postaweek – Page 6 – Renaissance Guy

A Witch’s Parable

Addendum: Oh good grief. This was supposed to go up at the beginning of the week, but something went awry. Alas! Well, it’s up now.

Suppose we live in colonial times, in a town on an archipelago. The islands are individually small and isolated, but their position relative to the prevailing winds and ocean currents mean that different small islands can grow a wide variety of crops that are normally only obtainable by intercontinental trade. The presence of these crops, and good, predictable winds and currents, has made those islands that don’t grow food into world renowned trade hubs, and attracted overseas investment.

With access to capital and a wide variety goods, the archipelago has boomed. Artisans, taking advantage of access to exotic painting supplies, have taken to the islands, and scientists of all stripes have flocked to the archipelago, both to study the exotic flora and fauna, and to set up workshops and universities in this rising world capital. As a result of this local renaissance, denizens of the islands enjoy a quality of life hitherto undreamt of, and matched only in the palaces of Europe.

The archipelago is officially designated as a free port, open to ships from across the globe, but most of daily life on the islands is managed by the Honorable South India Trading Company, who collect taxes and manage infrastructure. Nobody likes the HSITC, whose governor is the jealous brother of the king, and is constantly appropriating funds meant for infrastructure investment to spend on court intrigue.

Still, the HSITC is entrenched in the islands, and few are willing to risk jeopardizing what they’ve accomplished by attempting insurrection. The cramped, aging vessels employed by the HSITC as ferries between the islands pale in comparison to the new, foreign ships that dock at the harbors, and their taxes seem to grow larger each year, but as long as the ferry system continues to function, there is little more than idle complaint.

In this town, a local woman, who let’s say is your neighbor, is accused of witchcraft. After the debacle at Salem, the local magistrates are unwilling to prosecute her without absolute proof, which obviously fails to materialize. Nevertheless, vicious rumors about men being transmogrified into newts, and satanic rituals conducted at night, spread. Local schoolchildren and off duty laborers congregate around your house, hoping to get a glimpse of the hideous wretch that legend tells dwells next door.

For your part, you carry on with your daily business as best you can, until one day, while waiting at the docks to board a ferry to the apothecary, a spat erupts between the woman in question and the dock guard, who insists that he shan’t allow her to board, lest her witchery cause them to become shipwrecked. The woman is denied boarding, and since the HSITC run all the ferries, this now means that she’s effectively cut off from rest of the world, not by any conviction, but because there were not adequate safeguards against the whims of an unaccountable monopoly.

As you’ve probably guessed, this is a parable about the dangers posed by the removal of net neutrality regulations. The internet these days is more than content. We have banks, schools, even healthcare infrastructure that exist solely online. In my own case, my life support systems rely on internet connectivity, and leverage software and platforms that are distributed through open source code sharing. These projects are not possible without a free and open internet.

Others with more resources than I have already thoroughly debunked the claims made by ISPs against net neutrality. The overwhelming economic consensus is that the regulations on the table will only increase economic growth, and will have no impact on ISP investment. The senate has already passed a bill to restore the preexisting regulations that were rescinded under dubious circumstances, and a house vote is expected soon.

I would ask that you contact your elected representatives, but this issue requires more than that. Who has access to the internet, and under what terms, may well be the defining question of this generation, and regardless of how the vote in the house goes, this issue and variants of it will continue to crop up. I therefore ask instead that you become an active participant in the discussion, wherever it takes us. Get informed, stay informed, and use your information to persuade others.

I truly believe that the internet, and its related technologies, have the potential to bring about a new renaissance. But this can only happen if all of us are aware and active in striving for the future we seek. This call to arms marks the beginning of a story that in all likelihood will continue for the duration of most of our lifetimes. We must consult with each other, and our elected representatives, and march, and rally, and vote, by all means, vote. Vote for an open internet, for equal access, for progress, and for the future.

Wanted: Backpack

Job opening: Backpack, medium to large, willing to work long hours in rugged and varied environments to replace aging current backpack. Benefits few, but travel is included, and mandatory. Candidates must include:

Minimum two separate pockets

At least one water bottle pouch capable of holding at least one standard sized 24oz bottle without breaking or losing bottle

At least two comfortable straps, capable of being adjusted to fit other wearers, in line with orthopedic recommendations

Ability to be easily crammed into small spaces without damage to backpack or its contents. Examples of spaces to be crammed into include, but are not limited to: lockers, x-ray bins, underneath airplane seats, underneath tables while fully loaded.

Easily able to be opened and searched by hand, or scanned by x-ray.

Resistance to dirt, dust, pollen, sand, sunlight, and water.

Must conform to FAA, TSA, and airline personal item standards.

Candidates will be tested on a variety of metrics. Preference will be given to brands that carry a long warranty period. Although no specific color is required, the requirement to work in all weather conditions means that backpacks which have a high albedo (i.e. light colors) will be preferred.

Shiny

Alright, listen up Pandora, Diamonds International, Tiffany & Co., and other brands of fancy upscale jewelry that I can’t be bothered to recall at this time because I’m a guy. I’m about to talk about an idea that could help you dodge a bullet and get ahead of the next big thing.

Let’s face it, jewelry is seen as feminine. This is true to a place where guys feel out of place in a jewelry store; not just lost, but in many cases subtly unwelcome. This is a problem for you, because, as businesses, you want to be able to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. And perhaps more to the point, you don’t want to be marked as being too much part of traditional gender roles in the minds of the younger generation.

To your credit, you’re clearly trying, with your displays of cuff links, tie clips, and other implements of haberdashery. There’s just one problem- I have only the vaguest idea what a cuff link or a tie clip is supposed to do for me. As far as I know for sure, cuff links are the little pieces that hold the two wrist parts in handcuffs together, and tie clips are part of a wardrobe organizational system that prevent ties from becoming creased in a way that’s noticeable. And I’ll wager a lot that I’m far from the only guy for whom this holds true.

So you need something more obvious in its application. Something that I can walk up to the display and immediately surmise and articulate precisely why it is I need to own that thing, instead of needing a sales representative to explain to me how back in the olden days, fancy shirts didn’t used to come with buttons on their cuffs, and why I should care to replace mine with something more expensive and less practical.

Like, say, a wristwatch. It’s obvious why I would want to have a watch to tell me the time, and if I’m going to be wearing one anyways, a convincing argument can be made that I ought to treat myself to the finest and shiniest, which, I will be told, has been perfectly painstakingly custom engineered by the best in alpine watchmaking tradition. I may not have any use for such a watch today, but at least it’s a defensible reason for me to indulge myself to peruse shiny and expensive objects.

Except wristwatches are dying. Not just fancy and expensive models that use gratuitous amounts of valuable metals and stones, which have been slowly getting replaced by smaller, lighter, digital models that can also tell me the date, weather, set alarms, and act as a stopwatch since the calculator watches of the 1970s, but even these are being edged out. In some cases by smart watches, which can do everything listed previously, and then also take over several functions of a phone. But in most cases, watches are simply disappearing and being replaced by… nothing.

That’s because the need for a watch has been steadily eroded as young people have decided that they can just use their phone to tell the time. The smartphone didn’t kill the wristwatch, but the cultural shift towards having the action of glancing at one’s phone as casually acceptable as looking at one’s watch will. The more accepted having phones out becomes in polite company, the faster watches will disappear.

So, how do watches compete? It is still marginally easier to glance at a watch than to take a phone out from a pocket and look at it. But when a phone can also do so much more, to the point that pulling out a phone is a routine action anyways (to check texts, news alerts, and the like), the watch is still going to lose. The watch has to be able to take over some tasks from the phone in the same way that the phone can from the watch.

Modern smart watches already meet this threshold. On my own pebble smartwatch, I can receive text messages and other notifications, and decided whether I need to respond without ever having to touch my phone. I can screen incoming calls, and route them through my headphones. I can play and adjust my music, all without ever having to unlock my phone. It does exactly what I need it to, which is why it is an essential part of my essential kit.

There’s just one problem. My smartwatch is made of clunky looking, albeit durable and relatively cheap, plastic components. It stands out like a sore thumb in a formal outfit. Moreover, smart watches aren’t accepted in the same way that smartphones are.

So, jewelry companies: you need a trend you can cash in on with young men? Try smart watches. Cast them in silver and gold, with sparkling diamonds on the menu buttons, and custom engravings. Or heck, cut out watches entirely and go straight to phone cases. The important part is embracing this paradigm shift rather than stubbornly insisting that I still need a miniature grandfather clock on my wrist because my wearable computer isn’t fancy enough.

Life Changing?

What does it take to change a life? To have such an impact on another person that it changes their default behaviors and life trajectory, even if subtly? Certainly it can be argued that it takes very little, since our behaviors are always being influenced by our surroundings. But what about a long-term difference? What does it take to really change someone?

The year 2007 was perhaps the most important and most impactful of my life. I say that 2007 was the year that my childhood ended. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but not by much. It was a year of drama and trauma, of new highs and extreme lows. In my personal history, the year 2007 stands out like 1914 in European history. It is a date I measure things from, even more so than my birthday.

That year contained both the best and worst days of my life to date. The worst day, July 20th, 2007, and the bad days that followed it, I have already written about. But what about the best day? What happened on that day?

January 5th, 2007 had all the hallmarks of a good day. I was on school holiday- summer holiday, in fact, since the Australian school calendar follows Australian seasons so that our main break comes around Christmas -and I was traveling. Being ever-curious and ever-precocious, I loved traveling, especially by plane.

All the mechanisms of air travel fascinated me: the terminals, with their lights and signs and displays, acting as literal gateways to every far flung exotic locale on the planet. Customs and security, with its fancy DHS eagles, and its sense of officiality, and finality, advertising that it once you cross this line, you have crossed some important threshold from which you could not simply return, as if somewhere, someone reading your story would be holding their breath while turning the page. And of course, the planes themselves, which not only seemed to defy physics in their flight, not only liked the world together, but did so in such comfort and luxury.

That day, we started early from the family farm in Indiana to the Indianapolis Airport, via a road that had enough dips and bumps that we called it affectionately “the rollercoaster road”. We arrived at Indianapolis Airport for our short flight to transfer at my all time favorite airport, Chicago O’hare, which I adore for its dinosaur skeleton, its Vienna beef hot dogs, and its inter-concourse tunnel, where I would stare up in wonder from the moving walkway at the ceiling light display. I was told that the abstract neon colors were meant to represent the aurora, but for my part, having seen both, I have always thought the lights at O’hare to be more impressive than the aurora.

We arrived in Orlando at about 8:00pm, which, to my then childish mind, was a kind of magical hour. Things only happened after 8:00 on special occasions- watching New Year’s fireworks or space shuttle launches on television, calls from relatives in different time zones. After 8:00pm was the time of big and exceptional things, and the fact that we were only now boarding the bus from the airport to Disney World only seemed to vindicate the feeling I had woken up with that morning that it was going to be a great day.

Much of the resort was already closed by the time we arrived. But even then, there was much excitement to be had. We found our rooms, and as we wound our way around the Port Orleans Resort, I remember drinking in every detail of the scenery and design, and thinking to myself about how much attention and intent must have gone onto adding all the little details and embellishments. At this time I used to enjoy drawing, but whenever I did, I would become obsessed with details and embellishments. I would draw an airplane, and become fixated on the precise curvature of the engines, the alignment of the ailerons, the number of windows depending on whether it was a Boeing 747 like the one we took to San Francisco or an Embraer like the one we took…

You get the idea. Details were important to me. For me to see that someone had paid enough attention to the details to add all these little decorative Easter eggs, like hidden Mickeys, or a plastic frog on a Lilly pad in a small pond beside the concrete path. To see these little acknowledgments of my attentiveness told me that other people had been paying at least as much attention as I had, which put me at ease, and made me feel welcome and safe, at a time when I had spent most of my life as a foreigner, and a great deal of my time at school being bullied.

Thus assured that I was in a place that was safe and well designed by people who thought like I did, I let loose, skipping happily along as I never did in school for fear of being mocked, and sang songs I had memorized from the inflight children’s “radio station” (which was actually just a recording loop) about fishing worms, the state of Michigan, and carps in tubs.

The next day, I was reunited with my Best Friend in the Whole Entire World, whom I knew from Australia, but who had recently moved to Denver. It was the first time we had seen each other since he had moved away. I had missed his going away party because, in what now seems like a foreshadowing of what was to come, I had been in the hospital with Acute Pan Sinusitis, and after having my immune system wiped out by the drugs, was stuck in protective quarantine.

Together, we tore up the parks, going on rides and eating Mickey out of house and home. This last point proved to be dire foreshadowing, as looking back I can say it was the first time that the earliest symptoms of the medical calamity that would consume my life just six months later were indisputably noticeable. In fact, the symptoms of hunger and thirst were so bad that they caused problems trying to eat off the Disney meal plan. It was the only bittersweet thing about the trip- that it was the last great experience of my life unmarried by the specter of disability and looming death. But that’s a story for another time.

So, back to the question at hand: what does it take to change a life? Was my trip life-changing? Did it change who I am as a person, or alter my future behavior or trajectory in a meaningful way? Hard to say. Despite picking a solidly philosophical topic I’m not willing to sit down for the requisite hours of navel gazing to try and formulate the probable alternate histories if that trip hadn’t gone just so.

It’s tempting, then, to brush it off and say that even though I definitely see that event as one of the high points of my existence, that it never changed who I am at my core. It certainly didn’t change the course of events that were about to happen, which were in retrospect so obviously already in motion. It would be easy to extrapolate that the whole event had no effect on me, but for the fact that I know of a counterexample.

The day itself, more than a decade in the past, has gotten old enough in my mind that parts of it have started to fade around the edges. I don’t, for example, remember which side of the two connecting rooms my brother and I slept in, and which side my parents slept in. The parts I do remember are as much vaguely connected vignettes as they are a consistent narrative, and correlate more to the things that struck me as important at the time than what might be important to the story now. Hence why I can’t tell you what rides we went on, but I can describe the exact configuration of the twisty straw that I had with my milkshake.

One of the things that I remember clearest about that day, one of the things that to this day will occasionally interrupt my stream of consciousness, was the in flight radio. In particular, I recall there being several songs about environmental themes. And I recall sitting there, consciously rethinking my point of view. My train of thought went something like this: The reason I’m hearing this song, which, though decent, isn’t artistically great, is because it’s about a cause, which is clearly important to whomever is picking songs to play.

The kind of causes that get songs written about them, and, despite artistic shortcomings, played constantly at children, are ones that are important to society at large: learning one’s ABCs, being prepared for emergencies, and national crises like a world war (Over There) or pandemic (there was a song about washing one’s hands that was circulated during the Mad Cow scare). That I am hearing this song indicates that it is viewed not just as something of idle interest, but as a crisis of immediate concern.

It was at that moment that I remember mentally upgrading the issue of environmentalism from something that I was merely passively sympathetic towards, to something which I actively supported where possible. Hearing that song on that trip changed my life. Or if it is melodramatic to say that hearing a song single handed lyrics changed my life trajectory, then at least it is accurate to say that hearing those songs at that time provoked me into a change in attitude and behavior.

Would I still have had such a moment of revelation on a different day? Probably, but I doubt I would have remembered it. But as to the question of what it takes to change a life, we are forced to consider how much effort it took for me to hear those songs. There is no good answer here. On the one hand, it took a massive amount of societal machinery to record, license, and select the song, and then see that it was played on the flight that I happened to be on. To do this purposely would require a massive conspiracy.

On the other hand, it requires no small number of miracles from a huge number of contributors to get me the iPad I’m writing on, and the web server I’m posting to, and massive amounts of effort to maintain the global system of communications that allow you to view my words, and yet I’d hardly argue that my writing here is the pinnacle of all of society thus far. Perhaps so, in a strictly epistemological, navel-gazing sense that is largely meaningless for the purpose of guiding future individual actions. But realistically, my authorial exercise here is only slightly more effort than recording my unpolished stream of consciousness.

The truth is, even when I can identify what it has taken in the past to change my own life, I can’t extrapolate that knowledge into a meaningful rule. It’s clearly not that hard, given that it’s happened so many times before, and on such flimsy pretenses. But it also clearly can’t be that easy, or else everyone would already be their best self.

People have in the past attempted to compliment me by insinuating that my writing, or my speeches at events, or my support, have changed their lives. Despite their intentions at flattery, I have generally been disinclined to believe them, on the grounds that, though I may take pride that my writing is decent, it is certainly not of a caliber great enough to be called life-changing. But upon reflection, perhaps it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps the bar isn’t nearly that high. Perhaps, I venture to hope, one does not need to be perfect to change another’s life for the better.

Personal Surveillance – Part 2

This is the second installment in a continued multi-part series entitled Personal Surveillance. To read the other parts once they become available, click here.

Our modern surveillance system is not the totalitarian paradigm foreseen by Orwell, but a decentralized, and in the strictest sense, voluntary, though practically compulsory network. The goal and means are different, but the ends, a society with total insight into the very thoughts of its inhabitants, are the same.

Which brings me to last week. Last week, I was approached by a parent concerned about the conduct of her daughter. Specifically, her daughter has one of the same diagnoses I do, and had been struggling awfully to keep to her regimen, and suffering as a result. When I was contacted the daughter had just been admitted to the hospital to treat the acute symptoms and bring her back from the brink. This state of affairs is naturally unsustainable, in both medical and epistemological terms. I was asked if there was any advice I could provide, from my experience of dealing with my own medical situation as a teenager, and in working closely with other teenagers and young adults.

Of course, the proper response depends inextricably upon the root cause of the problem. After all, treating what may be a form of self harm, whether intentional or not, which has been noted to be endemic to adolescents who have to execute their own medical regimen, or some other mental illness, with the kind of disciplinary tactics that might be suited to the more ordinary teenage rebellion and antipathy, would be not only ineffective and counterproductive, but dangerous. There are a myriad of different potential causes, many of which are mutually exclusive, all of which require different tactics, and none of which can be ruled out without more information.

I gave several recommendations, including the one I have been turning over in my head since. I recommended that this mother look into her daughter’s digital activities; into her social media, her messages, and her browser history. I gave the mother a list of things to look out for: evidence of bullying online or at school, signs that the daughter had been browsing sites linked to mental illness, in particular eating disorders and depression, messages to her friends complaining about her illness or medical regimen, or even a confession that she was willfully going against it. The idea was to try and get more information to contextualize her actions, and that this would help her parents help her.

After reflecting for some time, I don’t feel bad about telling the mother to look through private messages. The parents are presumably paying for the phone, and it’s generally accepted that parents have some leeway to meddle in children’s private lives, especially when it involves medical issues. What bothers me isn’t any one line being crossed. What bothers me is this notion of looking into someone’s entire life like this.

That is, after all, the point here. The mother is trying to pry into her daughter’s whole life at once, into her mind, to figure out what makes her tick, why she does what she does, and what she is likely to do in the future. Based on the information I was provided, it seemed justified; even generous. As described, the daughter’s behavior towards her health is at best negligent, and at worst suggests she is unstable and a danger to herself. The tactics described, sinister though they are, are still preferable to bringing down the boot-heel of discipline or committing her to psychiatric care if neither may be warranted.

This admittedly presupposes that intervention is necessary in any case, in effect presuming guilt. In this instance, it was necessary, because the alternative of allowing the daughter to continue her conduct, which was, intentional or not, causing medical harm and caused her to be hospitalized, was untenable. At least, based on the information I had. But even such information was certainly enough to be gravely concerned, if not enough to make a decision on a course of action.

The goal, in this case, was as benevolent as possible: to help the daughter overcome whatever it was that landed her in this crisis in the first place. Sometimes such matters truly are a matter of doing something “for their own good”. But such matters have to be executed with the utmost kindness and open-mindedness. Violating someone’s privacy may or may not be acceptable under certain circumstances, but certainly never for petty vendettas.

It would not, for example, be acceptable for the mother to punish the daughter for a unkind comment made to a friend regarding the mother. Even though this might suggest that some discipline is in order to solve the original problem, as, without other evidence to the contrary, it suggests a pattern of rebellion that could reasonably be extrapolated to include willful disobedience of one’s medical regimen, such discipline needs to be meted out for the original violation, not for one that was only discovered because of this surveillance.

Mind you, I’m not just talking out of my hat here. This is not just a philosophical notion, but a legal one as well. The fifth amendment, and more broadly the protections against self-incrimination, are centered around protecting the core personhood- a person’s thoughts and soul -from what is known as inquisitorial prosecution. Better scholars than I have explained why this cornerstone is essential to our understanding of justice and morality, but, to quickly summarize: coercing a person by using their private thoughts against them deprives them of the ability to make their own moral choices, and destroys the entire notion of rights, responsibilities, and justice.

Lawyers will be quick to point out that the fifth amendment as written doesn’t apply here per se (and as a matter of law, they’d be right). But we know that our own intentions are to look into the daughter’s life as a whole, her thoughts and intentions, which is a certain kind of self incrimination, even if you would be hard pressed to write a law around it. We are doing this not to find evidence of new wrongs to right, but to gain context which is necessary for the effective remedy of problems that are already apparent, that were already proven. By metaphor: we are not looking to prosecute the drug user for additional crimes, but to complete rehabilitation treatment following a previous conviction.

In government, the state can circumvent the problems posed to fact-finding by the fifth amendment by granting immunity to the testifying witness so that anything they say can not be used against them, as though they had never said it, neutralizing self-incrimination. In our circumstances, it is imperative that the information gathered only be used as context for the behaviors we already know about. I tried to convey this point in my recommendations to the mother in a way that also avoided implying that I expected she would launch an inquisition at the first opportunity.

Of course, this line of thinking is extremely idealistic. Can a person really just ignore a social taboo, or minor breach, and carry on unbiased and impartial in digging through someone’s entire digital life? Can that person who has been exposed to everything the subject has ever done, but not lived any of it, even make an objective judgment? The law sweeps this question under the rug, because it makes law even more of an epistemological nightmare than it already is, and in practical terms probably doesn’t matter unless we are prepared to overhaul our entire constitutional system. But it is a pertinent question for understanding these tactics.

The question of whether such all-inclusive surveillance of our digital lives can be thought to constitute self-incrimination cannot be answered in a blog post, and is unlikely to be settled in the foreseeable future. The generation which is now growing up, which will eventually have grown up with nothing else but the internet, will, I am sure, be an interesting test case. It is certainly not difficult to imagine that with all the focus on privacy and manipulation of online data that we will see a shift in opinions, so that parts of one’s online presence will be thought to be included as part of one’s mind. Or perhaps, once law enforcement catches up to the 21st century, we will see a subtle uptick in the efficacy of catching minor crimes and breaches of taboo, possibly before they even happen.

Personal Surveillance – Part 1

This is the first installment in a multi-part series entitled Personal Surveillance. To read the other parts once they become available, click here.

George Orwell predicted, among many other things, a massive state surveillance apparatus. He wasn’t wrong; we certainly have that. But I’d submit that it’s also not the average person’s greatest threat to privacy. There’s the old saying that the only thing protecting citizens from government overreach is government inefficiency, and in this case there’s something to that. Surveillance programs are terrifyingly massive in their reach, but simply aren’t staffed well enough to parse everything. This may change as algorithms become more advanced in sifting through data, but at the moment, we aren’t efficient enough to have a thought police.

The real danger to privacy isn’t what a bureaucrat is able to pry from an unwilling suspect, but what an onlooker is able to discern from an average person without any special investigative tools or legal duress. The average person is generally more at risk from stalkers than surveillance. Social media is especially dangerous in this regard, and the latest scandals surrounding Cambridge Analytica, et. al. are a good example of how social media can be used for nefarious purposes.

Yet despite lofty and varied criticism, I am willing to bet the overall conclusion of this latest furor: the eventual consensus will be that, while social media may be at fault, its developers are not guilty of intentional malice, but rather of pursuing misaligned incentives, combined with an inability to keep up, whether through laziness or not grasping the complete picture soon enough, with the accelerating pace with which our lives have become digitized.

Because that is the root problem. Facebook and its ilk started as essentially decentralized contact lists and curated galleries, and twitter and its facsimiles started as essentially open-ended messaging services, but they have evolved into so much more. Life happens on the Internet nowadays.

In harkening back to the halcyon days before the scandal du jour, older people have called attention to the brief period between the widespread adoption of television and the diversification; the days when there were maybe a baker’s dozen channels. In such times, we are told, people were held together by what was on TV. The political issues of the day were chosen by journalists, and public discourse shaped almost solely by the way they were presented on those few channels. Popular culture, we are told, was shaped in much the same way, so that there was always a baseline of commonality.

Whether or not this happened in practice, I cannot say. But I think the claim about those being the halcyon days before all this divide and subdivide are backwards. On the contrary, I would submit that those halcyon days were the beginning of the current pattern, as people began to adapt to the notion that life is a collective enterprise understood through an expansive network. Perhaps that time was still a honeymoon phase of sorts. Or perhaps the nature of this emerging pattern of interconnectedness is one of constant acceleration, like a planet falling into a black hole, slowly, imperceptibly at first, but always getting faster.

But getting back to the original point, in addition to accelerating fragmentation, we are also seeing accelerated sharing of information, which is always, constantly being integrated, woven into a more complete mosaic narrative. Given this, it would be foolish to think that we could be a part of it without our own information being woven into the whole. Indeed, it would be foolish to think that we could live in a world so defined by interconnectedness and not be ourselves part of the collective.

Life, whether we like it or not, is now digital. Social media, in the broadest sense, is the lenses through which current events are now projected onto the world, regardless of whether or not social media was built for or to withstand this purpose. Participation is compulsory (that is, under compulsion, if not strictly mandatory) to be a part of modern public life. And to this point, jealous scrutiny of one’s internet presence is far more powerful than merely collecting biographical or contact information, such as looking one up in an old fashioned directory.

Yet society has not adapted to this power. We have not adapted to treat social media interactions with the same dignity with which we respect, for example, conversations between friends in public. We recognize that a person following us and listening in while we were in public would be a gross violation of our privacy, even if it might skirt by the letter of the law*. But trawling back through potentially decades of interactions online, is, well… we haven’t really formulated a moral benchmark.

This process is complicated by the legitimate uses of social media as a sort of collective memory. As more and more mental labor is unloaded onto the Internet, the importance of being able to call up some detail from several years ago becomes increasingly important. Take birthdays, for example. Hardly anyone nowadays bothers to commit birthdays to memory, and of the people I know, increasingly few keep private records, opting instead to rely on Facebook notifications to send greetings. And what about remembering other events, like who was at that great party last year, or the exact itinerary of last summer’s road trip?

Human memory fades, even more quickly now that we have machines to consult, and no longer have to exercise our own powers of recognizance. Trawling through a close friend’s feed in order to find the picture of the both of you from Turks and Caicos, so that you can get it framed as a present, is a perfectly legitimate, even beneficial, use of their otherwise private, even intimate, data, which would hardly be possible if that data were not available and accessible. The modern social system- our friendships, our jobs, our leisure -rely on this accelerating flow of information. To invoke one’s privacy even on a personal level seems now to border on the antisocial.

Entitlements

I am decidedly upset because of what happened a few weeks ago as I was hassled in public at my local theater because of my disability. At a bag check, immediately after several people, including my able-bodied family were passed over with no more than a cursory inspection, I was stopped and briefly detained. I was told that I would not be allowed in with the contents of my bag. I explained that the items which she had indicated were medically necessary. The woman persisted, insisting that it was house policy, to which I replied that denying me access over a matter of medical necessity where it pertained to a legally recognized physical disability would be a blatant case of discrimination and a clear violation of the law. Or I tried to; I was flustered by her unusually pugnacious attitude, and the crowd that was gathering behind me.

After a few more moments of back and forth she switched to saying that while I might be allowed to bring in my backpack, I would certainly have to dump out the contents of my water bottle, which I also need for medical purposes. I was initially prepared to accept this on the assumption that it was a matter of security (this is, after all, what I do at TSA; I empty my water bottle before screening and refill it after at a public fountain) until she added the suggestion that I could purchase water at the concession stand; that this was a matter of commercial policy. That’s a horse of a different color. After all, I need my water. If I’m not able to refill it for free, then I’m being forced to pay because of my medical condition. And of course, when one is compelled to pay extra because one is disabled, that’s discrimination.

I tried explaining this. The lady seemed to relent on the water, but then demanded that I prove that I’m disabled and need these things. This is a trap, for two reasons. First, it’s essentially impossible for a person to positively prove that they need something to survive and be healthy to someone who is determined to be skeptical. To use an intentionally ludicrous example: Sure, you say you need oxygen, but have you tried going without it? Maybe you should try not breathing for a while and then get back to me. So asking someone to prove they’re disabled isn’t so much an honest question as a remarkably effective logical fallacy used to browbeat people.

The other reason this is a trap relates to HIPPA. Legally*, medical information is confidential and privileged, unless and until the patient reveals it voluntarily. Once the information is disclosed, however, it’s fair game. Kinda, sorta. It gets complicated real fast, and comes down to the comparatively squishy world of case law, reasonableness and intent. But it does mean that they can try and argue, based on whatever bits of medical trivia they happen to know, that they know your disease better than you, and they can (try to) say you don’t need whatever specific thing you’re asking for.

Usually, this is a moot point, because HIPPA is very clear that a person can’t be coerced to reveal their confidential medical information. The interpretation of coercion is broad enough that it could reasonably include requiring disclosure of medical issues to receive disability accommodations. The logic here is that if you are, in fact, disabled, that either option results in your rights being violated; either your right to equal opportunity or your right to privacy.

As a result, most institutions have a policy of not asking at all and only acting on what you give them. So, at most places, if you tell them you need a water bottle, and you haven’t given them any reason to disbelieve you (i.e. you haven’t mentioned a specific diagnosis that they think they’re familiar with), they won’t bother you. But apparently this lady didn’t get the memo.

I showed her the Medic Alert bracelet that I wear just to get her to let me go. Of course, I didn’t tell her that the bracelet, which is a third party nonprofit, wasn’t particularly more legitimate as proof than my backpack, which is a design given by another nonprofit to families with children diagnosed with one of my issues. The truth is that there is no universal, or even officially sanctioned, form of proof, since that too would either violate privacy by being tailored to specific diagnoses, or would have to be so broad as to give every person carrying an EpiPen personal aides, full access to handicap parking, free motorized wheelchairs, and every other accommodation in history.

I did politely tell her, because at this point I was growing rapidly annoyed with her attitude, that asking me to reveal my diagnosis and to try and prove it was a violation of my HIPPA rights. And since I’m the only person being required to disclose, is still discrimination. She shook her head indignantly, and tried to justify to me, claiming that she had encountered many other people who had claimed to need various things for medical reasons, but didn’t really need them.

I kept my mouth more or less shut, because I couldn’t at the time think of a polite way to respond; to suggest that it was quite possible that some of those people, though perhaps not all, did in fact need as they said, and that rather than catch the guilty, she had merely browbeaten the innocent into bending their medical protocol and risking their health in the process, as has happened to many I have met. I did not retort that her finding a way to reconcile her employer’s policy and federal law is distinctly not my problem, nor is it my problem to speak on behalf of everyone who might need disability accommodations to bring her up to speed.

If ever I seem to act entitled, it is because, as a matter of fact, the world does owe me. The world owes me not because I have suffered pain in the past, or because I have been discriminated against in a society that is supposed to avoid such things, and punish violators. Although it might be nice to receive some recognition for the struggles I have gone through, I am not so naive and petty as to think that the world is fair, and that I am entitled to compensation, even if I might deserve it. I am, however, entitled to my rights, and to my dignity. I believe that I am entitled to going out in public without being accosted and interrogated. I do not think this is too much to ask.

*Obligatory reminder: I am not a lawyer. And while I do my best to always be right, if you’re having actual legal issues, you should consult an actual lawyer. Which I am not.

My Experiences With Guns

Note: This post talks about guns, and some of my experiences with them and opinions about them, some of which are, let’s say, charged. This post may not be appropriate for everyone. Reader discretion is advised.

I have a few different stories about guns. The first come from Australia. Most Americans are vaguely aware that Australia has adopted fairly tight regulations around guns as a consequence of a mass shooting several years ago. It does indeed have tight restrictions, but it is indeed still quite possible to own guns in Australia. I know this because my mother shot competitively while we lived there. She applied and was granted a license to own and shoot pistols for sport. She was actually quite good at it.

The process involved plenty of paperwork and questions. It also involved having a new safe installed in our house under close supervision to make sure it was properly bolted to the wall, and couldn’t be accessed improperly. But even as a foreign immigrant and a mere amateur, her permit was granted. Of course, after she got her license, she had to use it often enough to prove that she was in fact shooting for sport. As a child I spent time at pistol clubs and shooting arenas watching my mother compete.

Occasionally we would be subject to police inspections to see that my mother’s pistols were being stored according to regulation. The officers were perfectly courteous about the whole affair, and often gave me and my brother tokens, like coloring pages and trading cards featuring glossy color photographs of police helicopters, and the off-road vehicles they used in the outback.

Not everyone was satisfied with the way things worked. Many of the people we met a the various pistol clubs grumbled about the restrictions, and more broadly, the vilification of their hobby. Several others, mostly schoolmates and friends of schoolmates, thought that the restrictions weren’t enough; that there was no reason for anyone outside of the military to have a gun (our local police, when they carried weapons, mostly used tasers when on ordinary patrol, and even this was widely seen as too intimidating for police), and certainly no reason to keep one at home.

The balance struck by the law was a compromise. Very few were completely happy, but almost everyone agreed that it was preferable to one extreme or the other. Those who would shoot for sport could still do so, albeit with some safety precautions, and checks to prevent the notion of sport from becoming a loophole. Those who lived in the outback, and were in danger from wildlife, or too far away from settlements to rely on police, were still permitted arms to defend themselves. However, one could not simply decide to purchase a gun on a mere whim.

My second story, which is quite a bit longer, was several years later, on an unassuming Friday in December, almost four years after moving back to the United States. Like most days, I was sick, more reeling than recovering from a recurrent sinus infection that had knocked me off my feet for most of the first semester. I had slept through most of the morning, but after a hearty brunch felt well enough to try my hand going into school for the afternoon. My first sign that something might be amiss was a news alert; a national headline flagged for my attention because it was local. Police were responding to an incident at an elementary school in neighboring Newtown. There were no details to be had at that exact moment, so I shuffled out the door towards school.

My second sign that something was wrong were the police cars parked around the school building. I was stopped getting out of the car, by the police officer I knew from middle school DARE sessions. He shouted from where he stood behind the squad car, which was positioned between the curb and the school doors, as if to barricade the entrance, and told me that the school was on lockdown.

I hesitated, car door still open, and asked if it was about whatever was going on in Newtown. His face stiffened, and he asked what I knew. I explained the vague news alert. After a moment’s hesitation, he said that there had been an attack, and it was possible that there was a second gunman. Hence the lockdown. So far there had been no reports from our town, but we were close enough that even if the suspect had fled on foot, as was suspected, we were still potentially a target. Classes were still going on inside, but the school buildings were all sealed, and police had been dispatched to secure key sites around town.

I looked back to the car, then at my schoolbag, then at the school. I asked if I should go home, if he school was on lockdown. The officer hesitated for a long moment, looking me over, and then looking at the building. In a low, almost conspiratorial voice, he told me to go ahead in. He knew me, after all. He cracked a halfhearted joke, saying that I wasn’t the suspect they were looking for, and that I should move along. I chuckled politely.

Class was never so quiet and so disorderly at the same time. Any pretense of productive work had disappeared. Despite classes still nominally occurring, the bell schedule had been suspended; either because they wanted to minimize the number of students in the halls in the event that a full lockdown had to be initiated, or because students were already so distracted and distraught that it didn’t particularly matter if they wasted time in their classrooms for period six or period seven.

My teacher kept a slide up on the smart board with all of the key points from the lesson we had been supposed to cover, just in case anyone wanted to distract themselves with schoolwork. In the back of the room, students paced anxiously, awaiting phone calls or messages from friends and loved ones with news. In the corner, a girl I was tangentially friends with wept, trying every few moments to regain her composure, only to lose it anew in a fresh wave of sobbing. Someone she knew had lost a sibling. A few other girls, who were better friends with her than I, sat with her.

In the center of the room, a handful of students had pulled chairs together in a loose circle, and were trying to scrape together all the information they could between themselves, exchanging screenshots and headlines on cell phones and laptops. The idea, I think, was that if we knew what was going on, that it would make the news easier to take. That, and the idea that doing something, applying this familiar method or coordination and research, gave us back some small modicum of power over this thing being wrought upon us.

The teacher sent us home without any homework, and waived the assignments that would have been due soon. In a moment that reflected why he was one of my favorite teachers, he took a moment to urge all of us to look after ourselves first, to take time off or see the guidance office if we felt we needed to. The next day back, the guidance office brought in extra counselors and therapy dogs. Several dark jokes circulated that this level of tragedy was the only thing that could cause the teachers of AP classes to let up on homework.

The mood in the hallways over the next several days was so heavy it was palpable. It seemed that students moved slowly, as though physically wading through grief, staring either at the floor, or at some invisible point a thousand yards off. You would see students at lunch tables weeping silently alone or in groups. I remember in one instance, a girl who was walking down the hallway suddenly halted, and broke down right there. Her books fell out of her hands and her head and shoulders slumped forward as she started crying. One of the extra counselors wove his way through the stopped crowd and silently put a protective arm around her, and walked her to the counseling office.

Several days later, the unthinkable happened as, without any kind of instruction or official sanction, our school dressed up in the colors of our rival, Newtown High School. Even the cheerleaders and football players, those dual bastions of school tribalism, donned the uniforms of their enemies, not as a prank, but in solidarity. It was a bold statement covered in all the papers, and captured on local TV news.

Despite having memories of the period, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that I actually remember the attacks of September 11th. Certainly I took note of the marines stationed at the consulate, and the way they regarded even my infant brother with the kind of paranoid suspicion that is learned from loss. I recall how in the days after, people would recognize our American accents on the street, and stop us to offer condolences, solidarity, and hugs. But I don’t have enough memories from before that to form a meaningful context, at least not from my own experiences. Some bad people had done a bad thing, and people were sad and angry and scared, but I didn’t know enough to feel those things myself except as a reflection of the adults around me.

I imagine that people felt on September 11th the way we felt on the day of Sandy Hook. For that matter, I imagine that is roughly how those who lived through it felt after Pearl Harbor. We had been attacked. Our community had been attacked, savagely and deliberately, without warning, and without any apparent reason other than the unknowable agenda of a probable lunatic. A bad person did a bad thing, and now children and teachers were dead, and our whole community was grieving and looking for answers.

There was a caveat to our shared grief. Not a silver lining; it was an unadulterated tragedy, without qualification. But a footnote. We saw the media attention that this local tragedy was getting. We saw the world grieving with us. For my part, I had old friends half a world away, who didn’t didn’t know anything about US geography, but who knew I lived in the same general area as the places suddenly mentioned on the news calling me. We saw the massive reverberations, and we were comforted in the fact that we were not alone.

There was no silver lining. But the caveat was that the same tragedy that had touched us personally had set things in motion on a larger scale. Our world had been shaken up, but things were righting themselves, and in doing so it seemed like there would have to be consequences. The adults seemed to agree that this was a tragedy, and that it could not be allowed to happen again. The outcry seemed to demand change, which we took to mean that those who had lost would not have lost in vain, and that there would be new laws so that we could put this incident behind us, and feel safe again.

We waited for the change that seemed so inevitable that most hardly even bothered advocating for it. It seemed so blatantly obvious that we needed to update our laws to keep guns out of the hands of madmen. Perhaps because we were children, we took it as given that all those adults who had sent their hopes and prayers would realize what was painfully, tearfully obvious to us: that the current balance on gun control had failed miserably, and needed to be renegotiated. As the police and then the media dug in to the details of which loopholes and lapses had been exploited to create this tragedy, we assumed, perhaps naively, that our leaders would take note, and close them.

We waited in vain. The promised reforms never came. As the immediate sting faded for those who hadn’t been close enough to see any kind of firsthand, or even, as in my case, secondhand, consequences, people stopped asking questions. And those who did, instead of focusing on questions like why a madman could access unsecured weapons of war, or why such weapons exist in abundance among civilians in the first places, focused on other questions, like why a school isn’t build to withstand a literal siege, and whether the people who are stricken by grief because of this are even real people at all.

Instead of a safer society with fewer possibilities for mass murder, our government helped to fortify our school, replacing the windows and glass doors we passed through each day on the way to our classrooms with bulletproof glass and reinforced steel, under supervision of increased police and armed security. More dark jokes circulated through the student body, comparing our building to a prison, or a Maginot fortress. A handful of brave students and other adults did speak out, gathering signatures and organizing demonstrations, but they faced fierce backlash, and in some instances, came under attack from conspiracy theorists who accused them of orchestrating the whole tragedy.

For many people I knew, who were motivated by grief and a need for closure, this broke them. To have the worst day of their life scrutinized, torn apart, twisted, perverted, and then thrown back in their face with hostility and accusation was simply too much. The toxicity of conspiracy theorists and professional pundits, coupled with the deafening silence of our leaders, broke their resolve. And so the tragedy at Newtown became just another event in a long list of tragedies mentioned occasionally in passing on anniversaries or during political debates. The camera crews left, and life went on, indifferent to those of us still grieving or looking for answers.

Many of the people I knew who were most passionate about seeing change in the immediate aftermath eventually let up, not because their opinions changed, but because they lost hope. New mass shootings, even school shootings, happened, pushing our local tragedy further and further into distant memory. Nothing happened, or at least, nothing large enough on a large enough scale to shift the balance from the current decidedly pro-gun stance, happened. Those of us who waited after Newtown, or whatever other tragedy touched them personally, as there have been so many, still wait, while those of us who have seen other systems work, possibly even work better, silently lament.

It is perhaps worth reiterating explicitly what has been mentioned previously: any conclusion on gun regulation will be a compromise. This is not merely a realistic view of politics, but a matter of reality. No country, even those cited as having overly draconian laws, has completely outlawed firearms, for essentially the same reasons that no country has completely outlawed painkillers. Every country wants to ensure that sportsmen (and women) can hone their craft, that serious hunters can enjoy their hobby, and citizens can defend themselves, even if they disagree to what extent these activities themselves ought be regulated.

Every solution is a compromise; a tradeoff. And naturally, the balance which is best suited to one country may not be as effective in another. I do not suppose that the Australian system, which despite its ample criticisms, did mostly work for Australia, could be copied wholesale for the United States, at least not without serious teething issues. Yet I also think it is obvious to all that the current balance is untenable. With so many unsecured weapons in so many untrained hands, there are simply too many points of failure.

Perhaps the solution is to focus not on restricting firearms purchases, but on training and storage. Maybe this is an issue of better an more consistent enforcement of existing laws. There is also certainly a pressing need for improvements in mental health, though the kind of comprehensive system that might conceivably be able to counterbalance the inordinate ease of access to weapons; the kind of system that can identify, intervene, and treat a sick person, possibly before they have any symptoms, probably against their will, would require not only enormous year to year funding, but the kind of governmental machinery that is fundamentally inimical to the American zeitgeist (see: American attitudes towards socialized medicine).

Every solution is a tradeoff. Some are better than others, but none are perfect. But one thing is clear: the current solution is unacceptable. Scores of children murdered is not an acceptable tradeoff for being legally permitted to buy firearms at Walmart. If ensuring that students of the future do not have to cower in ad-hoc shelters means eliminating some weapons from a hobbyist’s arsenal, then so be it. If preventing the next soft target terrorist attack requires us to foot the bill for extra police to get out into the communities and enforce the laws before the next crisis, then so be it. And if preventing these tragedies which are unique to our country requires the erection of a unique and unprecedented mental health machinery, which will cost an inordinate amount as it tries to address a gun problem without touching guns, then so be it. But a new solution is needed, and urgently.

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.