To those who know Smash...

Friends,

Mo and I have just returned from visiting Smash in the hospital at UCSF Parnassus. She is currently being moved out of the intensive care unit into a normal room.

As most of you don't yet know, on Sunday she manifested an aggressive bacterial infection in her right arm. It is partially a complication of surgery during her breast cancer treatment during 2005. The current diagnosis is cellulitis (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulitis), but there are other less pleasant possibilities. She has been on broad-spectrum antibiotics since arrival in the ER on Sunday afternoon, and today is sufficiently stable to be moved out of intensive care.

For the past three days, Mo and I have been spending all of our free time (as well as Mo's entire workdays) in the hospital with Smash. Keeping her emotional state stable and her spirits up is critical to beating the infection and recovering quickly and fully. In short, she needs company. She has not lived in San Francisco for a long time, and her family is in the Midwest. Mo and I (not to mention Smash) would super-duper appreciate anyone who can take the time to pay her a visit. If you have met Smash and spent any time with her, you know her to be smart, caring, compassionate, funny... She's super. Please help us support her through what is truly a shitty situation.

If you want to know more, including her location and visiting hours, please contact Mo or I as soon as possible. Tribe message, email, phone, whatever. Fastest response by SMS or email to Mo.

Mo: 203-675-2438, m.khodadoust@gmail.com
B: 408-205-0031, bmc@section9.net

If somebody doesn't post a comment soon, I'm going to throw a tantrum. THEN you'll all be sorry.

Y'all a buncha without-me-playa-goin-ass motherfuckers.

Also, GAH! I certainly hope I can bring this project to some kind of useful conclusion in another two days. TWO DAYS? Christ. I'm fucked. In three weeks, I've had to learn two AMS (Application Management System--the portion of the JME that is responsible for managing the lifecycle of Java applications on an embedded device) architectures, Windows IPC (*barf*), and the JSR 211 specification, and then mostly rewrite the JSR211 code because the new architecture that I'm porting to is so different.

I'm being a whiny bitch--this is my JOB, after all. But I'm also in China, which is, itself, a little stressful from time to time. This morning as I was almost ready to head out of the hotel to come to work, the thought popped into my head, "Oh, shit, it's still CHINA out there, isn't it?" As though "China" were a weather pattern I had been hoping would blow over. So.... Ordering breakfast by pointing; wild gesticulations with the taxi driver to get him to drop me off where I want to go, instead of where he seems to want to take me. Also, fast-ish food courts in and near office parks are, it turns out, mediocre the world over.

At least Mo is home. She's gonna be lucky if I don't break her on Friday night.

I have no idea if this is even cogent to someone other than me. Let me know. :-)

Time flows through
me, in a hotel room high
above Chaoyang. I have come
to Beijing to do my small part
in
the
accelerating
enrichment of the elite
of China, and of those other
nations that own
and are owned in turn
by parts of it.

Time flowed through
me in the eternal, unchanging summer
afternoons of childhood,
just the same. Misdirecting
mitosis; strengthening and building
the striated muscle
that allows
me to do; bringing to seed,
bloom
and fruition
the brain
that allows me to be.

I didn't know, then, that the vibrating
rush
of the unfolding was
wearing on me.

Or, maybe I did.
I curse Frost for
warning me that the memory fools. Does this monkey tell
himself lies
about
the past, to make the narrative
more pleasing? The flow
of events more
satisfying?
Serendipitous?

I cetainly feel in this moment,
and in many others recent, a helplessness in the
apprehension
of inevitability.
Whatever
I choose, the world
will continue to be. However full
my accomplishments, however
tragic,
comic,
pathetic my failures,
I am one small dog.

What minute change
in the stream--whatever

chaotic,
dynamical
perturbation
I can
create--it seems

I can not predict.

And I have watched
others, women
and men that I admire,
whose poise
direction
serenity I seek
after, err
in recollection
of their own days and concerns.

There was a terror in seeing it.

But as the time
slides through me, its bulk
filling the channel of
my being as water
fills
a sluice
through a dam,
each drop that passes
by
is gone.

So much water was before
me once, and now so much
is
gone
behind.

And it is all full.
Each moment pregnant
with possibility,
a tree laden
with fruit
to pick,

to crush

between

my

teeth,

to feel slide
cool and wet into my
throat on the way to becoming me.

last.fm

I got wiring loose inside my head
I got books that I never ever read
I got secrets in my garden shed
I got a scar where all my urges bled
I got people underneath my bed
I got a place where all my dreams are dead

--Porcupine Tree, "Blackest Eyes"

Risk and Reward

Just said "Goodbye" and hung up the phone with Mo for 9 days. She has had a lot of anxiety and nervousness about going to the burn "alone." But she is a rockstar, our friends are rockstars. Rockstars are responsible for making the fun. She will keep herself safe and healthy, or I will be very put out.

It's 3 AM in China. VPN proxied web access is slow. Only ssh is really "reliable" most of the time. When I have some time, I want to hook Alex up with a VPN connection through some infrastructure in the States so he can get secureish and privateish access.

China is a strong contender for Most Interesting Phenomenon in the World right now. It's deeply different. In some ways, 80,000 years worth of different--back to when some humans coming out of Africa went West, and some East. It is very old, and very, very new. It does seem to be changing rapidly. One hears this in the Western media often. But being here, and talking with Chinese residents, it's clearer. More on this later.

Tomorrow, Badaling and the Great Wall, and then the Summer Palace. I'll get at least four hours of sleep. The sights won't see themselves, don'tcha know.

Night.

Beijing #2

So, here it is, my third day in Beijing. It's somewhat alienating to be in a place where I have no hope of understanding anything anyone says, and I can't read any of the signage. My and Mo's friend Alex lives here, though, and speaks Mandarin. It's a relief to have someone here who knows me, and for whom I have some social context.

Last night, Alex tended bar at a large club called Banana, so I went to hang out. Being white and Alex's friend, the bar staff made sure I had a beer in my hand all night. Today I have a slight hangover and smell like cigarette smoke. I guess some things are the same here--bars are still boring. :-) I got hit on by a prostitute at the bar. Her English wasn't very good, and I have no idea what she was saying to me. Prostitution is big, here. I wasn't checked into my hotel 90 minutes before someone slid a card under my door advertising "massage" services. Their menu of "Service item," reproduced verbatim here for your entertainment, includes:

* TheRussianyoungladymassage
* Theladymassages
* Walesexualfuntionobstacle
* Thefootbottomcaresthemassage

I was tempted to call just to find out what a "Wale sexual function obstacle" might be. I guess if you're one of those unfortunate few who is only able to become aroused in the presence of cetaceans, they're happy to bring a porpoise by for your benefit? Who knows. The Chinese give the Japanese a run for their money in the "weird" department, for sure. Yesterday, I was awakened at 10 AM by a phone call from a woman whose only command of English seemed to be repeating the question, "Massage?" She did not appear to understand, "No."

Yesterday, I was fitted for a three-piece suit for the wedding. They'll have it put together tomorrow night, apparently, at which point I go back for another fitting. The suit, as well as five custom dress shirts, all in high-quality fabrics, came to $260. Unreal. The suit is going to be this long, many-buttoned, almost Victorian-looking affair. It should be hot. I picked the design out of a catalog, and then talked with the tailor about making it slimmer, more fitted.

Something that took me by surprise about foreign travel is that economies vary not just in scale, but in, um... proportional composition, I guess? There's probably a word for this in economics. But what I mean is that a car doesn't necessarily represent the same multiple of monthly income here as it does in the States, or Argentina, or elsewhere. Ditto a house or apartment, or a meal out. So it's not like the usual guideline in the US that your rent or mortgage should consume 25%-40% of your monthly income applies everywhere (or anywhere) else. It never occurred to me that those sorts of ratios would vary. But, in retrospect, there's no reason they should be fixed, I guess. The market for any particular product or service would be completely dependent on the particulars of production, availability, demand, laws and regulations. And the demand for it would be dependent on all sorts of cultural factors that it would take considerable knowledge and experience to begin sorting out.

I feel vaguely embarrassed or inadequate that I don't have anything to report regarding the Great Wall, or the Forbidden City, or the Summer Palace, or any of the "omigodi'minchinaihavetogoseethe-" kinda things. After all, I've been here 72 hours! What the hell am I doing with my time? :-)

And tomorrow morning, I go to work! Weird.

teh chin0rz

Hm. So I'm going to China. I have to do a software port onto a new phone platform, and the rest of the engineering team is in in Beijing. I'll be leaving middle or end of this week. I'll be back on 9/7.

This means I miss three weeks' worth of wedding preparations (out of three months available to us), as well as Mojgan's preparations for, departure to, and return from Burning Man. I can't say I'm happy about any of that. On the bright side, obviously, I do get to go to China. Mo's friend Alex is an American who speaks Chinese, and is currently living in Beijing. I'm relieved to know somebody there--three weeks seems like a long time, especially if I'm going to be working a lot. I'm not planning on working the weekends, and if I get away with that, I'll have three of them to explore. I'd like to see the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, but I also want to see China as it is, and how it's changing. It occurs to me to go check out some open-houses, since personal property ownership is on the rise; it would also be interesting to see things like how health care operates.

I'm going to blog the trip on LiveJournal. This will be a little experiment. I almost never log onto LJ anymore, but most of the people who are interested in the trip are over there. I'll be copying the posts to my tribe blog as well.

If anyone has any experience or advice to offer me on first-time travel to China, business travel specifically, and/or Beijing, please jump in and let me know.

40s lead to blunts?

The scientific research apparatus has unearthed a heretofore unknown connection between drinking malt liquor and (wait for it...) smoking marijuana.

www.eurekalert.org/pub_rele...72607.php

I'm SO glad that these things are receiving proper scientific scrutiny.

24 Hours of American Liars

If this was a real democracy, we'd be out in the streets shutting the nation down until Bush resigned, taking Cheney with him. The unions would call for general strikes, as would immigrant rights groups, poverty groups, families of soldiers. All seventy percent of us. Clogging the cities and towns, demanding that we take back the country from the people who want to harm us.

But this is not a real democracy. It is a group of geographically tied together people with pretense to democracy, fearful of actual power because it means actual responsibility for themselves, for each other.

rudepundit.blogspot.com/2007/0...at.html