Foray into fiction

A friend of mine, SHB, thought I should try writing a book. Sure, I thought, why doesn't everyone? But faced with doing research or making s**t up, last night I chose the latter. ("And that has made all the difference.") Here's a first attempt:

Mr. Yamada awoke one Sunday morning with a most peculiar headache. As the first streaks of sunlight found their way into his room and directly to the tops of his toes, he tried to muster coherent memories of what had happened the night before. Nothing came to mind. He recalled cooking a lovely fish for dinner with a side of young carrots, not those apocryphal things called baby carrots but actual young carrots with green tops intact. And there was a newspaper story he was reading too, something about a boy who had found a wallet with 900 USD and decided to turn it in. The story had put him in a pleasant state of mind.

What happened after that, he thought. In the two minutes it had taken him to remember dinner and the news, his headache had not improved. In fact, what started as a dull pain on the right side of his head had now grown roots with steely hairs and was working its way toward the middle. A phone call, there had been a phone call last night, from Mrs. Ito, he recalled. Would he mind watching the two cats while she and Mr. Ito were away for a couple days? No, he wouldn’t mind. And, if it wasn’t too much trouble, would he mind coming down the street to their house to pick up the key at, say, 10:30 tonight? No, it wouldn’t be any trouble; in fact, he could come sooner. No, she hesitated, no sooner than 10:30, please.

Just as Mr. Yamada was hanging up the phone, Craig Bliss was stepping out of his car on Davidson Street. He was not happy. A knocking in the trunk had gotten louder over the last two minutes, and it was now, he thought, intolerable. As cars swerved over and to the left to avoid hitting him, he opened the passenger-side back door and pulled out a baseball bat, its finish long worn with nicks up and down its length. He proceeded to the back of the car and brought the bat down on the trunk – one, two, three, four times – until the knocking stopped; he got back in the car and drove away.

When Mr. Yamada arrived at the Itos’ house, two minutes before 10:30, he wondered if he had remembered the house number correctly. He was sure the house number was 2164, because 21 was how old his daughter would have been this year – he remembered thinking this when he came by the house two weeks ago – and ’64 was a good year, the year he finished graduate school. Mr. Yamada rang the bell again and strained to peer into the French door whose curtains were drawn. The house was dark inside, and if the Itos were home, they must have been in the back. Or maybe they had stepped out to pick some things up for their trip. It was a trip they were going on, right? He decided to wait. After all, he was early.

What I did last summer, in advance

I've started making plans for the summer. Seeing as how I'll be stuck in Ann Arbor, with no obvious vacation destination in mind, I've decided to do the equivalent of sign up for a ton of extracurricular activities. Here's my list so far:

- Volunteering with Washtenaw Literacy. There was a good part of me once known as a teacher.

- Taking yoga at the nearest rec center. I love me some good tai chi, but I've already had three semesters of it.

- Taking a language class at the community college. I've never felt it was a waste of time to learn more about other people.

In short, whatever it takes to get me out of the lab and into the world. If Ann Arbor can seem like a prison, then the lab can surely seem like my prison cell. But it's also my cell where I have everything arranged just as I want it. My chair is arranged to the right height; I have a fast internet connection; I can play music as loud as I want (after 5 p.m.). In fact, the lab (or at least my little corner of it) is too comfortable. I'm the alpha of a 5' x 5' space. I'm 30 years old and the alpha of a 5' x 5' space!

HAMLET: [Ann Arbor's] a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, [Ann Arbor] being one o' the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET: Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

Feeling in the dark

This morning I was thinking about an incident that happened a long time ago, when I was maybe six or seven and at the library one Saturday with my dad. He had this rule: I could only check out one comic book at a time. (The other books I'd get were usually about planes or birds.) My favorites were the slim, hardbound Peanuts collections, but this particular Saturday all of the Peanuts books were out, save for one. It was lying out in the open, and I took it.

I brought it up to the counter and immediately a boy standing next to me said, "Hey, that was mine!". I remembered seeing him in the comic book aisle but didn't think much of it at the time. Legitimately the book was mine, but the pull on my moral tendrils was telling me otherwise.

In the end I let him have the book, but this morning I was wondering, would I have done the same today?

I've been thinking about the dark side of the persona, mine and everyone else's. Robert Bly calls it the shadow. The Chinese call it yin. The Christians might call it evil, or Satan. Do we try to get rid of it, escape it, or make peace with it? The question's not just academic with me -- it seems to dog me whenever I'm by myself, which is to say, pretty frequently lately.

I started reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger by way of Robert Bly's translation. It's a bit like Catcher in the Rye or Kafka's "Metamorphosis," a first-person account of a very bad day. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it later, but for now here's an excerpt:

"These people I met on the streets, how gaily and lightly they rolled their shining heads and swung through life as if through a ballroom! Not a single eye had grief in it, no shoulders had burdens, in these happy minds there was not a clouded thought, not even a tiny hidden pain. I walked there, alongside these creatures, young myself, hardly leafed out, and I had already forgotten what happiness was!"

Friday night at Starbucks

3:15 am, Friday night turning into Saturday morning. I again find myself at the only 24-hour Starbucks in Ann Arbor, a repeat of last night. I feel good and refreshed after working out tonight, like I could work on this damned review until sunrise. But that’d be like raising the white flag on any hopes of a normal schedule. There's a bonus tonight: I came after they'd closed out the register. Free coffee.

I’m again intrigued by my fellow customers and what they’re doing here at this time of night. A couple of fellows have passed out on the couch behind me. It does look comfortable, I guess. In front of me an Asian couple is sharing a seat, not a love seat, just a plain wooden chair. Actually, she’s sitting in his lap and it’s making me lovey-dovey ill. Gropers. Luckily tonight I’ve remembered my headphones, and Chemical Brothers are blaring through at unhealthy levels.

A dense pea soup descended on Ann Arbor this evening. Driving here tonight with the radio tuned to some esoteric minimalist crap being played on the radio was like descending into the underworld. I passed a minivan on the bridge over the Huron -- it was going 10 miles an hour. I wonder if there’s ever traffic on the Acheron. Is Charon’s boat a one-seat punt, and do the queues get long? I guess people can afford to wait by the time they get there. No sense rushing into Hades.

4:05 am, the gropers have finally left. A sense of calm comes over me. Energy level, still good.

4:25 am, I have a funny tingle in my legs and I feel my posture starting to give way. I give myself roughly half an hour before I start feeling some real ill effects. The morning shift has come in, and they’re helping the overnight shift ready things for the coming day. Boxes of muffins are brought in and unpacked. Fellows behind me, they’re still passed out on the couch.

4:50 am, the overnight shift has now departed. Being here with a different shift, realizing all the faces in the place have changed (not counting the passed out fellows), somehow makes me uneasy. I feel the sun tracking the rotation of the earth, ticking off the longitudes that were formerly in the dark. My head is spinning a bit, and I feel my lower half lilting to the left. Clearly the earth and I are both reaching our event horizons. It’s time to go. I could probably push on, but the drive home would become increasingly perilous.

Laying me down to sleep

I was up late last night, I mean, really late. Technically I pulled an all-nighter, but all I saw of morning was light creeping in around the blinds. I'm helping my advisors write a manuscript for Immunological Reviews, and to make sure overlapping edits don't get made, only one person gets virtual possession at a time. Having no allegiance to God or country, family or other duty (like a real job), I typically get the overnight hours.

The funny thing about last night was being totally exhausted at the end. I finally touched head to pillow around 7 am and immediately things went batty. Thoughts of people I've known, their voices and faces, drifted in but were muffled, as if behind gauze. I put up a little fight, tried to boost the gain on the thoughts, but it was no use: Sleep, a panicked sleep, was taking over. I felt my heart rush a little at the prospect of losing people, of losing everything. And then all went black, and nothing mattered.

Even then, just shy of 7 am, the analogy was obvious: Is this what real death feels like? You care for a moment, think "oh, it's happening," and then you don't?

Le sacre du printemps

Spring has finally arrived in Ann Arbor, and I think we are all the better for it. The number of joggers on the street increases with each passing day, the short-sleeved shirts in the closet edge their way to the front again, and everything outside takes on an unfamiliar sheen in the long afternoon sun. Coming home yesterday even my iron seemed to take on a personality in the light streaming through the vertical blinds:

Free of library fines for the time being, I made a massive grab of random items yesterday. I have Brian Eno's CD Another Day on Earth playing here in the lab, and as much as I might resist, it is spirit-lifting, like running outside without your shoes on.

"How many people will we feed today,
How many lips will we kiss today,
If we wake up?

"How many worlds will we ever see,
And how people can we ever be,
If we wake up?"

Wow, thank you, Brian Eno. How can I get to the same place you must have been at when you laid those lyrics down?

Jeff Daniels, my hero

The night before last I had a dream that seemed to pull together a lot of different things that have been on my mind lately. If it had been a play, it might have looked like this:

Scene: Nighttime, suburban Dallas. A house on a corner lot, noises of a party coming from inside.

Me: So, what have you been doing since you graduated from high school? Remember when I was your math teacher? How did we end up in my parents' house anyway?

Random kid: Yeah, later. [walks away]

Me: [turning toward Jeff Daniels] So, it's really beautiful out here in Michigan...

[Outside of house suddenly changes to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.]

JD: Thanks, I grew up here [pointing out window]. I'm taking my RV across the country. Lots of beautiful places.

Me: Wow, I wish I could do that.

So, that's about it. A combination of my experience teaching at my old high school, being at my parents' house (located less than a mile away from said high school), and a flashback to an interview with Jeff Daniels I saw on television. Jeff Daniels happens to be from Michigan. I appreciate Michigan but at the same time I'm ready to get the hell out of here! I'm 30 years' old and I'm still in grad school, dammit!

The statistics of eBay

I'm eBaying for a new laptop this morning, as my Compaq Presario 732 (about four years' old) has begun having serious issues. The power button has taken on the personality of a devil child and responds only about 5% of the time. I take this to be the Grim Reaper calling and am cherishing every moment we have together.

I used the "Buy It Now" option on an IBM T40 Thinkpad, and started having buyer's remorse as soon as the initial rush wore off. At any given time there are about two or three dozen T40s for sale in various configurations. One auction (for a T40 with better specs, wouldn't you know?) is finishing in a few minutes, and I'm wondering how much the price is going to shoot up. Has anyone ever done a study on that? "If only I had a statistical model...." How many times have I said that? Don't even get me started!

A quick Googling of the issue shows only a couple academic papers using eBay data. This one from Stanford seems most promising. Let's see... "Multi-variable regression results"... perfect! Reference to a Table III... ugh, that's a lot of variables. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but maybe the problem's more complicated than I thought.

Well, the auction's over now. It looks like the final price represents only about a 7% increase over the t-2 minutes' price. But who needs 1+ GB of RAM anyway? (sigh)

Buridan's Ass

Recently I've become obsessed with the parable known as Buridan's ass: an ass, placed equidistant between two haybales and unable to make a decision, starves to death. I think most would agree the ass got what was coming to it. Clearly there are times when we can't have it both ways (regardless of what "it" is); when we can't be good liberals and wish everyone a nice day; when bad comes from making a choice but worse comes from not making one at all.

I'm thinking of how these situations play out in the movies, especially in hero movies. Spiderman has to choose between a tram-ful of people and Mary Jane. Batman has to choose between Robin and a random love interest. In both cases the hero somehow saves both parties. He wins big. Likewise, in Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" the main character doesn't just choose one religion. He chooses three, even while denigrating agnostics for not being able to choose.

It's a damned thing, this part of life consisting of making tough choices.

Yesterday I turned 30.