Tag: postaweek

A Song of Flame and Snow

Where I lived growing up in Australia, there was no snow. There was barely rain, and if it ever gold cold enough for water to freeze, the entire city lost its mind. The closest experience we ever had to snow was a massive hailstorm. Shops closed, preachers proclaimed the end times were upon us, there was mass panic, and people used surfboards (remember, this is Australia) to try and recreate sledding as seen on TV, with the layer of ice on the streets instead of snow.

It wasn’t that we lacked our own weird weather. It’s just that we didn’t get a whole lot of storms. We did get droughts. It got hot and dry enough that if one wasn’t careful, a backyard pool that existed at the beginning of the beginning of the week could easily be a dry hole in the ground by week’s end. Water rationing made this harder.

The storms we did have were more often firestorms. With the land as dry as it was, the threat of fire loomed over everyone. A single match, or cigarette dropped accidentally or negligently, could kindle a fire that would consume the country. A single bolt of lightning striking the wrong tree could ignite a blaze that would render the most flammable parts, which were mostly the areas surrounding population centers, uninhabitable.

Through the summer months, public information adverts warned citizens of hazards that could create the spark that would burn down our civilization. School projects demonstrated how a glass bottle discarded in the open could, if left at the wrong angle, magnify the sun’s raise and start a fire. Poster campaigns reminiscent of WWII and Cold War civil defence campaigns lined walls at public places, warning of the danger. Overhead, helicopters scouted and patrolled daily, checking for any signs of smoke, and marking off which pools, ponds, and lakes still had water that could be used if needed. Meanwhile, ground vehicles checked water meters and sprinkler setups, and issued stiff fines to those who used more than their fair share.

At school, we conducted fire drills, not only for evacuation, but for prevention, and active firefighting. We were quizzed on which tools and tactics worked best against which type of fire. We drilled on how to aim and hold a hose while battling flames, how to clear a fire break, how to fortify a residential structure against an oncoming firestorm, how to improvise masks to prevent smoke inhalation, and other first aid. We were told that if the fire reached our homes, the professionals would likely already be overwhelmed, and it might well be up to us to do what we could, either to shelter in place, or to eliminate any fuel from our homes before retreating.

When the fires did come, as they did almost every summer, we followed the progress along, marking down on maps the deployments of the fire brigades, the areas that were being cleared to create a break, the areas that were marked for evacuation, and so on. We noted the location of our local teams, and the presence of airborne units that we saw on television and publicity material. The campaigns often lasted for weeks, and could span the length of the continent as new theaters flared up and were pacified.

While there are some similarities, a blizzard is something quite different. Whereas the Australian bushfires are perhaps best understood as a kind of siege, blizzards of the sort that exist in the American northeast are closer to a single pitched battle. Blizzards are mostly contained within the space of a day or two, while bushfires can rage for an entire season.

A blizzard is almost quaint in this way. It forces people to break routines, and limits their actions in a way that creates the kind of contrived circumstances that make interesting stories. Yet the inconvenience is always temporary. Snow melts, or is removed, power lines get repaired, and schools go back into session.

Bushfires are only quaint if one is sufficiently far away from them, and only then in the way that people call the Blitz, with its Anderson Shelters, blackouts, evacuations, and “we’ll all go together when we go” spirit, quaint, in retrospect. A blizzard may impact a larger swath of land in a shorter period, dumping snow to knock out electricity to large numbers of people, and closing roads. But bushfires will scour towns off the map, suffocating or burning those who stand in their way. And while snowstorms are mostly bound by the laws of meteorology, a sufficiently large bushfire will spawn its own weather system.

It is an interesting contrast to consider while my house and the landscape around it is buried in snow.

Not Dead Again

So last night, as of writing, I very nearly died. This comes off somewhat melodramatic, I know, but I regard it as a simple fact. Last night, the part of me that makes me a cyborg and prevents me from being dead suffered a catastrophic failure. Possibly multiple catastrophic failures depending on how you count, and how much blame you give the hardware for trusting it.

That last sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, so here’s an illustrative example: take your average AI-goes-rogue-and-starts-hurting-humans plot. In fact, it doesn’t even to be that extreme: take the plot of WarGames. Obviously, McKitrick didn’t intend intend to start an accidental nuclear war, and even tried to prevent it. But he did advocate for trusting a machine to oversee the process, and the rest of the film makes it pretty clear that, even if he’s not a villain, he’s at least partly at fault. The machine, inasmuch as a (at least probably) non-sentient machine can take blame, was responsible for the film’s main crisis, but it was literally just following its instructions.

Last night wasn’t quite as bad as that example. My life support didn’t go rogue, so much as the alarm that’s supposed to go off and warn me and others that my blood sugar is dropping critically low didn’t go off, at least not at first. The secondary alarm that is hardcoded and can’t be silenced (normally a fact I loathe) did go off, but only on my receiver, and not on my mother’s.

By the time I was woken up, only half-conscious at this point, I was so far gone that I couldn’t move my legs. I’m not sure if the problem was that my legs wouldn’t respond, or that my brain was so scrambled that it couldn’t issue commands to them. I picked up my phone and immediately texted my mother for help. In retrospect, I could and probably should have called her, either on the phone, or by screaming bloody murder until everyone in the house was awake. The fact that nether of these things occurred to me speaks to my mental state.

I felt like I was drowning. It didn’t help that my body was dumping all of its heat into my surrounding linens, creating a personal oven, and sweating up a small lake, and shivering all at the same time. I don’t know why my autonomous nervous system decided this was a good idea; I suspect it was simply that the part of my brain that controls temperature was just out of commission, and so was doing everything it knew how to simultaneously and at maximum capacity.

I was drowning in my mind as much as on land. I struggled to pull together coherent thoughts, or even incoherent ones. I fought against the current of panic. I couldn’t find the emergency sugar stash that I normally kept on my nightstand, and I couldn’t move to reach the one in the hall. I looked around in the darkness of my home at night, trying to find something that might save me.

And that was when I felt it. The pull of darkness. It was much the same tug as being sleepy, but stronger, and darker in a way that I can’t quite put words to. It called to me to simply lay down and stop moving. I had woken up because of the alarm, and because I had felt like I was baking in my own juices, but these things wouldn’t keep me awake if I let go of them. My vision darkened and lost its color, inviting me to close my eyes. Except I knew that if I fell asleep, there was a very good chance I wouldn’t wake up again. This was, after all, how people died from hypoglycemia. In their sleep. “Peacefully”.

I didn’t make a choice so much as I ignored the only choice given. In desperation, I began tearing open the drawers on my nightstand that I could reach. I rifled through the treasured mementos and documents like a stranger would; a looter in my own home. At last I found a couple of spearmints, which I presumably acquired long ago at a restaurant and left in my drawer when emptying my pockets. I frantically discarded the wrappers and shoved them into my mouth, crunching them between my teeth. I could feel the desperately needed sugar leech into my mouth. It wasn’t enough, but it was a step in the right direction. I found some throat lozenges, and similarly swallowed them.

I kept pillaging my nightstand with shaking hands, until I hit upon what I needed. A rice krispy treat. I spent several seconds searching for an expiration date, though I’m not sure why. Even if it were expired, it wouldn’t have changed my options. So long as fending off death was the goal, it was better to be hospitalized for food poisoning than dead from low blood sugar. I fumbled around the wrapping, mangling the food inside, until I managed to get it open. I gnashed my teeth into the ancient snack, swallowing before I had even finished chewing. I continue to rifle through the drawers while I waited for the Glucose to absorb into my bloodstream.

I texted my mother again, hoping she might wake up and come to my aid. At the same time, I listened to music. The goal of this was twofold. First, it helped keep the panic at bay and focus my thoughts. Second, and more importantly, it helped anchor me; to keep me awake, and away from the darkness.

Whether it was the music, or the sugar, or both, the dark, sleepy sensation that pulled towards eternity, started to ebb. More of the color came back to my vision. The trend indicator on my sensor, though it was still already dangerously low and dropping, was slowing in its descent.

It was now or never. I yanked my uncooperative legs over the side of the bed, testing their compliance and trying to will them to work with me. With trepidation, but without the luxury of hesitation, I forced myself to stand up, wobbling violently and very narrowly avoiding a face-first collision as the floor leapt up to meet me. Without time to steady myself, I shifted the momentum of falling into forward motion, knocking over my rubbish bin and a few various articles and pieces of bric-a-brac that lay on my winding path from bed to doorway. Serendipitously, I avoided destroying anything, as my lamp was knocked over, hit the wall, and harmlessly bounced off it back into standing position.

I staggered towards the IKEA bookshelf where we kept my emergency sugar stash. I braced myself against the walls and sides of the bookshelf as I took fistfuls of this and that item and stuffed it into my pajama pockets, knocking over containers and wrecking the organizational system. So be it. This was a live-to-clean-up-another-day situation. With the same graceless form of loosely-controlled falling over my own feet, I tripped, stumbled, and staggered back to my bed to digest my loot. I downed juice boxes scarfed peppermint puffs stockpiled from post-holiday sales.

By this point, the hunger had kicked in. My brain had started to function well enough to realize that it had been starving. The way the human brain responds to this is to induce a ravenous hunger that is more compulsion than sensation. And so I devoured with an unnatural zeal. About this time, my mother did show up, woken by some combination of my text messages, the noise I had stirred up, or the continued bleating of my life support sensors. She asked me what I needed, and I told her I needed more food, which was true both in the sense that my blood sugar was still low, and in the sense that a compulsive hunger was quickly overrunning my brain and needed to be appeased.

My blood sugar came up quickly after that, and it took another fifteen minutes or so before the hunger faded. By that time, the darkness had receded. I was still sleepy, but I felt confident that this was a function of having been rudely awoken at an ungodly hour rather than the call of the reaper. I felt confident that I would wake up again if I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel safe; I hardly ever feel safe these days, especially after so harrowing an incident; but I no longer felt in imminent danger.

I woke up this morning slightly worse for wear. Yet I am alive, and that is never nothing. It had been a while since I last had a similar experience of nearly-dying. Of course, I evade death in a fashion every day. That’s what living with a chronic disease is. But it had been a while since I had last faced death as such, where I had felt I was acutely dying; where I had been dying, and had to take steps to avert that course. After so many similar incidents over so many years, naturally, they all start to blur together and bleed over in memory, but I reckon it has been a few months since the last incident.

I am slightly at a loss as to what cadence I ought take here. Obviously, nearly dying is awful and terrifying, and would be even more so if this wasn’t a semi-regular occurrence. Or perhaps the regularity makes it worse, because of the knowledge that there will be a next time. On the other hand, I am glad to not have died, and if there is going to be a next time, I may as well not waste what time I do have moping about it. As the old song goes: What’s the use of worrying? It never was worth-while. Oh, pack all your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!

It is difficult to find a balance between celebrating small victories like not dying when I very well might have, and letting myself become complacent. Between acknowledging my handicaps and circumstances in a way that is sound, and letting them override my ambitions and sabotage myself. Of course, I am neither the first, nor the only person to face these questions. But as the answers necessarily very from person to person, I cannot draw upon the knowledge of others in the same way that I would for a more academic matter. I wish that I could put this debate to bed, nearly as much as I wish that it wasn’t so relevant.

Hearts of Iron Review

Since finally caving in and buying Hearts of Iron 4, I have been quite enthralled with it. That is, until our house’s main computer decided to stop responding to inputs from the keyboards or mice. Near as anyone can tell, the computer is fine, but without it can’t do anything. Left without my game, I have felt compelled to contemplate on what I like and don’t about it. Hence, this review.

For all of the complaints that Hearts of Iron 4 has a steep learning curve, I managed to get a (very basic) handle on the mechanics after only a few hours. Admittedly some of this might be because I have experience in other games, like Age of Empires, or because I’ve seen videos from YouTubers who play the game competently. Also I am what most people would call a history buff, meaning I can tell you not only what the Manhattan Project was, but what the Office of Strategic Services did, what Liberty Ships were, and why the United States was almost unbeatable by 1942, especially combined with other allies; but by the same coin, had to put in extra effort to put their finger on the scales in Europe and Asia.

Needless to say, I played my first game of the United States. Or rather, I started as the United States, but quickly got bored of simply waiting for things to happen while the American people couldn’t be bothered for anything because of the ongoing Great Depression. Democracies, in this game, have all sorts of limitations that limit their early game potential and make them merely reactive. So instead of just sitting and waiting for stuff to happen, in my timeline, by early 1939, revolution was sweeping through the United States. The newly-instated Communist States of America rapidly began rearming the country, preparing to spread the revolution across the continent. Despite lofty promises, the military campaign to liberate the Mexican proletariat proved decidedly more difficult in practice, and the planned encirclement of the Mexican Army failed spectacularly. American forces, who in many places were still equipped with outdated WWI equipment, were forced back into Texas.

The Communist States eventually won the war through sheer numbers, securing Mexican industry and manpower for the Comintern. The CSA continued pushing through Guatemala and Honduras, only stopping at the Panama Canal. Plans to invade Canada in a similar fashion were drawn up, but quickly shelved as Nazi Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazi advance was quickly blunted by American air power, and American lend-lease weapons. Nevertheless the eastern front quickly devolved into a stalemate of back and forth while Soviet troops stalled for time as their American comrades worked their way from their ports in Siberia.

The war quickly became one of attrition, and in this, it was colossally one-sided. Whatever the Nazis threw at the meat grinder, the Comintern would match them for. An abortive attempt was made to open up a second front just northwest of the Dutch border, but though the landing went well, and early progress was made, in the excitement and confusion, the landings were never reinforced, and were quickly driven back. The divisions that died in the landing did not die in vain, however. For the distraction in the west gave the Comintern the opening they had needed to begin the march to Berlin.

For some inexplicable reason, Spain under Franco, and Japan, took this moment to throw their lot in with the beleaguered Axis. Perhaps they feared a Europe dominated by the Comintern, and knew that their chances of victory would only grow more slim with each passing day. Perhaps the AI in Hearts of Iron doesn’t understand self-preservation. This needn’t have mattered, except that it was at this point that I learnt a very important lesson about checking whether countries had joined a faction between the time I started preparing an invasion and when I declared war. Apparently Iceland, which I had been planning to use as a new naval base, was now part of the Allies, and in declaring admittedly frivolous war on them, I brought the Allies into the war against the Comintern.

Of course, Comrade Bowder had never really trusted the British anyways. In fact, about half the army was stationed on the Canadian border. In stark contrast to Mexico, the Canadian campaign was a cakewalk. American motorized forces raced around the northern tundra, encircling the confused home guard divisions, who were expecting a mock German invasion as part of Canada’s “If Day” campaign, not a real American one. These triumphs in the north were tempered by news from Western Europe, where advancing American forces, hot on the heels of the remnants of the Reich, suddenly found themselves cut off by the very countries they had been liberating. The European Front became a massacre.

By late 1943, the war had settled in to something of a stalemate, with the Comintern controlling Europe north of the alps and east of the Rhine. In Asia, Mongolia and Manchuria changed hands almost monthly. The Americans kept up a mixed success rate in attempting to seize nearby British possessions by amphibious landings. American ports churned out endless fleets of screen vessels with the occasional capital ship, attempting to keep the routes to its trade partners open. In an attempt to break the stalemate, many of the Canadian provinces were put to work on producing nuclear materials. The first Atomic Bomb was dropped in early 1944 on a small town in the Netherlands where the fighting had devolved into a bitter stalemate. Comintern forces did achieve their breakthrough, but the destruction of major infrastructure prevented the breakthrough from being exploited. Over the coming weeks, dozens more bombs would be used by the Communist States of America across various fronts.

The main bottleneck to my winning was, at this point, production. I had more than six million men ready to be drafted, but nothing to arm them with. I could barely supply the troops I had (insert communism joke here). The bottleneck to production was resources. I lacked access to adequate Tungsten, Chromium, and above all, Rubber. Declaring war on the allies, while it had given me access to Canada’s factories, had cut off my main sources of all three. This problem only got worse when my main trading partner, the Soviet Union, closed their economy to outside trade to fuel their own war machine.

And then I read online that, actually, I could just make more rubber. I could synthesize it, if I built synthetic refineries. Which I hadn’t, because I had gotten it in my head (somewhere) that refineries were for oil, so I hadn’t even researched the technology. I also didn’t have building slots to spare at this point.

I wanted to argue a bit against the notion popular in reviews that Hearts of Iron has a steep learning curve, because that’s not quite accurate. I actually found most of the controls themselves intuitive enough. The game even does a decent enough job of notifying you when things are going wrong, at least as far as proximal causes go. Where the game has trouble is in tracing these proximal causes back to bottlenecks that can be fixed. For example:

Your invasion… err, liberation… of the United Kingdom has stalled. You know this because your troops are still in marshaling areas at Norfolk instead of London. Okay. You go to find the commander of that task force to give a talking to, and he says he called it off. Why? Because he’s concerned the mid-Atlantic isn’t fully under our control. Why isn’t the Atlantic an American Lake? Because the fleet you assigned there decided to head back to port. Because its ships got dented by those pesky British subs. It’ll be done repairing… soon…ish. So you look to deploy more ships, only to find your shipyards have also been taking a break. Because you lack Chromium. And good luck finding more. Because the only country that has Chromium that’s not at war is Sweden. And Sweden hasn’t delivered. Why? Because there’s an ocean in the way. An ocean filled with British subs. The ones that you need your navy to beat. Your navy that needs Chromium.

Even though the story here is relatively straightforward, every sentence here is buried on a different tab. Once you’ve figured out that it’s a shipping problem in Sweden, and everything trickles down from there, it’s relatively straightforward to come up with a solution (most of them involve invading Norway). But figuring out the issues is, sometimes literally, half the battle.

This problem is somewhat exacerbated by the pace of the game. Hearts of Iron measures in-game time in hours. This is fair enough when tearing through undefended countryside in a motorized division, but gets a little slow during the moments in between, or even along a static front. Of course, part of this may be due to my computer, which, while it meets the minimum specifications (or used to when it still worked), isn’t new by any stretch. The time on my computer doesn’t seem to pass as quickly as it does on videos of other people playing.

Computer issues aside, the game still involves a lot of waiting. You have to wait for factories to be built, for materiel to be produced, for troops to be trained and marshaled, for fleets to be assembled, etcetera. Even on a fast computer, this takes hours, if not days (real time). Hearts of Iron alternates between short, staccato bursts of activity, in which you scramble to give orders to all of your divisions at once, and long periods of buildup and regrouping. You can speed up and slow down time, but in my experience this still isn’t fast enough to power through the slow bits. Indeed, I have played almost the whole game at maximum speed, and in many places it still felt too slow.

In 1944, the Comintern navies finally got the upper hand in the battle for the Atlantic, paving the way for the American invasion of the United Kingdom. Supported by liberal use of nuclear weapons across the European continent, American forces moved from Plymouth towards London. As American motorized forces raced north to secure Scotland and jump into Northern Ireland, the remaining British forces desperately shifted their forces across the Channel, abandoning continental Europe to defend the holdouts in Dover. British forces held firm, but were overrun, as were the remaining western enclaves in France and the Low Countries. By 1946, the Americans had used their nuclear arsenal to force an encirclement, trapping most of the Spanish frontline and what remained of Vichy France, and causing the last major power in Europe to capitulate. The bitter mountain campaign continued, but this was a mere distraction for the Comintern.

The remaining exiled British forces fought on in India, but as American forces arrived in greater number, the front slowly inched closer to the last major allied capital. In the Far East, Atomic bombs rained down on Japan, shattering any pretense of industry. Still, having yet to lose ground in battle, the sole Axis power would not surrender. At this point, a victory on either front would mean an effective end to the war, particularly as killing either the allies or the Axis would allow the Comintern to consolidate their resources. The rubber shortage had by 1946 been mostly alleviated by synthesis, but Chromium remained in short supply.

In 1947, India surrendered, triggering a conference of the major warring powers to divide up the world. For some reason, the Soviet Union decided to take Canada, which I had worked quite hard to build up after liberating it. Despite this, they didn’t seem too concerned about how Europe looked. So I took most of Great Britain, except for London, where the USSR installed a puppet government that controlled the city as well as… Italy, apparently. I took most of costal France, and a few bits and pieces in the balkans, India, and Africa that would give me the Chromium I needed to continue prosecuting the war against Japan.

The Home islands were taken that same year in an amphibious invasion that took the Japanese completely by surprise. That should have been the end of it, but the game decided that the real powerhouse behind the Axis was Reorganized Nationalist China, that is, the puppet government installed by the Japanese. And this is where things bogged down again, because while WWII-era China may not have much in the way of infrastructure, or technology, or planes, or a navy, or logistics, they do have a seemingly endless reserve of men to absorb all the munitions the Comintern can produce, be they conventional or atomic.

Worth noting- the way the game handles atomic bombs is interesting. Rather than act as world-ending weapons, they inflict a decent, if somewhat disappointing amount of damage, and, rather than bring your opponent closer to surrendering, instead they lower the threshold, which is calculated by what percentage of major cities a nation holds. This means that A-bombs are helpful to give your opponent a nudge, but you can’t win a war just by throwing nukes at the enemy while you sit back in your bunker. From a game mechanics standpoint, this is a solid approach. Unfortunately, it means that you can fling scores of bombs at an enemy until you run out of targets, and your enemy is no closer to surrender than when you started. It also means that using nuclear weapons to support a ground advance is only effective in marginal cases.

At the beginning of the game, there were seven countries the game recognized as great powers. By 1949 there were two remaining that weren’t puppet states. Who would’ve won in a showdown is an open question. The USSR had far more troops in the field (in all of the fields, because apparently Zhukov didn’t feel like moving his divisions to the front), but my Communist States of America had more factories, and had lost far fewer men in the fighting so far. I had also already been preparing for a 1984-style betrayal, building fortifications, stationing troops to man them, and keeping enough planes and rockets on standby to begin bombing Moscow if need be. On the other hand, nearly every country was already in the Comintern, and so chances were good that it would be pretty much the whole world versus me. And while I could out-produce the Soviets, I wasn’t sure I could take on the rest of the world combined. I could try and make a bunch of them switch, but that would take time, and the game clock was running out. Also, my computer was already sputtering with the number of divisions it had to render, and I didn’t think it would be terribly happy with opening up even more fronts.

I made a lot of stupid mistakes during my first game. The whole rubber debacle comes to mind, as does accidentally declaring war on the allies before I was ready. I also managed to have multiple amphibious invasions fail spectacularly because I forgot to order them to take a port from which they could be supplied, and as a result by the time I went back to check on them, they were starving to death and couldn’t be bothered to move. My troops had a knack for advancing into places where they could be supplied, and subsequently developed a knack for losing whatever equipment they were issued. Perhaps there’s a way to fix this, so that the largest economy on the planet isn’t struggling to supply its soldiers.

The game does take some patience and willingness to learn, but it is eminently learnable. Much of the minutiae which makes the difference between a smashing victory and a pyrrhic one aren’t fully detailed in the tutorial, and so have to be looked up online or intuited, but despite criticism, the game is intuitive coming from the proper stratego-historical (according to the original Greek declensions, this is the correct way to say that) headspace. This game is not easy, and it is certainly not simple, but it is great fun for the right person. I enjoy it, and as soon as our computer can be brought back into line, or I decide to finally set up my laptop, I shall continue to enjoy playing it.

Heroes and Nurses

Since I published my last post about being categorically excluded from the nursing program of the university I am applying to, I have had many people insist that I ought to hold my ground on this one, even going so far as filing a legal complaint if that’s what it takes. I should say upfront that I appreciate this support. I appreciate having family and friends that are willing to stand by me, and I appreciate having allies who are willing to defend the rights of those with medical issues. It is an immense comfort to have people like this in my corner.

That firmly stated, there are a few reasons why I’m not fighting this right now. The first is pragmatic: I haven’t gotten into this university yet. Obviously, I don’t want the first impression of a school I hope to be admitted into to be a lawsuit. Moreover, there is some question of standing. Sure, I could try to argue that the fact that I was deterred from applying by their online statements on account of my medical condition constitutes discrimination in and of itself, but without a lot more groundwork to establish my case, it’s not completely open and shut. This could still be worth it if I was terribly passionate about nursing as a life path, which brings me to my second primary reason.

I’m not sure whether nursing would be right for me. Now, to be clear, I stand by my earlier statement that nursing is a career I could definitely see myself in, and which I think represents a distinct opportunity for me. But the same thing is true of several other careers: I think I would also find fulfillment as a researcher, or a policy maker, or an advocate. Nursing is intriguing and promising, but not necessarily uniquely so.

But the more salient point, perhaps, is that the very activities which are dangerous to me specifically, the reasons why I am excluded from the training program, the things which I would have to be very careful to avoid in any career as a nurse for my own safety and that of others, are the very same things that I feel attracted to in nursing.

This requires some unpacking.

Through my childhood my mother has often told me stories of my great-grandfather. To hear all of the tales, nay, legends of this man portray him as a larger than life figure with values and deeds akin to a classical hero of a bygone era. As the story goes, my great grandfather, when he was young, was taken ill with rheumatic fever. Deathly ill, in fact, to a point where the doctors told his parents that he would not survive, and the best they could do was to make him comfortable in his final days.

So weak was he that each carriage and motorcar that passed on the normally busy street outside wracked him with pain. His parents, who were wealthy and influential enough to do so, had the local government close the street. He languished this was for more than a year. And then, against all odds and expectations, he got better. It wasn’t a full recovery, as he still bore the scars on his heart and lungs from the illness. But he survived.

He was able to return back to school, albeit at the same place where he had left off, which was by now a year behind. He not only closed this gap, but in the end, actually skipped a grade and graduated early (Sidenote: If ever I have held unrealistically high academic expectations for myself, or failed to cut myself enough slack with regards to my own handicaps, this is certainly part of the reason why). After graduating, he went on to study law.

When the Second World War reared its ugly head, my great grandfather wanted to volunteer. He wanted to, but couldn’t, because of his rheumatic fever. Still, he wanted to serve his country. So he reached out to his contacts, including a certain fellow lawyer name of Bill Donovan, who had just been tasked by President Roosevelt with forming the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime intelligence agency meant to bring all the various independent intelligence and codebreaking organizations of the armed services under one roof. General Donovan saw that my great-grandfather was given an exemption from the surgeon general in order to be appointed as an officer in the OSS.

I still don’t know exactly what my great grandfather did in the war. He was close enough to Donovan, who played a large enough role in the foundation of the modern CIA, that many of the files are still classified, or at least redacted. I know that he was awarded a variety of medals, including the Legion of Merit, the Order of the British Empire, and the Order of the White Elephant. Family lore contends that the British Secret Service gave him the code number 006 for his work during allied intelligence operations.

I know from public records, among many other fascinating tidbits, that he provided information that was used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. I have read declassified letters that show that he maintained a private correspondence with, among other figures, a certain Allan Dulles. And old digitized congressional records show that he was well-respected enough in his field that he was called for the defense counsel in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his word as an intelligence officer was able to vindicate former colleagues who were being implicated by the testimony of a female CPUSA organizer and admitted NKVD asset.

The point is, my great grandfather was a hero. He moved among the giants of the era. He helped to bring down the Nazis (the bad guys), bring them to justice, and to defend the innocent. Although I have no conclusive evidence that he was ever, strictly speaking, in danger, since public records are few an far between, it stands to reason that receiving that many medals requires some kind of risk. He did all this despite having no business in the military because of his rheumatic fever. Despite being exempt from the draft, he felt compelled to do his bit, and he did so.

This theme has always had an impact on me. The idea of doing my bit has has a profound, even foundational effect on my philosophy, both in my sense of personal direction, and in my larger ideals of how I think society ought work. And this idea has always been a requirement of any career that I might pursue.

To my mind, the image of nursing, the part that I feel drawn to, is that image used by the World Health Organization, the Red Cross, and the various civil defence and military auxiliary organizations, of the selfless heroine who courageously breaks with her station as a prim and proper lady in order to provide aid and comfort to the boys at the front serving valiantly Over There while the flag is raised in the background to a rising crescendo of your patriotic music of choice. Or else, of the humanitarian volunteer working in a far flung outpost, diligently healing those huddled masses yearning to breath free as they flee conflict. Or possibly of the brave health workers in the neglected tropical regions, serving as humanity’s first and most critical line of defence against global pandemic.

Now, I recognize, at least consciously, that these images are, at best, outdated romanticized images that represent only the most photogenic, if the most intense, fractions of the real work being done by nurses; and at worst are crude, harmful stereotypes that only serve to exacerbate the image problem that has contributed to the global nurse shortage. The common denominator in all of these, is that they are somehow on the “front lines”; that they are nursing as a means to save the world, if not as an individual hero, then certainly as part of a global united front. They represent the most stereotypically heroic, most dangerous aspects of the profession, and, relevant to my case, the very portions which would be prohibitively dangerous to an immunocompromised person.

This raises some deep personal questions. Obviously, I want and intend to do my bit, whatever that may come to mean in my context. But with regards to nursing, am I drawn to it because it is a means to do my bit, or because it offers the means to fit a kind of stereotypical hero archetype that I cannot otherwise by virtue or my exclusion from the military, astronaut training, etc (and probably could not as a nurse for similar reasons)? And the more salient question: if we assume that the more glamorous (for sore lack of a better word) aspects of nursing are out of the question (and given the apparent roadblocks for me to even enter the training program, it certainly seems reasonable to assume that such restrictions will be compelled regardless of my personal attitudes towards the risks involved), am I still interested in pursuing the field?

This is a very difficult question for me to answer, and the various ways in which it can be construed and interpreted make this all the more difficult. For example, my answer to the question “Would you still take this job if you knew it wasn’t as glamorous day to day as it’s presented?” would be very different from my answer to the question “Would you still be satisfied knowing that you were not helping people as much as you could be with the training you have, because your disability was holding you back from contributing in the field?” The latter question also spawns more dilemmas, such as “When faced with an obstacle related to a disability, is it preferable to take a stand on principle, or to cut losses and try to work out a minimally painful solution, even if it means letting disability and discrimination slide by?” All big thematic questions. And if they were not so relevant, I might enjoy idly pondering them.

2017 in Review

Author’s note: I started writing this at the beginning of December, and then promptly got distracted. As a result, most of this piece is written from a while back.

In many ways, my 2017 has been a sort of contrasting reflection of my 2016. My 2016 started off okay, got slightly better, before bottoming out in the end. My 2017 started at a fairly low point, but got better; incrementally at first, and then in larger strides. All in all, though, it is probably too soon to call 2017, for a few different reasons.

First, and most immediately relevant, is the fact that I am currently in the midst of trying to pull together college applications. This process probably should have been started with more time before my New Year’s deadline (Author’s note: We got it submitted in time). In my defence: I was told that the software my school uses would make the process streamlined and simple. It might have worked, if the school computers didn’t insist on purging my account from the registry no matter how many times it’s reactivated. Maybe I should have anticipated such problems ahead of time. Alas, I am too often too trusting.

I should say that whether or not I am accepted, or even whether or not my application comes together in time to be submitted will not have a great impact on my overall morale and views of the achievements of the past year. I should say this, but I would be lying. If I get accepted, likely then I will look back on this year as a moderate success overall. Else, I will probably view this year as equivocal; it had its good moments, and it had its bad moments.

In any case, it is difficult for me to internalize the year coming to a close while I have yet to wrap up my last great project of applications. Indeed, this difficulty in coming to grips with the rapid onset of the holiday season has led me, as it often does, to unknowingly procrastinate on gift acquisition. Here I must add that in addition to the considerable distraction of college application, and the unprecedented stress and anxiety which hath befuddled me amidst this process, I have also seemed to have taken ill with viral symptoms.

Among all this equivocating and qualifying, there are a few solid events and conclusions about the year with which I am reasonably comfortable. For one, I received my diploma (I still struggle to grapple with the term “graduation”, as that term carries implications which I believe are misleading), and ceased formal enrollment at my high school. Typing this sounds like I am underselling these events, but in all honesty the formalities were surprisingly anticlimactic compared to the struggling before it.

I traveled a fair bit, spending an appreciable proportion of time at Disney World, visiting the White Mountains and Bretton Woods, and seeing the eclipse, which, even with all the hype, did not disappoint. I attended a record number of Nerdfighter-related events, going first to NerdCon: Nerdfighteria, and then later to the release party for Turtles All The Way Down. Such events are invariably never what I expect, yet still good. Most recently, I embarked on a Disney Cruise which departed from New York and traveled to the Bahamas and to the Disney parks. And though I have not yet been able to fully collect and organize my thoughts on the subject, I must add that for what is otherwise a multi-day car trip, cruise ship is an excellent alternative.

Of course, I traveled a fair amount in 2016 as well, so it’s hard to call the travel record-breaking or year-defining. Nor has the sociopolitical convolution been particularly distinct from yesteryear. Certainly things have been active; chaotic even. But to a large extent this feels like an inevitable consequence of the momentum generated from past events. Indeed, many of the political items which I am inclined to focus on as being of singular historic importance – the mass demonstrations, the special counsel investigation, even the surprising turns of events in elections both domestic and abroad – seem more like reactions to the current conditions than like actions in themselves; and therefore do I feel that they are less relevant to considering this year separate from others.

What has been defining about 2017, at least the latter half of it, has been the appearance of free time in my life for the first time in recent memory. This has had two principal effects.

First, it has led to a proliferation of personal projects, ranging from simple items such as setting up a gallery page, and a crowdfunding campaign, to more ambitious endeavors such as restarting my creative fiction writing, and building a prototype board game. Even though only a handful of these projects have yet been achieved, and none have been the runaway success that my wildest enthusiasm might have daydreamed, I do believe that I am better off from having tried all of them.

Second, I am happier now than in school. Even though the process of wrangling college applications has caused a minor relapse into some of the less healthy mental patterns, and it is difficult to make meaningful data out of the minute to minute fluctuations in mood and happiness, I can say without reservation that I am happier on balance now than at any point since my first year of high school.

Like I said previously, the determination of how 2017 compares will likely be one made in retrospect, partly because the events which are likely to define it in retrospect are still ongoing, and partly because it’s nigh impossible to judge this year in particular devoid of its proper context. That being said, this year has defied my expectations, and has been, if not quite as good as my wildest hopes, then at least, better than the trajectory of the end of 2016 had led me to fear.

2018 Resolution #3

2018 Resolution #3: Get back to exercising

Around spring of this past year I began, as a means of giving myself some easily-achievable goals, a loose program of regular exercise, chiefly in the form of regular walks. Although this simple routine did not give me, to borrow a phrase from the magazines I pass at the checkout counter, “a hot summer bod”, it did get me out of the house at a time where I needed to, and help build my stamina up in order to withstand our summer travel itinerary.

Despite my intentions, I fell out of this new habit after mid-November, and have not managed to get back into it. In my defense, my normal walking route from my house through town lacks sidewalks, and the lawns which I normally walk through are covered in snow. Our house is populated and organized in such a way that even if I possessed proper exercise equipment, there would be no place to put it.

Going to a gym does not strike me as a practical alternative. To put it simply, there is not a gym close by enough to drop by under casual pretenses. This is problematic for two reasons. First, an intense routine on a set schedule that requires a great deal of preparation and investment is more or less contraindicated by my medical situation, which has a distinct tendency to sabotage any such plans.

Secondly, such a routine would clash with the lies that I tell myself. In executing my more casual routine, I have found in motivating myself, it is often necessary, or at least, helpful, to have some mental pretext that does not involve exercise directly. If I can pitch getting out of the house to myself instead as a sightseeing expedition, or as a means of participating in town society by means of my presence, it is much easier to motivate myself without feeling anxious.

Accordingly, my resolution for the coming year is to exercise more later in the year when I can. Admittedly this is a weak goal, with a lot of wiggle room to get out of. And I might be more concerned about that, except that this was basically the same thing that I did last year, and at least that time, it worked.

2018 Resolution #2

2018 Resolution #2: Remove unused clothes

At present, I have an overabundance of clothes. In my case I define overabundance as having reached a point at which some 65% of my clothes have not been worn in six months, and some 35% have not been worn in a year. On the one hand this statistic is slightly misleading, as most of that 35% are clothes have never been properly catalogued and entered into my organizational system in the first place, probably because they were given to me in a large bundle all at once, and I simply never got around to sorting them, because I never found myself wanting for anything from those particular bundles.

Other times it is because The clothes no longer quite fit me comfortably, or I have simply not had occasion to wear them, or that the clothes are not even mine, but merely reside under my jurisdiction because on the day that specific item needed to be stowed away, I had space where others did not. Consequently I have acquired several stacks of clothing and apparel in closets and against walls.

This problem is exacerbated by the nature of our household’s gift economy, which is such that clothes which survive to no longer fit me are given to by brother, who has much the same problem, as he has clothes coming in both from gifts, same as I do, and from me. So in order to clear the backlog in my room, there has to be room in my brother’s room, and so on.

This task does not represent a terribly large physical difficulty, nor a particularly prolonged period of execution that would necessitate a major time commitment. It does however represent a challenge of both logistics and cooperation, in that it requires several parties to work on the same page.

2018 Resolution #1

2018 Resolution #1: Standardize to 24-hour time

A year or so ago, one of my resolutions was to finally iron out the problem of writing dates. For context: I grew up in Australia, where the default is DD/MM/YY. But in the US, where I now live, the default is MM/DD/YY. Now if I had to pick one of the two, I would probably lean towards the former, since it seems slightly more logical, and more natural to me personally. But since everyone around me uses the latter, taking that avenue would only cause more confusion in my life, perhaps not for me, but certainly for those around me.

For a while I would switch between the two systems depending on what purpose I was writing the date for. Items such as school assignments would be dated in the American fashion, while things for my personal consumption would be done in the commonwealth manner. Until after several years I started going throug my own files of schoolwork, particularly artwork, and encountering dates such as 9/10. What does that mean, in the context of a pencil marking in the corner of a sketch, jotted down as an afterthought? Does it mean the tenth of September, or the ninth of October? Or was it completed during the month of September, 2010? Or perhaps it is merely the ninth piece of a series of ten? Or perhaps it received a score of 90% that I wanted to record for posterity.

I knew that the dualistic system was untenable, but I also knew that I would likely fail in the mental self-discipline necessary in forcing myself into either of the two competing standards; especially given that there remain certain contexts where it is necessary that I use each. I therefore decided to adopt a whole new system, based on ISO 8601.

Henceforth, where I was given the choice, I would record all dates in YYYY-MM-DD format. This would make it abundantly obvious that I was recording the date, and the format I was using. It was also different enough that I would not confuse it. Where compelled by outside forces, such as stringent academic standards for school assignments, I would continue to use the other formats, but there it would be clear which format I was using.

Despite skepticism from those around me, this system has worked out quite well, and so I am expanding the project to include having time displayed on my devices in 24-hour time.

Secret of Adulthood

For the entirety of my life until quite recently I was utterly convinced of the idea that all “grown-ups”, by nature of their grownupness, had the whole world figured out. It seemed to me essentially up until the week of my eighteenth birthday that there was some intrinsic difference between so-called “children” and these “adults”, where the latter categorically knew something the former didn’t and never the other way around.

I was never quite positive what it was that gave adults this intrinsic knowledge of how the world worked. I assumed it was something covered in a particular school class, or perhaps the secret was contained within those late night broadcasts only over-eighteens were permitted to watch. Whatever it was, I was confident that by the time I reached that mystical age of eighteen, I too would have the world figured out. After all, how else would I be able to consider myself qualified for such important duties as voting, paying taxes, and jury duty.

While I am still open to the fact that one of these days I shall wake up in bed and find myself suddenly equipped with all the knowledge and skills necessary to make my way in the world, I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is, in fact, not how it works. Rather the growing body of evidence is pointing towards the conclusion that all of my intrinsic abilities, which in truth I do not feel have grown significantly since about six years old, are the only toolset with which I will ever be equipped to deal with the world.

This quite terrifying conclusion has been cemented by the relative ease (compared with what I might have imagined) of registering to vote. There was no IQ test, barely any cross-examination of my identity papers, and most shockingly, no SWAT team descending from the heavens to inform me that, no, sorry, there must’ve been some mistake because I can’t possibly be qualified to genuinely help decide the future of our country and the world at large.

Despite being nominally an adult, I still have this habit of basically assuming that every other adult still knows something I don’t. So when, for example, my brother gets into the car to drive to Florida without sunglasses and wearing wool clothing, I broadly assume that he is aware of all these issues, and has some plan to combat them. It is then frustrating when he realizes later that he left his sunglasses on the counter and asks to borrow my backup pair.

This habit also makes it annoyingly easy to believe that anyone acting with confidence must have some grounds for acting so. While I have come to accept that I am merely faking this whole adulthood thing, it is a whole other matter entirely to convince myself that not only am I flying by the seat of my pants, but so is everyone else.

There has been one minor silver lining in this otherwise terrifying revelation. Namely, it is the realization that, with no intrinsic confidence to distinguish those who genuinely know what they’re doing from those who haven’t the foggiest clue, nine times out of ten one can get away with whatever one desires provided one can act sufficiently confident while doing so. That is to say that with few exceptions, it is fairly easy to convince others that you know better than they do what needs to be done.

Overall, while I wish it were true that adulthood brought with it some intrinsic wisdom of how to make it in the world, I also recognize that, this not being the case, I should at least try to work on my ability to look like I know what I’m doing. Because that is the secret of adulthood. It is all an act, and how you act determines whether people treat you as a know-nothing little boy or a wise young man.

Automatism

I’m not sure what exactly the nightmares was that stuck with me for a solid twenty minutes after I got out of bed and before I woke up. Whatever it was, it had me utterly convinced that I was in mortal peril from my bed linens. And so I spent a solid twenty minutes trying desperately to remove them from me, before the cold woke me up enough to realize what I was doing, and had the presence of mind to stop.

This isn’t the first time I’ve woken up in the middle of doing something in an absentminded panic. Most of those times, however, I was either in a hospital, or would be soon. There have been a handful of isolated incidents in which I have woken up, so to speak, at the tail end of a random black-out. That is, I will suddenly realize that I’m most of the way through the day, without any memory of events for some indeterminate time prior. But this isn’t waking up per se; more like my memory is suddenly snapping back into function, like a recording skipping and resuming at a random point later on.

I suppose it is strictly preferable to learn that my brain has evidently delegated its powers to operate my body such that I need not be conscious to perform tasks, as opposed to being caught unawares by whatever danger my linens posed to me that required me to get up and dismantle them from my bed with such urgency that I could not wake up first. Nevertheless I am forced to question the judgement of whatever fragment of my unconscious mind took it upon its own initiative to operate my body without following the usual channels and getting my conscious consent.

The terminology, I recognize, is somewhat vague and confusing, as I have difficulty summoning words to express what has happened and the state it has left me in.

These episodes, both these more recent ones, and my longer history of breaks in consciousness, are a reminder of a fact that I try to put out of mind on a day to day basis, and yet which I forget at my own peril. Namely, the acuity of my own mortality and fragility of my self.

After all, who, or perhaps what, am I outside of the mind which commands me? What, or who, gives orders in my absence? Are they still orders if given by a what rather than a who, or am I projecting personhood onto a collection of patterns executed by the simple physics of my anatomy? Whatever my (his? Its?) goal was in disassembling my bed, I did a thorough job of it, stripping the bed far more efficiently and thoroughly than I could have by accident.

I might not ever find serious reason to ask these questions, except that every time so far, it has been me that has succeeded it. That is, whatever it does, it is I who has to contend with the results when I come back to full consciousness. I have to re-make the bed so that both of us can sleep. I have to explain why one of us saw fit to make a huge scuffle in the middle of the night, waking others up.

I am lucky that I live with my family, who are willing to tolerate the answer of “actually, I have no idea why I did that, because, in point of fact, it wasn’t me who did that, but rather some other being by whom I was possessed, or possibly I have started to exhibit symptoms of sleepwalking.” Or at least, they accept this answer now, for this situation, and dismiss it as harmless, because it is, at least so far. Yet I am moved to wonder where the line is.

After all, actions will have consequences, even if those actions aren’t mine. Let’s suppose for the sake of simplicity that these latest episodes are sleepwalking. If I sleepwalk, and knock over a lamp, that lamp is no more or less broken than if I’d thrown it to the ground in a rage. Moreover, the lamp has to be dealt with; its shards have to be cleaned up and disposed of, and the lamp will have to be replaced, so someone will have to pay for it. I might get away with saying I was sleepwalking, but more likely I would be compelled to help in the cleanup and replacement of the lamp.

But what if there had been witnesses who had seen me at the time, and said that they saw my eyes were open? It is certainly possible for a sleepwalker to have their eyes open, even to speak. And what if this witness believes that I was in fact awake, and fully conscious when I tipped over the lamp?

There is a relevant legal term and concept here: Automatism. It pertains to a debate surrounding medical conditions and culpability that is still ongoing and is unlikely to end any time soon. Courts and juries go back and forth on what precisely constitutes automatism, and to what degree it constitutes a legal defence, an excuse, or merely an avenue to plead down charges (e.g. manslaughter instead of murder). As near as I can tell, and without delving too deeply into the tangled web of case law, automatism is when a person is not acting as their own person, but rather like an automaton. Or, to quote Arlo Guthrie: “I’m not even here right now, man.”

This is different from insanity, even temporary insanity, or unconsciousness, for reasons that are complex and contested, and have more to do with the minutiae of law than I care to get into. But to summarize: unconsciousness and insanity have to do with denying criminal intent, which is required in most, though not all, crimes. Automatism, by subtle contrast, denies the criminal act itself, by arguing that there is not an actor by whom an act can be committed.

As an illustration, suppose an anvil falls out of the sky, cartoon style, and clobbers innocent bystander George Madison as he is standing on the corner, minding his own business, killing him instantly. Even though something pretty much objectively bad has happened; something which the law would generally seek to prevent, no criminal act per se has occurred. After all, who would be charged? The anvil? Gravity? God?

Now, if there is a human actor somewhere down the chain of causality; if the reason the anvil had been airborne was because village idiot Jay Quincy had pushed a big red button, which happened to be connected to an anvil-railgun being prepared by a group of local high schoolers for the google science fair; then maybe there is a crime. Whether or not Jay Quincy acted with malice aforethought, or was merely negligent, or reckless, or really couldn’t have been expected to know better, would be a matter for a court to decide. But there is an actor, so there is an act, so there might be a crime.

There are many caveats to this defence. The most obvious is that automatism, like (most) insanity is something that has to be proven by the defence, rather than the prosecution. So, to go back to our earlier example of the lamp, I would have to prove that during the episode, that I was sleepwalking. Merely saying that I don’t recall being myself at the time is not enough. For automatism to stick, it has to be proven, with hard evidence. Having a medical diagnosis of somnambulance and a history of sleepwalking episodes might be useful here, although it could also be used as evidence that I should have known better to prevent this in the first place (I’ll get to this point in a minute).

Whether or not this setup is fair, forcing the defence to prove that they weren’t responsible and assuming guilt otherwise, this is the only way that the system can work. The human sense of justice demands that crimes be committed, to some degree or another, voluntarily and of free will. Either there must be an act committed that oughtn’t have been, or something that ought have been prevented that wasn’t. Both of these, however, imply choices, and some degree of conscious free will.

Humans might have a special kind of free will, at least on our good days, that engenders us these rights and responsibilities, but science has yet to prove how this mechanism operates discretely from the physical (automatic) processes that make up our bodies. Without assuming free will, prosecutors would have to contend with proving something that has never even been proven in the abstract for each and every case. So the justice system makes a perhaps unreasonable assumption that people have free will unless there is something really obvious (and easily provable) that impedes it, like a gun to one’s head, or a provable case of sleepwalking.

There is a second caveat here that’s also been hinted at: while a person may not be responsible for their actions while in a state of automatism, they can still be responsible for putting themselves into such a state, either intentionally or negligently, which discounts the defence of automatism. So, while sleeping behind the wheel might happen in an automatic state, the law takes the view that you should have known better than to allow yourself to be behind the wheel if you were at risk of being asleep, and therefore you can still be charged. Sleepwalking does not work if, say, there was an unsecured weapon that one should’ve stowed away while conscious. Intoxication, even involuntary intoxication, whether from alcohol or some other drug, is almost never accepted.

This makes a kind of sense, after all. You don’t want to let people orchestrate crimes beforehand and then disclaim responsibility because they were asleep or what have you when the act occurred. On the other hand, this creates a strange kind of paradox for people with medical conditions that might result in a state of automatism at some point, and who are concerned about being liable for their actions and avoiding harm to others. After all, taking action beforehand shows that you knew something might have happened and should have been prepared for it, and are therefore liable. And not taking action is obviously negligent, and makes it difficult to prove that you weren’t acting under your own volition in the first place.

Incidentally, this notion of being held responsible; in some sense, of being responsible; for actions taken by a force other than my own free will, is one of my greatest fears. The idea that I might hurt someone, not even accidentally, but as an involuntary consequence of my medical situation; that is to say, the condition of the same body that makes me myself; I find absolutely petrifying. This has already happened before, as I have accidentally hurt people while flailing passing in and out of a coma, and there is no reason to believe that the same thing couldn’t happen again.

So, what to do? I was hoping that delving into the law might find me some solace from this fear; that I might encounter some landmark argument that would satisfy not just some legal liability, but which I would be able to use as a means of self-assurance. Instead it has done the opposite, and I am less confident now than when I started.