’m still not convinced I could end up with exactly the same thing.

Now, on the flip side, I would never use tcsh for a shell script.  The only scripting I ever do in tcsh is in my .tcshrc, and even that I find almost unbearably painful.  I regularly have to look up the syntax for loops and even if conditionals.  I originally used ksh for all my shell scripts, and I even held on to it long past the point when it was rational to do so: past the point where I was manually downloading pdksh because no one was shipping ksh any more.  I finally made the switch to bash about 10 years ago, and, other than having to change all my prints back to echos, it was fairly painless.

The definitive proscription against using the C shells for scripting is of course Tom Christiansen’s Csh Programming Considered Harmful, but I’ll give you my personal breakdown:

• Shell redirection.  In a shell script, I quite often do want to redirect stdout and stderr separately, and not being able to do so in the C shells is practically a non-starter.
• Unset variables.  In the Bourne shells, an unset variable expands to the empty string, which makes sense.  In the C shells, it expands to ... a syntax error.  You have to use $?VARNAME to see if the variable is set before trying to use it, unless you’re very very sure that it will be.  That’s just annoying.
• Backquotes.  Trying to use backquotes for capturing command output just sucks.  The ksh/bash construct of $(command) is so much better.  Interpolation works, nesting works, it just ... works.
• Basic string manipulation.  In ksh or bash, I can chop off prefixes or suffixes, do global substitutions, put in default values, and all sorts of other stuff.  In tcsh I pretty much have to echo my variables to sed or somesuch.
• Basic arithmetic.  In ksh or bash, it’s $(( $VAR + 6 )).  In tcsh, I’d have to pipe that to bc or something.
• Newlines in strings.  You just can’t in the C shells.
• Getopts.  No such thing in the C shells.
• Trap.  No such thing in the C shells.
• Extended pattern matching.  No such thing in the C shells.
• "$@".  No such thing in the C shells.

I could probably go on.  Or you could just read Tom Christiansen’s essay, linked above.  I don’t agree with everything he says, and some of what he says is nitpicky and doesn’t actually come up that often, but it’s comprehensive, and Tom has experience with “considered harmful” essays.

So hopefully the next time someone asks me why I still use tcsh, after all these years, I’ll pass on a link to this post and that’ll be the end of it.  I don’t mind switching to newer things when it makes sense (I did, eventually, switch from ksh to bash, as I mentioned above), but right now my .tcshrc is nearly 250 lines of painstakingly handcrafted customization over nearly 20 years, and there’s too much effort for not enough gain to try to get used to bash on the command line.  Maybe one day ... but probably not.  Maintaining compatibility with the Bourne syntax inherently creates some difficulties that I simply don’t have any need or desire to overcome.  Perhaps if tcsh ever gets as hard to come by as Betamax machines or PS/2 MCA buses, I’ll reluctantly give it up.  Until then ... why should I?

The Arrival and the Reunion

Yesterday, at 7:38am PST, we celebrated the arrival of Merrick Elizabeth Brunker Burden.  She was born at home, measured 21 inches from tip to tail, and weighed in at 8 pounds, 1 ounce.  Her Apgar scores were 9 at one minute and 10 at two minutes, and she currently has no known health issues.  She was, as is typically the case, the result of 9 months’ hard work on the part of her mother and a few minutes’ investment on the part of her father.

I’ve already discussed where her first name comes from; her second name is her maternal grandmother’s.  The third and fourth names she’s pretty much stuck with on account of her parents.

The aspect of the home birth was one that we considered for a long time.  Our eldest child was born in a hospital, and we witnessed firsthand how little control one has over the birth experience in that situation.  Our middle child was born in a birthing center, and that meant that our eldest was able to be there at the time and witness the miracle of his brother’s birth.  This was very affecting for him, and I personally always thought it brought them closer together.  A birth center was an option this time around as well, but in the end there’s quite a lot to recommend the home birth.  You don’t have to worry about driving anywhere, which often saves you hours waiting around for something to happen, since you usually don’t wait to be sure that labor is progressing well before rushing off to the hospital.  You get to pick your own CDs to play, and your own food and drinks to consume.  You can have who you want there, and you don’t have to worry about strange people whisking your newborn away to stick them with things that you probably wouldn’t agree to if you really knew what they were.  Best of all, when it’s all over, the mom can just crawl right back into her very own bed and roll over with her new baby and get some well deserved sleep.  Ask any mom who’s delivered in a hospital how much rest they got in that crappy hospital bed.

So we decided to take the plunge and do the birth as births were done for hundreds of years before we decided we were too smart and “modern” for all that nonsense.  When the time came, the mother had a midwife, a midwife’s assistant, a doula, and her mother.  And me, I suppose, although at that point there wasn’t a lot left for me to do.  I got accused of “hovering” a lot.  Which I was, I’ll admit.  Hovering around, trying to be useful, mostly.  Or at least to be out of the way of people who actually knew what they were doing.  It was a bit of a balancing act.  I think I did okay.

It was around midnight when the contractions got down to around 5 minutes apart, and anyone can tell you that that’s well before my bedtime.  So I never actually got to sleep; I lay down with the mother while she tried to get some rest for perhaps an hour and a half, and that was pretty much it until a nap later in the afternoon after it was all over.  Our elder son is as much of a night owl as I am, so he hadn’t gone to bed either when things started to get exciting.  For that matter, our younger son hadn’t been asleep that long.  They managed to wake up for the main event, though.  The eldest handled the video duties.  The soon-to-be-middle-child mainly patted his mother’s face and waited to see the new arrival.

When she came, he was excited for a few minutes, then he was ready to wander off and play video games.  We’ll see if this brings him as close to his sister as it did his brother to him.

Regarding fatherhood, Johnny Depp once said:

Having kids was a huge change for me.  Becoming a father.  But I think more than changing, I feel like I’ve been revealed to myself, I kind of found out who I was.  When you meet your child for the first time and you’re looking at this angel, you start realising what an idiot you’ve been for so many years and how much time you’ve wasted.

Looking into the eyes of your child for the first time is indeed a complex emotion; I think it’s difficult to describe, and probably different for everyone.  For me, there’s some of what Johnny Depp talks about.  Less of feeling like an idiot, perhaps, and more that whatever else there’s been just wasn’t that important ... if not completely irrelevant, at least minimized, as if it was a story about other people, one which was very engaging and seemed important at the time, but finally you’ve realized it is, after all, just a story.  But there’s also something else, something like a feeling of rightness, or perhaps purpose achieved.  Like this was the point of the whole ride, and I just hadn’t realized it before.  It is, of course, slightly different for each child, but still: there’s a lot of familiarity as well, a lot of clicking into place, a lot of “oh, yeah ... I was starting to forget, but now it all comes rushing back to me.”

It’s good to have those feelings renewed again.  It’s good to have another round coming up—scary, of course, as I’m getting older all the time and I worry about keeping up—but satisfying.  I’m very lucky to have the family I do, and I know it.  I’m looking forward to getting to know this little girl, and teaching, and learning, and remembering, and sharing.  Feels comfortable.  Feels like coming home.


Today’s post title comes from a song by Dead Can Dance off their album Aion.  It’s a pretty song, but in this case it’s the phrasing of the title that I’m primarily trying to evoke.

Fetal Distraction 2: The Quickening

You know, right up until a few minutes ago, I still thought I might do a post this week.

Silly man.

We’re two weeks away and counting, lots of new baby preparations going on, and my todo list is still pretty big.  But, on the positive side, the mother’s mother (that is, the person who would be my mother-in-law were this a more “traditional” relationship) will be here tomorrow, and I’m taking a day off from work to pick her up from the airport, and plus I had some notes and even a sentence or two that I jotted down last week before I gave up then.  Overall, it didn’t seem irrational to produce a mere 1500 words even in the midst of this chaos.

But one of the guidelines we have around this house is: don’t set yourself up to fail.  (Or, put alternatively, know your limitations.)  And, if I try to squeeze in a blog post today along with all my other shit to do, I’m just going to be making myself crazy all day and end up coming up short anyway, and that’s no good.  I’ve got to work on keeping my stress level down, because stress is bad for pregnant women, and stress is contagious.

So today I’ll just be chillin’.  Next week may well be more of the same.  We shall see what we shall see.

Fetal Distraction

Well, it’s exactly 3 weeks until the date that doctors and midwives tell us our daughter will be born, and things around the house are heating up to a fever pitch.  My “Saturday chore list” is getting out of control—pretty soon my “A1” todo’s won’t fit on a screenful of spreadsheet rows.

So there isn’t much of a blog post this week, and I suspect it won’t be the last time you, poor reader, are skimped out on—I even named the draft file of this post “Merrick1.”^*  What can I do but advise you (yet again) to refer to the title of the blog? 

So, while it’s very exciting over here, preparing for the birth, it’s also very hectic.  You know, when we moved into this house, it was emotional for the folks who were leaving.  This was the house where many of them had grown up, the house where the patriarch and matriarch lived (parents to some and grandparents to others), the house where the family would gather to stay in touch and renew their family ties.  It held a lot of memories for them.  The mother promised them that we would treasure it as much as they had, that we would make this our family’s home in the same way.  She told them that we would be having at least one baby in the house.  It looks like that promise will be fulfilled—literally, as we’re planning on a home birth.

So hopefully you’ll bear with me over the next month or so if my writing schedule is a bit erratic.  Forging new family memories takes a bit of a time investment.


* Check out my post on naming for whence that name.

Relativistic Absolution

I have a horror of absolute statements.

It might even be a phobia, now that I ponder it.  It starts with my experience of certain people: my father was fond of absolute statements, as was the first person I took on as a partner after I started my own company.  Both of these people have something in common: they believe that if you state something with enough confidence, people will believe you.  It didn’t much matter whether the something was actually true or not.  This actually works, sort of, especially on strangers.  Unfortunately, people that have to listen to you on a regular basis quickly learn that the more confident you are (and the more absolute your statement is) the more likely you are to be full of shit.

So I myself learned to be more cautious when I state things.  With the result that many folks (including some of my closest friends) think I’m “wishy-washy.”  I dunno; maybe I am.  I certainly don’t like to be wrong, although I think many people think I feel that way because of pride, or a need for superiority.  The truth is, I just feel bad when I’m wrong.  If I tell you something, and then it turns out I was wrong, I’ve misled you.  That makes me feel crappy.  You came to me for information (and, the older I get, the more that happens, obviously), and here I went and told you the wrong thing.  Makes me feel like a right bastard.

In addition, my whole philosophy of life reinforces the concept that absolutism is useless.  Again and again in this blog I’ve talked about how I believe in two competing things at once: from my initial post on what I (only half-jokingly) mean when I claim to be a Baladocian, to paradoxical views on reality and perception, semantics, uncertainty, quotes, parenting, hype, and grammar.  (Wow, that list was even longer than I thought it was going to be when I started to write it.)  With that many posts about how two seemingly contradictory ideas can both be simultaneously true, is it any wonder that I tend to stay away from statements that pretend there’s only One True Way to view the world?

But if I had to pick one single reason why I don’t believe in absolute statements it would certainly have to come back to ... a book.  Now, there are five books which I think of as having changed my life.  Four of them are fiction: Stranger in a Strange Land, Cat’s Cradle, Legion, and The Dispossessed.  None of these are perfect—charges of sexism against Heinlein are mostly true, and Blatty’s books require a strong stomach in places—but each of them caused some fundamental shift in how I viewed the world.  The characters of Valentine Michael Smith, John (a.k.a. Jonah), Lt. Kinderman, and Shevek all have something in common: they are all thrown into strange settings (Earth, San Lorenzo, a supernatural murder, Urras) and their attempts to grapple with the bizareness they’ve been thrust into generate philosophical ramblings in addition to essential plot points.  The plots of these books are very good, but that’s not why I list them here; in terms of sheer plot, there are many other books I like better.  No, it’s the philosophical ramblings that are the important bits.  Smith’s handling of money and religion, Kinderman’s views on the impossibility of evolution, John’s exploration of truth and lies, Shevek’s reflection on language and possessions ... these are the aspects which challenged my worldview and caused it to shift, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small.

But perhaps none of these shook up my brain patterns as much as Quantum Psychology, a book by “science fiction” author Robert Anton Wilson.  I put the term “science fiction” in quotes, because, although some of what RAW (as he’s often affectionately known) writes is definitely science fiction, much of it can’t be categorized so simplistically, and quite a lot of it (including Quantum Psychology) isn’t really fiction at all.  In fact, Quantum Psychology reads like a textbook ... but a textbook for a class like no class you’ve ever taken before, nor are particularly likely to, for that matter.  I find it difficult to believe that quantum psychology has ever been taught in a college setting, even in the most liberal of institutions.

And yet, after reading it, you’ll wonder why not.  Well, you’ll also know why not—primarily because few teachers could present it and few students would “get” it—but you’ll still marvel that we don’t all have to learn this stuff.  At least I’m pretty sure you will.  I know there are people who are simply not wired to handle this sort of introspection, and, if you happen to be such a person, I fancy you’ll proclaim it to be pretentious tripe.  And that’s no reflection on you personally.  Maybe one day in the future it would make more sense.  Or maybe you can’t get past RAW’s dismissive stance on the world’s religions (in the same way that staunch feminists will have serious problems looking past Heinlein’s rather primitive portrayal of women in Stranger in a Strange Land).  Or maybe you just don’t care to dissect the universe that much.  That’s okay.  As always, I refer you to the masthead.

But if you’re the sort of person who’s bothered to read this far (which of course you must be) I bet you would find QP just as fascinating as I did.  Now, there are many vital concepts to be learned from this book, but one of the most fundamental is also (perhaps unsurprisingly) one of the earliest presented: E-prime.  I’ll let Wilson explain it:

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the “is of identity” from the English language.  (The “is of identity” takes the form X is a Y, e.g., “Joe is a Communist,” “Mary is a dumb file-clerk,” “The universe is a giant machine,” etc.)  In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words “is” or “to be” and the Bourland proposal (English without “isness”) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

Okay, that’s what it is ... but what’s the point of it all?

The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that “isness” sets the brain into a medieval Aristotelian framework and makes it impossible to understand modern problems and opportunities.  ...  Removing “isness” and writing/thinking only and always in operational/existential language sets us, conversely, in a modern universe where we can successfully deal with modern issues.

Okay, so the problem appears to be with our friend (and nemesis) Aristotle again.  Remember him from the balance and paradox discussion?  He’s the fellow who told us there were four elements (when there weren’t), and five senses (when there weren’t), and two possible truth values ... when we know the world is more complicated than that.  Well, it turns out that Aristotle had another potentially problematic habit: that of describing how the world actually “is.”  Or, as RAW puts it, “the weakness of Aristotelian ‘isness’ or ‘whatness’ statements lies in their assumption of indwelling ‘thingness.’”  But the truth is, again, more complicated.  If you think about it, it doesn’t actually make any sense to talk about what something “is.”  We can talk about things we’ve seen, or otherwise experienced, or we can talk about our opinions on the world or the things in it, or we can talk about how things act, or how we remember they acted.  But what something “is”?  Once you let go of your Aristotlean prejudices, it doesn’t actually make any sense.

RAW givs us a few examples of where “is” can lead us astray.  “That is a fascist idea.”  As long as the proposition is put thus, it’s bound to lead us into an argument.  We could fight over the technical definition of “fascist,” or we could argue about the intentions and/or beliefs of the person who came up with the idea, or we could debate about whether people’s perceptions on whether or not it’s fascist override any consideration of whether it actually is fascist.  Now, what if we restate the proposition in E-Prime?  “That seems like a fascist idea to me.”  Well, not much to argue about there, is there?  I could claim you’re lying, I suppose, but honestly: why bother?  If it seems like a fascist idea to you, okay.  It doesn’t seem like a fascist idea to me.  Glad we had this little chat.

So, see how “that is a fascist idea” is an absolute statement, while “that seems like a fascist idea to me” is properly qualified?  And also how the absolute statement is problematic, while the qualified one is just fine?

I could go on (as RAW does), but just think about it.  Think about the last time you had an argument with someone, and see if the word “is” wasn’t intimately involved somehow.  “That is a very bad idea.”  “Republicans are all in the pocket of big business.”  “Gay marriage is destroying American family values.”  “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  “This movie you recommended is crap.”  “You are so frustrating sometimes!”  The “is” is the part that makes it an absolute statement, and the worst part about that sort of absolute statement is that it involves us making judgement calls for things we can’t possibly back up, stating opinions as facts, and describing the very essence of things, when the nature of the universe mandates that all reality is mediated by our senses, so that the best understanding we can ever achieve is still just a mental picture of that reality.

Now, note that I don’t actually write in E-Prime—neither in general, nor even in this particular post.  In fact, go back and look for the places where I’ve used “is” (or “are” or whatnot) and notice how those statements are the very ones that provoke you, that are confrontational, that make assertions that I can’t actually prove and challenge you to apply your brain instead of just accepting whatever I say at face value.  If I had written this entire post in E-Prime, that would have made it very difficult for you to disagree with anything I said.  But maybe I wanted you to disagree.  Maybe I wanted to shake you up and make you think.

So, even though I think that E-Prime is a fundamental concept that everyone should understand, I personally believe that not using E-Prime has some value as well.  But, of course, that’s just my opinion.

Chapter 19 (begun)

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What is this?

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The Race

The mermaid-things retired to the far side of the inner lagoon, where the arms of the island stretched out to skinny sandbars, barely a pace across, and almost touched each other.  Looking at it now, Johnny wasn’t sure how The Slyph had fit through the gap.  On the deck, the humans (and Bones) gathered for their own huddle.  Roger started to strip off all her clothes.  Johnny looked at her with some surprise, but Larissa pointed out that clothes would just be extra drag, and Roger nodded curtly.  Aidan was giving Bones a complicated list of ingredients to gather, and fiddling in his own pouches for the rest.

“What are those things?” Johnny asked, to fill time and keep his mind (and his eyes) off Roger’s body.

“Scalas,” Roger replied, pulling off a boot.

“I believe the proper plural is ‘scalae,’” Aidan said.  He pronounced it “skah-lie.”

“The proper plural is ‘bitches who are going to get their fishy little asses beat,’” Roger answered with a snort.  “Now, are ye ready to help me out here?”

Aidan nodded.  “As soon as Bones returns with the remainder of the components I need for the rite, I can brew it in a very short amount of time.”

“Good.”  Roger was now pulling pants off and Johnny was studiously looking elsewhere.  He noted that Aidan seemed to view Roger’s body the same way Larissa did: he looked, but he didn’t respond.  Perhaps, as a priest, he was celibate.  Larissa glanced at him, but said nothing.

Less than a minute later, Roger was naked again, fiddling with her ponytail.  Her smallish breasts were thrust forward.  Not that Johnny was looking, of course.  Bones was back, laying out all sorts of bits and bobs in neat little piles for Aidan to sort through.  To a wooden pitcher, Aidan added three different kinds of powder, some silver things that looked like ball bearings, a dollop of the gunk they used to grease the fan, a piece of the pemmican that he cut into some intricate shape, and the guts out of one of Roger’s flares and the smallest of the ship’s barometers.  The Water Guide’s hands were a blur, so there might have been other scraps as well, and those liquid words chimed out, softly and smoothly.  At the end, Aidan raised his hands into the air, the chanting crescendoed, and Aidan clapped, but it was a thunderclap, and, indeed, when his hands drew apart, a little black cloud formed between them, and it actually began to rain into the pitcher; one brief, jagged fork of lightning arced down into the mixture, and the sound that accompanied it wasn’t thunder, but the electronic sizzle of a large bug zapper, or the flat crack you get when you attach the jumper cables to the last battery terminal.  Gradually the little cartoon thundercloud dissipated and its rain tapered off.  Aidan raised the pitcher and one eyebrow at Roger.  She threw her arms wide and planted her bare feet firmly on the deck, tossing her head back with closed eyes.

Roger upended the pitcher over her, covering her entire body with the glassy liquid that oozed out.  None of it hit the deck; it seemed to inch over her body as if sentient.  It was entirely transparent, but you could still see it somehow, sparkling in the half-light.  When it had covered her entire form in a thin sheen of aqueous film, Roger took a deep, gasping breath and lifted her head.  As she opened her eyes, the stuff, whatever it was, became invisible.  One second you knew it was there, even though you couldn’t actually see it, and the next it was as if it had never been.

Aidan turned her around and inspected her from every angle (again, seeming to be oblivious to her attractions).  “Roger, my dear captain, you are officially, completely, and by the grace of Shallédanu, slick.”

Johnny looked back and forth from captain to Guide.  “Meaning ... ?”

Roger smiled her devilish smile.  “Meaning I shall slide through the water like shit through a seagull.”

“Ah.”  Johnny paused a moment, hesitant to breach the subject, but knowing he must.  “And, if you, you know ... don’t win ... will they really eat you?”

Roger strode over and slapped Johnny on the back; Johnny was well used to this by now, and it hardly hurt at all any more.  “Aye, faster’n ye can say ‘Jack Ketch,’ that they will.”

“Ah.  And, what if, you know ... we don’t particularly want you to be eaten?”

Roger chuckled.  “Well, I’ll take that as neighborly concern on yer part, Johnny me boyo, and I’ll thankee kindly.  It’s a risk I knew I’d have to take, and I’ll take it gladly to get us where we’re goin’.  But don’t count yer good captain out quite yet, if ye follow my tack.”  Roger winked.

Johnny rolled his eyes.  “What do we need an ‘opener’ for anyway?” he asked.

Aidan stepped up.  “To open the way for us.  We thought we’d have to ask for both a pathfinder and an opener.  But apparently you can be our guide, so we were able to negotiate a much less dangerous bargain.  Trust me, son, compared to the compact Captain Roger and I thought we would have to make, this is quite reasonable.  There’s always a chance that Roger could lose, yes, and we would have to face very grim consequences indeed if that were to come to pass, but the deal that was struck means that I can do anything in my power to help her win now.  Actually, any of us can, although I suspect the majority of the burden will fall on me.”

“Yes, but why can’t ... look, maybe I could be the opener too.  I ... well, I opened something to get here.  Twice, even.  Sort of.”

Roger and Aidan exchanged unreadable glances.  “This I did not know,” the Guide said.  “It is good information to have ...”

“Although ye might have mentioned it sooner,” Roger mumbled under her breath.

Aidan ignored her and continued.  “Good information to have, but I don’t think it helps us in this particular instance.  Not just any opener will do for this task, Johnny.  Anyone can get into a place between places.  But getting back out again is more difficult, and almost always requires intervention from the natives.”

“Mister fancy-pants here means to say that we need the tubs o’ fishguts out there.”  Roger waved a hand at the monstrous mermaids in the distance.  “All ways here are their ways.”

Johnny stared at her.  “Did you just quote Alice in Wonderland?”

Larissa stepped in.  “Through the Looking Glass.  The Red Queen to Alice: ‘I don’t know what you mean by your way: all the ways about here belong to me.’”  Johnny reflected that this was possibly the most normal thing Larissa had said since they entered the sewers.

Roger stared at the little girl, confused.  “Well, I don’t know queens from quarterdecks, but, aye, it’s exactly like the little missy says.  All the ways are scalas’ ways, and nobody opens ’em but them as know their secrets.  And, by the bye, I’d not let on to Miss Ugly out there that ye have the power.  Else ye may find yerself being an opener in their employ yerself, if ye catch my spur.”

Roger strode over to the deck railing, put two fingers between her lips, and gave a piercing whistle.  Bones was hopping up and down on the crossbar beside her, flapping his wings and screech-squawking.  Aidan whispered as he passed Johnny: “all the ways are scalae’s ways” and then rushed to join her at the rail.  Johnny shook his head at Larissa.  “They’re all crazy,” he said.

Larissa answered simply: “Everything here is crazy.”

Johnny considered that for a moment.  “Yep, you’re right.  Can’t argue with that.  Let’s go be crazy too, I suppose.”

Larissa followed, but slowly.





>>next>>

What is this?

Chapter 18 concluded

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What is this?

|<<first

Around the backside of the “desert island” (which turned out to be bigger than it looked from afar), there was an enclosed area of water.  “It’s a lagoon within the Lagoon,” Johnny breathed.  Aidan gave him a sideways grin.

Roger pulled The Sylph into the inner lagoon and let it float aimlessly.  She rejoined them in the bow and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking towards the shoreline of the island proper.  “I think we’ll be able to pick up some water here, after.”

Johnny looked back at the island, surprised.  To him it still looked like a roughly circular pile of sand with a single tree growing in the middle of it, no bigger in circumference than he could walk in ten minutes or so.  Where could there possibly be water?  He opened his mouth to ask, but then realized that was a tangent that wasn’t likely to get him anywhere, not to mention that there were more interesting avenues to pursue.

“So ...” he ventured.  “Who exactly are we going to talk to?”

Roger just smiled enigmatically and cast her eyes toward Aidan.  Johnny turned to the Water Guide to repeat his question, but the young man had already turned his back on them and was holding his staff over his head in both hands, looking out over the water.  The mumbling was low this time, but still retained all its fluid qualities.  Suddenly he began to twirl the staff, parallel to the deck, hands nothing but a blur as they manipulated the hunk of wood so fast it almost resembled the rotor of a helicopter, the stroboscopic effect making it appear to spin in reverse.  Then, in a split-second move, the staff stopped, pointing straight out to the ocean-like lagoon, and Aidan brought it down sharply until it struck the railing.  A rippling wave of force seemed to shoot out of the end of it, and Johnny could see the wake it left in the water, and a shimmer in the air as it shot off into the distance.  Aidan turned and put the butt of the staff back on the deck, leaning heavily on it.  “That should get their attention,” he said.

Johnny reached out to help steady him.  “You okay?  You’re dong a lot of that ... whatever it is you do.”

Aidan gave him a quick smile to show he was fine.  “Not to worry, son.  That last one wasn’t as strenuous as it looked.  Just a quick hail to grab the attention of the locals.”

Indeed, the water below them suddenly seemed to be teeming with life.  A few of the flying fish that Johnny had last seen during the overground trip into the selvage shot up and did some fancy figure eights before dropping back into the water.  Here and there a large, red crab claw popped up and waved at them.  Several fins broke the surface and shot back and forth; some appeared to be fish, others dolphins or porpoises.  Even the little blue water snake around Larissa’s wrist had raised its head and was tasting the air with a flickering tongue.

Suddenly a bigger, darker fin rose up, way out in the open water, but speeding towards them so quickly it almost seemed mechanical.  By the time it reached the edge of the inner lagoon, all the local aquatic life had decided it had business elsewhere.  The little blue snake ducked its head into its coils and went back to doing its impression of a bracelet.  The fin shot straight at the ship; when it was within two feet of the hull, the head of the creature emerged from the water with a mighty splash.

Johnny wanted to call it a mermaid.  Certainly that was the first thing to spring to mind.  But, if it was a mermaid, it was some monstrous version.  The main part of the body wasn’t that of a fish: it was a shark’s body, gray with just a hint of blue, and white on the underbelly.  The large dorsal fin that had announced the coming of the creature looked perfectly at home on the thing’s back.  It had arms, though they were also covered in sharkskin, and they ended in long hands with obscenely long fingers that looked more like gnarled twigs.  The thing had human breasts, so Johnny supposed it must be a “she,” but those too were covered with the leathery skin—even the nipples were covered over in gray, although surrounded by white rings where areolae should be.  The rough skin covered the neck and lower jaw as well, then began tapering off, and most of the head and face appeared to be layered in human epidermis. The shape of the face was mostly human, although also somehow triangular and sharklike.  The eyes were beady black dots, exactly like a shark’s, and the hair was long and black and stringy, interwoven with seaweed and small seashells, but not in an attractive way—more like the creature just let any sort of garbage collect in it.  Johnny’s mind was reeling with trying to take it all in, and then the thing opened its mouth.  There were rows of ragged teeth: not the perfect arrowhead shapes that you might expect to find in a shark’s maw, but jagged little blades of ivory, pitted with age and set at crazy angles so that it seemed impossible the thing wouldn’t tear out its own gums when it closed its mouth.  The nightmarish vision hissed at them, a warning or perhaps a challenge, but Johnny was already backpedaling.  The teeth had been more disturbing than any sound it could make.

And now others were rising up, but they were not shark-mermaids; they were composed of other creatures.  One had the dark mottled brown hide of a moray eel, and brown fisheyes with blue rings around them; one had white-blotched black tentacles and the horizontal pupils of an octopus; one had the forehead protrusion, spikes, and luminous eyes of an angler fish; here was the blue-green shell and eyestalks of a lobster; there was the silver-blue scales and slightly ovoid pupils of a marlin, set into large, reflective cyan sclera.  And, on each one, the long, lank hair, always some dark and dingy shade; on each, the frightening fingers and teeth; and each carried a hint of its progenitor in its facial shape, from the bullet-like head of the moray to the heavy lower jaw of the angler, and the bulbous and vaguely squishy head of the octopus.

When the lead creature spoke, its voice was like rusty hinges and oozing sea muck.  Johnny could hear the howling ocean wind and the clacking together of bits of gravel and shells and old shark’s teeth rendered perfectly smooth by the sea.

“Why have you summoned us?” it said.

Aidan looked down at them gravely.  “Shallédanu lei shonta,” he said.

The lobster woman shook her body to make a sound like lobster claws snapping; the octopus woman thrashed the water with her tentacles.  The shark woman said: “Your benedictions hold no sway over us, priest!  Spare us the niceties and get to the point.”

Roger stepped forward.  “We need an opener.”

The moray woman just gnashed her teeth loudly, but the others made a tittering, screeching sound that Johnny eventually comprehended as laughter.  Roger waited calmly for them to finish.  “And why would we give you such a thing, landbound one?”

“Ye’ll give it me when I earn it, and I’ll thank you not to call me ‘landbound.’  I was born to the waves, same as you, and I live for them, same as you.  Not my fault the gods give me these things”—here Roger slapped a leg—“instead of proper fins like you ladies have.”  Apparently Roger saw the creatures as female, although that was still too much of a leap for Johnny’s brain to make.

“Born to the waves, you say?” shark-woman asked.

“Aye, same as you.  Straight from me mother’s womb into the water, and had to swim for me first breath.”

Shark-woman’s beady black eyes flashed.  “We have no need to breathe the air as you do.” It was obviously a point of pride.

“Six o’ one.  Ye had to swim to get somewhere when ye popped out ... or were ye hatched?”  Roger raised an eyebrow.

Shark-woman hissed again, but the others repeated their eerie laughter.  It was clear Roger was scoring points, somehow.

There was a pause while the creatures considered.  They looked at each other, but did not speak aloud.  Johnny wondered if they could communicate telepathically.  Finally shark-woman spoke again.  “You say you can swim, then?”

Roger snorted.  “Best swimmer with two legs.  At least as far as you’ll ever see.”

Shark-woman smiled, and Johnny shuddered.  “Then challenge us to a race.  Beat us, and we’ll give you your opener.  Lose, and we’ll pick our teeth with your bones.”  That screeching, grating excuse for laughter rang out again.

Roger appeared to examine her fingernails.  “Oh, sure, challenge you to a race.  What, all of ye then?”

Shark-woman shook her head.  “No!  Choose any one of us.”

Roger nodded.  “Still and all, I did say I was the best swimmer with two legs.  I’d say none of you gals has any legs to speak of at all.”

At this, all the monstrous mermaids dove and flashed their tails at the watchers to show that Roger was indeed correct: threshing shark tail, wavy eel tail, stubby angler tail, powerful marlin tail, curling lobster tail.  Only octopus-woman had anything approaching legs, but she bunched her tentacles together as if she too had a tail.  After much splashing, they righted themselves and were staring up at the humans on the deck again.

Roger spread her hands.  “See my ketch?  You all have me at an unfair advantage.  Wouldn’t matter which of you I chose.  It still wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

Marlin-woman pointed at Aidan.  “The guide,” she said softly.  Her voice was just as grating as shark-woman’s.  Now the others picked it up, and repeated it as if chanting: “the guide, the guide.”  The sound of their voices left a feeling on Johnny’s skin as if he’d touched a snail.

Roger looked at Aidan, as if considering this suggestion.  “Why, yes, I suppose me bucko here could put a charm on me that might even the odds.  I don’t know ...”  She rubbed at her chin, speculating.

Shark-woman threshed the water with her tail.  “Hasten, landbound!  Do you mean to challenge or not?”

Roger put up a hand.  “Hold yer line there missy!  I’m considerin’.  Ye did just say ye was going to eat me if I lost, did ye not?  I reckon that means I ought to be right careful what I say long about now, don’t it?”

Johnny took a look at his companions.  Aidan was staring at a spot on the deck just in front of his feet.  Larissa was gazing at Roger, her face unreadable.  Bones was bouncing up and down on top of the crates behind them, hyperactive as always, but in a small, contained space so as not to disturb anything.  And Roger was back to scratching at her chin, practically pulling on an invisible beard.  This was not a characteristic habit for her, so far as Johny knew.  And there was something in her eyes ...

“Very well,” she said finally, taking another step forward and putting a gloved hand on the deck railing.  “I’ll challenge one of you, but only if ye’ll grant me one boon.”

Shark-woman hissed yet again.  “No more conditions!  We’ve given you all that you asked for.”

Roger leaned down and fixed the creature with a steely gaze.  “I think ye’re mistaken, missy.  I’ve not asked for aught.  Ye offered all that’s been said so far.  I’ve got but a single request and ye’ve yet to hear it.”

The mermaid creatures grew suddenly stiller, to the point where Johnny couldn’t imagine how they kept their upper bodies above the surface of the lagoon.  Their different eyes all flashed, although they studiously avoided looking at each other this time.  Finally shark-woman spoke.  “You speak the truth.  You have not yet made a request of us, and we are bound to hear it.  If we agree, we will accept the challenge.  If we do not, we will leave here and you must continue your journey on your own.”

Roger smiled again.  “Oh, I think ye’ll agree to this request all right.  It’s right up your alley.  I call for a race with no rules.  Pick the start, pick the end, and first one across the finish line claims the prize.  Whatever happens in between is fair play.  Do we have an accord?”  Roger plucked off her right glove, reached over the railing and offered her hand to shark-woman.  The creature thrashed over and reached out those long fingers.  Quick as a flash, they scratched Roger across the palm, and several drops of blood fell into the water.  Roger did not seem at all surprised by this, and used the small knife which had somehow sprung into her hand to slice into shark-woman’s hand before she could retrieve it.  Some black, tar-like goo remained on the blade when Roger straightened up; she had to wipe it forcibly onto the deck railing.

“Very well then,” Roger said calmly, making the knife disappear again.  “I’ll take the lobster wench.  Pick yer endpoints and I’ll have Aidan slick me up. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contest.”


>>next>>

What is this?

Amor Fati

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
        — Douglas Adams

Some people believe in destiny.  The idea that the threads of our lives are woven together in a tangled skein is an attractive one, and reappears throughout history: from the Moirai of the Greeks and the Norns of the Vikings to the Wheel of Time in Robert Jordan’s series of the same name, which gives us the quote “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and we are only the thread of the Pattern.”  The reason this concept is so tempting is that it accords with our experience of the world.  If you stop and think back on your life, you’ll see a hundred different coincidences, a hundred different times where, if one thing had gone only slightly differently, your whole life would be in a different course.  In fact, looking back on one’s life at all the little things that had to go just so to lead you to where you are now, it’s enough to make anyone ponder whether there might be something to this concept: call it fate, destiny, fortune, karma, kismet, call it random chance or divine providence, say que sera, sera, or say the Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, or say the universe puts us in the places we need to be, but any way you slice it, it’s hard to pretend there’s nothing behind the curtain.

For instance, say I had not dropped out of college: then I wouldn’t have gotten my first job as a computer programmer.  I might have become one later in life, maybe, but it wouldn’t have been the same.  Say I had not accepted the offer to leave that job to form a two-man company with one of my former co-workers, which only lasted a few months ... well, then, I might never have ended up going back to school to finish up my degree.  I know for a fact that if I had not accepted an invitation from a friend of mine attending college in the DC area to come spend a week with him that I never would have moved to our nation’s capital, where I spent 18 years of my life.  I know this because I had already applied (and been accepted) to another college; it just so happened that I had missed the deadline for fall admission at the college of my choice and I was going to have to wait until the following spring.  But this school my friend was attending still had spots open—not for freshmen, but, then, I was a transfer—and a surprisingly decent English program, and so it became my alma mater.

And that’s just the beginning.

Somewhere out there in the wide world is a woman whose name I can’t remember, born in Hawaii, with the dark skin and exotic beauty to prove it.  She went to high school in Los Angeles, and her sister (or her cousin, or her best friend—I forget) went out with one of the guys from Jane’s Addiction.  Somehow she ended up moving across the entire country, and wound up in Fairfax, in Northern Virginia, just outside DC, working at a cheesy little college pub.  And, if she had not come out of the back room that day, and had she not been so pretty, and had she not smiled just so, and had she not looked at me and my friend and said “two applications, then?” ... if all that confluence of chance had not come together at that exact moment in my life, when I was just giving my friend a ride around to various restaurants so he could find a job as a cook, since it just so happened that he didn’t have a car, and just after an exhausting two or three weeks wherein I learned that my experience was enough to get me any number of programming jobs, but there was apparently no such thing as a part-time programming job (at least not in that place at that time) ... if all that chaos theory had not converged on that exact moment in time, would have I cut off my friend’s “no, just one” with a resigned “what the hell, sure, two applications”?  Probably not.  And if I had never taken that job, I would have never engaged in the childish electronic prank that introduced me to the computer salesman who became my first business partner, which eventually led to my starting my first company, which eventually got me a consulting job at large corporation, where I eventually met the woman who is my partner to this day, and who is the mother of my children, who are essentially the entire point of my existence.

That’s a lot of “coincidences.”

When business for my company dried up, and my meager savings was running out, another friend of mine just happened to mention a job that he had interviewed for but had decided not to take, but mentioned I might like it there.  Turns out I did, and I spent three and half years there, meeting some folks who are still some of my favorite people of all time, and having a really great job where I got to learn a lot of stuff, and teach a few things, and have a great deal of freedom, which was important, because I was coming off of working for myself for 13 years, and I’d utterly lost the ability to wake up early (not that I’d ever really had it, for the most part), or wear shoes at work, and I had 13 years worth of ponytail between my shoulder blades.

The story of how I left that job and came to the great state of California is yet another of those sets of bizarre, interlocking coincidences.  Last week I told you what I thought of corporate managers telling you you must take PTO when you’re slightly sick and you want to work from home.  As Bill Cosby once said, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  I’m not going use any names here: if you know me, you most likely know the person I’m talking about, and if you don’t know me, you most likely wouldn’t recognize the name anyway.

When I first started at this job I’m talking about, the first job after running my own company for 13 years, I had a boss who lived in Boston and showed up for a couple of days every other week.  Despite not being around very often, this person was one of the best bosses I’ve ever had.  I was given very clear directions, never micromanaged, trusted, encouraged ... the only criticism I ever got from this boss was to step up my game, to take more responsibility, to stop worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes and take the lead on things.  This company was a subsidiary of a larger, public corporation, but our boss kept us insulated from any politics and let us do our own thing.  There was only one layer between our boss and the corporate CEO, and that VP and our boss seemed to get along just fine.

Then the synchronicity dominoes started to fall.  The VP left, and was replaced by a real asshole of a human being, one of those corporate jackasses who believes that being a jerk is a substitute for leadership.  In less than a year, the replacement was gone as well, apparently unliked by everyone, including the CEO, but it was too late: my boss had also submitted a resignation, and I was destined to receive a new manager, who would end up being one of the worst bosses I’ve ever had.  And I once worked for a twitchy Vietnam vet with a bad coke habit.

This new boss was a micromanager, never trusted, didn’t understand how to encourage and pushed bullishly instead, had no respect for the culture of the company, and basically ticked off every mistake that a corporate middle manager can possibly make.  It was like this person had a manual to go by:  Sow distrust and dissension among employees? Check.  Freak out and yell at people in front of co-workers? Check.  React to problems by increasing the number of useless meetings? Check.  I swear, somewhere out there is a book that tells these people exactly how to act, because the number of them who all do the same stupid things over and over again can’t be explained any other way.

It was Memorial Day weekend of 2007.  I was feeling a bit under the weather, but there was a big project going on at work that I knew we’d all regret if I fell behind on.  This new boss wasn’t my favorite person, but I still loved the company, and I wanted to do my best to make the (completely artificial) deadline.  That Friday, I sent my email saying I wasn’t feeling well, but I was going to soldier on.  Then I got to coding.  When I checked again, on the holiday itself, I discovered a snarky email from my boss, advising me that if I was sick, I should take PTO and not work from home.

I promptly replied that I was deeply sorry that I had attempted to make progress on our big project, and I assured my boss that it wouldn’t happen again.

I then went to check my spam folder, because that’s where all the recruiter emails invariably end up.

If you’re a technogeek like me, you know that once that very first recruiter finds you, there will follow a never-ending stream of offers for jobs in your specialty, jobs not in your specialty, jobs nowhere near the vicinity of your specialty, and non-specific vague pretensions of maybe possibly having a job for you one day so they’d just like to stay in touch.  Mostly you just ignore them ... until you get ticked off with your current work.  Then you realize that you’re sitting on a gold mine, tucked away in your spam folder.

I had always lived on the East Coast: 22 years in Tidewater, on the VA-NC border; 1 year in Columbia, SC; and the aforementioned 13 years in the greater DC metro area (partly in Northern VA and partly in Southern MD).  But if anyone asked me where I really wanted to live, I always said California.  I later expanded to the West Coast in general: Oregon is lovely (although, as it turned out, practically impossible to find a tech job in), and Washington is not a bad choice either (lots of tech jobs, but perhaps a bit colder than I’d ideally like).  But really it was California that had caught my interest; two trips to Borland out in Scott’s Valley and a couple of visits to San Francisco to visit an architect-turned-tech-entrepreneur friend of mine had cemented Cali—and the San Fran-San Jose corridor in particular—as the place to be.  So when I went looking for recruiter spam, I figured I might as well find something that said “California” on it.

There were only 3 or 4 recruiter emails, as it turned out ... a light dusting compared to what I normally had.  One of them said “Santa Monica, CA.”

Now, I didn’t know where Santa Monica was.  And I was too much in a huff to look it up.  But I knew where Santa Clara was, and I knew where Santa Cruz was, and I figured ... how much farther away could it be?

Pretty far, as it turns out.  Santa Monica is in Los Angeles county, and is (along with Venice Beach and Marina del Rey) one of the beach cities of LA.  As it turns out, my partner used to live in (or just outside) Santa Monica.  All that I was to find out later, though.

It was Monday (Memorial Day) that I sent a random email back to a random recruiter that I plucked out of a spam folder; on Tuesday, I got a garbled message from someone with an unintelligible accent—on a hunch, I called back that same recruiter and it turned out to be him; on Wednesday, I was talking to the recruiter’s boss, who was telling me about a company which had very high standards and was willing to pay full relocation; on Thursday, I had a phone interview with the folks who would eventually end up being my new bosses—this was conducted on my cell phone, while I was driving through the middle of downtown DC, trying to avoid the hideous traffic on the Wilson Bridge; on Friday, I was talking to someone at eBay corporate about a plane ticket; the following Monday night I got on a plane; Tuesday, I had what was possibly the best job interview of my career (probably second only to the one at the corporation where I met my partner), and they made me an offer on the spot; on Wednesday, I received a signed offer letter in my email; and on Thursday, I handed my boss a brief resgination letter.  So, to wrap up the discussion from last week, that’s under two weeks from the time my corporate middle-manager boss pissed me off over something stupidly trivial until the time I had a better job for about 25% more money (although, admittedly, part of that was simply to cover the higher cost of living in LA), and my old company lost 3 and half years’ experience and half their tech department.  Something for you corporate folks to chew on.

But the real lesson is, as far as I’m concerned (and as far as my family is concerned), when something is meant to happen, it will happen, and often with blinding speed.  I could tell you the story of our new house, for instance, which includes passing on it when it was overpriced, it disappearing from the market and then, strangely, reappearing for a cheaper price, and even a prophetic dream ... but I’ve babbled on for quite a while already.  No need to beat a dead horse, I think.

I’ve long felt that whatever force runs the universe, be it divine, karmic, quantum, or ontological, be it moral, predestined, anthropomorphic, cyclical, or merely mechanical, has been quietly and efficiently doing His/Her/Its job for me, or on me, putting me where I am today and seemingly with the inexorable goal of geting me to where I will be tomorrow.  As you can see, I’m an epistemological conservative, but still I can’t help but believe: all that effort that whoever/whatever puts into seeing me to my assigned place ... that’s a lot of pointless expended energy, if there really is no purpose behind it.

Something to think about, anyway.

Taking a Sick Day

I’ve spoken before of my distaste for American corporate culture, and I’ve no doubt I will again.  Corporations have many unfortunate practices, the vast majority of which are just very creative ways to shoot themselves in the foot.  It always amuses me to hear free-market zealots explain how corporations always act in their own self interest ... I could spend hours telling you stories of companies doing stupid things that cost them vast quantities of money, just from my personal experience.  Sometimes this happens because, while an idealized corporate entity might always do what’s best for itself, a corporation in the real world is run by people, and people do silly things.  But often it just happens because of tradition, because of momentum, because it’s “common knowledge” that this is the way things are done and nobody bothers to question it or double check to see if it’s working or not.

Let’s talk about one such policy and why it’s dumb.  This particular one is close to my heart, because it played a very important role in my life (although that’s a story for another blog post).  I’m not sure what book on corporate management is hustling this hoax, but it must be a common one since I keep running into it.  Let’s say your company has no problem with you working from home under normal circumstances.  But what happens if you wake up feeling a little under the weather and decide it makes better sense to you to stay home and get some stuff done rather than go to work and spew your germs around?

Your manager has a fit, that’s what.

For some reason, most corporate middle managers seem to think that you must take PTO when you’re sick, even though they have no problem with you working from home at any other time.  I’ve yet to have anyone explain this to me in a way that actually makes any sense.  Generally it’s something about how you need to get your rest and so you should take the PTO.

Let’s examine all the reasons why that is utterly moronic.

In the first place, we corporate workers don’t want to work from home if we’re really sick.  If you wake up with a really bad flu or somesuch, you want to lay in bed and moan all day, in those rare intervals when you’re actually conscious.  But of course that’s not every day when you’re sick.  In fact, that isn’t even the majority of days when you’re sick.  Most days when you’re sick you don’t feel well enough to suffer through that vicious commute, you don’t want to stray too far from your medicine and your familiar bathroom facilities, and you figure it’s safer to be at home just in case you suddenly get worse, but, all in all, you’re still plenty alert enough to do most corporate work, which (let’s face it) doesn’t require a whole lot of brainpower anyway.  What am I gonna do at home all day?  Watch daytime TV?  Bleaaaghh.  I could be reading a nice book, perhaps, or playing mindless video games ... or I could be getting stuff accomplished for your company.  Which one really makes the most sense, from the point of view of the always self-interested corporation?

This, of course, exposes the real reason that corporate managers don’t want you working from home while you’re sick.  It’s because they think you’re going to do a half-assed job.  Basically, they’re telling you that you can’t be trusted to know when you’re alert enough to do a good job.  This is stupid for a lot of reasons.  First of all, if you really can’t trust the person, you should just fire them.  But obviously that’s not true: you trust them enough to let them work from home in the first place.  So now you’re saying that maybe they can do okay when they’re out of your sight sometimes, but they’re not really bright enough to know when they’re too sick to work.  And the problem with treating your employees like children is that it causes them to act like children.  If you deal with people with a lack of respect, giving them the message that they’re not mature enough, they will inevitably start doing petty things to live up to your expectations.  Enforce ridiculous rules about office supplies and they’ll start stealing paper clips; institute draconian time-off policies and they’ll start calling in sick to go out drinking with their friends; treat them like you expect they can’t keep track of their own time and they’ll start miscounting hours and being more “flexible” about what constitutes work time.  If you want people to act like adults, treat them like adults.  This works for your children, too, in case you didn’t know that already.  (And, if you did, why did you think it wouldn’t work for your grown-up employees?)

But perhaps the biggest problem with this silly policy is the dilemma it puts the employee in.  ‘Cause here’s my thinking on the matter:  If you tell me that I can’t work from home if I’m sick, I have two choices.  One, I could take the PTO and stay home and not work.  Or I could say, screw it, and just come in anyway.  I mean, I may not want to deal with the commute, and it might be more convenient for me to be near my own toilet, but when the alternative is to take PTO (which, due to other silly corporate policies, is a very precious resource), I might decide to forego the convenience and just bring my germ-laden ass in to the office.  After all, I’m not that sick (if I were, the question wouldn’t have come up at all).  And it’s no skin off my nose if I get a bunch of your other employees sick and they have to take PTO and all their work starts falling behind.  No, the only pocketbook that impacts is the company’s.

So look at what this policy is costing you.  It costs you forward progress on potentially important projects.  It costs you morale as employees are insulted by your lack of trust.  And it costs you countless lost work hours as you actively encourage your workers to spread their germs throughout the office and create a domino effect.  And what do you have to put on the other side of that corporate balance sheet?  The possibility that you saved a half-day’s time due to someone not doing a full day’s work?  Are you really coming out ahead?

What about the possibility that your silly policy inspires someone to just quit and go find another job?  You may say to yourself that the chances are good that their next corporation will have the same policy, so they won’t quit over something like that, but a) you don’t know that for sure, and b) people often aren’t that rational.  Don’t tell yourself it can’t happen.  I’m living proof that it can.