10/3 The mood is good, but I’m feeling helpless because I can’t come up with anything for us to do. I’m preoccupied with my usual thoughts and projects. It is a bright fall day and we’re not even going out for anything. We’re spending a weekend together. We do what we normally do, and we happen to be in the same house.
10/2 Flew to Sweden overnight. The red-eye mornings into which these flights inevitably turn are so excruciating that I wonder how the flight attendants can handle it day after day. Is it as excruciating for them as it is for me? I can’t imagine any human for whom it is not. Does something else about the job make up for it?
As I go and do grocery shopping with the kids after picking them up – usually the first thing we do – I am surprised by a previously unknown automaticity with which they go to the shelves and get what we need to get; I am mostly just dragging the shopping cart around. My daughter says that she doesn’t like it when we all stand in front of a shelf in a big, undecided huddle, so she just goes ahead and does what needs to be done.
10/1 My dad is now using a walker to get around; they sent some pictures. I went on my first run yesterday after six weeks, and my right hip joint is aching from it. I know what it is, I’ve seen it on X-ray, it’s a slight deviation of the ball of the joint from a proper sphere. I do not know whether the pain would go away with more regular training. I also do not know what kind of pain it is that makes my father need a walker. It took several decades of my life until I realized that old people are not moving so slowly because of a general, mysterious slowness that has befallen them, but to avoid pain.
9/30 Monday was my first swim in four weeks, after the shoulder injury. I had been very worried about the first crawl stroke, and was quite relieved when I could pull it through with only minimal irritation. I still cut my distance by a third, and the crawl part in half. I did use the extra time to practice flip turns, that one movement I didn’t learn as a child, which for that reason isn’t ingrained into me like the others, and which I’m so envious of when I see other swimmers do it. I’ve been tiptoeing around it for years, wondering whether it’s worth the effort, and whether I even have a chance, now in my late fifties.
A reader tells me she’s been reading me for many years, and that she liked my German entries much better. It’s a good thing I am not writing for my readers and do not care which entries they like better. A good reader may also observe that cutting myself loose from my native language is a more radical operation than I may have thought, and that it takes time to find my center of gravity in a foreign-now-first language, on a new platform, while – for some strange reason – cross-posting all over the place.
9/29 Essay class: “Cheap tricks are always intentional.” “All we have is tinkering.”
9/28 Wondering about the nature of consciousness and the existence of free will used to be a pretty nerdy thing to do. Over time, you’d learn just how perplexing it is and that we have essentially no idea of how these things work. With the advent of AI, the entire rest of the population suddenly storms into this field and lets everybody know just how easy it is and how stupid you are if you are not getting it.
9/27 I, too, now have a stately assortment of medications sitting on the table in front of me, among the laptops, tablets, head phones, and power adapters. Two seizure drugs, because my neurologist says that we must, above all, prevent me from getting another seizure, which would likely turn into a cluster, and even status, with potentially devastating effects. Something anti-inflammatory to help my shoulder recover from its injury. Two sleep helpers. And something generic against pain. – I begin not to see them so much as potions anymore designed to fix something, but as external glands, a kind of chemical exoskeleton, a mutation that turns us into something that extends being human by just a little bit.
9/26 Woodstock Symphony: Beethoven, Bizet. I spent much of the time trying to think something about the music, with very modest results, until the last movement of the Seventh simply swept me away. Afterwards, in the lobby, Mina, the conductor, tried talking to me, but I wasn’t able to say anything meaningful.
9/25 That monster truck, an F-250 Super Duty, is parked across from our house again, in that spot where the owner sometimes puts it during alternate-side parking, because on his street there’s no room on the other side, and that’s fine, I think he even talked to J about it at some point. His truck’s been sitting there for a few days now, and that’s also fine, but also unusual.
I wonder, very theoretically, if the owner died, and had no family to notice. How long would it take for the car to be declared abandoned, and then towed, and then auctioned off?
Almost instantly I think of our things, all the items we have accumulated, and how a hauling company would indiscriminately grab everything and throw it away, excepting perhaps a totally random item here or there, certainly not the most valuable or unusual one, which would catch a worker’s eye and he would snatch it from all the stuff that goes in the dumpster. You can’t start thinking about all the things that way, or you’ll never see the end of it. There is something strangely reassuring in that the hauling company will indeed sort it out. There has never been a case where a hauling company has been overwhelmed by the number of items, or the difficulty of deciding the fate of each of them.
9/24 It may be worth documenting that my customers are all healthcare companies now, and a hundred percent of the IT specialists I am working with are from India. Most of them onshore; very few, at this point, offshore. Their workdays – so they tell me – consist of ten meetings back-to-back, and then the actual work starts. Some days also extend into nightshifts, and nobody seems to find fault with that.