10/29 Ran around the lake with my daughter. Watched Flow together in the evening.

10/28 Gothenburg. Announcements by the German flight crews burst with an enthusiasm I find foreign, international, naive.

10/27 No one ever knew what it is like to fly through the night with such a tube, because no-one has ever been outside the tube.

10/26 Boring, uninspired Orchestra Broadway Night. Geriartric audience – and even they were not old enough to have known the material first hand. After that, getting ready for Sweden.

10/25 What I’m looking for is not the ability to play jazz standards – not even, as I’ve put it, the ability to “hold my own in a jazz band” by age 60. I want musical literacy. The ability to do more and more with the instrument. What interests me the least is playing classical rep. I am most excited by free improv. Composing, arranging and producing is somewhere in the upper half. Playing and being able to comp contemporary music, including jazz, somewhere in the lower half. But I want to do all of that. I need to understand what is my best path forward – at this time, learning jazz standards does seem to be a next logical step, but my time is not infinite.

10/24 The doctor sent the exercise plan to me while I was standing next to him in the hallway, from his very cool looking midnight black macbook that he seemed to carry around everywhere. The anti-inflammatory drug I didn’t get on the same day, because they somehow failed to push it through to my pharmacy. After a nudge from me on Friday morning, it did go through, but it was too late to have it delivered before I would leave for Newburgh. I will have to take J’s anti-inflammatories, of which she has plenty. My shoulder icepack did arrive today, in Newburgh.

10/23 Saw a sports doctor on Madison and had my shoulder examined, which has developed a stabbing pain during weight-lifting, making all exercise next to impossible. Yet in the rest of the day, I feel almost nothing. He puts me through a barrage of at least 20 tests, turning and lifting and twisting my arm in all sorts of ways. Almost none of them hurts. He eventually settles for a labral tear, not anything in the rotator cuff, as I had thought. Conservative treatment, should take 4-6 weeks.

It was the first time I saw a doctor googling as part of his regular work – not really the diagnostic process, he used his twists and turns for that, but in order to show me his theory he googled for drawings of the shoulder system and went back and forth until he found one that illustrated most clearly what he wanted to say. So far, I’ve been used to there being a poster on the wall of the examination room, or a special computer system that patients don’t have access to.

He asked what kind of doctor I am, and I said computer science. He said he’d wanted to do that too, but his parents talked him out of it. He seemed genuinely unhappy, or at least in doubt about it. Talked about introvertedness, which we both deeply share, and how my job as a computer guy is for the most part working with people, and how every company today is a software company, and how AI will radically change both of our fields. 

10/22 Woke up even before four today and got more work done than on many other days. 

10/21 Got up at four because my brain was ready to do the work it had been contemplating since Friday. There was no discussion whether I was awake, I just was. By eight I had written a report and drawn diagrams for it, coded and measured a speed of 2,500 operations per second. Rest of the day in a jetlag-like disorientation. Slept an hour here and another there, my sleep rhythm will have a hard time reconciling that.

10/20 Outage of Amazon us-east-1. As a result, the cat feeder blinks a red warning light pretty much all day.