I see a therapist on a semi-regular basis. I just wanted to throw that out there because, in some circles, there’s still a stigma attached to needing help and then getting help. To be perfectly honest, I was a little worried about how I’d be perceived and felt weird about it at first. I’d be lying if I said it felt like anything but a personal failure when I scheduled my first appointment. I suspect many people have that same sort of trepidation. The stereotype that therapy is only for weak-willed people who can’t get their shit together may be less prevalent, but it’s still around, and it’s not helpful. It’s an obstacle which prevents people who need help from getting help and it has no more basis in fact than the idea that vaccines cause autism. I’ve had good results with therapy. I got different perspectives and approaches for dealing with problems which had resisted my tunnel-visioned approach. Even when I’m not struggling with anything in particular, it’s not a bad thing to make sure you’re not veering off into self-deception territory. My experience isn’t universal and may not even be typical, but it’s worked well for me. I try to be open about my experiences. I hope I can help ease a little of the stigma in some folks’ minds, or answer some questions, or help out in some small way. Mental issues are real. Telling people to just tough it out is no more helpful or realistic than telling someone with a broken arm to “just get over it.” So, if you have any questions for me about my experiences, please feel free to contact me. This image of Margaret Cho and Amanda Palmer has nothing to do with therapy. A google image search on the word “therapy” provides fewer interesting choices than I would have guessed. -RK
Category: Journal
Recovery
Last night, I was hit with another bout of labyrinthitis, which is very much a real thing even though my spell-check seems to think otherwise. If you’re not familiar with you, well, be thankful as it isn’t a great deal of fun. Sometimes, when you get some swelling in your inner ear (could be for several reasons), it messes with your semi-circular canals. The result is that one of your ears is sending wildly different signals to your brain with respect to things like motion and balance. Freeside concept art. Very germane to this discussion. This is not a lot of fun. The world looks like it’s spinning, or, in my case, jerking wildly to the left and then resetting. Keep your eyes closed when it hits. Trust me on this one. You’re not out of the woods yet, though. Any movement triggers the two sets of signals, so shifting your head to the side feels like lurching several feet. Try to avoid moving. If you have to move, say, to go to the bathroom, you crawl. You crawl with your eyes closed. As you might expect, nausea is one of the side-effects. It’s weird, in that it always makes me feel sick, but I never actually get sick. I’m not sure if that’s due to my iron stomach or some unusual aspect of this ailment. The first time it hit, some five or six years ago, it was terrifying. Your first thought is “will this ever end?” You don’t know, because it’s never happened to you before. The first time was the worst for that reason. The symptoms have been the same each time, but knowing it isn’t permanent makes it much easier to deal with. The other thing that makes it easier is that my wife had experience treating this same problem in animals, so she quickly recognized what was going on. The best treatments are motion-sickness drugs and sleep. The motion-sickness drugs are what allow you to sleep, and the sleeping lets you miss the several hours it takes for your body to re-calibrate. That’s what happens, in the end. Your body reconciles the two signals from the inner ears and figures out how to turn those two inputs into one, consistent reading on your balance. It takes several hours, so sleeping is far more pleasant than trying to fight through it. When you wake up, it’s like nothing ever happened, except you probably sweated a lot while dealing with the symptoms and your muscles are probably a little achy from, well, whatever they were doing. Today has been almost surreal in how pleasant it’s been. I’m well-rested (which almost never happens) and the whole day has felt gauzy and dreamlike. Probably a little of Dramamine still in my system. It’s hard to say for sure. Anyway, I suppose I’m fortunate in that my most severe ailment passes after a few hours and leaves almost no marks.
Fair Park Coliseum, 11 February, 1995
This is a response to the Flash (Non) Fiction Challenge: Tell Us A Story From Your Life on Chuck Wendig’s site. Normally, I post these in the Stories section, but as this one is a true story, or, at least, as true as I can recall given that it was over twenty years ago, I suppose it properly belongs in the Journal section. I have stories that I’d like to get down in writing, and I may wind up making this a recurring feature here. We’ll see how it goes… (p.s. Here’s a different account of the same evening: http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/the_melvins.shtml ) — In the late winter of 1995, Nine Inch Nails were still touring on The Downward Spiral almost a year after its release. They were no longer playing nightclubs in Deep Ellum; they had graduated to headlining medium-sized venues like the Fair Park Colosseum in Dallas. I’d seen NIN four or five times already, but this was the show I was really excited about. Not only were Nine Inch Nails playing, but my co-favorite band at the time, Pop Will Eat Itself, were opening. This had the potential to be one of the most memorable shows I’d ever been to, and I suppose it was, but not for any reason I could have expected. Fair Park Colosseum was an odd venue. It was the home to the rodeo during the State Fair, but most of the year, it was where the minor league hockey team, the Dallas Blackhawks, played. When the venue hosted a concert, they just put down plywood over the ice, or at least, they used to. A few weeks prior to the Nine Inch Nails show, Pantera played at the Fair Park Colosseum. At some point, the fans figured out that they could make crowd-surfing way more awesome by lifting up the plywood and having people surf on it. Just imagine a sea of arms, lifted into the air, pushing a plywood board forward, a fan struggling (and likely failing) to keep their balance atop the board. Now imagine the board, propelled forward, carrying two hundred pounds of fan, and the front edge dipping just low enough to hit someone on the back of their head. Ouch. So, for our show, the plywood had been replaced by maybe an eighth of an inch of particle board. You could feel the cold when you walked on the floor of the arena, or at least, you would if you weren’t wearing army boots like I was.* Normally, the crowds arrive late, but this was an exception: Pop Will Eat Itself received quite a ton of local airplay for their debut album “This Is The Day, This Is The Hour, This Is This!”** and the new record, on Trent Reznor’s Nothing label, was something of a masterpiece. The floor of the colosseum was nearly full when the lights went down and you could literally feel the edgy energy of a mosh pit that was about to explode. And then it all went wrong. In these strange, pre-internet days, communication was a much less certain thing. No one knew that Clint Mansell***, the singer for PWEI, had fallen ill and the Poppies had been forced to drop off the tour. None of us knew that the Melvins had been filling in for the last few weeks of the tour. All we knew is, if this was Pop Will Eat Itself, then they were the worst industrial band in the world. I’m sure the Melvins are a wonderful band, but for whatever reason, they simply did not have it on the 11th of February, 1995. I didn’t like them. My friends didn’t like them. The crowd didn’t like them. The first song came and went to angry murmurs and only the faintest hint of applause. They gamely went into their second song and it went from bad to worse. The buzz got a little angrier, the crowd felt restless, and the band seemed pissed off. It was around this time that some bright person on the floor of the colosseum realized that the floor was made of thin particle board and would tear with ease. They tore up a chunk of floor and threw it at the band. This seemed like a Very Good Idea to some other folks, who followed suit. Soon, the air was full of mostly-harmlessFrisbee-sized sheets of particle board directed at (but seldom actually reaching) the stage. The Melvins reacted badly, but you can’t really blame them, can you? Their response was to start playing one note, over and over, with a ponderous drum beat, while the singer improvised lyrics about what jackasses we were. Well, that, and the fact that they weren’t going to go away no matter how much of the floor we threw at them. But throw we did. We threw and we threw and we threw. We threw until there was literally no more floor left, at which point, one of my friends turned around, facing away from the stage, and sat down. All of my friends did the same. Eventually, everyone on the floor was sitting down, facing away from the band. The Melvins, either figuring they were beat or that they’d won as much as they were going to win, threw down their instruments, flipped us off, and stormed off stage. The lights came up, and Trent Reznor came out and stepped up to the mic. “Dude. Not cool. This next act does some seriously dangerous shit, and if anyone throws anything at them, we’re not playing tonight.” I may be off a word or two. It was a long time ago. The second act were the Jim Rose Circus, a freak show act that were kind of everywhere in the mid-90’s. The had a guy who put his entire body through a badmitton racket, a guy who lifted cinder blocks with his nipple piercings****, and similar acts. We behaved will and enjoyed the show. You’d think that seeing Nine Inch Nails after all that had gone on before would be anti-climactic. Or, at least, you might think that if you have never seen Nine Inch Nails. Their show was almost the perfect embodiment of the world “climax.” Trying to describe any show is difficult at best, but NIN at their peak? Imagine the heaviest music you’ve ever…
Jean-Paul Marat’s got nothin’ on me
I do a lot of my best reading in the bathtub. I might even do some writing there, too, but I won’t make any claims regarding the quality. I cheated on my project and finished William Alexander’s Flirting with French at home*. My wife pointed this one out to me at the local book store as something that might be relevant to my interests. I’ve been messing around with the Duolingo app and learning a smidgen of French in the process. The book is about a man’s attempt to learn French in his fifties, so yes, it is very much the sort of thing I’m interested in. My main takeaway? I will not be learning French any time soon. Alexander’s attempt to learn the language was considerably more intense than anything I’m willing to attempt and, I hope I’m not giving anything away here, he is not a fluent speaker by the end of the book. As I’ve never been especially good with languages, I can’t imagine I’d do any better. That’s ok, though. I’m just trying to sweep the cobwebs out of my brain, and trying to learn something you’ll never properly grasp is a heck of a way to keep the cobwebs at bay.
There and back again and back there before too long I hope
We got home from Denver late late late Monday night and I still have some unpacking to do, both literally and figuratively. I’m too lazy to do the former right now, so let’s get down to tacks of brass: I’d be happy to have the opportunity to live in the Mile High City one of these days. It was a wonderful and wholly exhausting experience. This is a thing that exists in Denver. Most of our vaguely-defined plans fell through, which left us a ton of time to just walk around town. In retrospect, it seems a little weird, but at the time we felt perfectly safe walking around a city we’d never visited. I don’t even remember hearing sirens. A big part of that is that fact that there were people walking pretty much all the time. It’s easy to feel comfortable when there are a so many people out and about at the same time. I’d also like to mention that the people we met were friendly. I mean really friendly, almost disconcertingly so. I’ve heard other people experience the same thing, so I’m starting to suspect that it’s just a genuinely friendly area. I’m not sure why this would be the case (apparently, this predates the legalization of certain plant-based products), but it’s a very charming trait for a city to have. Of course, it’s really pretty there too. If you like mountains, the horizon is chock full of them. When we were there, the air couldn’t have been cleaner, the roads were well-maintained, and the city itself was cleaner than any downtown I’ve visited. My sister taught me to understand the value of living someplace beautiful and that’s something I’ve yet to do. It’s not all roses, of course. Denver isn’t a no-kill city, they seem to have a complicated relationship with their homeless, and the climate is a mixed blessing, especially for those of us for whom dry skin is a chronic issue. For our next visit, we’re going to go in the middle of winter just to see if it’s something we’d be OK with. I’m a big fan of snow when I’m at a comfortable distance. It’s been some time since I’ve experienced it in any quantity and I probably ought to do that before even considering making a move. I love visiting places which are doing things that seem right to me and fit my vaguely-formed ideal image of what a city should be like. Even if we don’t ever live there, it makes me think of what my current home could be doing better, and it helps me work out my own priorities as to what’s important, to me, in a city. That’s quite enough (and then some) about our visit, but I needed to get it out of my system. I love travel, but it comes at a high cost, both financially and physically, so when I do it, I tend to obsess about it. Not for the first time, I’m like that guy who finds out about a band about five years after everyone else and gets way too into them. Just smile and nod and I’ll be on about something else soon enough. -RK
Transit
All work and no play makes me pretty much exactly what I am, so we’re taking a much-needed long weekend trip to Denver. It’s been ten years since I’ve been up here, and that trip was all business so I didn’t get to see much of the city. A lot of highways, some of which were incredible (I had to drive to Grand Junction), but not much of Denver. Ever since we watched Gary Huzwit’s Urbanized, I’ve kept an eye out for how cities are put together and run, what works, what doesn’t and things of that ilk. Denver, to a newly-arrived traveller, seems to have some good things going on in the downtown area. It’s one of the most walkable downtowns I’ve visited. Based on what I’ve seen, there are enough support systems to support someone working and living downtown and not having to own a car. There’s public transit, rental smart cars, plenty of bike infrastructure, and there’s an unusual amount of useful shops. I’ve only seen a tiny sliver of the city and I’m sure there are plenty of problems, but they seem to be doing a lot of thing well. Oh, and of course, it’s insanely beautiful outside today. The temperatures are going to be in the 50-70 Fahrenheit degrees range, and the air is a crisp as advertised. We couldn’t have lucked in to a nicer weekend. On the off chance that you’re interested in such things, I won’t be indulging in the recreation which was recently legalized here. It’s interesting, though, to see shops advertising legal marijuana in the central business district. I can’t see whatever disadvantages one might dream up outweighing the obvious benefits, so I imagine this sort of thing will spread wildfire. This being a short trip, we decided to do it up a little* and we’re staying at the Monaco. It’s such a lovely, quirky place, typical of the Kimpton hotels. We have a fish bowl in our room now just because we commented on the one at the front desk. Apparently, this is just a thing they do. Silly, I know, but it’s delightful and there’s way too little delight in the world these days. This being a “recharge the batteries” kind of trip, we have very few specific things planned. We’re going to walk around and enjoy this lovely town, chill in this ridiculous hotel, and get out and about and see a few friends. The rest will be all improv. We’re very fortunate in that we’re both most comfortable handling vacations this way. The real risk, for me, is this: Will I come back from this vacation full of vim** and ready to get back to work? Or will I instead come back thinking, “gee, I could really get used to that whole ‘vacation’ thing?” I think maybe Calvin’s dad was on to something… P.S The image if a stock photo of Idaho Springs, Colorado. We drove up that way to kill some time and determined that, while the mountains are really pretty and impressive, driving through them on the interstate isn’t quite all that. P.P.S. I just finished reading Hermann Hesse’s Sidhartha. Funny book, in the sense that’s it’s very much a post-WW1 German thinker*** telling a very non-German story and it reminded me a lot of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. I like reading purely philosophical novels. Even if I don’t agree with them, it’s fun to work out precisely why you don’t. * “Do it up” did not include the flight. We took Frontier, the Ryan Air of the American West ™. I’m all for bare bones budget flight, but charging upwards of $25 to check or carry any bag seems a little excessive. ** Not vigor. No one has ever described me as especially vigorous, and besides, isn’t vigor just getting by on vim’s coattails these days? *** Oh so many mentions of “nausea.”
Oldtimer
The new customer service rep from one of our vendors called me yesterday to introduce herself. I genuinely feel bad for these people. When they take over a new territory, they’re cold-calling a bunch of people whose business and background they only know from a paragraph on a transition email. She opened by letting me know how long she’d been with the vendor, which probably makes sense. What she hadn’t been told, however, was that not only was their software originally developed for a company I was working for at the time and I’d been involved with the first pilot of their software, but I’d previously been employed by this vendor and had family still working there. I said this not to one-up her, but just to give her a better idea of where I was coming from. What this means, though, is that I’ve been in this particular corner of this industry for approximately as long as this corner has existed. I work with people who weren’t alive when I first got in to this business. There are some who weren’t alive when this particular piece of software first crawled out of our office over twenty years ago. Most of the time, I use pop culture touchstones to demonstrate the passing of time. For example, this year’s class of high school graduates weren’t born when Radiohead’s “OK Computer,” Wu Tang’s :Wu Tang Forever,” Foo Fighter’s “The Colour and the Shape” and, Spiritualized’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” were released. The movies “Titanic,” “Boogie Nights,” and “Men In Black?” All after they were born. The difference is that I think those are funny. Watching people realize that their entertainment is now as old to them as their parents’ music and movies were to them is a hoot, albeit a slightly cruel one. On the other hand, realizing I’ve spent this much time in this industry is something that gives me chills, and not the good kind, every time. I’m not sure why. OK, that’s a lie. This is why (ganked from Kuenzer.com.) It’s like hitting “/played” in World of Warcraft and seeing just how much of your life you’ve sunk in to this pursuit. Granted, it’s mostly a pursuit of “having a roof over my head” and “having food to eat that isn’t dried ramen because, dude, you can only eat so much of that and I know exactly where that limit is.” My job could disappear tomorrow and the world wouldn’t even notice. I’m under no illusion as to the importance of my day job. I just don’t much care for confronting exactly how much time I’ve put into it.
Back to normality (and some stuff about Labor Day)
Beautiful girlfriend is home from her trip and the house feels like it’s home again. A few days ago, my sister asked me what guilty pleasures I planned to indulge in once I had the place to myself, something I wouldn’t do when the missus was around. Her example was “eat an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting” so you can tell we’re a wild family. I couldn’t think of a single thing. I’m not trying to win brownie points or anything like that; I just literally couldn’t think of anything I enjoy doing that I can’t do when she’s around. I don’t know if that means we have an exceptionally healthy relationship or we’re the poster children for co-dependence, but I’m not going to complain. I’m happy, and that’s more than enough. Back to work tomorrow. I know that Labor Day is sort of the runt of the litterwhen it comes to national holidays, but I’ve grown to appreciate it more over the years. I don’t remember hearing many positive things about organized labor when I was growing up, but in hindsight, I think the people who were controlling the narrative were the ones organized labor was vying against, so they may not have been impartial sources. I usually distrust declension narratives, but I get the impression that the gains which organized labor won have been eroded to a greater degree than many people realize. Work weeks seem to be getting longer as the workforce shifts to jobs which don’t provide overtime. I’m not an economist and by that I mean I’m really, really not an economist so I won’t even speculate as to why this is happening or what it means, but it seems, from my vantage, to be something we should be concerned about. Anyway, just like Memorial Day is a great time to reflect on the sacrifice of those who served, maybe Labor Day would be a good opportunity to teach the very important gains organized labor fought for and won for us all. That said, I’m not above taking advantage of a day off to just chill out and enjoy not being in the office. Heavy concepts like the importance of organized labor are great, but so is having a little local Tex-Mex, hitting up a book store, and basking in the joy of having your most favorite person by your side again. Absence/heart/fonder/etc. Turns out it’s true. P.S. Holy smokes, the bed is cold. That’s not any kind of figurative statement; the bed is downright chilly tonight. It isn’t help by that fact that, due to my medical concerns, I have to use a sheet between me and the blanket. This is not my preferred arrangement. I don’t like anything between me and my big, warm, microfiber bundle of joy. Even as a child, I always kicked my sheet to the end of the bed in my sleep. I know this doesn’t make any sense at all, but somehow, having an extra layer of fabric makes the bed feel colder. In theory, or at least my understanding of the theory, an extra layer of fabric to trap my body heat should be keeping my warmer. It doesn’t feel that way. The sheet feels slick and cool and not cozy by any reasonable measure of coziness. Sheets: I am not a fan.
Four updates in one post (warning: some updates my be really short)
I just finished reading Andy Weir’s The Martian and, on the off chance you’re in to hard science fiction and you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you pick it up. It’s breezy and funny and it moves along briskly and there are tons and tons of math! Don’t worry, though, because Weir does a great job of keeping it at a level that I found easy to follow. I’ve no clue if the movie will be any good or not, but the book’s a keeper. Now isn’t this interesting? New Orleans is making a bid to host Worldcon 2018? There are worse places to visit, and there are worse reasons for visiting a place. 2018 is far enough away I can’t even think about making concrete plans, but wouldn’t it be fun? Speaking of New Orleans, this arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s beautiful, it’s raw, and it’s special. I’m home alone this weekend. You’d think I’d be out doing wild, bachelor things and so forth. Well, you might think that if you didn’t know me. I’ve done a lot of work (because hey, that’s what you do on labor day weekend, right?) and some reading and a little, but not nearly enough, cleaning. The only bachelor thing I’ve done is restrict my meals to “things I can prepare easily and clean up afterwards easily.” That name would look terrible on a label, wouldn’t it? Someone smarter than me will probably come up with something better… That last flash fiction story was a bear. It was a two-part prompt: The previous week, we created a character. Then, last week, we wrote a story using someone else’s character. I selected a fellow who didn’t say much other than a few prophetic in brief spasms. Then I got to work on the story. I had a setting, I had other characters moving around the main character, I had a basic plot outline and even had it halfway finished when I noticed that I hadn’t really done anything with the character himself. Uh oh. This was the point at which I noticed that it’s tough to write essentially mute characters. In theory, I would have recognized this at the outset, but I’d somehow missed out on this vital realization. Four hours, a complete shift in POV, and an kind of a cop-out of an ending, I had it done. Not great, but a terrific exercise and that’s what these prompts are all about. It did, however, lead me to ask myself a question. Let me put on my toga and you can pretend I’m speaking in the voice of some Greek philosopher: “Is it better to tell a great story adequately, or to tell an adequate story skillfully?” Ok, I’ll take the toga off now.* Ideally, of course, you want to tell a great story skillfully. For the sake of practice, I feel as though I’ve been spending too much time and effort trying to come up with a great story and not working as hard at telling it well. So, for the next prompt, my goal is to pay more attention to the technical side of things, the mechanics of it, even if that means I’m not particularly “inspired” by the story. Does that make sense? * Don’t flinch; I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt underneath it.
Because What We Really Need Is More Hugo Awards Drama
The Sad Puppies are going to make another go of it next year. My understanding is that they are not planning on slate voting this time around, and if that’s the case, I wish them well. A group working to bring more awareness to science fiction and to highlight works that might not otherwise get much attention strikes me as admirable. I feel for the Sad Puppies, because they’re in difficult-bordering-on-hopeless situation. Let’s say that you’re taking a poll of the “six best songs of the summer!” If fifty one percent of your voting population like opera and forty nine percent prefer rap*, then there is a very good chance that every song on your list is going to be an opera song. This is a feature of how some voting systems are set up. Please don’t make me link the “Spider Jerusalem on voting” rant. Another thing which may be working against them is the inertia of familiarity. If a reader likes a particular author’s voice, they will probably prefer that author’s work and cast their vote for that author even if the objective “quality” of that work, however you can objectively definite it, is not equal to that of other works. I am reasonably sure that, if a Terry Pratchett novel were nominated for literally anything, it would take a massive gulf in quality to get me to vote for other works. That’s my own subjective bias. I won’t argue that it’s a good or a bad thing, but it is a real thing and I am certain I’m not alone in this. To me, these two factors are a reasonable explanation of why certain authors and types of books continue to be nominated and win Hugo awards. It strikes me as far more plausible than a cabal of liberal insiders gaming the system. I’m not saying it can’t exist, but rather that I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect. Those were the two problems the puppies faced at the outset. There are now two more, and they’re going to turn an uphill struggle into one that I can’t see them winning. Sorry. It’s impossible for me to think of “rabid puppies” and not think of Old Yeller. The first problem, obviously, is that their name has been soiled. The puppies brand is associated with slate voting, an association that will not serve them well (see below). Even worse, they’re associated with the rabid puppies, and that’s poison. The leader of the rabid puppies has an enormous amount of personal baggage and he has a history of taking groups with a legitimate beef and turning them into frothing partisans. Even if sad puppies 4 try to distance themselves from their earlier tactics and allies, I don’t think people will swift to forget. The bigger problem, and the one which I believe probably dooms the puppies, is that the massive uptick in voter participation at Sasquan was ruinous for their slate. While many of those voters certainly had reasons other than “not liking the books” for voting against the puppies (see above), this suggests very strongly that the puppies do not represent a silent majority. Based on the numbers I’ve seen, I’d expect the puppies percentage of support to scale inversely with the number of voters. Some people have suggested that the puppy slates losing to “No Award” is incontrovertible proof that the puppies claims are objectively correct and the Hugo awards are run by a clique hell-bent on ensuring the political correctness of award winners. That’s not merely hyperbolic; it’s simply not true that the voting results prove anything of the sort. It’s not helpful to anyone to distort the truth in that fashion, and if this kind of rhetoric is indicative of what we have to look forward to for the next twelve months, it’s possible that “No Award” will be the big winner again next year, and no one who cares even a little bit about science fiction wants to see that. Please do not interpret this as an anti-puppy statement. I just happen to be a cat person.