Fashionista

I'm not much of a fashion plate. At work I tend to opt for the casual dress shirt and Docker-like slacks, and at home I'm prone to comfort clothes, chiefly shorts and western shirts that have seen a few too many years of hard service. Not that I dislike nice clothes by any means - I like dressing up as much as the next person, but I am historically very hard on clothes. I'm the sort of person who would accidentially tear a hole in a brand new shirt with a sanding drum mounted in a Dremel tool.

But compared to modern sartorial thought, I appear to be a veritable clothes horse.

I stopped the gas station the other day, and as I was waiting for the gas pump to finish impoverishing me utterly, I noticed that there were three guys at the gas station all wearing pull-on shorts. When did formless plaid pull-on shorts turn into such a hot trend? I have a pair of plaid pull-on shorts too, but they said "pajamas" on the outside of the bag.

But these three guys had more in common than just the pull-on shorts. They were all of a specific type: fat guys with shaved heads, pubic beards, muscle shirts, pull-on shorts, and flip-flops. What up with that? I think it's the pubic beard that bothers me the most. You know what I'm talking about, the scanty fringe of hair completely surrounding the mouth that makes the mouth look more like an excretory sphincter than anything else. I've worn my facial hair in a great many ways over the years, the Rhodesian moustache being one of my favorites (often called a "porn star moustache" by people who have never heard of Rhodesia) but I don't think I've ever adopted the pubic beard.

I don't even like flip-flops. Oh, they're dreadfully convenient around the house, but for some reason the presence of that rubber thing between my toes distracts me to the point of near-madness. And I hate it when the toe of the thing gets stuck under the brake pedal.

No, I think I'm perfectly happy with my western shirts and shorts with actual buttons and shoes with laces, thank you very much.

Clarification

In a previous post I said I was famously dubious of superstring theory. I am, but I am even more dubious of supersymmetry. Without supersymmetry, superstring theory fails (or one might say, fails worse).

Supersymmetry arises from complex mathetical operations in representation theory that I don't presume to understand. How I judge it by is how one should evaluate any theory of physics: how well its predictions compare with experiment. So far, not very damn well.

The real-world ramification of supersymmetry, as opposed to allegedly "elegant" manipulations of theoretical mathematics, is that for every type of particle (electron, W, Z, quarks and so forth) there must be a "supersymmetrical partner" of the opposite type. By "opposite type" I mean that for every fermion, there must be a partner boson, and for every boson there must be a partner fermion. For the electron, a fermion, there must be a boson called a "selectron". I guess that means that for the photon, a boson, there must be a fermion partner, but I don't remember what it's called. Maybe a photino. (Fermions are the constituents of matter, generally speaking, while bosons are the carriers of force, generally speaking.)

ANYWAY. The point is that supersymmetry predicts the existence of a whole bunch of particles that thus far have never been seen in nature, not in particle accelerators, not in the byproducts of cosmic ray impacts in the upper atmosphere, nowhere. Am I the only person who finds it awfully convenient that every time a particle accelerator reaches the lower edge of the presumed energy of these superpartners and never finds them, that the theory is tweaked to make the superpartners just a little more massive?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but nevertheless at some point one simply has to admit that the emperor is naked. And if the supersymmetric emperor is naked, so is the superstring emperor (and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model as well, but I don't like it either).

Kindled

I heartily recommend the Kindle to one and all. The books are inexpensive. The reader is easy to use and quite convenient. And best of all, it facilitates impulse-buying in a big way. I've had some trouble sleeping over the weekend and more than once found myself browing the on-line store very late at night, just seeing what looked good. Plenty, but I held the line at buying a book on the history of particle accelerators and colliders, a subject (nuclear physics in general) that I have no small amount of interest in.

The book proved to be insufficiently meaty for me - a book on particle accelerators that never even mentions the existence of synchrotron radiation is too light for me (there's a reason the Stanford Linear Accelerator is linear, but you won't learn that reason from this book). The book also mentions superstring theory (which I am famously dubious of) and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model without really explaining why the results of runs at the Large Hadron Collider might be relevant to them, pro or con. (I also hoped there would be some mention of the GZK Limit and cosmic rays and the notion of Doubly-Special Relativity, but I can't really hold the absence of them from the book since they really don't have anything to do with colliders per se.)

In the end, it felt like it started out as a rebuttal of the notion that the Large Hadron Collider might produce quantum black holes or odd quark-antiquark bound pairs called "strangelets" that some theorize could end up destroying the Earth, and the rest of the book was written to flesh out the chapters that weren't about quantum black holes or strangelets.

But that isn't the Kindle's fault, by any means, and it still wasn't a bad book. It beat lying in the dark and trying not to think about the ominous and steady advance in my lymphoma symptoms. It's a good thing chemo starts up again next week, because I'm definitely going downhill again.

Back From The Dead

Well, I'm not back from clinical death, just from feeling like it. I still don't have a theory to explain it, but I increasingly think I brought back microbial friends from Mexico who proceeded to ravage me up one side and down the other for a couple of weeks. I'm sure there's a stress element as well. But whatever the cause, for a couple of weeks I was sick as a dog that had been eating out of the cat litter box. It was all I could do to simply go to work, and sometimes I wasn't entirely successful in that, and when I got home at night I merely collapsed like an Appalachian barn in a windstorm and waited for the next day of workaday tedium.

But lately I've started to feel better. Today was a regular Friday off, and I did nothing last night or today but read and sleep, which I think are activities hazardous to Mexican microbes. Specifically, I've been tinkering with my new Kindle.

A Kindle is a variety of ebook, the Amazon version thereof, and I confess I'm quite taken with the gadget. Friends of ours sent it to me as a gift, sort of a "we can't fix cancer but we can give you something to read" gift. It's approximately the size of an old-style steno pad (but thinner) and it reads surprisingly well. It displays about a half a page at a time in the default font size, but after a few minutes of adjustment the mind accepts the half-size format quite well. Best of all, if you lay it down and fall asleep, it likewise goes to sleep and remembers where you were, so when you wake up and reach for it, it's right where you left off - no more remembering to shove an empty Alka-Seltzer packet in the book as a bookmark before nodding off.

It is kind of amusing on first glimpse, though. It comes in a black pressboard tray that looks for all the world like high-end Chinese takeout, as though the mailman dropped off an order of kung pao chicken instead of a Kindle. It comes preloaded with a dictionary, which is fun enough, but last night at about 11 PM I decided to see if I could buy a new book. The process is so easy as to be rather mysterious. You wiggle the mouse-like knob on the front a few times, you type in a few letters in the search box, and suddenly by means Harry Potter might understand the book arrives on your Kindle. I don't think it took more than a minute or two to find the book I wanted, and no more than a minute or two to download. Within five minutes, not even enough time to go to the fridge for some apple juice, the book was loaded and ready to view, complete with photographs.

Amazing. I'd always assumed that ebooks would involve a lot of clunky setup of wireless networks and whatnot, and maybe some do. This one apparently works on the cell phone network, not the wireless Ethernet in the house, but I could be mistaken. I haven't fully read the user's manual yet, and frankly, who's interested in the technical details anyway? The lack of any billing questions, however, makes me think that my friends paid for the book, not me. I'm going to have to figure out how to change the billing information before I do the Harry Potter Bookus Immediaticus spell again.

I chose as my first book The Ayatollah Begs To Differ, a sort of conversational look at politics and society in post-1979 Iran, or what the author fairly diligently refers to as the Islamic Republic. It's quite a good book, though sometimes when I'm sleepy the profusion of jawbreakingly complex Iranian names can get a little confusing (sort of like The Brothers Karamazov, only a different set of complex names). It also serves to highlight the differences between Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad, "reformer" on the one hand and ultraconservative on the other. And the main takeaway is that it is foolish on our part to expect Iranian democracy to look like secular Western democracy - but that it doesn't necessarily have to be frightening either. I am fairly conversant with Shia Islam, at least in the main, but the book does a particularly good job of showing what Shia Islam looks like on the ground, to the millions of people who believe it and practice it (the difference, if you will, between understanding what cancer is and then discovering what it actually feels like, not that I am in any way suggesting that Shia is a form of cancer; I'm merely working with the analogies that come to hand).

Back to my Kindle!

Positive

I tested positive; my lymph nodes are still gripped by the Hodgkin's. I restart chemotherapy in about two weeks, though a different protocol - IGEV - than the old ABVD standby. If I were to name chemotherapy protocols, I'd give them cooler names. Gutbuster or Cranial Poundage or the ever popular This Is Gonna Kick Yo Ass.

"What protocol are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm doing the Italian Nutblaster. Which one are you doing?"

"The You'll Spend A Week In Bed After THIS One protocol."

I'm disappointed, of course, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't healthily scared. But it isn't as though I haven't done chemo before. Done it before, got through it, and I'll simply have to do it again.

If there are bright spots in any of this, they are:

1. The IGEV protocol is "well tolerated", meaning that I shouldn't projectile vomit, and

2. The IGEV protocol sets my stem cells up nicely for a stem cell transplant, if it comes to that, and

3. There's a very good chance that my wretched intestinal problems are the result not of my old chemotherapy protocol, but chronic overdosing with acetaminophen. Wouldn't THAT be a hoot?

4. My disease, which back around Thanksgiving was Stage-IV and plenty advanced, has retreated all the way back to Stage-I. My oncologist theorizes that the cancer survived in the two nodes in my groin either because their immense size shielded some cells from chemo, or that the cells themselves mutated and developed resistance to the ABVD drugs, which does happen.

And it occurs to me that I used the words "immense size" and "groin" in the same sentence without the slighest hint of self-consciousness. I'm not going crazy; I'm just trying to keep my immune system on the job with dumb jokes. This is no time for my T-lymphocytes (or whatever) to go on strike.

Tomorrow I go find out the result of my biopsy. Serious business. I think the only way my stress level could be higher is if I was in an airplane that was steadily falling apart in mid-air.

I don't see how I can afford a stem cell transplant procedure in the event of a positive result, so this probably isn't a good time to try to convince me that the health care/insurance system doesn't need some sort of reform.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Hitler wasn't a socialist; he was a fascist. It might do the shouters a bit of good to learn the difference. The Nazis coined the phrase "National Socialism" in the same spirit of cynical deliberate deception as the No Child Left Behind Act.

I'm too agitated to write anything meaningful. More tomorrow.

Squirrelus Horribilus

I can't prove that this is the same squirrel that ate the rattlesnake, but I'm pretty sure it is. This squirrel projects the same sense of feral red-eyed malevolence as the snake-eater. I bet if I sat still long enough, they'd try to drag me off to their hiding places, probably thinking "Holy cow is this biped ever hard to move, but if we get him hidden away, we'll eat all summer!"

Biopsy Blues

My biopsy Monday was uneventful, if perhaps a tad tedious. The hospital claimed it was all because of them switching to a new computer system, and maybe that really is true, but either way my biopsy was supposed to be at 9 AM and they didn't actually wheel me away for the procedure until 11:30 AM. The only good part of that is that I managed to catch an hour of sleep on the gurney, making up some of the sleep I didn't get the night before.

The biopsy was much easier than they said it would be. My doctor made it sound like it was going to be akin to a kidney transplant - general anesthesia, pipes, ducts, incisions, teams of medical professionals working at a feverish pace against the clock... Actually, the guy just gave me a local and went in with a device that make a clicking sound as it gouged out small bits of my flesh. I didn't feel a thing, and the only damage was to my dignity. Dignity will grow back eventually, I guess.

It was supposed to be guided by CT scan, but they switched to an ultrasound machine. The node in question looked like a lumpy potato on the ultrasound screen, and it was kind of creepy to watch the needle slide into view from upper right to lower left. The guy (it's always a guy, isn't it?) verified that the needle was in the node by wiggling the needle, which made the whole spud-like node wobble.

But so far, no results. It was difficult for me to relax very long, or very thoroughly, on my vacation in Mexico because my mind kept drifting back to the biopsy, the biopsy results, and its potential consequences. As of this writing I don't know what the results are, and it's now late enough in the day that we can pretty much rule out the chance of the doctor telling me the outcome this weekend.

Sigh... Another weekend of uncertainty. What's a boy to do?

Squirrel Irony

Before I left for Mexico I witnessed what could only have been supreme irony in the squirrel world.

A baby rattlesnake about eight inches long got into the garage, and was promptly killed using a long-handled scrub brush. It meant the death of the scrub brush too, which as it turns out had never been designed with withstand pounding action and broke.

But the snake was dead, and a good thing too, because it is apparently not just urban myth that young snakes are more dangerous than older snakes. The younger ones haven't yet learned venom control and tend to reflexively inject all their venom if they bite, whereas older snakes are able to distinguish between defensive bites and hunting bites and may not waste venom on a defensive strike (venom here regarded as a hunting asset, not a defensive weapon).

Anyway, I was sitting outside viewing the tenderized remnants of the little snake, which ended up out by the garbage can. I was still long enough that the little squirrels started to run and scamper and squeak at one another, and presently one of them found the snake. The squirrel sniffed cautiously at the snake, then sniffed somewhat less cautiously, then actually grabbed the snake with his squirrel teeth and dragged it away to his hole.

One didn't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to know that the squirrel was thinking "Hot dog! Usually the snakes eat us, but today I exact a weird and ironic revenge on the snakes!"

Kinda makes me look twice at the squirrels, though. Maybe I shouldn't sit still so long that they decide to try to drag me away.

Pleasing

I think it would please me beyond measure if the Progressive lady would run away with the Geico caveman.

Complications

I was going to go to Mexico this Monday, but I figured it wouldn't be wise to try to drive to Rocky Point on the same day I had a deep biopsy. So I'm going to go Tuesday morning, and will be back Friday afternoon.

The main draw for me is the ocean. I could spend hours just sitting and watching the ocean, and I probably will. Maybe it's some misplaced Viking DNA that makes the ocean so fascinating to me, and maybe as a desert dweller I'm simply astonished to the point of muteness by the sight of so much water.

But it appears that my body has picked a bad time to recycle all its epithelial cells, again. There had better be a bathroom about every half horu along the route, and I know that there are stretches where this is not true, especially the long trawl across the Goldwater range to Ajo, and the business through the Organ Pipe National Monument, and that bleak business between Sonoita and Puerto Penasco itself.

This is becoming very frustrating. When exactly can I expect this unpleasant chemotherapy side effect to finally go away? Or is this a side effect of the anxiety I feel? My stress level is extremely high these days, for many reasons that don't all revolve around cancer, and it's possible my innards have just gone berzerk from stress.

Either way, if I don't get better soon, going to Mexico becomes doubtful, and I just HATE the thought of that.