The boatman brought me back. He had to pick up Leona Helmsley. Look at her smiling (?) fa- . . . er, rictus. I remember her from, what, the 1980s? I think that's when she was buying up a lot of Florida real estate, Miami Beach property, and the like. She had quite the reputation, and it sounds mostly earned. This picture is especially awful. Too bad they didn't cast her for the Dolores Umbridge role. It's like, you expect her to catch flies when she thinks no one is looking.
So: the upgrade is pretty much a done deal. My two main tasks appear to be closed or closing. And this Thursday, I leave for my yearly conference in Boston. It starts next Monday, actually, but I'm taking a little time around it for R&R. Z-Man is slated to come out Labor Day weekend, and hopefully will get to meet Dr Rogish, visiting from York. I won't have as much vacation time this year, sadly, since my boss is taking time off precisely when I would have liked to. That means I have to be back working in San Francisco to cover for him.
So, posts will continue to be sparse for now. I have no idea how many people even read this anymore, although my stats look pretty consistent, and I've a few consistent comment posters (you know who you are). Xanga has introduced tagging for posts and pictures. This is a nice indexing feature that allows me to group posts and pix by subject matter of my own devising. I started going back through the archives and applying tags to my old posts. I've had this blog since 2003, so there's rather a lot to sort through. My old posts are, at turns, painfully funny and just painful.
Nonetheless, the Sidebar needs an overhaul too (I think I need to ditch some of those old, silly animated graphics; Tyra spewing lightning isn't as funny as it used to be . . . well, a little). I'd like to add a "tag cloud" to it, since I could never get the damn date search feature working properly. I'm not sure if Xanga has a dynamic tag cloud widget or what, but if anyone knows how to create a nice one for a sidebar, let me know. Here's a list of all the tags I'm currently using. The relative size of the tag is proportional to the number of posts using that tag, i.e. the bigger the font, the more posts I've got under that heading (hope this translates to my formatted style).
As a side note (and another tag I can add to this post, heh), this morning, I dreamt that some catastrophic event was about to cause the space-time continuum to fragment and break apart, and that I and about twenty or so other people had to be shunted back along their personal timelines to 1995, and live it all over again from then on forward. Physically and temporally, I'd be twenty five again, but somehow with the added knowledge. And thus began a dream that began to actually work through what people often say casually -- "If I knew then what I knew now."
I had no details on the catastrophic event, nor why that group of people would somehow avert it, nor who or what would empower such a solution. All I knew was that we were all allowed to keep the knowledge we had, and that we could act without paradox. In fact, we were encouraged to act differently the second time around, and I got the impression that this was because doing so would somehow avert said catastrophe. And it wasn't any one thing we were all responsible for: it was in every small, changed action, distributed amongst all twenty of us, that would eventually amount to what was needed to avoid catastrophe.
There was, though, the small chance that everything would happen exactly as it did before, or that anything we changed would not be enough to stop the coming doom. In any case, in some ways, it was a "dream come true," because although I don't have a lot of regrets, there would definitely be some things I'd do differently.
There would be some perks, as the human mind would immediately think of: lost loved ones would be "back," like my grandmother. At the same time, there was a sense of loss which itself led to an even wider sense of dread at a moment's reflection: I wouldn't meet Z-man for over ten years, and Bella (my cat) for three! That was the initial sense of loss, which quickly cut into my excitement. But compound that with the knowledge that if I did indeed change things that I wanted to change, that itself could, potentially, prevent me from ever meeting either one of them in my future! That was when a cold sense of dread at a devil's bargain began to seep in.
Because, I could somehow track down Z-Man, who'd just be starting college, and, for example, warn him that he'd hate being a lawyer. Which seems like a nice thing to do. But, practically? Would he even believe me? And if I warned him and he didn't think I was insane (which, really if you think about it, he would), would he then possibly go down a different carreer path and never make it to San Francisco? And I seriously doubt he'd be interested, at 18 or so, in who I was when I was 25.
And would I go through the whole consulting thing again? Would I stick around in Gainesville, give the band thing a different sort of go? 1995 was also the year I went to San Francisco for the first time. Would I do that? Would I have that argument with Dr Rogish that ended in my leaving his house, moving into 306B, and having an adorable little white stripey kitty adopt us? Would I get to go to Australia? Would I move to San Francisco?
Apart from this profound sense of loss that just sort of piles and piles on top of itself, what about the deja vu? Could I take seeing all of the same things happen all over again and not lose my mind? What, when you got down to it, could I really prevent from happening? Granted there'd be twenty other people potentially trying to change the same things -- but that, too, would be assuming we'd be united in what needed to change! We'd be thinking about the exact same questions about cause and effect, and there would be no guarantee that others would reach similar conclusions.
Take 9/11 for example. What could we even do about it, even if we were all unanimously agreed to try and avert it? Appeal to authority would probably brand us as crazy and/or dangerous, especially given the danger of abuse of the knowledge we had. Direct intervention would mean we'd have to sabotage and change things on our own based on what we knew, but if we somehow, for example, got all of the hijacked flights cancelled or delayed, or exposed the criminals, would we somehow end up making things worse?
And, if successful, once we changed things, we'd be on a completely different road map in time. Everything we knew previously might not come to pass, and we'd be adrift like everyone else, no special knowledge, no idea what's next.
So, yeah, the initial kid-in-a-candy-store notion of being able to get a do-over quickly got supplanted by the practical horror of it. I expect, being human, I'd probably still try to change a few things. In fact, there wasn't much more to the dream than this rush of question and thought-experiment. It ended rather abruptly, with my going to Shands to work, seeing an accident along the way that I'd long since forgotten. I was climbing a separated staircase, ascending folks mostly on the right, descending mostly on the left, but it was crowded and busy and tight on both sides. A couple, a man and a woman, were about to try and swim against the stream and descend against the ascenders, of whom I'm among.
Of all things, I suddenly remembered that incident in specific detail, and remembered that, the first time around, I'd let them pass by, and then experienced a good five minutes of stepped-on feet and claustrophic discomfort as they pushed their way down. Without thinking about consequences or paradox or anything, this time around -- the second time around -- I raised my voice at them at just the moment the appear to have decided to go against the flow and told him to use the other side, which they did, mostly out of surprise and shock.
"So it begins already," I remember thinking.
It's a little sad that I didn't actually hear about this until I read today's Something Positive, a webcomic for people like me (i.e. nerdy, with bite). But Robert Jordan passed away at age 58. Way, way too soon. Not merely because he was only 58, but also because he was just starting to work on the final book in a series I've been reading for years!!! GAH!
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