There are … Read more…
Three articles in the last couple of weeks didn’t shine quite enough attention on Artificial Intelligence.
Sandisk announced a 400 gigbit microsd memory card for your phone. Huawei announced a new processor chip for phones that features a “neural processing unit,” or NPU. The Economist newspaper has a couple of stories, one about AI being able to determine sexual orientation (straight or gay) from photographs, another about AI’s ability to determine not just who you are, but your mood, even your politics. Read more…
There are experiences hard to describe.
Find a new post from Jane here: http://ontillmorning.us/
Irish talks about fear. She fell, crushed half her face and lost her right eye. Of course she’s afraid of going back on the boat. No job and savings wiped out by divorce, she fears medical bills, as do many in much better shape. She fears for our relationship.
After losing her job, the day before she fell, she asked me if I “could still love an unemployed miscreant.” Her question was not out of the blue. This isn’t the first time Irish and I had gotten together.
We had connected on a dating site years ago, and met for dinner. We talked and laughed for three hours and closed the restaurant, but I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere: she’s conservative and I’m liberal, she lived with two adult sons and three dogs in a rented house 150 miles away from where I lived, I was on my way out of the country for weeks or months … and I intended to buy a sailboat and head for adventure.
After our date, I hugged her goodnight. She seemed so tiny and frail in my arms. That was that, because I wanted to be a gentleman.
A month or two later, after I returned from my trip, we had plans for a second date. While I was gone, the country went on daylight savings but I had not reset the clock in my truck. She called.
“Where are you?”
“On my way, but still early.”
“Um, no, you’re late.”
“It’s only 2:30, we’re meeting at 3 …
“It’s 3:30.”
“Oh no!” I said, when I realized what happened. “Please wait for me. We’ll get everything on the appetizer menu, and anything you want for dinner, I’m not that far away … please?”
She found that endearing, she waited, and we had another wonderful, four-hour conversation. That’s when she told me about her Parkinson’s Disease, and her fibromyalgia, and migraines and spinal fusion after she fell and cracked vertebrae in her neck …
It was full disclosure.
But the person you tell these things needs to know what you’re talking about, and I didn’t really have a clue.
We didn’t kiss after that date, either. While I could see a wonderful friendship, I still didn’t think it would evolve into romance, and I was trying to be a gentleman.
We had a third date. We kissed, and discovered we had what she called “kiss compatibility.” I still remember the first time I felt her fingertips on my skin.
Then I bailed out.
As she was planning our fourth date, and talking about when I could meet her best friend, and her sons. I was reading about Parkinson’s Disease and fibromyalgia and brooding on “two adult sons at home, three dogs, part-time job, a disabling disease that at some point will require constant care and then kill her…”
Just how does all this fit onto a sailboat headed to Fiji? The sailboat dream had been my refuge for decades, had prevented me from making horrible life compromises that I was otherwise willing to make for all the wrong reasons, had “kept me afloat” in more ways than one.
I knew I was falling for her, but we did not have the same future lined up, and I thought it was better not to get too much farther down the road of romance or the damage would be awful.
Three dates and out, I thought was being a gentleman.
But I could not stop musing on the way she said simply, “Hey” when she texted or called me or answered the phone when I called. That was really weird. Just the simple, drama free, glad to hear from you, “Hey.” It took a while, but I checked back in, just saying “hey.”
Predictably and justifiably, Irish responded, “What the hell do you want?” or something like that. “You made me feel I was unlovable because of my Parkinson’s.”
“It was because I could fall in love with you that Parkinson’s scared me away,” I told her.
“We don’t know what and how the Parkinson’s will progress,” she told me. “Many things could happen.”
After a while, she agreed to fourth date. We’ve been together since. So, she’s not being unreasonable to fear for our relationship. I’ve had a few fears of my own.
After she fell, I spent the first night in the hospital pacing and waiting for her to come out of surgery. I spent the next night on the couch in her recovery room listening to hospital sounds and nurses who came in every two hours to administer pain meds and antibiotics, check her pulse, oxygen, etc.
I was far beyond tired by the next day after two nights without sleep and drinking far too many cups of coffee and cans of ginger ale. The caffeine and sugar were no longer keeping me alert, but had morphed into agitation.
“Can you love an unemployed miscreant, with only one eye?” Irish mumbled the question from her damaged mouth. She remembers being desperately afraid of my answer while knowing that then and there I could not answer “No.” I gave her a kiss, a squeeze. I don’t remember what I said.
“You told me something I needed to hear, that I hoped was true,” she said later.
But when I left the hospital to shower, and buy a sweatshirt and T-shirt to replace ones they cut off her in the emergency room, her fear burrowed into me and became mine: ugly, self-absorbed, anguish-ladened fear that seemed match, drop for drop, the cold, soaking, wind-driven rain that pounded the streets of Victoria.
I was once afraid of flying, so I bought an old plane and became a (mediocre) pilot. I love to travel to far-away places where English is rarely spoken with absolutely no clue what I’m going to do after the first night. I drive a race car at 160 mph through blind corners inches away from other cars.
At an age when many are looking forward to a lounge chair and afternoon of televised football (that I never cared much about before the Seahawks), I bought a sailboat. I’d never really sailed before, but the plan was to take it to Alaska for a shakedown this summer and then on to south, maybe even New Zealand.
I’m an adrenalin junkie. That’s not unusual for someone of my background. I’m also “a runner.” The closer I become to someone, the more I love them, the greater the danger I will fear my own vulnerability and run, sometimes for a pretext so flimsy it’s obvious I’m running from fear. It’s my inheritance.
Two days after Irish fell I set foot again on the boat and looked to see where she fell.The wood rail where she struck had no sign of the impact, but it was so much harder than her delicate cheek, nose, skull, and eye. There were spots of blood on the deck and I wondered which held fragments of her burst and missing cornea.
Sleepless, feeling helpless, I growled through clenched teeth at the boat.
“Why!? Why?!? You jealous bitch, why did you do this to her!?”
Cold and indifferent, the boat declined to answer.
I knew I was being foolish, that the boat had done nothing, the boat was an inanimate object, that the fall was an accident, a misstep, a bad decision in footwear, a breaking of Boating Rule #1 to always keep a hand for yourself, hold on to something when moving about.
But I was irrational, anger was setting in, even as I know better than most that all anger has its roots in fear. All the fears that chased me away from Irish the first time returned, with a vengeance for their exile. Almost as quickly as I had boarded the boat, I showered off the sleepless hospital night and headed out into rain pelting downtown Victoria and I walked, looking for something to look for so I did not have to go back to the hospital quite yet.
I blamed Parkinson’s for the fall, not the stupid heavy socks. I howled at myself for ignoring my earlier “knowledge” of the inevitability of Irish’s immobilization, I cried that that she would be helpless unless I helped her, that the sailboat was now gone, adventure a thing of memory, that I was about to become … be … immobilized, encased in my own fat and bound by chains of duty.
And then, St. Francis showed up in the form of a prayer I remembered vaguely from countless meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. It wasn’t like I didn’t bring my own host of disabilities to this relationship, after all.
“… Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace!
That where there is hatred, I may bring love.
That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness.
That where there is discord, I may bring harmony.
That where there is error, I may bring truth.
That where there is doubt, I may bring faith.
That where there is despair, I may bring hope.
That where there are shadows, I may bring light.
That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted.
To understand, than to be understood.
To love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.”
Why this prayer? Unlike Irish, I’m no Catholic and some would say I’m not even a Christian. That’s okay, I’ve long thought of myself as a Taoist and I’ve been known to debate the definition of God, wherever She may dwell.
But the prayer brought quick, deep relief. It seemed I saw through the words and into the meaning of how, and why, St. Francis sought to comfort than be comforted. Then I heard Irish speak.
“I don’t want anything from you that is not given with a glad heart,” she said to me. She had told me once that she taught her boys this lesson, and I heard it as plainly as if she were standing beside me, as if the narcotics that bound her to bed in the hospital had given her the gift of teleportation.
I didn’t know the future. I didn’t need to know. Two miles away lay a woman I loved in a hospital bed, terribly injured. I had not only the duty but a deep desire to be there with her, make sure that she had a ginger ale if she wanted a sip, pain medication if she was hurting, to comfort her if she was frightened, as she was sure to be.
The memory of the sound of her face hitting the coaming on the boat makes me shudder, and always will, but I wanted to be there. I still am.
We’re planning to take the boat to Alaska in June. It’s been about eight weeks since Irish fell on Foxy, our boat. We are on the ferry now, on our way back to Victoria. In two hours we’ll be back on board, for the first time for Irish, after many misgivings for me.
But it’s time.
Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
By Jane Miller (from ontillmorning.us)
By Jane Miller
What if I can’t do it?
Would it be better to break up now and call it a good try rather than stay, fail, and watch my relationship with Erik splinter into a million heart-broken pieces? Pictures of the boat frighten me. The cockpit seats, the coaming, the small space between the edge of the bench seat and the binnacle where I lay until Erik picked me up.
I am petrified of walking up the starboard side of the deck to the bow and not seeing the entire right side of the ocean because my right eye is missing. Of hating it … the uncertainty, the panic, the inexperience, the fear … Of seeing the sad disappointment in Erik’s eyes as he looks at me and says, “Oh, Janie, we tried.”
Irish’s father died last Saturday. We’ll drive from the mountains to the valley tomorrow, pick up her sons in Eugene, and then head to the Oregon coast where the service will be held the next day.
So much for 2017 making up for last year. The girl didn’t have enough on her plate over the last six weeks? Parkinson’s, losing her job over Thanksgiving, four days later the fall that nearly took her life and did take her eye? Surgery days before Christmas, and before the middle of January, her father dies.
I don’t know if I could have withstood all she’s been hammered with over the last eight weeks, but not once, in the year we’ve been together, have I heard her say, “Why me?” Though she has sworn at times at how this glorious adventure together keeps getting interrupted, she seems to have no sense of entitlement. On one of our earliest dates, she said “Why not me?” with characteristic toughness, and a shrug.
His death was not sudden. He was 91, and needed oxygen to get from his chair to the dinner table. But the 6 a.m. phone call from her brother, informing Irish of her father’s death, hit her hard. She was close to her dad. They talked by phone every Sunday, and snippets I could hear were full of gentleness, love and concern.
I could also tell there wasn’t a whole lot of time. For her birthday I surprised Irish with a trip down to southern California in November to spend a weekend with him. She’d also wanted me to meet him, and him to meet me. I did not let my awful fear of commitment get in the way.
When we met, her father was irascible, funny, frustrated and frustrating, gentle and appreciative, a lover of football and as far as I can tell, a true hero. I link to his obituary here, because I think it’s important for people to read about what America was, compared to how it seems today. I was humbled and grateful to share time with him.
Not a surprise. He’s her dad.
by Jane Miller
I didn’t really mean to write about all of this. Traveling over the Santiam Pass on New Year’s Eve, I wrote notes for something vastly different. But that will have to wait.
December needs to be revisited first.
I have been so afraid and so deeply sad. I lost my eye. I almost died. My face is still a mass of bruises, swelling, and pain. I will heal, I know, but there will be scars inside and out.
This past month keeps replaying itself in my memory. My world exploded on December 1 – a catastrophic fall on our sailboat. Four days later, Erik and I traveled painfully back to the States with the help of porters at every airport. Over the next two days, I saw my first eye doctor at the Casey Eye Institute and then a facial reconstruction ENT surgeon. It was decided to do a new ultrasound on my eye and operate on my face toward the end of December. The news that I could be looking at multiple surgeries was more than disheartening.
But Erik, being who he is, pushed to move the ultrasound up to December 15 to give us time to reevaluate should any new information come to light. We drove back over the pass to OHSU in a blizzard, avoiding an avalanche, to have the ultrasound. The technician, a brilliant and perceptive angel, noticed some issues with my eye.
We were ushered in to a meeting with the retinal surgeon who told us my eye was too damaged to save, that to leave it in could damage the other eye. We took time to breathe, think, and decide.
We put out an all-call on Facebook, and with a speed and love I never could have imagined, we began receiving support and help from all over the world.
A friend of Erik’s – a lovely woman he introduced me to in the line at the post office, and to whom I spoke for maybe 10 minutes – offered to put us in touch with a world-renowned retinologist. A member of our “racing family” introduced us to a professional who studied with my retinologist in England. My niece introduced me to a “friend of a friend” who had faced the traumatic loss of an eye. Just messaging her helped.
And the love and prayers that cascaded over us … from “wraparound hugs” to entreaties to call should I need anything … from friends I’d had since high school to my sorority sisters, from my family to my person to my brand new racing family … tears fall as I type this knowing I would not be here without you all.
I had my surgery on December 20, and after four days in the “ambulatory” surgical unit, Erik drove me back home. Getting over the pass was intensely painful, despite his best efforts. Christmas was saved by the presence and hugs of our children.
We went back over the pass to see my doctors on December 30, just a week and a half after they put my face back together. Details were revealed that the doctors had told me, I was just not coherent enough to fully realize.
The orbit of my right eye was broken in so many places, the facial reconstruction surgeon had to find a piece that was still attached to my skull and tie that one to the next and the next one to the next. The only comparison she can make is to a patient she had who fell five stories and landed on his face.
My right cheek was disintegrated to the extent they had to use a thicker titanium plate to rebuild it so it would hold shape. My right eye had literally exploded. My septum was deviated and the right side of my nose broken in pieces too many to count.
The injuries to my face were the kind associated with the head-on collisions of drunk drivers. Minor in comparison, I tend to forget the depressed skull fracture on my right temporal lobe.
I was stunned. “Jesus,” I thought, “how can this be so bad?” I lost an eye, but it’s more than that. The pain, the loss, the fear. I can’t write these words without tears. I don’t know why it wasn’t just enough to give me Parkinson’s.
I hadn’t believed them when they said the pain and bruising from this operation would be greater than the original accident. After they rebuilt my face from one incision in my mouth at the gum line and other incisions behind my eyelids, I learned they were right. My allergy to opioids caused wracking nausea and vomiting, making narcotics as brutal as suffering through the pain. After two days I retreated to Tylenol, Advil, and Excedrin.
The real news from the doctors was encouraging, though. My facial surgeon was pleased. My nose was straight, my cheek and orbit were holding shape. The surgeon who removed my eye said I’d made the right decision. The eye he removed was soft and not viable, the retina had disintegrated. He promised to give us the pathology report that accompanies surgery “to remove a limb.”
I cried in his office as the finality washed over me again. Erik held my knee and told me it was ok to cry, that I had to grieve.
But here I am now, December 31, New Year’s Eve, sitting on the couch in the Tree House in Sisters. There’s no dancing, but there is a love that will sustain us through bone-deep fatigue, pain and sorrow, and enable us to find joy in all things.
We are making plans to go back up to the boat soon, and still plan to sail to Alaska this summer.
So while I have many more rows to hoe, bones to mend, bruises to heal, and lessons to learn, I can begin my new year with tears for the trials of 2016, a sense of dread about the pain I still have to endure, but also gratitude for the love of family and friends, and the man who brought me home.
Second star to the right and straight on ‘till morning.
by Jane Miller
My world exploded on Thursday, but the fuse was ignited on Monday when I was fired from my job. I had more than half expected it, work was a toxic environment at best, but the finality of it was daunting.
Erik was determined to keep my spirits up though, and we set off on a walkabout. Being in Victoria with him, being on the boat with him, just being with him made me irrepressibly happy. I was afraid, though, what this change in employment and finances would bring to our relationship. My voice shook as I nervously asked him if he could still date an unemployed miscreant who couldn’t hold down a job. I had learned long ago that there were perils to asking a question to which one did not know the answer.
Four days later, I fell while stepping from one side of the boat to the other.
Erik remembers the sound, and for that I am sorry. His expression changes when he remembers.
I remember the pain. I lost myself as it enveloped me. I screamed and the pain was excruciating. “ERIK!” I begged him to make the pain go away, even as I knew he couldn’t. I begged God to make it stop. But it didn’t. I lost words and could only say “Oh” as I rocked back and forth, trying to comfort myself.
Erik described the logistics and the sequence of events. How the paramedics found the boat because of the flashing Christmas lights. What he did not know, though, was that when the paramedics went to work on me, asking questions, completing their triage, I heard one of them catch his breath and say, “Is that her cheekbone?”
One of them gently palpitated the back of my neck, and when I said that it hurt (such varying degrees and kinds of pain I was experiencing) I remembered my neck surgery – a discectomy and fusion at C4-5 and C5-6. The paramedics insisted on putting me in a cervical collar. It was made for someone larger than me, and threatened to choke me, but I was too close to unconsciousness to care.
I don’t remember how I left the boat. As I piece together the events, I realize I must have walked off with the help of the paramedics. There I was, with what ended up being a crushed nose, shattered cheek, my right orbit broken in pieces too numerous to count, a ruptured eye, and a depressive skull fracture … walking off the boat.
As I was put on the gurney, my only thought, though, was knowing where Erik was. As long as he was with me, as long as I could hear his voice, I knew I would live. Being essentially blind, I needed to hear his strength through the sound of his voice and the touch of his warm fingers. If I lost that, I was afraid that I would crawl inside myself and never be able to come out.
The pain had the power to drive me to ground, and Erik was the only anchor in a too-dark world.
I was triaged at one hospital, then transferred with lights and sirens to the Royal Jubilee hospital, which had an ophthalmological surgery unit. A new voice entered my world as Dr. Taylor explained the extent of damage and the low probability of either saving my eye or my sight. I finally had enough pain meds in my system so I could breathe, and I knew Erik was with me, but I clung to his voice as they wheeled me to the OR.
“Call my family,” I asked Erik. “But after surgery.”
Surgery on my eye lasted three-and-a-half hours. It had basically exploded and was torn more than half way around. I’d lost the iris, and there was so much blood an ultrasound couldn’t locate any retina left. I spent the next three days in recovery. The surgeons didn’t try to repair my crushed face, leaving that for later.
Erik made appointments for me with the best doctors back in Oregon as soon as I could travel. He organized air travel so there would be wheelchairs waiting every step of the way. He rarely left my side, sleeping on the couch in my hospital room, waking with me every two hours when nurses came in to apply medication. On Sunday, the day before we left, he made me walk around the hospital ward.
Still, I was terrified by the question I had asked about whether he could love me when I had lost my job. Now, how could he love an unemployed miscreant with one blind eye? How would we do this? How could I sail? Erik was the first to point out that I became seasick in rough seas, that I was afraid when the boat heeled over too far. How would I be now? We had started to work on the deficits that came with Parkinson’s, but this …
This was a deficit I didn’t know we could overcome. Erik had had this dream for twenty years – sailing, Fiji, trans-Pacific crossings – but his dream had not included a partner with such failings. But I didn’t ask. I couldn’t ask.
We arrived in Oregon four days after my fall and saw a doctor at the Casey Eye Institute the next day. We set up appointments to have another ultrasound, made plans to repair the bones in my face, and began ultimate plans to try to save my eye. Little did we know it would all be for naught.
Two weeks after the fall we were sitting in the retinologist’s office, going over the ultrasound that had just been taken, being told of the poor prognosis of seeing even light and dark, the medical hazards involved in keeping a blind eye, and the recommendation of surgery to remove the eye completely. It was difficult to breathe.
We needed a break, we needed to eat, talk, hold hands. Decide what to do.
I was now an unemployed miscreant with one prosthetic eye. Good grief. How was this going to fit in with Fiji? This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
This time, though, we didn’t mention the boat. We didn’t mention sailing. We just talked about what would be best for my health and for us. I told him I loved him, which I do all the time. He told me he loved me, too.
Why is no one drawing the straight line from right-wing talk shows to Donald J. Trump, Republican candidate for President of the United States? Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, Hannity, Palin, Beck… Donald Trump would still be a third-rate real estate developer without the influence of these men and women on the culture of our country over the last 30 years.
Of course there are other factors. “Collateral damage” of our middle class, caused by both globalization and automation, is a major contributor. We should have provided opportunity for their children, though the rise of TV and video games, then cell phones, is a giant cultural / psychological / biological experiment that may have made this too difficult.
Collective cowardice is another, in that no one was willing to stand up and say the 1950s throughout about the year 2000 was a unique period of prosperity for the United States, that we failed to invest in the future. The wealth of this period also came with challenges that were poorly met, similar to the effects on the children of very successful people.
But Biology is also at work here. Fear is a greater motivator than hope, and those who manipulate fear have a greater chance of gaining influence.
The rise of the internet, where half-baked or completely false information is gobbled by a public that chooses not to know the difference between ranting and discussion, feelings and analysis, simple opinion and complex evaluation, also contributes.
But the panderers listed above use all this to build ratings, and their own wealth. They sell senseless outrage, the fear of loss, and aim snide disrespect at those of another political persuasion. They are cynically divisive, and may have ruined underpinnings of our democracy by demeaning the rule of law, attempting to delegitimizing our president and the election process
This election is not about the Supreme Court. It’s not about Benghazi. It’s not about the emails. It’s not even about the horror of electing a man as vile as any in the public arena to the most important post in America. It’s about what has happened to America, the America of Reagan, if you will, or of the Kennedy’s if you prefer.
Talk show hosts will own any unpleasant aftermath when their candidate, Donald J. Trump, loses the election because he is utterly and completely unqualified to be considered a decent man, let alone president of the United States.
He is, however, a perfect distillation of all that talk show hosts say and all that they stand for. He is their man, their candidate, their caricature.
Yes, the hosts above have freedom of speech. They have freedom of the press. But they are screaming “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. They need to own the consequences. The rest of us know what they have done, and should hold them accountable.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
