Today I will bring my Dad home from the hospital after nearly two months. I have no idea what I’m doing. But, we will figure it out together. We have to.
If you only watch one octopus video today, watch this one
Pretty amazing evolutionary adaptation. The blanket octopus releases a blanket-like webbing when threatened.
Søren Kierkegaard’s view on the aesthetic life
A while back, I heard a good podcast from BBC’s In Our Time, on Søren Kierkegaard’s view on the aesthetic life leading ultimately to despair. I spent a little time googling up some information as I know very little about Kierkegaard. This seemed interesting:
In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious life, one is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly free, and this causes boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe in things that we can prove, but we can only have faith in things that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in gravity: we feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of gravity’s existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in gravity, since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity would fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There’s no rational evidence for God, but this is exactly what allows people to have faith in him.
As an agnostic, this is the problem I have with staunch atheists. To deny even the possibility of a God is to make a leap of faith. Just like to believe in God requires a leap of faith. In this sense, both atheists and theists lack a healthy sense of doubt, even though we’re dealing with ideas that are beyond proof. The existence of God is essentially unknowable as he presumably stands outside natural law and physical reality. In my experience, both extreme theists and atheists have more in common with each other than they do agnostics. They seem to be reacting to some bad experience by moving toward one pole or the other, in search of certainty.
Knowing what to do
This thing with my Dad being in the hospital. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because I didn’t want to jinx anything. The further we get toward survival, the better I feel.
Knowing what to do has been the hardest part. Since my brother and I are my father’s next of kin, we have had to navigate a sea of problems, ranging from the medical and legal to the personal and financial. I think we’ve done okay, all things considered.
It’s weird how difficult experiences can be valuable. On the one hand, you wouldn’t voluntarily experience something painful, but while going through it you get a sense of the gravity and meaning that seems to exist under the surface of daily life. When you see a daily parade of shattered families walk through the ICU with fear in their eyes or crying in huddled groups, it makes an impression. The message is: every day that you go about your normal routine, someone somewhere is having their heart ripped out. Suffering is universal, so stop being such a jerk.
The other thing you learn is that everyone needs access to medical care. I don’t advocate any particular plan, but most people don’t plan on being hospitalized. So, if employers are not forced to offer health insurance and people are not required to have health insurance, it stands to reason that many people are taking the risk of serious injury and the subsequent crushing medical debt. Even people with health insurance are often insufficiently covered. How can healthcare be optional in this country? We’re ignoring the problem.
Love and tex-mex
All this heavy life stuff is happening and I want to write about it, but it just doesn’t feel right. You want to write things down so you remember how you feel and how things are, but it feels like voyeurism. Like life is too real to turn it into a story.
But, I do want to remember because I forget. What really matters. The truth of things.
Random stuff:
1. I ran into my best friend from 5th grade, Sheldon. He is a technician in the ICU. I hadn’t seen him since 1995. He recognized my brother before he recognized me. Maybe because I had a beard, but maybe because I just don’t look the same. He has an iPhone. He remembered a lot of things I had forgotten, like the time our dachshund, Ginger, bit my brother in the nuts. It’s funny how other people remember things you don’t, even though you were there, too.
2. The surgeon who fixed my dad’s face with titanium bands is a Merryman. She has to be related. I have never run into a Merryman before who was not related. She has the pale, heavy-lidded Merryman eyes.
3. In the hospital lobby, there was an issue of National Geographic from 1970 with Hutterites on the cover. That magazine was 38 years old and it was just sitting there like some joke about waiting rooms. Where did it come from?
4. I found a good restaurant near the hospital, Blanco Cafe. Lupe, the nurse that beeps people in during visiting hours, turned us on to it. I had to revise my tex-mex list to put it in the top 3, just after Mi Tierra. Breakfast all day. Sweet tea. Cheap and awesome. My favorite meal: beef enchiladas with a glass of Red Flash (I prefer Big Red with my tex-mex, but it’ll do in a pinch.) In the last three weeks, I’ve probably eaten there 6-7 times. The tortillas are fresh. You can tell because they are just slightly crisp and papery and you can feel the flour dusted on them. Bakery tortillas are moist from being packed into plastic bags after they come steaming off the griddle. It’s just not the same.
Fast Food Afficianado
Since I’ve been back in San Antonio for about three weeks, I’ve gotten to know the surrounding restaurants very well. Too well. In between visiting hours, I normally walk across the street to Chik-fil-A, so I don’t have to pay twice for parking. As far as fast food goes, Chik-fil-A is top of the heap. You can actually tell what kind of animal the sandwich came from. They also do things a little differently:
- The employees at Chik-fil-A always say “My pleasure” when I say, “Thank you”. Even if it is part of some cynical marketing ploy, I like it.
- There are fresh flowers on each table. The other day they were yellow daisy-like flowers. Today they were purple daisy-like flowers.
- Little Texas Pete hot sauce packets! I am all for condiment selection. Hot sauce is essential. (Don’t miss the Texas Pete Wikipedia article wherein someone gets a little free with the truth: “In late 2003, Chick-Fil-A opted to carry Texas Pete sauce (packet-form) in its restaurants nationwide. Same-store sales catapulted over 45% in 2004. Many analysts close to the firm heralded the decision to carry the sauce, largely attributing the company’s success to the sauce itself. In several third party surveys, Chick-Fil-A customers have exclaimed, “Texas Pete doesn’t go on the chicken sandwich, the chicken sandwich goes on the Texas Pete,” and “Best thing since the chicken sandwich.”)
- They play Christian music as background music. I don’t really have a problem with this except it’s generally bland and I don’t know any of the songs. That’s okay. Background music is not supposed to be good.
- Real lemonade. Tart and sweet. ‘Nuff said.
- At the entrance to the playscape, they provide the kids with little alcohol towelettes so they can clean their grubby hands.
Change blindness
From the NY Times: Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face:
Visual attentiveness is born of limited resources. “The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain,” Dr. Wolfe said. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view. In deciding what to focus on, the brain essentially shines a spotlight from place to place, a rapid, sweeping search that takes in maybe 30 or 40 objects per second, the survey accompanied by a multitude of body movements of which we are barely aware: the darting of the eyes, the constant tiny twists of the torso and neck. We scan and sweep and perfunctorily police, until something sticks out and brings our bouncing cones to a halt.
Critical condition
Now that things have stabilized, I wanted to take a moment to explain where I’ve been for the past two weeks. On March 15th (beware the ides of March), my father was in a bad car accident. The situation is very serious and up until a few days ago when we started to see some improvement, the last thing on my mind was to write about it. Until I came home this weekend, I basically lived at the hospital. It has been a perspective-inducing experience without parallel. When things get better, I will share some of what I have learned.
Google Book Search a joy for antiquarians
Google Book Search is a project that exemplifies Google’s vision for information. For the past few years they’ve worked with various libraries and universities to digitize books, periodicals, and journals that might otherwise have remained untouched in their collections. Each resource is scanned by hand and rendered into indexable text. For older works whose copyrights have lapsed, you may read the entire thing online. Even for books under copyright, Google Book Search is a good way to search the contents of published works and is a great supplement to the usual search engine results for many research topics. Over the past few months, I’ve come across several books I might have paid for available online via Google Book Search. For any older books, this is now the first place I check. Here are a couple good books you may read online. They’re mostly aphorisms or concise wisdom, so it should be good for casual reading:
- The Maxims of Cháṇákya: The Maxims of Cháṇákya are an interesting record of thought by an early Indian statesman.
- The Maxims of Francis Guicciardini by Francesco Guicciardini. Practical and political philosophy by a contemporary of Machiavelli, the historian Guicciardini.
- The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave: From the Latin
- Maxims and Moral Reflections by François La Rochefoucauld
Good use for Social Security data
Every year I get a green, printed Social Security statement in the mail from the federal government. It lists my taxable income for every year I’ve paid taxes. Looking at past earnings is a trip down memory lane. The first jobs at 16, the lean college years, the post college flailing about… my life story in numbers, faithfully recorded by the Social Security Administration.
- It would be useful to take this information and chart your earnings over time to see the trend. I would imagine that if you did this over your expected lifetime you would observe a bell-like curve. From no earnings in youth to a considerable increase then a slowed growth, then inevitably a decline as you approach old age. (I could be wrong here. How would you continue increases in income growth? Invest an inordinate amount when young?)
- You could also calculate your year over year percentage income growth to keep your career earnings on track. For example, if you experienced 15% in annual growth for several years and then observed a decrease in growth or even negative growth you might consider retooling your skillset or looking for other income growth opportunities in order to maintain your growth trajectory. Income growth is essential in asset growth, though you will have no asset growth if you spend everything you earn.
- It might also be a good idea to keep an eye on average annual income growth on a five year trend. The last five years are probably a better guide to your income growth than what you earned at 16.