Stubborn Idealism

New Mandelbrot Pics

Date: Fri 6 February 2009
Time: 8:36 PM EST

Back in October, I announced the creation of the Mandelbrot Picture of the Day website. It started off with recycled images that I had previously displayed here. For those who are interested, it used up the last one of those old pictures in mid-January. So there are now several weeks' worth of new images to download, and a brand new one every day.

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I Knew It

Date: Fri 2 January 2009
Time: 12:44 AM EST

"Well, eh-everybody's heard about the bird. B-b-b-bird bird bird, bird is the word," sang the computer's speakers. He threw on his headset and clicked the little green icon to answer the phone call. He didn't recognize the caller's number.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's me," said a female voice. She sounded like she'd been crying. He had no idea who it was. He waited. After a pause, she continued. "I think Cassie's been hit by a car. Dad said to ask you if you would go with me to the emergency vet."

Karen, he thought. "Sure," he replied, trying to remember which one was Cassie. The furry black one? He hoped not. That one was a sweetheart. "Want me to meet you at your house?"

"Okay."

"Be there in a little bit."

"Okay, thanks. Bye."

While putting on his shoes and coat, he remembered that the furry black one's name was Ms. Priss. Cassie was the little white one. Good, he thought. That's the one that keeps shitting behind their couch and pissing on the floor, and she always runs away when you try to pet her. I couldn't give a shit about that one.

Then he thought, I know how this is gonna go. Their father was out of town visiting relatives. The responsibility of taking care of his house and cats while he was gone fell to Karen, who lived with him. John knew his sister well enough to know that "Will you go with me to the vet," was probably code for "I need you to drive me and the cat in your car to the vet, and to pay the bill also."

His bladder told him it wasn't empty, and he took two step towards the bathroom before the urgency of the situation hit him. A cat probably lay dying from internal bleeding, and it was waiting for him to arrive at his father's house before the trip to the vet would even begin. He left.

Pulling out of his driveway, he thought about how oddly his father and sister were handling this. She discovered the cat had been seriously injured, but instead of leaving for the vet immediately, she called her father. He, in turn, did not tell her to get off the phone and take the cat to the vet, but rather told her to call John and ask him to "go with her." Which meant a further ten minute delay while he drove over there. Meanwhile, the poor cat was suffering.

Well, what did you expect from them? he thought.

Ten minutes later, he pulled up their driveway. He walked in the darkness (the porch light had burned out long ago) towards the front door. He was half way there when Karen's voice came from that direction saying, "Mind if we take your car?"

"Sure," he said, and swiveled on his feet back towards his vehicle. I knew it, he thought.

"So I take it your car's broken?" he asked as they turned onto Northwest Ave.

"No, but I haven't unpacked it yet so there's no room."

It had been several weeks since she had moved back in with their father. Well, that's Karen for you, he thought.

She then told him about how she had been in the bathroom when she heard yowling from the kitchen. She had dismissed it at first because it sounded like Harvey, who performed regular cat operas. "You know how he gets." But then Harvey walked into the bathroom while the yowls were still coming from the kitchen. She went to look and found Cassie lying there. Her hind legs seemed limp.

"She's pretty quiet now," noted John. He hadn't heard any noise at all from the cat carrier next to him in the passenger seat. The cat could be in shock. For all he knew, the cat was already dead.

The rest of the fifteen minute trip passed in silence, other than Karen giving him directions to the vet. He thought about how the holidays were bad for cats in their family. Betsy had died on Thanksgiving in 1999. Pete died on Halloween in 2003. On Christmas of 2005, Winkie had to be catheterized because he couldn't urinate. And here they were on New Year's Day of 2009, taking Cassie in because she had apparently been hit by a car.

Later, John would reflect that this was just selective thinking on his part. How many cat problems had happened on ordinary days? How many holidays had gone without incident? Many, of course, but the human mind likes coincidences, and those are what it counts. It was the same fallacy that led many people to believe that they were psychic.

The receptionist behind the counter was a pleasant-looking young woman with red hair, pale skin, and a touch of acne. She asked some questions about Cassie, then took Karen's contact information and asked her to sign a consent form. She said, "I'll get this info to them. Please wait till they call you." She disappeared through a door, then reappeared thirty seconds later from another door and called, "Cassie!" as if Karen and John weren't alone in the lobby. They followed her through the door into an examination room. Karen placed the cat carrier on the metal table that stuck out from the wall into the middle of the room (John could see now that the cat was alive and alert inside), and the receptionist said, "If you'll have a seat, the doctor will be with you in a few minutes." She left the room and closed the door behind her.

Karen sat in one of the two chairs. John took off his coat and threw it into the other chair, opting to lean against a wall. He spied a plastic squeeze bottle labeled "personal lubricating jelly" on a small counter in the far corner of the room. He wondered what they used that for here and imagined them sticking their fingers up animal behinds.

A minute or so later, an assistant came in and said she was going to take Cassie back to be weighed and looked at. She grabbed the carrier and left.

They waited. John could hear muffled voices on the other side of the door. Most of it was unintelligible, but at one point he clearly heard someone say, "Yeah, she can't feel a thing." He wondered if Karen heard that. If she did, she didn't give any indication.

The doctor entered the room. She was a forty-ish woman, tall, with short hair. She said, "It looks like she was in a fan belt accident. Lots of times when it's cold out kitties like to crawl up inside cars for warmth, and they can get injured if somebody starts the car. It looks like there is abrasion on her upper left front leg but it's hard to tell for sure. Her back legs are fine; she could scurry to the back of the cat carrier when I went to get her out. But there appears to be some nerve damage in the front left leg. She can't feel it when I squeeze it, and the leg seems very weak when she walks. If it was a fan belt injury, then there's also a possibility of brain trauma. And if that's the case, then she could be bleeding inside her skull, and if a clot forms in there or if the bleeding doesn't stop then she could pass away. I'd like to hospitalize her for a few days so we can treat her for shock and monitor her."

She left, and a moment later another assistant came in with a sheet of paper that she placed on the metal table. "This is an estimate of the costs if we hospitalize Cassie." She briefly explained all the items. Then she said, "We'll need a deposit from you to leave her here tonight, to make sure you come back. The deposit is based on the estimated expenses, so it's $728."

"She's my dad's cat, so I'll have to call him and let him know what's going on," said Karen. The assistant left, and Karen dug her cell phone out of her purse. She punched some numbers (John wondered why the buttons made tones like an analog land-line phone would, since the number would be transmitted to the cell tower in binary), and after a moment said, "Hey Maryanne, could you put Dad on the phone?"

John heard the muffled tones of their aunt's voice, then a pause, then their father's "Hello?" Karen explained what the doctor had told her. Then she told him about the $728 bill. "WHAAAAAT?" John clearly heard this from the phone's tiny speaker. They exchanged a few more words, then Karen held the phone out to John.

He had known this was coming, but he feigned surprise and said, "But I'm just the taxi driver!" Karen had been working a steady job for several years now, and hadn't had to pay rent during that time as she was living either with her father or her boyfriend. So John knew she had to have money saved up. Still, the notion that she couldn't pay the bill was not that far-fetched. She was coming up on twenty-eight years old, but he didn't think she had ever opened a bank account. He took the phone from her.

"Hey," he said.

"Thanks for driving Karen and Cassie to the vet. So how does it look to you?"

As if I'm a veterinarian, thought John. I fix computers for a living! So he just repeated what the doctor had said, going into a little more detail than what Karen had but essentially saying the same thing.

Then came the part he had been expecting: "Could you take care of the bill, till I get home and pay you back?"

I knew it, he thought. I fucking knew it!

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Losing Weight Again

Date: Wed 31 December 2008
Time: 8:07 PM EST

It's been a month and a half since my last post, shame on me. While casting around in my mind for something to blog about, I remembered that I've been successfully maintaining a diet for two weeks now. I've lost ten pounds already.

The 'again' in the entry title refers to a previous attempt to diet, which cut forty pounds off my weight earlier this year from about 265 lbs to 225 lbs. The target weight had been 200 lbs, but the bottom dropped out of my motivation after three months when my clothes started to fit and I started sleeping comfortably.

And I need motivation. I love to eat.

In the six months between the end of that diet and the beginning of this one, I gained back twenty pounds. My shirts started to feel tight, and the fabric of my jeans inside the thighs started to wear thin.

The diet itself is simple: Eat just one meal a day. (I eat lunch, for social reasons at work.) During that meal, eat all you want, even dessert. Before and after that meal, eat nothing, and drink only water.

Getting started is hard. Going from three heavy meals a day, with snacks and sodas littering the hours between, to one meal and nothing else, is a shock to the body. I felt hungry all the time for a few days. That feeling gradually faded, and two weeks later I think about food only during the hour leading up to lunch. I have little urge to eat at any other time of day.

Except in the evening, for some reason. Just before bed time, I fantasize about what I will have for lunch tomorrow, if I'm off from work. "I'll go to Poncho Villa and get a huge plate of camarones vallarta," I say to myself. Or, "a 12-ounce ribeye steak at Outback would be delicious!" But by morning the urge has passed, and at lunch I usually end up eating fast food or whatever happens to be in the fridge.

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