10/13 My software engineering professor has died. Hardly anyone has had as much influence on me. He once challenged me to give a presentation to a room full of software engineers on “What’s Philosophy Good For?”

I responded by showing some key passages from several philosophers, from Heidegger to Camus, and then I said: “If you can live without that, by all means do.”

The funeral will be in Germany next week. I decided I need to go. Not least because when my PhD advisor died earlier this year, I didn’t go, and I know I should have. Need to start getting the hang of funerals.

10/12 People getting angry at my writing should give me more trust in it.

10/11 Link has been meowing at the top of his lungs, but also from the back of his throat, for many nights now. As if he was trying to push this as yet very rudimentary communication system of cats several steps up the evolutionary ladder by sheer force of will. It got so bad that we took him to a vet hospital with an emergency service this morning, a drive of forty minutes in pouring rain with wipers thumping.

I estimated his chances of coming back with us alive at maybe fifty percent. But the vet couldn’t find anything. His bloodwork is okay. It is very likely dementia. He’s old, he’s losing his grip on the world, a sundowner, as the vet said.

Before today, I wasn’t aware that pets usually survive a trip to the vet. My only such visit before had been with Link’s brother Met a few years ago, and he had to be put to sleep right away, something none of us had quite expected even an hour earlier.

When Link moved around tonight, when he sat on my armchair for a while as I was playing piano, there was something supernatural about it. It felt unreal for him to be alive, just as it would have felt unreal for him to be dead.

10/10 I will now have to write 25 postcards a day for the next 10 days to finish my assignment. It feels increasingly bizarre. The message I write is predetermined; I am strongly asked not to make up my own message, because the message I’m writing has been statistically proven to be the most effective. All I’m adding is my own handwriting, the as yet unfakeable sign of actual human effort: irregular curves and dents the ballpoint leaves in the cardboard. I wonder how much of the allure of this program is simply that it gives those who do it the feeling of having done something. Statistically, my 300 cards might make three people go vote who wouldn’t have done so otherwise. But, as I wrote the other day: If, under these circumstances, people have to be reminded to vote, we probably don’t deserve a way out of this.

10/9 We have the fine sensors for each other that couples have, and we notice it when something’s in the air. But what if there’s always something in the air? There is. It took us a few years to stop noticing it.

10/8 At the dentist, the assistant took a kind of light pen, or more like a light spoon, or a light pestle, with a rectangular grid of sensors glowing blue and green at the tip, and moved it around in my mouth to produce a 3D scan of my teeth. There was no reference point, no fixing of anything to anything, no holding still, just moving the pestle around so it could familiarize itself with the surroundings. It produced a kind of three-dimensional photograph which you could easily twist and turn on the screen.

I asked if I could take pictures of it with my phone, which she allowed. Could she also email it to me? Of course, she said, although after a few minutes of trying, it turned out there was no way to do that. It’s medical data; you’d be surprised if there was. But when I stood at the front desk to check out, she rolled the monitor down the corridor, views of each jaw from all angles neatly positioned on the screen, so I could take another cell phone shot of it.

The teeth look, well, aged, not too flattering. The silver fillings in them are half a century old, and the teeth in which they are embedded a decade older. Of course they look dated. I’ll try to keep them in good working order, like someone entrusted with a vintage car.

10/7 Building an application larger than any I’ve built with AI before. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really speak the programming language it is written in, and don’t know the libraries that it uses. The language was designed by humans for humans, and so were the libraries. Very soon these will be built by AIs for AIs. I feel like I’m losing my footing, but I welcome that. I deeply welcome change.

(I know I’m responsible for every line of this code and will review it before it goes anywhere.)

At the gym this morning exchanged a few grunts with two of the older regulars in the locker room. I must be quite a spectacle for them because of my consistently skimpy underwear, and probably also because I’m blow-drying my hair. “You’re blowing your head for the pool?” one of them seemed to say, which I vaguely affirmed. “We’re from the city,” he then seemed to say, probably meaning that they are from the City of Newburgh, the more progressive part of Newburgh, rather than from the Town of Newburgh, the much larger and more conservative part. Or was it “You’re from the city,” meant as a question or even a slur? Was he offering to continue the conversation, in small snippets, even in the future?

I may have misunderstood each of these utterances in ridiculous ways, as I usually do, and only realize when I’m around people together with J, who catches my errors and translates for me.

10/6 Back in Newburgh. Some notes about this trip.

We had an unusually long morning in Gothenburg, since our flight didn’t leave until 2pm. That made the cleaning of the house much less stressful; I even spent some time writing beforehand. The handling of J’s wheelchair was a mixed bag this time: truly exceptional in some places, cringey in others.

Even though this was Lufthansa, more than one ground staff member seemed irritated that we were using a personal wheelchair rather than the airport ones. (Reasons here.) The battery questions were a whole lot more painstaking this time, partly because it was Lufthansa and partly because apparently there had been a battery incident somewhere on the planet, with some airline, just recently. Even though I had been more thorough this time and registered the wheelchair with all the appropriate forms via telephone and email 48 hours before departure, we caused a delay in Frankfurt right at the gate because the words “Lithium-Ion” were not printed anywhere on the Chinese-made battery.

But then, on the transatlantic leg, we had a flight attendant like none we’d ever seen. He simply took charge of the wheelchair from beginning to end, informing J, as she took her seat, that her husband was just about done packing up the wheelchair, after which it would be transferred into the cargo hold and he would make sure to let us know once it was there. And when we arrived, he told us to stay seated until he had personally made sure that the wheelchair had arrived on the jet bridge right outside the aircraft door.

Driving on the conduits, the beltways, the parkways, and the freeways of the City felt, especially after Sweden, like Super Mario Kart. I wondered if I had a button somewhere to throw things around, and expected some blurpy game noises. We drove into Manhattan so J could pick up her Jeep, then to Newburgh quite worried about Link, because according to the feeder app he hadn’t eaten in three days. He was fine, though.

The morning in Gothenburg, the flights across Europe and across the ocean, the drive into the City – and then not just into the City, but further on to the countryside an hour up the Hudson Valley – had all seemed so alien to me not long ago, and now it seems even more alien to me that I’m getting used to it and consider it a normal thing to do.

10/5 It may have been a quieter-than-usual weekend, but nobody seems to have minded much. Drove the kids to school in a wet Gothenburg. First time I’ve driven them to schools that are just a few blocks from each other. We were several minutes late for my daughter’s drop-off due to the traffic tightening up at 8, amid all the construction that has been going on in the city for years. Next time we’ll know to add a few extra minutes. But the next time I’ll be driving them to school will be next year.

10/4 Watched a movie in the morning. Played a game of magic. Went to Bastard Burger in the evening, as it is our tradition. I’m shaky; the ever-present feelings of inadequacy flaring up.